The seeming ‘round trip’ of learner-centred education: a ‘best practice’ derived from China’s New Curriculum Reform?

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the ‘advanced’ Western experience, China has implemented the New Curriculum Reform promoting learner-centred education since 2001. The OECD has identified this reform as a key feature contributing to Shanghai’s ‘PISA success’, worthy in turn of re-imitation by the West. Drawing upon official documents and interview data, this article shows that learner-centred education has been well accepted in rhetoric, which has led to more time being given to pupil activities. However, in reality, teaching and learning practices have continued to reflect what Confucian scholars have persistently advocated. Moreover, this article illustrates that the ‘round trip’ of learner-centred education between the East and the West has only taken place on the surface. The Chinese government has relied on the transformed Western concept for policy legitimacy, while international policy agencies have nevertheless deployed the case of China as an ideal exemplar to justify this Western concept as a global ‘best practice’.

KEYWORDS:

• Confucian Heritage Culture
• learner-centred education
• China’s New Curriculum Reform
• education policy borrowing
• best practice

Acknowledgement

For valuable suggestions on previous drafts of this article, I would like to thank Julian Elliott, Michele Schweisfurth and Charlotte Nussey. Special thanks to Xu Fangjie for her kind help in contacting interviewees. Any omissions or errors are my responsibility alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yun You completed her PhD at the University College London, Institute of Education in 2015 and is working as a ‘Peak Discipline Project’ post-doctoral research fellow at the East China Normal University, currently focusing on the global construction, representation and referencing of East Asian education and Shanghai’s school reform experiences.

Notes

1 Although this article particularly focuses on CHC, there is no intention to take Confucianism as the sole cultural and philosophical factor in shaping Chinese education. Rather, as Jin and Dan (2004, 571) point out, in addition to Western influences (e.g. Pragmatism and Marxism), ‘Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and neo-Confucianism have all been taken as frameworks in developing education theories’ in China. Nevertheless, I agree with Yu (2008) that while some aspects of CHC may have been modified by other belief systems, Confucianism as a whole has never been replaced and has maintained its supremacy in Chinese society (also see Liang 2016).

2 These are two types of local schools running in Shanghai. In 2016, 87% of local secondary schools were public-funded, catering for 88% of all secondary pupils (Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau 2017).

3 The ‘Key School’ system was initiated in the 1950s and re-established in the late 1970s to concentrate the best material and personnel resources on the most promising pupils. This policy resulted in quality gaps between schools and underpinned the exacerbation of ‘school choice’ fever.

4 The subjects related to politics are ‘morals and rule by laws’ (primary and junior secondary education), ‘history and society’ (junior secondary education) and ‘thoughts and morals’ (senior secondary education).

5 In almost all Chinese schools, pupils are often asked to read aloud together or individually during the morning reading activity (usually 30 minutes every day). Some of the interviewed teachers mentioned that, in order to save class time, they would ask pupils to recite the key content during the class break or after school.

6 This is the short version of Zhu Xi’s words circulated among the people. The original text, as translated by Gardner (2007, xxvi), is that ‘you must constantly take the words of sages and worthies, and pass them before your eyes, roll them around and around in your mouth, and turn them over and over in your mind’.

7 In many online forums and websites, parents and agencies that provide supplementary education have shared the experience about the content and form of all kinds of ‘face-to-face talk’ and competitions.

8 Since the 2000s, a number of top universities have been given the power to autonomously recruit a certain percentage of pupils. As Vickers and Zeng (2017, 187) note, the rationale behind this move is that ‘the rigidity and narrowness of the gaokao was frustrating the implementation of “quality-” oriented curriculum reforms’. By 2010, the number increased from 5 to 30%–60% in various universities. Meanwhile, rumours and controversy about the corruption and poor transparency of the autonomous recruitment have not ceased. In this scenario, the government stipulated that the percentage of non-gaokao pupils would remain at five per cent.

9 For example, in 2016, local parents in Hubei, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces strongly protested against the MOE’s scheme that allocated part of the local enrollment quota to some western provinces to promote education fairness (Utopia online magazine 18 May 2016 http://www.wyzxwk.com/Article/shidai/2016/05/363973.html)

10 Instead of the Western dualism, Hall and Ames (1987) develop the term ‘conceptual polarity’ to ‘indicate a relationship of two events each of which requires the other as a necessary condition for being what it is’. An epitome is the concepts of Yin and Yang, which are symmetrically related and mutually immanent. Rather than arguing whether the teacher or the learner should be the centre of education, ‘polarity’ may provide an alternative philosophical way of perceiving teacher-learner relationship, which deserves further discussion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Peak Discipline Construction Project of Education at East China Normal University.