China Study Trips: Expanding Teacher and Leadership Horizons

• In Event: Roundtable Session 55
  In Roundtable Session: Invigorating and Reexperiencing Teacher Identity and Teacher Education in International/Transnational Contexts

Abstract

Through narrative inquiry, a research method that studies people | places | things in interaction, this paper examines what can be learned from travel study trips to China undertaken by students at a mid-southern U.S. university. Meaning is made of the students’ travel experiences through broadening, burrowing, storying and restorying, and fictionalization, narrative inquiry’s interpretive tools. Dewey’s notions of education/life as experience, Lugones’s ideas about ‘world travel’ and ‘loving perception,’ and Schwab’s “best-loved self” conceptualization, along with his conception of how professors should work alongside student learners, deepen understandings. Three overarching themes emerge: (1) membership in the human race unites people; (2) the harmonious society philosophy permeates Chinese life; and (3) Chinese school practices are becoming modernized and arguably westernized.

Authors

• Yali Zou, University of Houston

• Cheryl J. Craig, University of Houston

• Rita Poimbeauf, University of Houston