A Narrative Inquiry into Chinese Teacher Induction in West China through Cross-Cultural Teacher Development

This article is part of a narrative study of Chinese beginning teacher induction through cross-cultural teacher development, which has been developed and contextualized in the Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program between the University of Windsor (UW), Canada and Southwest University (SWU), China. This program is part of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership Grant Project, Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education between Canada and China. The partnership builds on the Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program, and the Shanghai-Toronto-Beijing Sister School Network. In this article, the authors conducted narrative inquiry with two of the SWU participants in the Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program to explore their experience from their cross-cultural learning in Canada to beginning teachers in West China. The findings of the research suggest the need to develop a global and cross-cultural dimension in teacher education and development in West China. It is evident that the cross-cultural experiences in Canada have influenced beginning teachers’ curriculum views, relationship to students, and beliefs about teaching. Their “lived stories” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 6) also indicate that the personal, pedagogical, and social influences of cross-cultural experiences play important roles in beginning teachers’ teaching careers.     

Reciprocal learning in teacher education between Canada and China

ABSTRACT

The Preservice Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Programme has been developed on a vision of bridging the East and West dichotomy by harmonising Eastern learning with Western knowledge. This programme is one of the two foundations for Xu and Connelly’s 7-year Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Partnership in teacher education and school education in 2013-2020. The Programme, ‘provide[s] an exceptional cross-cultural experience with international engagement … to broaden teacher candidates’ horizons for a society of increasing diversity in today’s globalized world’. This article’s purposes are to discuss how reciprocal learning is both a concept and an approach for international and cross-cultural teacher education and school education and to present the learning outcomes and educational significance of the East-West reciprocal learning programme in teacher education. The Programme has created opportunities for both pre-service and in-service teachers to understand and appreciate a culture and educational system different from their own, thereby reciprocally contributing to educational opportunities for those they teach. The research theory and method utilised in this work are found in a companion paper in this special series and are briefly discussed below in the project overview and later in a discussion of student outcomes. This work has implications for other school settings where increasing immigrant student population and cultural diversity have become the norm.     

Reciprocal learning: One teacher’s narrative

This paper is a personal narrative from the perspective of one teacher in Toronto who participated in the Canada–China Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education Partnership Grant Project. I took part in a Sister School partnership between 2013 and 2017. Over the four years, I came to understand relationships in an international professional learning community. Participating in the project gave me the benefit of seeing my practice through an international lens. For my students, it offered a global citizenship experience. Although there are numerous professional development opportunities in Toronto, this partnership extends beyond a lunch and learn, or a full day professional learning. The commitment to my partners has fueled my desire to incorporate new teaching ideas and has required ongoing reflection on my own teaching practice. In this article, I will explain some of the challenges, stages of development, reciprocal learning, and implications for future international professional learning communities.     

Reciprocal Learning in the Partnership Project: From Knowing to Doing in Comparative Research Models

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to describe an international project aimed at building a knowledge base between Canada and China and beyond for cross-cultural educational understanding and harmonious relationships. The overall purpose of this work is to move beyond cross-cultural comparison and competition to collaborative reciprocity. Reciprocal learning is the guiding term for the Canada–China Partnership Project. The term is relatively commonplace and its deceptive simplicity veils important research and public discourse consequences. The Partnership Project, though not explicitly comparative in nature, draws heavily on the literature of comparative education, particularly with respect to methodology and understandings of Chinese and Canadian education. We describe four comparative education approaches which we think of as models of reciprocal learning across cultures. In the following remarks, we unpack these ideas of reciprocal learning as they apply to collaborative studies of Chinese and Canadian education. The models are assessed for their potential to generate collaborative teaching and learning situations with associated reciprocal learning.     

Changes of Chinese exchange teacher candidates’ professional beliefs in the ‘reciprocal learning in teacher education and school education between Canada and China’ project

ABSTRACT

This article is based on the empirical research involving Chinese exchange teacher candidates from Southwest University in China who participated in the Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education between Canada and China (RLTESECC) project and studied at the University of Windsor. These teachers conducted classroom observation in Canadian schools from 2010 to 2016. The research study explores changes in Chinese teacher candidates’ beliefs about their professional life, which was promoted by the project, inspired by the Teachers’ Change Model proposed by F. A. J. Korthagen and based on the concept of Reciprocal Learning as collaborative partnerships between and among cultures. A two-stage research design was guided by the Grounded Theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). The findings reveal that the reciprocal learning project created an environment, which was conducive to exchange teacher candidates’ professional development and especially introduced new perspectives to teachers’ understanding of their profession in four areas: 1) teaching, 2) learning, 3) researching and academic writing and 4) professional social life.     

