Leading, teaching and learning
When There Is No Choice By Richard Mast
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here is always choice in any given situation. However, sometimes what appears to be a choice is actually an illusion. Take the notion of offering an international curriculum in China to students from a non-western culture. There are plenty of choices to make: • Which curriculum will be used? • How many international administrators will the school need? • How many international teachers will be needed? • What are the skills, knowledge and experience that are going to be needed for this group? • What skills and experience will be needed for the Chinese administrators and teachers?
24 | International School | Summer 2021
• What subjects will the Chinese teachers teach? •H ow is the school going to deal with the compulsory curriculum for Years 1 to 9? The list is a long one. What if the answers to these questions were to be challenged? Imagine a recruiting interview where the foreign administrator is asked: ‘Should the international curriculum and the teaching methods be modified because the students are Chinese?’ and the foreign teacher is asked: ‘How do you think your teaching methods need to be adjusted to account for the learning of Chinese students?’. These are questions that are not often put to such applicants, yet they should be, since this is the essential issue that has to be faced when seeking to work in a school in China. The international curriculum does not transpose into a Chinese context with ease. The application of ‘best practice’ does not work anything like as well as the foreign teacher assumes it should.
Which curriculum? For all students from Years 1 to 9 it is the Chinese National Curriculum. The Chinese schools that are seeking to introduce (without stating their intent) pedagogy based upon international education will grab hold of an international curriculum that they think can do the job (marketing-wise and education-wise). The foreign teachers and administrators come in and do what they can to use that approach, and will assume that because they have been hired to implement the international curriculum, that is what they should do. The problem is that the context is completely different from the context they are used to. On the surface that is what it appears to be, but that is not the choice that will work in this situation. There are alternative choices to make. One choice is in relation to the interpretation of the curriculum. Chinese
