Poster #9 - Chinese Teachers' Comparative Perspectives: Pros and Cons of Chinese Education and Education in Foreign Countries

• In Event: 63.088 - MTCC Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: 63.088-3 - Division K Section 10: Teacher Educator Learning and Practice

Abstract

Adopting a constructionist epistemology, this research views teachers as active constructors of knowledge in comparative education. It investigates 163 Chinese teachers’ (part-time graduate students) representations of the foreign and Chinese educational systems, and explores sources that have shaped the teachers’ imaginaries. This paper uses the teachers’ narratives in a required article as primary data, but it also considers other complementary data such as interview and observational transcripts. As the data reveals, inheriting the legacy of Orientalism, the Chinese teachers made a contrast between a negative auto-stereotype and a positive hereto-stereotype. Social media played an important role in shaping the teachers’ imaginaries. It offered opportunities for sharing information, but led teachers to ‘an avoidance of effort’ in achieving a reflexive stance.

Author

• Xi Wang, Beijing Normal University