Labelling, resistance and academic disengagement in China’ secondary vocational schools

Academic disengagement in China’s secondary vocational schools is often attributed to selection effects or student deficit. Drawing on labelling theory and self-fulfilling prophecy research, this article shows how macro-level stigma is translated into a school-based labelling regime that shapes learning orientations and self-understandings. Based on ten weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in a technical college in Guangzhou, China, including classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, the study finds that labelling operates through routine organisational and interactional practices: spatial sorting in small-group teaching, epistemic exclusion when students’ questions are treated as disruption, gatekeeping of valued opportunities, concessionary make-up assessments, and selective tolerance of minor deviance. Students responded through rigid and flexible resistance, yet these efforts were frequently misrecognised and reinforced by peer boundary-making, making disengagement increasingly credible within the classroom moral order. The article contributes a process account of how classification and misrecognition are institutionalised in vocational schooling.