Education Reform in China

Changing concepts, contexts and practices

Janette Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136719189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Over the past decade there has been radical reform at all levels of China's education system as it attempts to meet changing economic and social needs and aspirations. Changes have been made to pedagogy and teacher professional learning and also to the curriculum - both at the basic education level, from kindergarten to year 12, and at the higher education level. This book focuses on reform at the early childhood, primary and secondary levels, and is the companion book to China's Higher Education Reform and Internationalisation, which covers reform at the higher education level.

Education Reform in China outlines the systematic transformation that has occurred of school curriculum goals, structure and content, teaching and learning approaches, and assessment and administrative structures, including the increasing devolvement of control from the centre to provincial, district and school levels. As well as illustrating the changes that are occurring within classrooms, it demonstrates the continuity of cultural and educational ideas and values in the midst of these changes, showing that reform does not just involve the adoption of foreign ideas, but builds on and even resurrects traditional Chinese educational values. Importantly, it considers how exchanges of people and ideas can contribute to new ways of working between Western and Chinese educational systems.

Part I

Curriculum Policy and Practice

1 Reflection in Action: Ongoing K-12 Curriculum Reform in China

Jian Liu and Changyun Kang

Written by two key initiators and organisers of China’s curriculum reform programme, this chapter provides a unique insiders’ account of the various stages of the reform as well as the tensions, conflicts and challenges that have arisen and the extraordinarily complex processes involved at each stage of the reform programme. It explains in detail the chronology, aims and processes involved, marking the milestones along the way over a decade of reform and explaining the processes that have been put in place to deal with the very real challenges and dilemmas facing all stakeholders in this mammoth and ambitious task.

The end of the last century witnessed the launch of China’s eighth curriculum reform since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Regarded as a radical systematic reform which covers every single aspect of basic, K-12, education (Kindergarten to Year 12), including curriculum aims, structure, content and assessment as well as curriculum administration, the reform has also triggered a series of reactions in related areas such as teachers’ professional development, teacher education, assessment systems and education administration. The national reform project has been proceeding for over a decade. The two authors of this chapter, as key players in this reform, describe here the unfolding picture of the education reform from our first-hand experiences. This description entails five overlapping and interlinked stages. We reflect openly and in depth on the processes, the influencing factors, the social mechanisms and the various systems involved, as well as on the voices from various sections of society. We offer distinctive solutions to the issues and challenges that continue to confront the process of curriculum reform in China. We firmly believe that although there is still a long journey ahead for the reform with its ongoing difficulties and its opponents, the achievements and significance of the reform to the future of China’s education cannot be denied. Moreover, it is clear that the reform will continue despite these issues and challenges. We believe that the current and ongoing education reform in China will undoubtedly provide a unique and extremely valuable case for curriculum reform worldwide.

Background

China, with its five thousand year history and a population of 200 million students, is at a time of rapid transformation and revival. The end of the last century witnessed the launch of China’s eighth curriculum reform since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. This remarkable national education reform has made great progress over the past decade and it is still in the process of being implemented. This chapter reviews the past decade of reform chronologically by first examining its major events and significant achievements and then providing a reflection and evaluation of each of its various aspects.

Stage 1 Curriculum Ideology and Planning (1996–98)

Key Events and Significant Achievements

Survey of the Nine-Year Compulsory Education Curriculum

From June 1996 to 1997, with funding from the United Nations Children’s Fund, the Basic Education Department in the Ministry of Education (MOE) organised curriculum experts from six key Chinese universities including Beijing Normal University, East China Normal University and the Central Education Institute, to carry out a survey of the national nine-year compulsory education curriculum. The survey involved nine provinces and municipal cities, 72 districts, over 160,000 K-12 students, 2,500 principals and teachers and more than 50 national government education consultants and government science, culture and health committee members. The survey covered aspects such as the implementation of curriculum goals, the appropriateness of teaching content, approaches to teaching and learning and examination and assessment issues.

The vast amount of information and data generated demonstrated that there were a series of major problems in the current curriculum practices, which included: relatively outmoded educational concepts; a lack of connection between school education models and contemporary theories of child development and learning; moral education which was lacking in relevance and effectiveness; curriculum content that was out-of-date; and curriculum structures that were narrow with isolated subject systems which did not reflect innovations and developments in modern Science and Technology and in the Social Sciences. In addition, the school curriculum was isolated from students’ lived experiences and social reality; many students were struggling with the traditional memorisation approach to learning and teachers were exhausted and bored with worksheet training. In terms of assessment, too much emphasis was put on students’ marks and the processes of selection to the next level of education. Curriculum administration was so centralised that the curriculum could not address local economic and social development needs as well as the dynamic growth of students. In some areas, these problems were so common and so profound that they had started to inhibit the healthy development of the younger generation and crush their creativity.

