The Practical and reconstructing Chinese pedagogics

Abstract

This paper explores the relevance and significance of the Practical in Schwab’s the ‘Practical 1’ paper in relation to the reconstruction of pedagogics as an educational discipline in China. It begins with employing Schwab’s medical framework–in terms of symptoms, diagnosis and prescription–to analyse the crisis in Chinese pedagogics, and then articulates what is entailed in reconstructing pedagogics in terms of the Practical as a solution to the crisis. The paper next examines the construction of ‘life-practice’ pedagogics by Professor Ye Lan and associates–a remarkable undertaking which in many respects instantiates the Practical, while not influenced by the thinking of Schwab. It concludes by linking the Practical to the European Pädagogik tradition and Chinese educational wisdom concerning theory development.

Keywords:

• the Practical
• pedagogics
• theory–practice relationship
• theory development
• curriculum theory

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to Ian Westbury for his numerous critical and thoughtful comments and extremely helpful suggestions on the earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks also go to F. Michael Connelly for his support and encouragement in preparing this paper.

Notes

1. This framework was also used in his book College curriculum & student protest (Schwab 1969).

2. The new schools of Pedagogy include ‘cybernetics of Pedagogics’, ‘systems theory of Pedagogics’, and ‘information theory of Pedagogics’ (see Cha 1986, Qiao 1985).

3. However, there is an important difference in their visions of education. Whereas Ye Lan held the development of ‘life’ as the ultimate purpose of education, Schwab viewed the cultivation of intellectual powers and moral reasoning capacities as the central aim (see Reid 1984).

4. It is interesting to note that similar arguments are found in Klafki (2000) concerning instructional practice in the German Didaktik tradition. For a discussion on the similarities between ‘life-practice’ pedagogics and German Didakitk, readers are referreed to Deng (2013).

5. Interested readers are referred to Ye (2009a) and Wu (2011).

6. In the first period, China turned from a situation of borrowing one external model from Japan to one ‘in which a range of external models were used eclectically to develop a road to educational reform’ (Ding 2001: 161). In the second period, China was reopened to the world after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), ‘ready to absorb all that was of value in the world’s experience and adapt it in realistic ways to China’s own development’ (p. 172).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zongyi Deng

Zongyi Deng is an associate professor at National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616; e-mail: [email protected]. He is a former associate professor at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and is currently an honorary research associate with Wah Ching Centre of Research on Education in China, HKU. His interest areas include curriculum making, curriculum content or subject matter, didactics (or Didaktik), educational policy and Chinese education. He is an executive editor of JCS and has published in The Sage Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction, Curriculum Inquiry and JCS. His latest publication is Globalization and the Singapore Curriculum: From Policy to Classroom (with S. Gopinathan and Christine Lee; Springer, 2013).