Intercultural communication in the context of a Canada−China Sister School partnership: The experience of one New Basic Education school

This paper presents the case of one Sister School in the Canada–China Reciprocal Learning Project based on a belief that practice has significant value for the development of teachers’ intercultural awareness and schools’ intercultural communication experience. This paper focuses on one Shanghai school’s reciprocal learning experience, highlighting the content of intercultural communication, the areas of collaboration, the characteristics of collaboration, and the attitudes towards collaboration in the intercultural context. Against the backdrop of New Basic Education reform in China, I try to depict how a Sister School partnership guided by the principle of reciprocal learning motivates Chinese and Canadian teachers to work together across cultural differences in order to learn and develop in terms of theory and practice. I also discuss difficulties and challenges that have occurred in the process of intercultural communication. In the process, reciprocal learning is re-conceptualized and relived as part of our research endeavor.     

Building a bridge between Western and Eastern worlds: reciprocal learning programmes that create reflective practice,hope and prosperity in education

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the Reciprocal Learning Programmes between Western and Eastern educational systems through a Sister School project as well as, a Reciprocal Learning Programme through preservice programs between a Canadian university and a Chinese university. Benefits of the Reciprocal Learning Programs include reflective practice of content and pedagogical learning, cultural and societal learning, globalisation and emotional and social impact. Qualitative documentation demonstrates that educational, social and cultural dimensions are cultivated and nurtured through the Reciprocal Learning programs and have positively affected the students, educators and leaders involved in the project. Criteria for success in the programs included professional and personal commitment, educator inquiry, vulnerability, organisational commitment and multi-dimensional partnerships.     

Developments in statistical education

This paper describes recent work carried out by the Schools Council Project on Statistical Education. The Project advocates a problem-solving approach towards the teaching of statistics in secondary schools (11–16 years age range). It sees statistics as an interdisciplinary subject primarily concerned with data. The article illustrates these important aspects with teaching materials which have been developed and tested extensively in a variety of schools. Finally an evaluation and assessment of the project's work is presented.The author worked with the project for three and a half years and has made extensive use of working documents produced by the project team in preparing this paper. He would particularly like to thank the director, Mr. Peter Holmes, for permitting the use of these documents. The author was formerly at the School Council Project on Statistical Education, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England and is now at the Mathematics Department, Polytechnic of the South Bank, London SE1 0AA, England.     

Exploring alternative perspectives in educational research

This paper advocates the use ofsocial constructionist perspectives in the development of collaborative educational research studies. The perspectives described were developed during our project work in Canada on “Curriculum and Context in the Use of Computers for Classroom Learning” (Ontario Ministry of Education Grant, 1989–1993). The paper explores the interrelated epistemological and ethical implications of such perspectives. These include the requirement that participants be treated as sense-making agents in the construction of the social reality, and the recognition of inequities in the production and distribution of knowledge. Social scientists must recognize their own roles within the structures of power and prestige which condition educational research, and design research strategies which take them into account. An example of the difficulties encountered in applying an alternative model of research is related, and some lingering ethical dilemmas are raised.     

Reviews

Beginnings Begin Here … The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
Towards Partnership Industry and Higher Education: Collaboration to Improve Students' Learning and Training.
Becoming Your Own Teacher Learning to Learn Across the Lifespan
Canadian Higher Education Youth, University and Canadian Society: Essays in the Social History of Higher Education
Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties Paul Axelrod (Kingston, Montreal
Accounting for Performance Quality Assurance and Accountability in Higher Education
Perfmmance Indicators in Higher Education     

Connecting theory and practice: Results from the teaching of Logo

This paper is concerned with pupils' learning of the concept of variable in the Logo programming environment and how this relates to teaching. Results from three research projects are described and compared in a discussion of how improvements in learning have been influenced by a refinement in teaching method. This refinement has been influenced, in part, by the theories of Vygotsky. Within this paper, details of the changes in teaching approach are described together with a discussion of the effects of these changes. The main conclusion drawn is that in mathematics education we need to make more explicit the underlying theories influencing our work, because these theories influence both the ways in which we work in the classroom and the ways in which we analyse our data.I am grateful to Celia Hoyles and Harvey Mellar for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. And I would like to thank the Economic and Social Science Research Council for their support for Project AnA (Grant Number R000232132).     

