Bridging West-East Dichotomy through Reciprocal Learning: An Inquiry into Canadian and Chinese Principals' Collaboration

• In Event: Roundtable Group 10
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Pathways to Equity in Foundational Learning: What can we learn from comparing cases

Proposal

Despite the increasing global interconnectedness, tensions persist between China and the Western world. The binary worldview and competitive mindset of West vs. East are evident not only geopolitically but also in Western and Chinese educational discourses.

This paper originates from the longitudinal Canada-China Reciprocal Learning in Education Partnership project (Xu & Connelly, 2013-2020). The project attempts to overcome the binary opposition and unidirectional flow of knowledge between the West and the East by establishing a reciprocal partnership framework between Canada and China for sharing practitioners' knowledge, expertise, and experiences in teaching and learning in schools and pre-service teacher preparation programs.

The focus of the paper is to explore and present the narratives of Canadian and Chinese principals who participated in the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Partnership. Specifically, the paper aims to understand 1) the kinds of practitioners' knowledge shared between Canadian and Chinese principals during their seven-year partnership and 2) to what extent this shared knowledge influenced the improvement of school education.

The paper begins with an overview of the partnership framework called "Reciprocal Learning as Collaborative Partnership" (Connelly & Xu, 2019, 2020). It then explains the utilization of narrative inquiry methodology and methods to study and promote collaboration and reciprocal learning experiences among Canadian and Chinese principals. Next, the paper showcases selected stories of these principals, demonstrating how the reciprocal Canada-China educational partnership fostered interschool communities, shaped school leadership, and impacted student learning, school culture, and teacher professional development.

We intend to submit the paper to a roundtable session to seek insights from fellow comparative scholars regarding the relevance of our reciprocal learning partnership framework to diverse comparative and international educational research settings.

In June 2020, UNESCO’s International Commission on the Futures of Education emphasized the need for "renewed commitments to international cooperation and multilateralism, together with a revitalized global solidarity that has empathy and an appreciation of our common humanity at its core" to address inequalities and shape a desirable future (UNESCO, 2020). We believe that the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Partnership project, alongside its goal to promote two-way understandings and learning between educational systems through practitioners coming together and sharing knowledge, expertise, and experience with each other, provides educators in different societies with a generative way to think about global solidarity amidst cultural differences and national educational comparisons and competitions. In a divided world, educators and researchers have a crucial role to play to realize deep learning and solidarity that goes beyond the comparative mindset. With its intention to promote interconnected educational/school communities for knowledge sharing and collaboration across national and cultural boundaries, our study hopes to generate meaningful conversations among educators and colleagues to explore collaborative and reciprocal educational frameworks in the field of comparative and international education.

Authors

• Yishin Khoo, University of Windsor

• Shijing Xu, University of Windsor