Teachers’ Responses to Curriculum Reform in China: An Organizational Behavior Perspective

• In Event: Educational Research for Revealing Conflicts Derived From Different Ideologies in China

Abstract

Over the past few decades, Chinese teachers have been suffering severe criticism for their conservatism in responding to education reforms. In particular, when curriculum innovation emphasizing students’ cognitive development has become a crucial direction on the China’s educational reform agenda, the public issued a fierce rebuke over teachers’ resistance. Researchers have pointed out many factors hindering the reform success, such as extreme pressure from examination and insufficient administrative supports from governments (Dello-Iacovo, 2009). However, exploration on responses of teachers towards reforms at school level is insufficient, especially in the context of China, where school are under a strong bureaucratic control and facing a substantial stratification of public reputation.
Organization behavior theory serves as the conceptual framework for understanding teachers' responses to curriculum reform in this study. From its perspective, teachers’ attitude and practice towards reform are not developed individually, but formulated collectively at school level and reshaped in an organizational context, such as institutional arrangements and routines. As school’s public reputation is a key indicator of resources accessibility and academic capacity in China, it is considered a critical factor in formulating teachers’ collective ideology and behavior. Therefore, schools with differed public reputation may react differently to the challenges driven by curriculum reform, which in turn shapes teachers’ responses.
The present study tries to contemplate the nature and impact of different institutional choices employed by individual school. More specifically, the study attempts to answer three questions: 1) what is the teachers’ attitude and practice in response to curriculum reform in different schools? 2) what are the possible institutional choices made by schools with different characteristics to respond to the requirements of curriculum reform? 3) How different institutional choices influence teachers’ attitude and practice towards the reform?
This study is based on teachers’ interviews about curriculum reform carried out in 10 senior secondary schools in two cities in China. In each school, a semi-structured open-ended interview was conducted with teachers. In total 28 teachers participated in the interview. Each interview was transcribed verbatim. The interview transcripts were organized by Nvivo 9 and analyzed by within-and cross-case analysis methods.
The results reveal that schools institutional choices have tremendous influence on teachers’ attitude and practice. In the schools encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation, transferring teacher autonomy, and setting up supportive evaluation system, teachers expressed a positive attitude towards the reform, created a sustainable professional community and achieved school development. The interviews also provide some evidence of the deficiency of traditional organizational structure of senior secondary school in China. As the teaching and research group functions as an administrative department rather than a professional community, it is ill-prepared to respond to the requirements of curriculum reform to cultivate student’s creative thinking and problem-solving ability in an interdisciplinary context.
The present study provides the Chinese case to understand teacher resistance towards curriculum reform under the complex indigenous context in terms of a combination of intensive disparity among schools and over-centralized administration system.

Authors

• Diya Dou, Ghent University

• Chunrong Liu, Beijing Normal University

• Zheyu Lin, Beijing Normal University