International Comparative Research on Curriculum Development

Between 1997 and 1998, a large number of Chinese education researchers carried out research on curriculum development and strategies in other countries and regions looking especially at how their education systems were confronting the education needs of the new century. This included education systems and curriculum in England, America, Canada, Germany, Japan, Australia, Korea, Russia, Sweden, India, Brazil and Egypt as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. This research helped to underpin the development of an understanding of curriculum development worldwide and resulted in the publication of a series of influential papers and books which provided information and background for the new round of basic education curriculum reform in China.

Development of the Guidelines on Basic Education Curriculum Reform

After exhaustive discussions and debates at hundreds of meetings, seminars and consultation events across China, the values, mission, map and timetable for the national basic education curriculum reform were outlined in a blueprint document which outlined the aims of the reform in six areas: curriculum goals, structure, content, implementation, assessment and administration.

Reflection and comments

This stage took over three years due to the need to get to grass-roots levels and also due to a lack of policy certainty and limited financial resources. This situation, however, also created a rich environment for scholarly investigation and the identification of important education values for the new century and for the new basic education curriculum development to underpin the regeneration of the Chinese nation and the individual growth of every student. The common vision, core values and general spirit generated through this early stage of the reform programme attracted people to engage in research and carry out various types of research projects.

Stage 2 Design, Dissemination and Experimental Stage of the Curriculum Documents (1999–2001)

Key Events and Significant Achievements

In the second stage of the reform programme, the MOE issued the Confronting the Twenty-first Century Education Rejuvenation Action Plan to champion the campaign for the reform of the curriculum system and its assessment mechanisms. Following approximately a decade of trialling and experimentation, the twenty-first century basic education curriculum textbook system was implemented nationwide. Thus, the eighth basic education curriculum reform since the foundation of People’s Republic of China was officially launched in this period, issuing in a phase of widespread action and government and individual organisation-led participation. A Basic Education Curriculum Reform Expert Team was established in January 1999 comprising over forty experts from higher education institutes, local administration bureaus, renowned scholars and researchers in the fields of curriculum, education and psychology, as well as principals’ and teachers’ representatives. The expert team members held a series of seminars and consultations on the topics of basic education curriculum goals, structures and design, curriculum standards, examinations and assessment, as well as subject curriculum standards, rural curriculum reform and curriculum support policies. The research projects on curriculum standards in Chinese Literacy, Mathematics, Moral Education and Elementary Science were given priority with the aim of exploring and initiating a set of subject curriculum standards. After a year of deliberation by the Mathematics curriculum standards research team, and drawing on extensive research on the existing literature, 30,000 copies of the draft National Mathematics Curriculum Standards were formally published in March 2000 to seek public feedback.

At the same time, the basic education curriculum reform expert teams formalised their working processes for the curriculum standard research projects as follows:

• Conduct research on historical and contemporary literature on the subject’s educational development, international contexts and comparisons, future outlook and trends, and the future requirements for public literacy and the learning needs of K-12 students.
• Based on the above research, develop major concepts, ideas and strategies for the curriculum of the subject.
• Develop draft curriculum standards for feedback.
• Invite feedback from elementary and secondary schools and the public.
• Respond to the feedback and suggestions received.

As mentioned above, the basic education curriculum reform programme was divided into a number of key projects which included a general outline for curriculum reform, curriculum goals, curriculum standards, curriculum structure, textbook composition and administration, curriculum implementation, curriculum assessment and administration policy. Documents on Basic Education Curriculum Reform Programme Application, Adjudication and Administration Details and Curriculum Reform Basic Education Project Outlines were developed and disseminated and invitations to undertake projects were issued to some of the normal (i.e. Education) universities, research institutes and provincial education administration bureaus. The end of December 1999 witnessed the opening of a national Basic Education Curriculum Reform: Workshop and Project Bidding Conference. In less than three months, 261 research proposals were received involving more than 3,000 education experts and scholars. The proposals were evaluated between April and June 2000. The project evaluation teams, which were composed of experts from the fields of education, curriculum, pedagogy and the subject area, conducted two initial and one final assessment of the proposals received. The committee considered principles of fairness and equity and used exhaustive selection processes to select the project principal investigators and co-investigators and finalise the proposals for each project bringing together the strong points of each proposal. By June 2000, a total of 11 categories and 40 key projects had been identified, which covered the national standards for K-12 curricula and guidelines for local curriculum administration and development, school curriculum administration and field activities, as well as processes for assessment, curriculum and textbook assessment, and teacher research and training. The research projects were fully implemented by July 2007.

To ensure the quality of the curriculum standards research projects and their effective implementation, apart from requiring the project teams to seek wide feedback during the research process, the Ministry of Education also employed a dozen local education bureaus, in Shenzhen (Guangzhou), Yulin (Guangxi), Xiamen (Fujian), Suzhou (Jiangsu), Dalian (Liaoning), Shijiazhuang (Hebei) and Wuhan (Hubei), to seek feedback on the standards from local teachers. It also commissioned Southwest Normal University, Northwest Normal University and Fujian Normal University to seek feedback from Southwest China, Northwest and Fujian province, respectively, and the Shanghai Educational Science Institute Intellectual Development Department was asked to seek feedback from large- and medium-size enterprises on the curriculum programme and standards. In May 2001 several well-known education academics including Zhou Yulin, Lin Qun and Zhao Zhongxian participated in the National Compulsory Education Curriculum Standards Adjudication meeting. Detailed adjudication comments were formulated for each project and subject and the leaders from the Ministry of Education considered the evaluation feedback for each subject.

