Xudong Zhu – författare

This book addresses two main questions, namely how to prepare high-quality teachers in the 21st century and how the East and the West can learn from each other. It addresses the different challenges and dilemmas that eastern countries, especially China, and western countries are facing with regard to teacher education. We explore the question by examining teacher education research, practice and policy in different countries, identifying both common problems and country-specific challenges. We then try to find valuable experiences, theories and practice which can solve specific problems in the process of teacher education, also addressing how local and global factors impact it.In this regard, our approach does not strictly separate pre-service teacher education from teachers’ in-service professional development, adopting an integrative perspective. Further, we believe the respective social and cultural contexts must also be taken into account. Lastly, we call for teachers’ knowledge and individual character traits to be accounted for in the education of high-quality teachers.

This book comprehensively examines classroom culture in the Chinese context and develops the model of “collective-individualism-based learning.” Classroom culture plays a fundamental role in constructing students’ learning competencies, perceptions, and behaviors. This book puts forward a collective-individualism-based learning model to explain the classroom culture in China, both past and present.

The collective-individualism-based model reflects the individualized learning style of students in Chinese classroom culture, and is characterized by nine symbolic objects; a textbook, an exercise book, a pen, a blackboard, a screen, a computer, a table, a chair, and a platform. In addition to summarizing this approach to learning, the book examines the construction of a classroom culture with Chinese characteristics and argues that the collective-individualism-based model accurately portrays the personal learning style of students in a specific classroom culture that includes particular symbolic objects.

This edited book is a collection of keynote speeches in the 3rd Global Teacher Education Summit in Beijing Normal University from October 14 to 16, 2017. The speeches intend to raise international response in the field of teacher education to the enduringly changing education policy environment. Multiple perspectives are needed in order to gain insights into teaching and teacher education for excellence and equity, as well as disentangle from rigid, inapplicable old paradigms. This book on one hand provides typify global voices, and on the other hand contributes Chinese stories to this field. China’s education manifests a tendency with stronger indigenous features related to the changing domestic climate and international geopolitical position. Chapters included about teaching and teacher education in China can provide local evidence, intelligence and relevance to global audience, and even voice indigenous epistemes within the non-Western platform. This book aims to build such dialogs between global perspectives and Chinese insights for heteroglossia in content and methodology in the field of teaching and teacher education.