How teachers learn and change in reciprocal learning space

This paper reports the impact of a new Canada and China school network on its participating teachers in the context of the Canada?China Partnership Grant Project. Eight schools formed four pairs of sister schools, and teachers in these schools created collaborations embedded in their practices. The data include interviews of teachers and principals in both countries and records of teachers’ cross-cultural collaborations. Informed by the literature on teacher learning and professional learning communities, this paper shows benefits of international teacher communities. Also, it explores a new approach to research that features spatiality considerations reflecting a new trend in the comparative education literature. Focusing on teacher knowledge and practice, it shows reciprocal effects of collaboration in the international school network. Finally, this paper links the research results to the literature in a way that highlights the potential of international teacher professional learning communities and contributions of this kind of practice and research.     

弗莱克斯纳报告精神引领下的加拿大医学教育未来图景

2007年加拿大医学院校联合会启动了"加拿大未来医学教育规划",这一规划的总体目标就是深入剖析加拿大本科医学教育的现状,主要关注其与当代社会和未来社会的需求之间的契合程度.与弗莱克斯纳报告相同的是,该规划涉及一个反思和复兴的过程,而与弗莱克斯纳报告不同的是,它采用了多种技术手段来搜集信息.该规划的总结报告以"加拿大医学教育的未来:集成的愿景"为题,提出了关于21世纪初医学学术与教育优先发展领域的10项建议.本文将这10项建议与1910年弗莱克斯纳报告所提出的优先解决的问题作了关联比较,弗莱克斯纳精神聚焦于作为科学的医学的内涵,而当代的重心则转向医学与社会需求之间的联系.回顾弗莱克斯纳报告,我们可以体会它对当代医学教育的引领作用,同时更加清晰地认识到医学教育的未来探索方向.     

An interdisciplinary collaboration between computer engineering and mathematics/bilingual education to develop a curriculum for underrepresented middle school students

There is a strong need in the United States to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups who pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Drawing from sociocultural theory, we present approaches to establishing collaborations between computer engineering and mathematics/bilingual education faculty to address this need. We describe our work through the Advancing Out-of-School Learning in Mathematics and Engineering project by illustrating how an integrated curriculum that is based on mathematics with applications in image and video processing can be designed and how it can be implemented with middle school students from underrepresented groups.     

Engaging the community, targeted interventions: achieving scale in basic education reform

In 1983, after over 10 years of working on mathematics education reform in the Philippines, I wrote a paper for a Tokyo conference arguing that education reform in developing countries such as the Philippines should begin by working on macro-problems, namely the social, political, and economic environment of the schools, as a context for the micro-problems, the usual concerns of curriculum, teacher training, textbooks, and so forth. This article recounts how we carried out this approach to education reform in three large-scale initiatives: the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP), the Synergeia Foundation, and the Ateneo Center for Educational Development. The TEEP is an education project for the 23 poorest provinces in the Philippines, which began in the mid-1990s and was carried out fully from 2000 to 2006. The Synergeia Foundation, Inc. and the Ateneo Center for Educational Development are organizations which have been working with elementary schools on the scale of whole towns, cities, and provinces. They are also now beginning their work with high schools. What these initiatives have in common is that they begin by engaging the community, the school superintendents and supervisors, principals, teachers, parents, and political and civic leaders. A process is followed to have them focus on the realities of their schools, develop consensus on strategic plans and priorities, and participate in the process of achieving goals. Implementation then focuses on what we call targeted interventions, such as teacher training, educational materials, and physical facilities, which address the agreed-on priorities. The evaluation of the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP) at its end in 2006 shows that the approach leads to major improvement on a large scale. We are seeing the same kind of results in the work of Synergeia Foundation, Inc. and the Ateneo Center for Educational Development.     

