Heidi Ross

China learns English : language teaching and social change in the People's Republic

An account of curriculum construction, teaching practice and classroom interaction in a Chinese secondary school by a foreign member of the faculty. Through day-to-day accounts the reader is shown not only the Chinese system but also how it compares with education debates across the globe.

Introduction: The Context of the Theory and Practice of China’s Language Policy

We have devoted the previous pages to illustrate our point that the theory and practice of China’s language policy in the past half-century must be viewed in the context of changing perceptions of tradition, modernization, state-building, and nation-building. We can conclude that China’s tradition, modernization, and state-building all tend to empower one single standard language politically, legally, socioeconomically, and even aesthetically. China’s early multi-nation-building efforts enthusiastically supported the maintenance and development of minority languages, whereas its recent mono-nation-building drive has significantly decreased such support, if not withholding it, and adopted a (social) Darwinist attitude - allowing nature to run its own course because there are too many languages in China as Jiang Zemin, the CCP’s past general secretary, suggests (Tiemuer & Liu, 2002, p. 57). Coupled with globalization and the forces of market economy, China’s modernization drive appears to favor only two dominant languages, Chinese as the national commonly-used language and English as the world language (cf. Ross, 1993; Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999, pp. 156–186).

Social Capital Formation through Chinese School Communities

We investigate how communities in China use schools to create and reproduce the values, knowledge, and social expectations that engender social capital. We focus on private and girls’ education, and report on the experiences of four schools between 1995 and 2005. We argue that, beyond schools’ contribution to the skills acquired by individual students, whether they promote the formation of social capital within communities should be a part of our assessment of their effectiveness. Schools as centers of activism can provide communities a forum for formulating their social demands and identities. In this context, social capital formation provides a useful heuristic for reclaiming the language of social justice and considering the human ends of education.

Glocalizing Chinese higher Education: Groping for Stones to Cross the River

Over two and one-half decades have passed since Deng Xiaoping proclaimed that Chinese education must face in “three directions”—toward modernization, the world, and the future. At that time leaders had yet to articulate the driving purpose of reform as the creation of a robust market integrated with the global economy. Today Chinese educators and policymakers use “globalization” rather than modernization to approximate the pedagogical and social means (including cultivating a citizenship capable of creativity, flexibility, independent thinking, and innovation) they believe will ensure China’s engagement in an international knowledge economy. In response, Chinese universities grapple with how to shape institutional frameworks that fit the social, political, economic, and intellectual contours of this evolving context. Most Chinese commentators have jumped on the globalization bandwagon, praising globalization for injecting into education a forward-looking “Olympic spirit.” Some, however, describe the impact of globalization on education more cautiously, using a Chinese proverb, “groping for stones to cross the river.” We

Rethinking Human Vulnerability, Security, and Connection Through Relational Theorizing

In this volume we have been asked to consider how educators and scholars ought to intellectually deconstruct or pragmatically respond to America’s “war on terrorism.” This challenge requires that we engage in ethical reflection, perhaps even that we become political philosophers. To this end, I consider the relevance of relational theorizing to understanding human vulnerability, security, and alliance across difference.2 I am motivated by perennial questions that have been raised with renewed urgency since September 11, 2001. What accounts for the ease with which we dehumanize each other? What allows us to see each other as human beings? Can universities nurture those abilities that critical theorists demand we nurture—“the ability to seriously interrogate the world, the capacity to imagine and re-envision a world free from the pain and disfigurement of domination and exploitation?”3

Chinese Higher Education and Evaluation in Context: Guest Editors' Introduction

The beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed a breathtaking expansion of China’s higher education system, even surpassing ambitions set forth in the Tenth Five-Year (2001–5) Plan. The plan specified an optimum increase in total higher education enrollment from 9 million to 16 million, reaching a gross enrollment rate of 15 percent by 2005 (Ministry of Education 2002). Instead, at the end of 2005 enrollment in all types of higher education institutions exceeded 23 million with a gross enrollment rate of 21 percent (Ministry of Education 2006). Two years later, the figure had jumped to 27 million with about 23 percent of the college-age population enrolled in 2,321 higher education institutions (Ministry of Education 2008). A shift in policy from expansion and massification to the enhancement of quality in higher education was outlined in the Eleventh Five-Year (2006–10) Plan (State Council 2007). Change has not occurred overnight. In January 2005 Minister of Education Zhou Ji announced a refocusing of higher education reform from quantity to quality, capturing the attention of educational practitioners and the public (Xinhua Net 2005). Two years earlier the launch of the National Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Evaluation project (Quanguo benke jiaoxue gongzuo shuiping pinggu) and the annual expansion of its institutional coverage generated a platform for nationwide debate among scholars and university administrators on concepts and practices in quality assurance, institutional and programmatic accreditation, quality assessment, and evaluation. By the end of 2008, the project

Guest Editors' Introduction: The Limits and Possibilities of Responsive Justice

In our first issue on students’ rights and higher education, we examined two high-profile cases, Tian Yong v. the University of Science and Technology Beijing (1999) and Liu Yanwen v. the Degree Evaluation Committee of Beijing University (1999, 2001). These two cases have been credited for raising “rights consciousness” among Chinese students and indirectly leading to revised regulations on college students’ disciplinary action. We argued that such cases reflect a transformation from a state-centered approach to rights to a combination of top-down efforts to consolidate the principle of rule of law and bottom-up pressures by a new generation of students who are willing to use their newly developed political efficacy to test the strength of that principle. This second issue builds on that argument by introducing several educational law cases and their social and legal significance as discussed by Chinese scholars and judges. The cases and their interpretations reflect tensions in a legal system that on the one hand is perceived to be lagging behind social change but on the other hand is simultaneously clarifying the boundaries of rights and consolidating “rule of law.” We adopt from Shen Kui’s examination of the relation between students and institutions of higher learning “responsive justice” as a conceptual framework for evaluating the changing legal contexts that shape student rights.

What Does Innovation Mean and Why Does it Matter

Carolyn Mooney’s question, posed in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (2014), aptly captures our motivation for writing this chapter. Why has “innovation” become a global buzzword in the discourse of educational philanthropists, policy makers, and pundits? What explains the saliency of innovation as the (disruptive or salutatory) silver bullet that should direct “the future of college” (Wood, 2014)? When educators and reformers advocate for innovation at both the institutional and individual level, to what social, economic, and political conditions are they responding? And what and whose purposes do their stated desires to nurture innovation serve? This chapter explores these questions primarily from the perspective of how innovation is employed in the national policies, academic discourses, and institutional contexts of higher education in China.

Commentary on Carnoy

Twenty-five years ago, in response to a presidential address by Erwin Epstein, CER published comments by a number of distinguished scholars, including Vandra Masemann and Martin Carnoy. This year we solicited a brief critical commentary on Martin Carnoy’s presidential address from Robert F. Arnove, Nelly P. Stromquist, Christine Fox, Henry M. Levin, Vandra Lea Masemann, and Erwin H. Epstein. David Post, Mark Ginsburg, and Heidi Ross

Book ReviewsEducation and Training for Development in East Asia: The Political Economy of Skill Formation in East Asian Newly Industrialized Economies. edited by David Ashton, Francis Green, Donna James, and Johnny Sung London and New York: Routledge, b1999. 185 pp.

Current Issues in Supervision: A Literature Review by Gabriel Carron and Anton De Grauwe. Trends in School Supervision Series. Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning and Unesco, October 1997. 73 pp.