Abstract
With Early Childhood Curriculum in Chinese Societies: Policies, Practices, and Prospects, Weipeng Yang and Hui Li offer a profoundly comprehensive and critically reflective picture of updated early childhood curriculum (ECC) in contemporary Chinese contexts, including mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They not only review and envisage the policies and practices, but also highlight the local dynamics in global discourses in ECC, from a cultural-historical perspective. In fact, early childhood education and care (ECEC) has two competing ideologies internationally, as part of compensatory programs targeting the poor and vulnerable, or as a social right for all (Mahon, 2016). Therefore, two distinctive pedagogical traditions, namely, readiness for school and social pedagogy (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006), embedding in the imported western curricular approaches, have experienced conflict and confusion with Confucian heritage, during the journey to Chinese societies. As discussed in mainland China, adaptation of foreign curriculum models in ECEC has been a vivid example of how globalization comes into direct contact with Chinese cultures and creates cultural hybridities over a century (Li and Grieshaber, 2018). After intensive research work in curriculum research in early childhood, the authors as good storytellers, demonstrate a pioneering exploration with systematic reviews and empirical evidence, and voice for non-Western world in ECC to inform global readers.
In Part 1, Yang and Li firstly set the stage within the context of globalization and internationalization in Chapter 1, including reasserting their position to support the paradigm shift in ECC studies from a developmental perspective to a sociocultural one. Afterwards, they target mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as main players, and briefly introduce the background information to critically review the ECC reforms with further discussions in Chapter 2. They then systematically compare the ECC policies in the three Chinese societies in Chapter 3 with document analysis, and find the shared themes and differences, in terms of the structural property, continuity and applicability. In sum, this part depicts the changes of foundations, policies and reforms of ECC.
Part 2 turns to the ECC practices with narrative stories. Different from a quantitative methodology, Yang and Li adopt in-depth case studies, and focus on the local adaptations and innovations of Chinese kindergartens in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a tale of two cities. They describe how the five Chinese kindergartens followed similar four-step dynamic process to localize the foreign curricular in Chapter 4. After that, Yang and Li utilize the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to unmask how the potential sociocultural mechanism and driving forces influenced the school-based curriculum development in the kindergartens in Chapter 5. Furthermore, the Chinese approaches to implementing ECC are documented and analyzed by the CHAT in Chapter 6, to further answer how teachers’ beliefs and practices have been affected by the Chinese cultures tacitly. Altogether, Part two characterizes the complex interactions of social mechanism with deep description and meanings in ECC practices.
In the closing part, Part 3, Chapter 7 theoretically summarizes the sociocultural mechanism embedding in the ECC in Chinese societies with nesting systems, including macrosystem, exosystem, mesosystem, and microsystem in a sociocultural perspective. Chapter 8 revisits ECC with thoughtful ideas, in terms of lessons, challenges and trends, laying foundations to further discuss the ECC as a cultural practice in Chapter 9. In the last part, Early Childhood Curriculum in Chinese Societies is reconsidering the past experiences and envisioning the future with ‘a renewed construct-appropriateness’ (p. 114), in order to go beyond the developmentalism and developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) as a powerful rationale for curriculum, offering an alternative view on culture diversity and responsive context-specific engagement. The three chapters that Yang and Li provide would assist in better understanding the uniqueness and complexity of interactions in the sociocultural mechanism in contemporary Chinese societies, and also contribute to revitalizing current discourses of curriculum policies and practices from a social constructivist perspective, and repositioning ECC as a cultural practice with postcolonial imaginations.
In conclusion, it is important to reemphasize that this book is the first English monograph with theoretically self-contained frameworks and originally evidence-based research in ECC in Chinese societies. China’s remarkable and impressive sociocultural transformation since the Reform and Open-door policy in 1978, characterized by multifaceted modernization and social development, has been evident in the relationship between sociocultural changes and psychological consequences (Sun and Ryder, 2016). This also brings along complex changes in attitudes and behaviors around education and parenting, which has far-reaching implications for the ideas and practices of early childhood education. However, few studies could balance the insider and outsider perspectives in related literature. Yang and Li as native Chinese, have rich research experiences in China and beyond, which might help them to be inside-out and outside-in elegantly. Therefore, I strongly recommend this book to all the scholars, policymakers, teacher educators, and even master teachers who are interested in ECC in contemporary China and the non-Western world.
