Beijing International Review of Education

Teaching, born of the period of the ancient sages, developed as the moral art of living that introduced humanity to teaching as a moral pursuit, to the formation of value, to a moral and religious mode of being, and to a set of moral principles that have survived into the modern day. The idea that the ‘future of teaching’ represents a technological disruption of moral traditions of teaching and what teaching might become has become a serious concern for the current generation of philosophers in both China and the West. This editorial examines these issues and introduces this special issue.

Many policy makers and educational researchers seem to be convinced that teaching matters. Unfortunately, such a case for teaching and teachers tends to rely on a rather one-dimensional view of what counts in education - namely the production of measurable learning outcomes - and a rather mechanistic view of what counts as education - namely teaching as an intervention that is aimed at producing particular effects. Such views about teaching and education more generally are also affecting programmes of teacher education. In this paper I raise some questions about such views about the significance of teaching, on the assumption that the future of teacher education needs to be informed by a different understanding of what teaching is and what it is for. I make a case for a multi-dimensional view of the purposes of education and for teaching as an act of communication and interpretation that always requires judgement about that ‘what’ and the ‘what for.’ Placing such judgement at the centre of teacher education suggests that the structure of the curriculum for teacher education should be spiral rather than linear-cumulative.

Top school systems select and educate their teaching staff carefully, they provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame good practice, they encourage teachers to grow in their careers; and they have moved on from administrative control and accountability to professional forms of work organisation.

Still, the laws, regulations, structures and institutions on which education policy tends to focus are just like the small visible tip of an iceberg. The reason why it is so hard to move school systems is that there is a much larger invisible part under the waterline. This invisible part is about the interests, beliefs, motivations and fears of the people who are involved in education, parents and teachers included. This is where unexpected collisions occur, because this part of educational reform tends to evade the radar screen of public policy. That is why educational leaders are rarely successful with reform unless they build a shared understanding and collective ownership for change, and unless they build teacher capacity and create the right policy climate, with accountability measures designed to encourage innovation rather than compliance.

The most essential reason why teachers’ ownership of the profession is a must-have rather than an optional extra lies in the pace of change in 21st century school systems. Even the most effective attempts to translate a central curriculum into local classroom practice will drag out over a decade, because it takes so much time to communicate the goals and methods through the different layers of the system and to build them into traditional methods of teacher education. In a fast-changing world, when what and how students need to learn changes so rapidly, such a slow process leads to a widening gap between what students need to learn and what and how teachers teach. The only way to shorten that pipeline is to professionalise teaching, that is to ensure that teachers not only have a deep understanding of the curriculum as a product, but equally with the process of curriculum and instructional design and the pedagogies to enact and enable the ideas behind the curriculum. The challenge is to build on the expertise of the teachers and school leaders and to enlist them in the design of superior policies and practices. Where systems fail to engage teachers in the design of change, teachers will rarely help systems in the implementation of change.

Inclusion is nowadays a most cherished notion in educational discourses and policies around the globe. Discourses of inclusion appear as the most humane, politically sensitive and praiseworthy heights that political thought and educational practice can reach. At the same time, a kind of inclusion in the public sphere is enacted whenever people freely join debates on matters of general interest, educational or other. For, participation in debates on education and on teacher education is not limited to educational researchers, teacher organizations and all those involved in educational theory and practice. The present article begins with the operations of inclusion in educational theory and discusses some complicities and risks lurking in the unqualified valorization of inclusion that is noticeable in educational discourses and in public debates on education and teachers’ performance. Such valorization operates inter alia at the expense of thoughtful withdrawal and pertinent self-exclusion. In societal debates on education, inclusion as unconditional prerogative of a narcissist I (eye) or as social interpellation to participate legitimizes just everybody's having investigative relevance to issues of education. The article ends with some suggestions concerning the positioning of inclusion within a broader set of concepts required for a desirable redirection of educational discourses and policies.

Writing from the perspective of both an instructor in a teacher education program at University of Toronto and more importantly as a mentor for teacher candidates in the classroom, hosting for over twenty years student teachers from six universities in Ontario and New York, the paper explores the master-apprentice relationship within the practicum placement in schools - drawing philosophically on Martin Heidegger's reflections on apprenticeship, Donald Schön's pragmatic emphasis on studio work and Lee Shulman's focus for training on developing subject related pedagogical-content-knowledge, to resituate the significance of what many educators and student-teachers say forms the core of teacher education. Subtle changes in teacher education over the last thirty years, set against dominant themes of professional autonomy and agency within sweeping educational and economic reforms such as the neo-liberal accountability and austerity movements, are sketched in order to follow their arc or trajectory into possible futures. Using a Foucauldian genealogical approach, the author aims to show how we could think and act differently in our practices and governance of teacher education.

