How do the “Pastoral Children” transform into Modern Students? Reflections from the perspectives of cultural reproduction and cultural acculturation

•Innovates Framework: combines cultural reproduction & acculturation theories, examining educational equity mechanisms.•Exemplary Case: kangding City(with its schools)a typical site and critical junctures for multicultural coexistence.•Systematic interviews: Students, teachers, admins, & community leaders across primary, middle, & vocational schools.•Findings: bear significant implications for educational policy and practice. Education serves as one of the most potent means to promote equity and justice, yet concurrently functions as a powerful mechanism for the reproduction of inequity and injustice. This study integrates the theories of cultural reproduction and cultural acculturation, combining macro-level structural considerations with micro-level agency perspectives to explore the regeneration mechanism of educational equity. Utilizing interview methods, data were collected from 83 students, 48 teachers, 25 parents, 26 education administrators, 12 leaders in education administration, and 9 local cultural elites in Kangding City, a central urban area for China's ethnic minorities. The findings indicate that minority working-class students from traditional communities, upon entering urban schools where the predominant culture is modern mainstream, face significant challenges related to strict temporal and spatial regulations, as well as the intense clash between the inward-seeking spiritual foundations of traditional culture and the outward-seeking demands of modern mainstream culture. This results in a profound cultural interruption and even conflict during the process of cultural reproduction, as students strive to master the new cultural capital taught in schools, facilitating cross-cultural adaptation and transforming into genuine modern students. Following cultural adaptation, new issues of cultural identity arise, leading students into a dilemma of self-reflection within diverse contexts and even fostering a dual alienation from both modern mainstream society and traditional communities. All these aspects underscore the imbalance in power relations between urban schools in marginalized communities, which, in teaching cultural capital and reinforcing social control, deviate to some extent from their original intent of addressing educational equity issues.