The Design and Launch of the Basic Education Curriculum Reform Guidelines (Pilot Project), the Compulsory Education Curriculum Design Pilot Proposal Guidelines and each Subject Curriculum Standards (Pilot version) were then published and became cornerstone documents for this round of the curriculum reform programme, providing direction for the design of the new curriculum documents, the launch of the new curriculum policy and the processes for curriculum implementation. These clearly stated that the compulsory curriculum should provide each student with an educational standard that should be attained by the majority of the students, that curriculum content and aims should be explicit and should not be expanded or enhanced too liberally, that curriculum content should be developed with the focus on students’ minds, healthy development and life-long learning, and that it should be centered on creativity and ‘hands-on’ learning. Emphasis should be given to students’ ability to collect data, to acquire new knowledge and to be able to analyse and solve problems and to develop their skills of communication and collaboration.

In preparation for the new experimental curriculum work, and in order to apply and test the new curriculum, the first 38 state-level curriculum reform experimental districts were identified in early 2001, and training and professional development was provided for all the education administrators, teacher researchers, principals and teachers involved in the pilot work.

Reflection and Observations

This stage of the curriculum reform process demonstrated the breadth and depth of the reform programme. Whereas previous educational reforms were limited to the adjustment of curriculum categories, revision of curriculum content and replacement of textbooks, this reform programme involved systemic and structural reform. It involved all dimensions of the curriculum including curriculum aims, structure, content, implementation, administration and assessment (see Figure 1.1 below) and entailed a transformation of perspectives of the curriculum nationwide.

Figure 1.1

The processes of systematic curriculum development involve the curriculum design process, the decision-making processes, the implementation process and the evaluation and feedback process (see Figure 1.2). This involves the development of the ‘ideal’ curriculum and the administrative arrangements required for implementation and then finally translating the curriculum into practice in the classroom. The processes required to minimise the difference between the transition from the stated ‘ideal’ curriculum to the actual, ‘enacted’ curriculum in the classroom was extremely important in order to avoid a simple ‘passive execution’ to more one of a ‘mutual adaptation and accommodation’. The core theme that emerged from this phase of work was how to translate the shared vision of curriculum reform and also maximise motivation, initiative and creativity at the grass-roots level of schools and teachers.

Figure 1.2

There was also a concern to ensure that the newly recruited curriculum design teams worked in ways that were scientific but also democratic. They worked closely together through a process of dialogue, consultations, weighing up of advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and finally by making overall judgements about the directions to take. There was a deliberate move away from formal hierarchies, institutional affiliations and academic ‘authorities’. There was an effort to ensure that team members developed skills of negotiation and communication and constructive criticism, and that when disagreements or conflicts occurred, that the interests of the state and of the children were paramount. These efforts made a considerable contribution to democratic, equal and communicative curriculum development.

For the first time, the importance of standard teacher training programmes was recognised, and the expert teams developed a comprehensive model for teacher training based on principles of equality, dialogue and collaboration. At the research seminars organised for the new curriculum implementers, the organisers encouraged participants to actively contribute. They encouraged participants to bring their knowledge of the local environment, cultural traditions, education contexts, and their positive aspects as well as their real dilemmas to the seminars to share with colleagues and try to find strategies and solutions for the effective implementation of the new curriculum.

Stage 3 Compulsory Education Curriculum Pilot and Finalisation of Secondary School Curriculum Programme (2001–2004)

Key Events and Significant Achievements

The State Basic Education Curriculum Reform Pilot Taskforce meeting in July 2001 witnessed the launch of the new curriculum pilot programme and set forth the general goals and strategies of the new curriculum pilot programme, and mapped out the pilot programme implementation process and teacher training programmes. This signalled that the basic education curriculum reform had entered the third stage – the pilot and experimentation stage. The state and provincial level governments took the initiative in implementing the pilot programme followed by the steady expansion of the experimental curriculum through a process of exploration and experimentation. The curriculum implementation strategy was to first establish a programme, trial it and then carefully progress step by step towards its full implementation.

The experimental pilot stage then began to scale up. By 2001, there were about 270,000 grade one students participating in the new curriculum pilot programme, which represented about one per cent of students at that year level nationwide. About 110,000 grade 7 students (that i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Curriculum policy and practice
• Part II: Educational quality and access
• Part III: Educational values and beliefs
• Part IV: Reform and internationalisation in the disciplines
• Part V: Mutual learning and adaptation
• Index