This study examines empirically what pre-service teachers learn from working with students of low socio-economic (SES) rural background during a cross-regional immersion internship in China. Drawing on the theory of boundary work in cultural sociology, this study attempts to explore the lived experiences of pre-service teachers and examine the mixture of cultural meanings appropriated by them for shaping their understanding and actions during the internship. In this study, I find that social class differences were not revealed as differences in socio-economic status only, but implicitly existent in student teachers' perceptions about their rural students in the form of symbolic (intellectual, cultural, and moral) boundaries. When the interns from the city meet with pupils from a rural village, they encounter the questions of how to teach children from a social class background different from their own. By identifying the symbolic boundaries that these interns marked among their rural students as well as between themselves and their students, I draw attention to the unexamined intellectual, cultural and moral boundaries that interns constructed to understand their students. I argue that the interns used these symbolic boundaries to guide their teaching and learned to reshape these boundaries during internship.The present study suggests that in order to better prepare pre-service teachers to work with students from low socioeconomic background, the teacher educators need to understand how pre-service teachers evaluate their students by means of intellectual, moral and cultural criteria. In addition, explicit communication between mentors and interns about how to work with students from low socioeconomic background is helpful for interns to reflect upon their own presumptions about these students.
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