Routledge International Handbook of Schools and Schooling in Asia

Kerry J. Kennedy, John Chi-Kin Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317439417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This comprehensive handbook is the ultimate reference work, providing authoritative and international overviews of all aspects of schools and schooling in Asia. Split into 19 sections it covers curriculum, learning and assessment, private supplementary tutoring, special education, gender issues, ethnic minority education and LGBTQI students in Asian schools. The volume displays the current state of the scholarship for schools and schooling in Asia including emerging, controversial and cutting-edge contributions using a thematic approach. The content offers a broad sweep of the region with a focus on theoretical, cultural and political issues as well as identifying educational issues and priorities, such as curriculum, assessment, teacher education, school leadership, etc., all of which impact students and learning in multiple ways.

The Routledge International Handbook of Schools and Schooling in Asia

brings together experts in each area to contribute their knowledge, providing a multidimensional and rich view of the issues confronting the region's school and education systems.

Chapters 34, 35, 36, 37, and 38 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

Schools and schooling in Asia

Achievements and challenges for “Asia rising”: an introduction to the Handbook

Kerry J. Kennedy and John Chi-Kin Lee

Why a Handbook on Schools and Schooling in Asia? The short answer is that it reflects our long-held belief that there are significant transformations taking place across Asia, and they impact on schools. We had a similar view when we undertook The Changing Role of Schools in Asian Societies: Schools for the Knowledge Society (Kennedy & Lee, 2008). That book helped us to provide some perspective on multiple issues that were influencing schools – issues as broad as globalization and as narrow as assessment practices. By the time we had finished the book, we felt we had only scratched the surface, thus the need for this Handbook: to examine more deeply the various aspects of Asia’s changing landscape and how they were influencing schools. This required views and perspectives that were much broader than ours, and so the Handbook provides insights from key workers in their areas. We have been very fortunate to have so many experts contribute to this work.

Yet it was not just a simple matter of wanting to know more about Asia – an encyclopedia can tell you more. We wanted to capture some of the nuances and deeper meanings of what has happened over the past decade. We wanted to look through different lenses, whether they reflected modernity, postmodernity or indigenous perspectives. We are not held captive by any of these epistemological frameworks and can acknowledge the contribution of each of them. But we did have one requirement of authors: they had to be in the region, either as a worker or a citizen, and they had to write from this insider perspective. Thus, this is a Handbook about insiders’ views of education in the region. This is not to suggest that insiders write from a single perspective; it is clear from the contributions here that they do not. But working and living within Asia provides a lens that is deliberately different from objectifying the region from afar.

There are some issues that we raised in The Changing Role of Schools in Asian Societies: Schools for the Knowledge Society that remain relevant for this Handbook on Schools and Schooling in Asia. We sensed then that globalization was having a remarkable effect in the region and that we needed to know more about its effect. We still have that view, but we are also aware that there are other influences on the international landscape, where globalization and its effects have been questioned, where nationalism appears to be rising and where there appears to be less tolerance for diversity. A number of chapters in the Handbook will address those issues, bringing perspectives from multiple authors. In particular, the Introductory Section explores a wide range of theoretical and policy issues that help to inform understanding of the broad canvas on which education policy and practice are painted.

In terms of specific education issues, we previously focused on what we considered core areas that helped to elucidate education in the region. These included civic education, examinations and assessment, curriculum reform, teaching and learning, leadership, teacher development and educational evaluation. These are important areas, and we have sought to expand on them in this Handbook to include:

• Curriculum (Section 2), Learning (Section 3) and Assessment (Section 4);
• International Schools (Section 5), Private Supplementary Tutoring (Section 6), Information and Communications Technology (Section 7), Early Childhood Education (Section 8), Language Education (Section 9);
• Special Education (Section 10), Moral and Civic Education (Section 11), Vocational Education (Section 12), Education for Sustainable Development (Section 13);
• Gender (Section 14), Ethnic Minorities (Section 15), Sexual Minorities (Section 16); and
• Teacher Education (Section 17), Learning Study (Section 18), School Leadership (Section 19).

We asked section editors to look as widely as possible across the region, realizing how difficult this task was and also realizing that making regional generalizations even with a broadly representative sample of articles would be a challenging task. In a sense, this gets to the heart of an important issue we had noted earlier: “Asia is characterized by diversity rather than uniformity” (Kennedy & Lee, 2008, p. 10). We do not want to go so far as to say that Asia is an “imaginary” or a “social construction”, since it is home to 4,148,177,672, representing 55.2% of the world’s population (Internet World Stats, 2017). Its urban centres are growing, accounting for 48% of its total population (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 2015), an increase of 8% since 2005 (Kennedy & Lee, 2008, p. 10). Yet both across countries as well as within countries, there is extraordinary diversity that we can only claim to have tapped in a minimal way. We believe, however, that the picture portrayed by the chapters in this Handbook conveys a sense of what is happening in different parts of the region and importantly suggests the kind of developments that characterize regional education development.