This paper reviews British experience of inspiring and educating teachers in Citizenship Education. It is based on a case study undertaken at ucl-ioe where provides diverse and distinctive teacher training programmes. The study firstly provides an overview on the National Curriculum for Citizenship and teacher education in England. Then it introduces three types of programmes related to citizenship education at ucl-ioe, in which the author used to work as both a teaching assistant and participant researcher. By reviewing relevant documents (e.g. curriculum frameworks with teacher's guide, programme handbooks, academic literature, and participants’ evaluation), the study analyses a multi-levelled structure of teacher education for citizenship at ucl-ioe, which consists of fundamental programme for concept and theory learning, specialised programme for subject and pedagogy learning both at the institute and schools, and practical programme for project-based learning cooperating with social organisations. The study further discusses how the university-led programmes could encourage and prepare teachers for their devotion into citizenship education, and argues for a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and participatory model to be implemented. The paper concludes that a high-quality teacher education for citizenship must help both pre-service and in-service teachers to develop subject-based, pedagogical and transferable competence.

The professional development of Chinese teachers of Chinese as a foreign language (cfl) in Europe is confronted with various complex educational challenges and problems. Traditional Chinese educational schemata and cultural values have great impact on these teachers’ professional beliefs and their perceptions. My case studies of six cfl teachers show that their professional challenges are connected with the cultural differences of Chinese and German educational contexts. Open-ended questions, in-depth interviews and classroom observation were employed. And multiple data sources, such as the transcripts of teacher interviews, field notes were included. Cross-case analysis indicated that the cfl teachers have to deal with some conflicts of their previous biographies and new requirements of local educational context, such as teacher-centered didactics versus student-centered didactics, traditional Chinese language approaches versus intercultural communicative didactics; strict classroom discipline versus acknowledgement of students’ individuality etc. I depict their professional development by employing a theoretic framework of developmental task theory, i.e. professional competence, mediation, acknowledgment and institution. My study may help to shed light on understanding the individual difficulties that cfl teachers face in overseas teaching environments. The study's findings and recommendations therefore are of significance for the future design of teacher training for cfl teachers in Germany and in other European countries.

This ethnographic case study documents students’ lived experience at a Canadian offshore school in Macau through students’ multimodal artifacts, interviews, and teacher-student interactions in English and Mandarin literacy classes. Undergirded by the theory of cosmopolitan literacies, this study revealed the opportunities at mcs for difference negotiation and fluid identity formation that were enabled by mcs‘s curricular emphasis on celebrating multiculturalism and multimodality. However, interview and observation data showed that literacy practices in the English literacy classes also centered around pen to paper meaning-making. This study identified human and non-human actors that enabled and constrained students’ literacy and identity options in the unique cross-border education context in Macau, such as mcs's multicultural reality, school's curricular emphasis on celebrating multiculturalism and multimodality, individual teachers’ preferences in literacy practices, and the expectations of the standardized Alberta test. The paper discusses the pedagogical potentials of cosmopolitan literacies to expand transnational education students’ literacy and identity options.

Digitalization as a key issue of society is increasingly a topic in school. Authorities like the recently deceased scientist Stephen Hawking and the founder and ceo of Tesla, Elon Musk, see both challenges and chances in the developing artificial intelligence (A.I.). Musk remarked: “A.I. will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity” (cnbc 1 2017). The solution, Musk said, is to increase regulatory oversight of the development and implementation of A.I. immediately: “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive.” (cnbc 2 2017). Stephen Hawking emphasizes the same point: “The emergence of A.I. could be the “worst event in the history of our civilization” unless society finds a way to control its development (…). Success in creating effective A.I. could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don't know.” Hawking said during a talk at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2017. (cnbc 3 2017). In view of these considerations and in regard to the meaning for education in school the question arises: Which topics and competencies should be presented to pupils against the background of the rapid processing in the field of digitalization and the corresponding uncertainty of topics and competencies that could be of importance in some years and decades? Verbalized differently: What does sustainable education for our future include? The answer will be aimed at the teaching and acquirement of basic competencies in general and in the field of digitalization. What should this “basic education” include? Another question is: How is it possible to combine learning processes in a “virtual reality” with learning processes in a “natural reality”? Further considerations are given in this article.

Feminisation in the teaching profession is a global issue. It has been said this problem implies gender inequality in relation to their male counterpart for it results in the lack of male models in the basic education and, thus promote social exclusion. This social reality is also the case in the Philippines. Data in 2008-2009 from the Philippine Commission on Women reveals that about 89.58% of the teachers in public elementary and 77.06% in the public secondary schools are female (pcw, 2014). In this regard, this paper argues that feminisation of education in the Philippines, all the more result to uncompromising situations of female teachers for as women, they need to work in shifts as part of their changing roles both in school and at home. Further, this paper presents an analysis of the narratives of ten female teachers in basic education which reveals that in spite of the feminisation of teaching from a purely statistical perspective, they still remain disadvantaged in the career that had always been believed to be their domain, especially in the area of career promotion. Limiting factors to the promotion of women still point to their social conditions as women, where the multiplicity of social expectations and duties in their diverse spheres clash to the detriment of their careers.

