Studying Curriculum Reform: China Comes to America While America Leaves

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

At the turn of the new century, Mainland China launched a nationwide curriculum change in basic education and senior high school education that continues presently. The reforms seem to borrow from the West, particularly from American reforms prior to that of NCLB and Race to the Top through its focus on individual creativity, flexibility and equality; paradoxically the US moves in the direction of prior Chinese reforms that relied on testing and subject matter teaching. The symposium considers the paradox to China’s reforms embracing particular liberal traditions of the US in schooling; yet at the same time of the need to go beyond that simplicity to develop a more complex understanding of the cultural practices and historical modes of thinking that enter into and interact with social, economic, and cultural practices in the school’s production of particular kinds of people.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Section 4: Social Context of Educational Policy, Politics, and Praxis

Chair

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin

Papers

• Curriculum Reform: Western Theories and Chinese Experience - Yahui Chang, School of Education, Shaanxi Normal University

• Reform at Risk: Internal Conflicts of Curriculum Reform and Its Projection of China’s Modernization - Liya Tu, Zhejiang University

• Endeavor of Nonprofit Organizations for Improving Educational Quality in a Rural Area of China - Shanyun He, Zhejiang University

• Pragmatism and Curriculum Reform in China: How America Comes to China - Wenjun Zhang, Zhejiang University

• The Cultural Consciousness of Curriculum and China’s Reconstruction of the Basic Structure of Curriculum Study in the Global Era - Liu Hui, Zhejiang University

Discussants

• Lynn Fendler, Michigan State University

• Jinting Wu, University of Macau