In the concluding chapter of The Changing Role of Schools in Asian Societies (Kennedy & Lee, 2008), we noted the “diversity” of “many ‘Asias’ ” (p. 177), the interactions between traditions and indigenous knowledge in education and Western ideas and technologies (pp. 180–181), as well as the educational divide and disparities within and across countries and sub-regions in Asia (p. 182). Yet we also note a common feature amidst this diversity: “commitment to education” across the Asian region (p. 176). As we pointed out, this commitment can be shown in different ways, and recently some of the common trends in Asian education were outlined (UNESCO, 2014, pp. 29–30, p. 45 and pp. 67–68):

1. 1 Emphasis given to lower secondary education and expansion of secondary education pathways;
2. 2 Shift towards decentralized or school-based management;
3. 3 Influence of shadow education and private expenditure on education;
4. 4 Dual emphasis on non-cognitive and higher-order skills and academic content;
5. 5 Increasing importance of using English;
6. 6 Importance of learning outcome assessment of secondary students for educational monitoring;
7. 7 Low popularity of and governmental attention to technical and vocational education and training (TVET); and
8. 8 Blurred division between TVET and general education.

Some of these issues are taken up in the chapters that follow since they indicate the extent of educational transformation taking place across the region. Law and Miura (2015, p. 3) have argued that there has been a paradigmatic change in many education systems characterized by a move from uniformity to “diversity” in terms of goals, contents, activities and assessment. Despite existing challenges, such as the lack of systemic capacity for change and insufficient teacher education, there are examples ranging from collaboration with parents and community to facilitate children’s learning in Japan and active learning methods involving scientists in Indonesia to aspirations and partial adoption of innovative pedagogical practices in Fiji, Nepal and Vietnam (pp. 3–4). An overview can be found in Edmond Hau-fai Law’s chapter in Section 2, “Re-engineering the curricular and pedagogical practices in the Asian region” in Section 2 on Curriculum. Further discussion of curriculum, teaching and learning in specific subjects (mathematics, science, arts, foreign language) and cross-subject domains (interdisciplinary learning, service learning) can be found in Sections 2 and 3 on Curriculum and Learning respectively. These kinds of changes suggest that the older stereotypical views of rote learning in Asian classrooms at the very least are no longer uniform.

If there are curriculum changes taking place in different parts of the region, the chapters on ICT (Section 7) signal that there are many experiments underway using digital technology. Oblinger and Oblinger (2012) have outlined the learning characteristics and requirements of young people, who are often referred to as “digital natives”, having grown up with technology and come to regard it as a natural way to communicate and interact. Learning in classrooms may very often be at odds with the expectations of digital natives, who are more attuned to working quickly, often in groups and even more often unsupervised. Motivation can be high for this kind of learning, and, equally, for more traditional kinds of learning, motivation can be dampened. The potential of digital learning, therefore, is high, and Section 7 clearly demonstrates this. Yet there is a caveat to this enthusiasm.

There is a digital divide that is both international and intraregional. Internet penetration in Asia has been estimated at 45.2% in 2017, compared with 55.1% for the rest of the world (Internet Word Stats, 2017). But even more revealing is the comparison with 2006, when we last wrote, when the penetration rate for Asia was 9.9% compared with 23.1% in the rest of the world (Kennedy & Lee, 2008, p. 10). Variations, however, continue: Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea are at over 80% compared with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, all at less than 20% (Internet Word Stats, 2017). Digital learning opportunities, therefore, are not available to all in the same way, and this is one of the major equity issues facing the region and its development.

The digital divide highlights a key objective for education systems across the region: the eradication of disparities in education shown also in rural-urban divides and socio-economic divides within and across countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar (Puthucode, 2016) but also Cambodia, Laos, China and Thailand. Gwang-Jo Kim and Wesley Teter’s chapter in Section 1 highlights the role of education in UNESCO’s 2030 agenda for poverty eradication, an agenda embraced by all governments within the United Nations system. Barriers in terms of insufficient resources and technology provision, including the weak physical and digital infrastructure and low quality of schooling are high on the 2030 agenda. Schools need to be connected by ICT infrastructure to ensure students have good access to learning resources and schooling through teachers’ innovative teaching practices, massive open online courses (MOOCS) and the use of Skype for lesson delivery by other actors from other parts of the world (Puthucode, 2016). There is also the imperative of facilitating transition from post-basic education to post-secondary and tertiary education by tackling the constraints of learners owing to disability and linguistic, religious, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds as well as less accessible geographical locations and inadequate resources provision in less developed areas/regions (UNESCO, 2015a, p. 2). According to ASEAN, there are important lessons that can help chart future directions for change and improvement (UNESCO, 2014, pp. 69–70):

1. 1 Formulation of a clear vision and sustained commitment to implementation of educational policies;
2. 2 Assurance of consistency and alignment of policies at various agencies and levels;
3. 3 Priorities for achieving equity, quality and relevance;
4. 4 Provisions and measures for catering to diverse learners’ needs;
5. 5 Establishment of partnerships among stakeholders; and
6. 6 Usage of external benchmarking and evaluation of outcomes for policy making and improvement.

