Curriculum Reform: Western Theories and Chinese Experience

• In Event: Studying Curriculum Reform: China Comes to America While America Leaves

Abstract

As the fruit of drastic social transition in the process of Western modernization, modern social sciences have formed varied theories and empirical studies, which can be borrowed by Chinese academia in the discussion concerning curriculum reform and the building of a “harmonious socialist society”. While Western theories and narrations may have universal meanings, they are not always applicable to the education development of China due to its unique institutions, history and culture. In the extensive space between Western theories and Chinese experience, education researchers in China are endowed with the vocation of bridging the gap and developing social construction theories with Chinese characteristics. At the present stage, the Chinese Model has been bringing about education developments as well as conflicts and clashes. Defining its keynote and institutional bottleneck, and establishing corresponding reforms and solutions can help pave a practicable path of curriculum reform in China.

Through the review of the representative sociological studies on curriculum reform, this article attempt to use three classical theoretical concepts of knowledge, discourse, and governance to analyze the formative and the operational mechanism of curriculum reform. In the aspect of knowledge, the curriculum reforms comprise of different elements of the universal, class and private knowledge. In the aspect of discourse, they utilize western theory, scholars and official responsibility system in the institution context of the two-track regime. In the aspect governance, they fuse different mechanisms of the institutional, knowledge, and mores dimensions together, and free the traditional family, community, and schooling resources for reform and creativity in the practice. As key position of social process of multiple elements and moments, curriculum reforms not only provide opportunities for institutional innovations, but also embody the institutional spirit of reform period, which combines tradition, regime, and new market mechanism, and provides an enriched process of education development. This framework drawing on the classical social theories will be conducive to reflection on the other phenomenon of organizational and institutional change in schooling and curriculum reform.

Author

• Yahui Chang, School of Education, Shaanxi Normal University