Reimagining and Redesigning: Chinese education in changing contexts

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

We have put together this panel to engage in ongoing dialogue and critique about the colonial and Eurocentric legacies within the field of the Comparative and International Education (CIE), and to actively work towards a shift from Western universality to global pluriversality. We aim to enrich the sophisticated and contextualized understandings of the coexisting epistemologies and practices of the different worlds and problems we inhabit and encounter (Reiter, 2018).
We draw the theoretical insights from some postcolonial/decolonial knowledge work. Scholars have proposed knowledge projects that decenter the global North in knowledge production, provincialize the universalist ontology and epistemology that underpin official knowledge (Takayama et al., 2017). Decolonial scholars delink with the Western modernity-coloniality nexus, and further expect a non-hierarchical space for diverse ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies that have long been marginalized. This would render a ‘world in which many worlds co-exist’ and unfold toward ‘an open horizon of pluriversality’ (Mignolo, 2011, p. 275).
We acknowledge that a postcolonial/decolonial CIE is about a collective rethink of the field, not about dividing paradigmatic comparativists, or overemphasizing uniqueness of Chinese culture. Ontological interrelatedness and interdependency are embedded in various indigenous non-Western cultures, while these cultures may have pluriversal approaches to interrelatedness and interdependency (e.g., Assié-Lumumba, 2017; Komatsu and Rappleye, 2020). Therefore, reimaging and redesigning Chinese education policies and practices should not only reference Chinese traditions and philosophies, but also draw upon what can be learned from plural ontologies.
The ontological interrelatedness and interdependency are particularly prominent as compared with the Western selfhood. Fundamental to the Western selfhood is characteristically egocentrism, which indicates: the self is an individual in isolation; the self and the other are sharply demarcated; and the self stands at the center, while the other is perceived by and through the self (MacMurray, 1953). Like many other indigenous cultures, Chinese philosophy recognizes interrelatedness and interdependency among all things (万事万物,human and non-human others) in the ontological sense. An individual entity only becomes what it is in relation to, and dependent on, another individual entity. In Confucianism, this refers to an active process of cultivating and becoming mature in physical, psychological, and moral aspects through its close engagements in family and social relationships (Yao, 1996). Daoism goes further for ‘non-self’, but this does not imply a complete negation of self; rather, it emphasizes the nondual and protean nature of selfhood which arises from the co-constitution with others (Wang, 2022).
Furthermore, education policy studies should extend our ‘geographic imagination’ (Ball, 2016) and attend to new education policy actors, connections, spaces, and discourses in thinking of the modalities of policy and the processes and consequences of policy making. The rise of influential transnational organizations in shaping education policy agendas in jurisdictions and disseminating policy solutions, and the increasingly interrelated spaces and actors between the global and local challenge the assumptions embedded in ‘methodological nationalism’. The perspective of ‘policy mobilities’ (Peck & Theodore, 2010) is a theoretical tool on which we draw to achieve new geographic imagination. The literature on ‘policy transfer’ (e.g., Rose, 1993; Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996) tends to see policy borrowing and learning across jurisdictions as rational choices. Policy mobility studies drew attention to ‘trans-national’ and ‘intra-national’ policy networks (Ball, 2016, p. 549) in shaping ‘global policyspeak’ (Ball, 2017). Studies should attend to processes of how mobilized policies are ‘(re)assembled’ ’ (Ball, 2016) and how they experience adaptations and ‘mutations’ (Peck & Theodore, 2010).
Paper 1, by drawing on a study of international school policy changes in Shanghai, demonstrated the ways in which international curricula were (re)assembled in practice and drew attention to the path dependency of the Chinese context in shaping policy learning. Discussions highlight the persistence of nationalism and utilitarianism in enacting the policy, and attend to tensions between orthodox traditions (nationalism) and new spaces and imaginations (transnational and intranational policy networks) in constructing and conceptualizing ‘best practices’.
Paper 2 investigates Chinese teachers’ understandings and experiences of teaching philosophy in schools. The study is not intended to blame them for not following the constructivist approach to teaching philosophy promoted by Eurocentric literature. It attempts to expose the cultural and institutional contexts that have shaped the teachers’ perspectives and critically examine hegemonies that have constrained their understanding of teaching philosophy.
Paper 3 examines teaching research officers, a group of professionals at the system level to take charge of teaching innovations and teacher professional learning in school-based professional learning communities (PLCs) in China. By illustrating their role and practice in bridging the gap between policy, theory, and practice, the study attempts to expand the global discussion around PLCs in non-Western contexts and shed light on how to (re)design PLCs to facilitate teacher professional learning at the system level.
Paper 4 critically explores the application of the OECD’s Study on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) in China. It problematizes the assumed cultural universality of the survey. Taking the Chinese views of social and emotional development as an example, this paper argues that the framework of SSES has limited our ability to think and live otherwise. It calls for challenges to the dominance of Western understandings and the need for re-imagining and re-designing in the light of pluriversal resources.
Paper 5 explores gender and leadership in higher education from the perspectives of Chinese academics. This study is informed by a post-colonial perspective that focuses on the situatedness of leadership and how leadership is shaped by the cultural, organizational, structural constraints of place and time. It provides nuanced understandings of how gender differences are produced and maintained by social and organizational practices in China.
Our collective critique is about acknowledging and challenging CIE field’s enduring coloniality, and (re)imagining our scholarship and practice as it could be without global North epistemic dominance, while engaging in debate and dialogue. We respond to Takayama et al.’s (2017) call and show how the ‘Rest’ or ‘Other’ can be ‘conceptualized as a source of radical difference and a basis for confronting the active legacy of colonialism that constraints our imagination about pedagogy, policy, and research’ (p.19).

Sub Unit

• East Asia SIG

Chair

• Ting Wang, University of Canberra

Individual Presentations

• Policy mobilities and the path dependency of China’s policy borrowing: Understanding international school policy changes through school enactment practices - Jin Jin, East China Normal University

• Chinese teachers’ understandings and experiences of teaching philosophy in schools - XI WANG, Beijing Normal University

• Bridging the gap between policy, theory, and practice: The role of Teaching Research Officers in China - Licui Chen, Zhejiang University

• Measuring social and emotional development with a Western ruler: Problematizing the cultural universality of the OECD’s SSES in Chinese context - Yun You, East China Normal University

• Gender and leadership in higher education: Exploring lived experience and perspectives of Chinese academics - Ting Wang, University of Canberra

Discussant

• Min Yu, Wayne State University