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China’s reform of teacher education institutions: a critical case study of policy implementation

Tue, April 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific I

Proposal

1. PURPOSE: Since the 1990s, various national initiatives have been launched to reform teacher education institutions (TEIs) and nurture better teachers in China. The latest wave of teacher education reform was speeded up by the Guidelines for Education Reform and Development (The Communist Party of China Central Committee [CPCCC] and the State Council, 1993, February 13) and the Teachers’ Law, both of which were enacted in 1993. The reform has been intensified since the mid-1990s. Central to these policy imperatives was to improve TEIs’ quality and performance in preparation for teachers. Although recent studies have emerged on China’s national initiatives, the dynamism and complexity of the implementation process in TEIs still remain as puzzles, especially at a micro-institutional level. This study aims at critically interrogating into the complex implementation process of China’s teacher education reform since the 1990s, based on a case study approach.

2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: Teacher education reform is often viewed political and contentious among people with differing ideologies, perspectives or interests. The critical framework examines the socio-political process by inquiring into the nature of relationships in social institutions, with a number of key assumptions, such as that policy implementation is a complex process (Honig, 2009), in which institutional transformation is driven by various power relationships. Throughout the power-contested, benefit-based interactions, the reality of inequality in terms of economic and political status, becomes the forefront for policy analysis. Economic and political tensions and conflicts in the process of implementation are seen as universal, pervasive and long-lasting, since policy players are political creatures (a fact that too many policy analysts forget) in political communities (Marshall, 1997).

3. METHOD AND DATA SOURCE: This paper employs a case study approach, identifying a “common case” (Yin, 2014, p. 52) among provincial normal universities, which provide the largest base for teacher education in China. Based on this criterion, the province of Yangtze (pseudo name) was selected as the site and the Yangtze Normal University (YNU) as the case for this study. Convenience sampling strategy was used for identifying 17 interviewees from YNU, with 11 leaders or administrators, nine of whom were male, and six faculty members, five of whom were male. The interview process involved approaches for open-ended interviews, i.e., the informal conversational interview, the general interview guide, and the standardized open-ended interview. The field work was mainly conducted between 2005 and 2009 and followed up in subsequent years up to 2013. To increase the reliability of this case study, “a chain of evidence” (Yin, 2014, 127-128) was maintained, and ethical codes, consent forms and triangulation were used consistently throughout the study. In addition to the firsthand data collection of interviews and some documents, the study involves in extensive collections of secondhand data, such as books, journal articles, newspapers and magazines, government reports, statistical archives, interoffice memoranda, position papers, bulletins, and so on.

4. RESULTS: From the critical framework, this study focuses on the dynamism of the implementation of China’s national reform by examining how YNU’s various policy actors engaged themselves in the process and how their respective statuses changed. These policy actors included implementers, mainly policymakers and administrators, and participants who were faculty members. Both the university and the national initiatives required leaders and administrators as implementers and faculty members as participants to get involved in the implementation process. Driven by the hunger for individual benefit through the implementation process, it is observed that both the implementers and the participants fought fiercely against each other for better economic reward and political status. As usually found in any large institutions in China, leaders and administrators at YNU enjoyed overwhelming authoritative power in the process, resulting in fierce economic and political tensions between participants and implementers.
Economic tensions. There were more hidden benefits for implementers than participants, and those hidden benefits were always guaranteed in terms of perks and bonuses. Participants’ income is often much lower than that of administrators, and they were greatly discouraged by the income gap. Participants took the reform as a political opportunity for actions to confront the unequal reality, and their strategy of going on the offensive in cyber space helped change their economic status to a certain extent.
Political tensions. According to China’s legislation on higher education administration, YNU leaders were required to be elected, de jure, by faculty representatives from departments through an officially organized process. In reality, this process was always manipulated through backdoor operations, with voters’ individual rights being disregarded. It is observed that participants took collective measures to “transform the fundamental nature of the conditions under which they work” (Giroux, 1988, xxxii). The firece economic and political tensions between implementers and participants showed that these conflicts were actually universal and unavoidable problems throughout the implementation process.

5. Significance of the Study: When the critical framework is applied, the dynamic implementation process at YNU can be viewed as a benefit-driven, power-based redistribution of national and institutional resources. The often conflicting relationships between implementers and participants became the central terrain in the process, along tensions pervasive in the institution driven by the hunger for individual economic and political benefits. The conflicting endeavors of these implementers and participants served as dynamic driving forces for YNU’s institutional transformation and development.
The unavoidable complexity of China’s reform for a better teacher education system at national, provincial and local levels explains “what works” in the implementation process, as concerned widely by policy analysts. Unlike the conventional view that often identifies such a complexity as a negative factor that “does not work” (Wheatley, 2006; Radford, 2006), YNU’s implementation has proved it as both “what works” and “what does not work” for intended outcomes in China’s socio-political context. These findings challenge the predominance of instrumental rationality in the studies of implementation.
The evidence garnered from the China case provides invaluable opportunities for looking for experiences about how national initiatives may be translated to institutional development throughout implementation. The implications revealed by this study shed new light on policy studies of teacher education reform in particular and public policy actions more generally, which may serve as an alternative implementation option for other socio-political contexts seeking for better teachers in a global age.

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