Much of the pedagogical work with which I have been involved over the last three decades in higher education directly concerns my relations with students and vice a versa. More recently (Waghid, 2019), I have given some thought to my pedagogical relations vis-à-vis the virtue of caring in an attempt to make sense of my encounters with students in higher education. This article reflects a closer look at pedagogical encounters between students and myself (as a university educator). In a way, I firstly reflect on my teaching and learning in a university context by making a connection between what it means to engage in pedagogical encounters through the act of caring. Secondly, I show how pedagogical encounters constituted by care could enhance both teacher and student autonomy, before, thirdly, tackling the notion that caring in pedagogical encounters cannot be remiss of deliberative iterations. Finally, I argue why caring pedagogical encounters are inextricably connected to an enactment of play which, in my view, corroborates the future of teaching.

This study explores how to be a teacher of holistic profession from a perspective of transformative learning. Cultivating holistic profession in transformative learning involves the process of changes in communicative and instructional learning, the process of learning practical experience, and the process of critical reflection. These transformative learning processes contribute to the construction of teachers’ holistic profession contextually. The rationales of applying a perspective of transformative learning concentrate on three major reasons. Cultivating teachers’ profession as one type of adult learning is the core subject of transformative learning. Development serves as core idea of teachers’ holistic professional consciousness. The learning transformation occurred from semi-profession to holistic profession. In this sense, the transformative learning model for teachers’ profession is initially proposed to identify a special lens to shape an explicit pathway of being a teacher of holistic profession. In this model, transformative learning involves identifying “learning being professional”. Transformative relationship focuses on “teaching being professional”. Transformative context view concentrates on contenting being professional. Transformative context view involves contenting being professional. The conclusion and remarks are offered to summarize the rewards of being a teacher of holistic profession.

This review examines the design cycles of innovation in response to changing policy, technological and practical imperatives. It begins with the initial creation of an information and communication technology course in an early childhood teacher education program and describes its evolution into a contemporary topic. Program changes occur because of policy-driven trends, including the expansion of the definition of what constitutes technology and the incorporation of innovations into curricula and pedagogical practices. We characterize these changes in three design cycles. In the first cycle, courses to prepare preservice teachers for early childhood centers focused primarily on computer-based skills. In the second cycle, new technologies were integrated into the curricula and teaching programs and incorporated into the practicum. In the third cycle, the principles and practices inherent to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) education were adopted to extend the role of new technologies in contemporary curricula and pedagogies. These new learning ecologies were characterized by the application of inter-disciplinary knowledge in authentic learning contexts. The reviewed case studies included students in three new technologies course projects in an early childhood teacher education program. The findings revealed that early childhood preservice teachers expected more opportunities to practice and apply new technologies in innovative learning spaces focused on stem learning. Furthermore, they believed that university teacher education courses should be applicable to practice-based contexts. The implications of this review inform the process of change in the design of teacher education programs from technology-based learning to the pedagogical innovations needed to prepare future teachers. It illustrates that new technologies for learning should consider changing learning ecologies in their design and implementation, and should support early childhood teachers in understanding and using child-centered pedagogical approaches.

In teacher education, it is problematic to intertwine theory and practice. It is also problematic that student teachers lack self-awareness about what values they express in their meetings with pupils. They need to reflect and verbalize their teaching experiences. In this article, results from a study in teacher education are presented from a development work where a combination of a didactic tool that visualizes ethics in teaching and a digital tool, video paper is tried. The purpose is to investigate how this combination can stimulate student teachers’ reflections on their teaching during their internship and through follow-up in the campus course. Findings indicate that the tools in themselves are not enough to bridge theory and practice. However, the tools can be helpful to teacher educators. Reflections presented in video papers are quite different in content, range and depth which are visualized through the questions of the didactic tool and by different typologies for reflection. The reflections show that there are many ways to verbalize ethics which raises questions about what it really means to visualize ethics.

Since 2011 Peter McLaren and Petar Jandrić have written a dozen of dialogic articles focused to critical pedagogy in the age of information technology and liberation theology. These articles are packed with Peter McLaren's interpretations of Karl Marx in various contexts, yet they never focused explicitly to McLaren's Marxist thought. In this article we present a collection of Peter McLaren's interpretations of Karl Marx written during 8 years of working together. Developed and published in various contexts, insights in this article do not present a complete overview of Peter McLaren's understanding of Marxism. Yet, focusing to extremely radically different themes of information technology and liberation theology, Peter McLaren's views present a rich source for understanding Marxist theory in the 21st century.

In January 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued the Curricular Standards of Science in Elementary Schools, aiming at developing students’ scientific literacy and a foundation for their learning and development as competent citizens. To achieve its overall goal, the reform reflects four main strategies: extending the learning time of science education, integrating engineering and technological contents into science subject, phased design based on the idea of learning progressions, and using big concepts to guide teaching contents. The Curricular Standards of Science in Elementary Schools has been implemented in major provinces and cities across the country and achieved initial outcomes in stimulating students’ enthusiasm for learning science. To better implement these standards, increasing capital investment, improving experiments, and upgrading equipment become urgent to be considered.

China has embarked on a new wave of curriculum reform since 2018. New Curricular Standards attempts to reposition high schools with the aim of improving the quality of citizens nationwide. It repositions basic education for the public which shall not only prepare students for university, but also for students to adapt to social life and career development, thus laying a foundation for their whole-life development. Emphasizing the key competence that students are expected to possess and formulating the academic quality standards are the two major innovations in this reform.