Organizing and Reconstructing Children's Experiences: Compiling National Civic Textbooks in China

• In Event: Curriculum Collaboration of Researchers, Policy Makers, and Practitioners for Civic Competence: Perspectives From China

Abstract

Background and purposes
The Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) started recompiling civic textbooks back in 2012 and finished in 2017. Trials of these textbooks were implemented in several cities already and the new textbooks will be used throughout the country in Fall 2019. Researchers in the study were invited as editors for primary school-level textbooks. Throughout a seven-year collaboration with MoE, one major challenge is how to incorporate children’s experience into textbooks. This study attempts to reflect on the process of compilation while authors serve as both government agents and researchers. The authors deliberate how to incorporate children’s experience in the process and facilitate their growth.

Theoretical framework
This study is informed by the theoretical belief that moral and social learning is based on children’s experience. Deviating from children’s experience, in any means, is a failure in textbook development. This research adopts Dewey’s principles of moral education, Agamben’s and Dewey’s experience theory, and Polanyi’s theory of personal knowledge, and clarify the relationships between education, experience, and children (Dewey, 1909; Dewey, 1987; Agamben, 1993; Polanyi, 1998).

Methods
This study critiques the traditional approach of excessive lecturing and reasoning in civic curriculum. It further elaborates the theoretical and institutional background for the traditional approach. Involving retrospective narratives, researchers reflect how new textbook compilation intends to connect with children’s experience.

Findings
In the compilation of textbooks, researchers explored several approaches on how to use, organize and rebuild children’s experience:
1. Selecting life events as “an experience” to awaken children’s experience to make children’s experience transfer from a natural state to a conscious state;
2. Reconstructing children’s experience via asking questions, leaving space, and connecting with others’ experience and facilitating the expression of own experience;
3. “Doing it by themselves” to understand the meaning of experience and get emotional sublimation, so as to transform from children’s learned “experience” (jingyan) to their lived experience (tiyan);
4. Bridging between children’s experience and others’ experience, facilitating the connection and interaction of both experiences, and further converging personal experience with social and cultural values;
5. Resolving the tension and conflict between professions of educators and power of government on the direct transmission of knowledge and incorporation of children’s experience.
These approaches of dealing with children’s experience engage textbooks with children and make them partners of children’s lives. These approaches lay the foundation of involving children in the textbooks and curriculum and empower children as the constructors of knowledge and values.

Scholarly significance
Bridging the gap between children’s experience and textbooks is a major theoretical and practical issue in textbook compilation and education, and it is also related to the legitimacy of moral education curriculum (Lu, 2003; Lu & ##, 2004; Lu, 2005; Turner & Bruner, 1986). This article addresses this long-standing concern and might contribute to a better understanding of moral and civic education.

Authors

• Desheng Gao, East China Normal University

• Yue Zhang, East China Normal University

• Wenye Zhou

• Lili Fu

• Yong Zhou, East China Normal University