The Practical Tradition in China’s Basic Education Curriculum: Past Progress and Future Prospects

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Across Contexts: Philosophies, Policies, and Indigenous Futures

Abstract

China is developing students’ core literacy through the eighth basic education curriculum reform, the curriculum exhibits a distinctly practical orientation. This study constructs a two-dimensional analytical framework by combining Doyle’s three levels of curriculum making with the historical institutionalism perspective, and adopts historical research and policy textual analysis to analyze the practical attributes of China's curriculum and institutional logic. The study finds that the practicality of Chinese basic education curriculum has changed in terms of practical orientation, practical connotation, practical modalities. These changes have been influenced by path dependence, critical junctures and institutional embeddedness. This study aims to reveal the internal logic of curriculum reform in the face of the tensions between global and local, historical and future.

Author

• Helen Gao, East China Normal University