Rethinking the Purposes of Teaching: An Incremental PAR in Chinese Free Teacher Education Programs

• In Event: Transformative Practices in Teacher Education: Lessons from the U.S. and China

Abstract

Recruiting and retaining quality teachers in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities is a global challenge. China has addressed this through state-funded free teacher education (FTE) programs that require graduates to serve in underprivileged regions. The Targeted Excellent Teacher Training Program for Mid-Western Underdeveloped Regions (Excellent Teacher Program or 优师计划) is the most recent national version.

While these FTE programs promote social mobility for enrolled students, they often fail to improve educational opportunities in the targeted communities (Qian et al., 2020; Wang & Gao, 2013). Students are attracted to the programs for their personal benefits—such as lower admission scores, full scholarships, and guaranteed state employment—but are often reluctant to teach in rural, high-poverty areas. Wang & Gao (2013) argues that the curriculum of these programs needs substantial reform to combat the social mobility discourse and to cultivate teachers committed to social equity and justice.

This paper emerges out of an incremental participatory action research project conducted in state-funded free teacher education programs at Beijing Normal University. Upon joining BNU as a junior faculty member, the first author designed and led two courses inspired by Paulo Freire (2000)’s conception of dialogue and conscientization, engaging more than 500 students between 2023 and 2025. These courses aimed at engaging preservice teachers in critical dialogues to collectively make sense of the stratification of educational opportunities they experienced, examine the underlying asymmetric power structures, and rethink the purposes and values of teaching.

The other authors initially participated in these courses as students and later joined the action research team, where they participated in collaboratively defining research questions, conducting literature review, analyzing data, and writing. The data analyzed include a wide range of materials produced in these courses: anonymous lesson and course evaluation surveys, discussion memos and reflective memos, instructor reflection, in-class discussion records and writing exercises. The team carried out statistical analysis on multiple choice questions in survey and abductive content analysis (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) on textual data.

Preliminary findings suggest that these two courses were increasingly effective in helping students understand the nature of educational inequality, re-examine the biases and values that they’d been socialized into, and rethink the purpose of education and teaching. Three strategies played a critical role in this process: (1) co-creating mutually respectful teacher-student relations and generative dialogues in classrooms which transforms students’ vision for what teaching-learning could be, (2) providing critical frameworks and for students to make sense of the root causes of their shared struggles and to examine their own biases, and (3) sharing relatable cases of ordinary educators and schools committed to educational equity/justice, which enables students to understand the agency of educators.

An illustrative example of critical pedagogy at work, this research provides important insights for the reform of free teacher education programs across China as well as similar programs beyond. Theoretically, it also serves as a useful model of knowledge production through incremental participatory action research in teacher education.

Authors

• Xin Xiang, Harvard University

• Wenjie Wang, Beijing Normal University

• Haoqi Li, Beijing Normal University

• Yipeng Guo, Beijing Normal University

• Jianbo Lin, Beijing Normal University

• Yuxuan Wu, Beijing Normal University

• Sihan Shen, Beijing Normal University