Reciprocal learning as collaborative partnership: Canada-China reciprocal learning partnership in teacher education and school education

• In Event: Intercultural and International Reciprocal Learning for the Improvement of School Education: Stories from a Toronto-Shanghai Sister School Network

Proposal

The Canada-China Sister School Network is founded on the idea of reciprocal learning and structured under the framework of reciprocal learning as collaborative partnership so that Canadian and Chinese researchers, school board administrators, teachers and students come into direct contact, creating a laboratory for the comparative study of knowledge, values, and teaching methods. The partnership has helped build a knowledge base for understanding and comparing the Canadian and Chinese educational systems, for generating positive, reciprocal, practitioner knowledge and methods, and for contributing to public discussion of primary and secondary education in China, Canada and more broadly.

The terms “reciprocal learning”, “collaborative”, and “partnership” are aspects or facets of the same thing, namely people with cultural differences engaged in common practical pursuits. The term “practical” is directly relevant to this line of work because of its action-oriented focus on schooling and teacher education and because the work is lodged in the philosopher Joseph Schwab’s idea of “the practical” and its contrast with “the theoretic”. These ideas reflect Confucian Analects where it is written that, “三人行，必有我师焉。择其善者而从之，其不善者而改之”. The Master said, "When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teacher. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them." In the Canada-China Sister School Network, when principals and teachers come together from the two countries, reciprocal learning does not necessarily take place as expected. Nevertheless, their cross-cultural interactions stimulate self-reflection on what they have been doing and on their assumptions in a process that generates new insights and understanding.

This paper focuses on how the Sister School Network’s reciprocal learning framework has contributed to the building of multi-dimensional bridges that bring academics, graduate student researchers, principals, teachers, and students in Canada and China together for West-East reciprocal learning in school education. It describes the school-based theoretical and methodological focus of reciprocal learning and gives credit to the academic, professional, financial and other supports provided by institutional partners in Canada and China for the development of the Sister School Network.

Authors

• Shijing Xu, University of Windsor

• Michael Connelly, OISE/University of Toronto