Collision between the Unit and Civil Society: Real Stories of Education Reformers

Author: Ouyang Huhua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: This thesis is an excellent illustration of how one can creatively exploit a conventional research genre for critical socio-ethnographic investigations. It makes a very interesting and informative reading, bringing to light some of the hidden complexities of socio-political undercurrents often implicitly influencing socio-linguistic and educational reforms. It is also a very bold attempt to uncover some of the hidden mysteries shaping, though often indirectly, such socio-educational reforms. It is almost like a forensic investigation beneath the facade of what appears to be and efficient, self-assured, and socially motivated consensual system. In a very modest way, the thesis unfolds the stories and experiences of educational practitioners who take upon themselves the task of introducing linguistic and educational reforms based on student-centered liberal educational ideologies from Western pedagogies in a typical local community of practices situated in Guangwai, the heartland of economic reforms in China, which apparently is heavily influenced, maybe dominated by Danwei, the ideology of central planning in the People's Republic of China.