Building Educational Improvement Science in China: Historical and Contemporary Reflections

• In Event: Systemic Educational Improvement: New comparative theoretical debates and empirical findings

Proposal

Responding to the call for Improving Education for a More Equitable World, this paper aims to reflect on the interdisciplinary Educational Improvement Science (EIS) emerged in recent decades through a critical analysis of historical ideas and contemporary practices in the context of China.
Since the early 2000s, educational improvement science has become a new field of interdisciplinary inquiry for educational change (Berwick, 2008; Bryk, et al., 2015; Lewis, 2015). In fact, the idea of educational improvement was often used in ancient China, with an enlightening Confucian belief emerged two thousand years ago: “If improved one day, do so from day to day, and let there be again and again” (The Great Learning). This idea of educational improvement was revived by Tao Xingzhi, a well-known, critical master-educator in contemporary China.
Reflecting on the history and contemporary practices of educational improvement in the context of China, this paper asks 1) what key philosophical assumptions and ideas about educational improvement have been explored in ancient China? 2) how may these philosophical assumptions and ideas have been further developed and tried out for educational improvement in contemporary China? and 3) how these ideas and practices in the context of China may illuminate the emerging field of educational improvement science in a global, post-pandemic era?
With a method of critical documentary analysis, this paper tries to answer the three questions based on an extensive exploration of related Chinese classics in education, with two contemporary cases reflected. One is the National Movement of Weak Schools since the 1990s and another is the more recent Shanghai New Excellent School Movement since the 2010s. The former is a nationwide initiative with a top-down approach to improve weak schools while the latter is a local practice with a bottom-up approach to improve relatively lagged behind schools in urban Shanghai. The practices of the two cases illustrate the nuanced core definition of educational improvement “as a process as well as an approach of advancement in education at individual, institutional, systematic, national and/or global levels...through which challenges are taken and problems are solved” (Author, 2021, p. 69).
The reflections garnered from the two case analyses together with the ideas developed from ancient China show: 1) improvement is an innate, universal nature of change, as it is always desired by human beings and human societies; 2) improvement in education has been practiced since ancient China, and become more pervasive and contested nowadays in classes, schools and other learning communities in China; and 3) theorizing of educational improvement practices in China is featured with a holistic, Zhong-Yong (pragmatic) approach.
Based on these reflections, the paper appeals for attaching importance to and research on Educational Improvement Science, especially the discipline-building and exploration based on local context and global vision, cultivating new ways and areas of educational research, which is to be enhanced further through the perspectives of comparative and international education.

Author

• Jun Li, Western University