Between progressive and conservative, technological discourses in Chinese and French teacher policies

• In Event: Global Perspectives on Teacher Education Policies and Leadership

Proposal

According to a 2021 MarketsandMarkets study, the global digital education market is expected to reach $46.7 billion by 2026. While digital education is booming, schools and digital technology have a special relationship. On the one hand, more and more school subjects, in their effort to educate students for their future careers and for digital citizenship, have to rely on professional software, most of which comes from private companies: compatibility software, office automation software, formal calculation software, including search engines, etc. On the other hand, digital educational resources have been specifically developed to support students in their learning and teachers in their teaching. In addition, digital teaching resources have been specifically developed to support students in their learning and teachers in their teaching. Regardless of the real need and effectiveness of these mediums in teaching, it effectively places new demands on teacher competence. The future of digital education lies in this tension between globalization and decentralization, and if the media is an extension of the man, so what are its extensions or variations in specific countries?
This paper analyzes French and Chinese teacher policies from 2000 to 2023 using text mining and finds that in French policy discourse, terms such as “ethics”, “arbitration”, and “management” are closely correlated with “technology”, and there is a tendency towards “conservative” institutionalized management of technology in schooling, with more discussion of the ethical and moral dimensions of technology. In its detailed arguments, France is more careful to consider the risks of the marketization of education. In Chinese policy discourse, the terms correlated with “technology” are “development”, “growth” and “flexible”, and the coverage of informatization is viewed more positively with a concern for “fairness”, requiring teachers to take the initiative to adapt to the development of informatization. In 2018, Shanghai published and planned to start using the “Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence (High School Edition)” textbook in six top schools, while thousands of kilometers away in a rural middle school in Southwest China, the electronic teaching equipment was already covered with cobwebs because no teacher knew how to use it. Through the medium of distance learning, we seem to have decentralized and erased some of the inequalities in educational resources. But with the rapid pace of technological change, new issues of educational equity are being raised. The different styles of policy discourse embodied in the two countries' approaches to technology are equally worth reflecting on.

Author

• Ganfen XIANG, Sorbonne University