Abstract
To understand better teaching and learning in schools in modern China, it is not enough to see its pedagogic philosophy as merely a reflection of communist ideology. Core values derived from China’s ancient civilization, especially the teachings of Confucius, arguably exert as much, maybe more, influence.
Highlights
My aim in this short paper is to describe and evaluate the most prevalent teaching style which I observed in a very small sample of elementary and middle “key” schools in Chongqing Municipality in China, where I was recently based during two extended residencies in the Faculty of Education at Southwest University, to which I am attached as a Visiting Professor of Education
By “interactive whole class teaching” I mean to refer to a way of teaching that has two distinguishing features
Students studying in classrooms that privilege “interactive whole class teaching” are not necessarily passive or inactive learners, as is often incorrectly inferred by its critics
Summary
My aim in this short paper is to describe and evaluate the most prevalent teaching style which I observed in a very small sample of elementary and middle “key” schools in Chongqing Municipality in China, where I was recently based during two extended residencies in the Faculty of Education at Southwest University, to which I am attached as a Visiting Professor of Education This style, which I call “interactive whole class teaching”, is immediately recognizable, because it is the default pedagogy found in the majority of the world’s schools, including very many of them in my own country, England, and the PRC. To be “effective” as teachers they need instead to encourage more group deliberation in class, while adopting a more “child-centred” approach that stresses the importance of learning from experience, rather than from text books and power-point slides. How fair is this assessment? “Not very” is my immediate answer, because it fails entirely to understand teaching and learning in China’s schools in its terms, preferring instead to impose uncritically on it a Western evaluation of what counts as preferred practice, which paradoxically has only a minority following even among its teachers who mostly, like their Chinese counterparts, prefer to teach interactively “from the front”
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