While these are important planning issues, they only make sense and are likely to be effective in the context of regional economic growth and development. There are a number of regional initiatives that seek to raise aggregate regional economic growth on the assumption that such growth is good not only for individual countries but also for the region. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has given rise to the Asian Economic Community (AEC) (UNESCO, 2015, p. 1). In addition, ASEAN+6, which encompasses the participation of Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea, is a regional cooperation framework designed to forge a shared vision of economic growth in East Asia and neighbouring areas (UNESCO, 2014, p. 1, Kennedy & Brunold, 2014).

China has recently initiated the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (often referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative) that spans Asian, European and African countries. It is geared to promote Chinese soft power in the region but also regional economic development (Liu & Sukumaran, 2017). It has also encouraged education development through collaborative educational programs and research to setting up offshore university campuses (for example in Laos, Malaysia and Thailand) (Chi, 2017; Lu, 2017; Liu & Sukumaran, 2017). There is also a caveat on these economic initiatives.

As Liu and Sukumaran (2017) pointed out, the Belt and Road initiative is “the guardian of globalization”, and the same can be said for ASEAN as an economic community. Once the unassailable economic doctrine of the West and increasingly adopted in Asia, globalization has recently come under considerable pressure from protectionists, such as President Donald Trump and his economic nationalism expressed most clearly in his “make America great again” slogan. Yet criticisms of globalization are not new. Stiglitz (2002, 2013), an economics Nobel Prize winner, has been warning of the deleterious effects of globalization on the most vulnerable in society for some time. He argued that the “trickle down” effects of globalization do not reach target groups, and while economic development certainly enriches an elite, there are many who continue to be disadvantaged. Donald Trump’s election victory in the United States and the vote to support Brexit in the United Kingdom are seen by most commentators as votes by those who have been left behind by globalization and who are searching for retribution through the ballot box. Thus overreliance on globalization, free trade and constant economic integration as an economic strategy and not taking into account the real needs of workers may be a risky strategy in the future. The creation of a large underclass in Asia (Kurtenbach & Mason, 2014) that feels repressed and that constantly misses out can become yet another major equity issue to be confronted and an issue that continues to exacerbate divides across the region.

As in many parts of the world, Asia has been adversely affected by climate change, environmental degradation, youth unemployment and illiteracy, poverty and health (e.g., HIV/AIDs) issues (UNESCO, 2014, pp. 3–6). Yet progress has been made on a number of fronts (UNESCO, 2015a,). According to the review of national Education for All (EFA) reports in the Asia-Pacific region, many countries made considerable success in achieving Goal 2, related to universal primary education, and Goal 5 on gender parity and equality in education respectively. The achievement of Goal 1 on early childhood care and education and Goal 3 on life skills and lifelong learning, related to lower secondary and secondary education enrolment also reflected relatively good progress. There remain, however, substantial variations within and across countries as well as entrenched challenges in addressing continuing issues of equity, equality, quality and governance in education.

It is notable, for example, that female teachers have been under-represented in Pakistan and Nepal, while male primary teachers remain dominant in Kazakhstan and Mongolia (UNESCO, 2015a, p. 59). As regards school enrolment and performance, boys have been disadvantaged in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Mongolia (p. 59). The provision of school children to enrol in lower secondary education in many countries, such as Bangladesh, Lao PDR, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Samoa and Thailand, is still inadequate (p. 58), leading to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Schools and schooling in Asia: achievements and challenges for “Asia rising”: an introduction to the Handbook
• Section 1 Framing 21st-century education in Asia
• Section 2 Curriculum
• Section 3 Learning
• Section 4 Assessment
• Section 5 International schools
• Section 6 Private supplementary tutoring
• Section 7 Information and communications technology
• Section 8 Early childhood education
• Section 9 Language education
• Section 10 Special education
• Section 11 Moral and civic education
• Section 12 Vocational education
• Section 13 Education for sustainable development
• Section 14 Gender
• Section 15 Ethnic minorities
• Section 16 Sexual and gender minorities
• Section 17 Teacher education
• Section 18 Learning study
• Section 19 School leadership
• Index