Laboratory learning: Addressing a neglected dimension of science teacher education

Conclusions Almost all teachers recognize the value of hands-on science instruction in the laboratory setting. Many will even recommend that instruction should be not only hands-on, but also cognitively challenging. Moving from recognition of the need for enhanced laboratory instruction to implementation, however, is more effective with guidance. Formal schemes such as Laboratory Learning: An Inservice Institute provide this guidance by employing the most powerful teaching strategy available—modelling. In the workshop, participating teachers and their peers demonstrated effective practices, then analyzed and discussed the behaviors making those practices useful. If participant attitudes measure a workshop’s success, then peer modelling is clearly a powerful approach to instruction. Modelling, small-group work, cooperative learning activities, and theoretical and research-based suggestions for enhancement all targeting a single element of science teaching were blended together to produce Laboratory Learning: An Inservice Institute. This material is based upon work supported in part by a grant from the Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education Act (Grant No. S164B 10015-12) through the Iowa State Board of Regents. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education Act or the Regents.     

A selective analysis of empirical findings in networked learning research in higher education: Questing for coherence

In this paper, we have attempted two ambitious tasks. We have undertaken a wide-ranging survey of the Network learning (NL) literature, and tried to identify the emerging themes of this work. We have selected three of these themes, and in each case tried to identify the main theoretical perspectives in use, the main directions of the studies, and the key ideas being addressed and researched. We have also tried to indicate where the main research effort might be directed in order to help to ‘fill in the gaps’ and achieve some coherence for the theme. Our second major task has arisen from our assertion that the field of Networked Learning research is theoretically fragmented. We have argued that this situation arises because Networked Learning research is a new field, and is drawing upon a wide range of theoretical perspectives. However, unless we can achieve some synthesis of these perspectives we may find it difficult to establish a coherent research programme in the field. We argue that one way of developing some coherence is to make theory and praxis interact explicitly, in other words, to ‘converse’ with each other in our research. By this we mean, to use theory to interrogate praxis, and use praxis to modify and develop theory, thus moving towards perspectives that are changing theory, modifying and improving it. As part of this argument, we have briefly surveyed the current level of Theory–Praxis Conversation, either explicit, or implicit, in the thematic research we have described. It is clear that some outstanding work is being done to make theory work, and to modify it in the light of research into praxis. However, it is also the case that much current Networked Learning research does not interrogate the theory that it uses to contextualise it. We see Theory–Praxis Conversation as a way of thinking explicitly about how we might make the work of interrogating theory in our research more explicit and systematic. In this way, our ‘Quest for Coherence’ may, we hope, help Networked Learning research to climb up to the higher ground, and give us a wider ranging view of learning in networked environments.     

The Internet Learning Forum

Summary

This paper reports an effort to create a community of practice for teachers' professional development via the World Wide Web. Beginning with a discussion of our theoretical foundations and current online models of professional development, we address the problem of how developing Web and video technologies may provide innovative and effective professional development for teachers. We describe the initial conceptions of the Internet Learning Forum (ILF), a Web site developed to support mathematics and science teachers sharing and evolving their pedagogical practices. This site includes exemplary instructional units, teachers' reflections, and peer discussion. Starting with video, ILF participants examine assumptions, reflect on practices, and share within the ILF community. The goal of this unique community of practice is to create quality professional development. While this paper provides an overview of our initial design work, the site has evolved into a nationally funded project. However, the work described here, which guided the development of the prototype, has important implications for other Web-based efforts to support teacher professional development.     

Interactive Robotics Using the Internet

We report on a project currently under way within the department of Computer Science at the University of Reading exploiting networking and multimedia technology to provide a shared robotics laboratory on the Internet. The laboratory is for use by our own students and students at other Higher Education (HE) institutions in the UK. We present a mobile robot system we have developed to support teaching, and we describe how the Internet is being used to provide and control access to the robot. A case study is presented illustrating the use of the mobile robot in student project work. The key goal of the work we are pursuing is the provision of robots as networked resources similar to other computing resources, in this way making them accessible to many more students than would otherwise be able to gain access to this advanced technology.