Editorial: Improving education for a more equitable world: Chinese and East Asian perspectives

Abstract

This editorial first introduces the theme underpinning a large-scale conference and publishing project of which an IJCE Special Collection is part, ‘Improving Education for a More Equitable World’, introduces five papers in the Special Collection, and then locates this work in the growing contributions of the International Journal of Chinese Education (IJCE).

Special collection introduction

This editorial reflects the common introduction in its first half, shared by all four journals with their individual permission, while the second half introduces individual articles published exclusively by IJCE after its blind review process. The special collection presented here to our readers covers the theme “Improving Education for a More Equitable World: Chinese and East Asian Perspectives”. The special collection includes five articles derived from the written responses to the CIES 2023 Theme as inspirations for us to explore how education may be improved for a more equitable world. The third and final part of this editorial locates these contributions in the growing landscape of IJCE.

Common theme: Education improvement for a more equitable world

All improvement requires change, but not every change is improvement.

The Improvement Guide (Langley et al., 2009)

To many, education remains a dream of equal opportunities for all learners, regardless of their backgrounds and contexts. Confucius advocated 2500 years ago for education without discrimination (有教无类), a dream of education for all. This evolving vision was renewed right after WWII by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stipulating that everyone has the right to education. Although pioneers, like minority woman leader Patsy Mink, have long envisioned equal education with persevering efforts for the United States, the realities in the country and worldwide do not reflect this dream.

Educational reforms abound around the globe, but limited improvements have been made to actualize educational equity, as is reported again and again by the UNESCO in Global Education Monitoring Reports (2021) and more recently in Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education (2022). There are many interrelated factors, often working in tandem, attributing to these limited improvements. These factors include power disparity, income, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language, ability, culture, religion, geo-politics, and neocolonialism, among others. It is important to note the context within which these factors exist. We are facing a global emergency of climate change, in an uncertain era post-Covid. However, the people and communities most impacted by these crises are already vulnerable and the situation will only worsen if drastic changes are not made immediately; these factors will only expand existing inequalities, and in particular, further widen the existing gaps of learning access and success. We must then ask ourselves an urgent and crucial question: What responsibilities, agendas, and solutions can properly address these alarming, coalescing challenges?

Educational improvement is not merely a technical term, evidenced by the emerging, fast-growing, and interdisciplinary field of educational improvement studies (Li, 2023). It constitutes a powerful approach and a dynamic process to advance education, through which reality and uncertainty are examined and problems are tackled. It varies across educational levels, forms, and contexts, including but not limited to equity, inclusion, diversity, quality, effectiveness, and sustainability. Each deserves stronger policy actions and more integrated theories and applications, requiring capacity- and community-building, a systemic approach, and multi-perspective inquiries.

Comparative and international perspectives are essential to fulfilling the dream of educational equity. How should we critically look at and meet desired outcomes across time and space? In what ways may micro, meso and/or macro educational strategies, structures, and processes be improved along with their environments? How do we know through rigorous methods that we ARE making progress responsively? What changes can bring about responsible and sustainable advancement in learning, teaching, and schooling? What implications may these changes have on individual systems, contexts, and the already vulnerable planet? And how may our endeavors help redefine comparative and international education in a way that reconnects it with contextualized educational policy and practice?

The 67^th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) was held successfully online and in Washington, D.C., on 14–22 February 2023, promoting the CIES 2023 theme “Improving Education for a More Equitable World” with close to 4000 global participants from various fields of education. To encourage wider CIES 2023 participation, CIES President Elect Jun Li called in April 2022 for Written Responses to the CIES 2023 Theme and the call remained open until the last conference date on February 22, 2023. After the annual gathering, an overwhelming number of submissions of these Written Responses were received from all over the world. Additionally, the UNESCO video responses to the CIES 2023 Theme were supported by various UNESCO centers and units, such as UNESCO Futures of Learning and Innovation, and by UNESCO Chairs across the globe.

To further disseminate these Written Responses to the CIES 2023 Theme “Improving Education for a More Equitable World,” Beijing International Review of Education (Brill) supported by Beijing Normal University; ECNU Review of Education (Sage) by East China Normal University; Future in Educational Research (Wiley) by Southwest University; and IJCE (Sage) by Tsinghua University (journals in alphabetical order) agreed to make concerted efforts in publishing them as a special issue or collection, together with four papers based on the Kneller Lecture and Keynote Speeches delivered at CIES 2023.

The publication initiative is the first of its kind with joint endeavors of different journals for the global CIES community and wider readership, thanks to the strong support by Xudong Zhu and Michael Peters, Shuangye Chen, Shengquan Luo and Hongbiao Yin, and Jinghuan Shi, the four journals’ editors-in-chief, respectively, and by CIES President Jun Li, a professor at Western University in Canada who also served as President of the Chinese Society of Education. The four special collections and special issues were grouped into the following themes by the four journals:

1. Improving Education for a More Equitable World: Comparative and International Perspectives by Beijing International Review of Education

2. Improving Education for a More Equitable World: Social Justice Perspectives by ECNU Review of Education

3. Improving Education for a More Equitable World: Futurist Perspectives by Future in Educational Research

4. Improving Education for a More Equitable World: Chinese and East Asian Perspectives by IJCE

Articles in this special collection

The articles featured in this special collection bring eclectic perspectives of education, from cultivating holistic wisdom and love to peace education aimed at broader equity and civil order to higher education improvement under the connotation of “internationalization” and the entrenched “world-class” ideology to lifelong learning based on learners’ interests. The breadth of topics helps to illuminate that authentic improvement is desirable in every education context. What is left to consider is how to critically re-examine the education mission and to comprehensively reflect on the role that education can play in realizing the two fundamental education missions: individual freedom and emancipation of human beings (Li, 2023). The articles provide hope for progress, with messages that direct attention towards policy and practice.

In the first article of this special collection, “Educating for Wisdom, Love, and Eco-Cosmic Ubuntu: Toward an Equitable Planet,” Jing Lin shares a view into how we can harness the transformative power of love and compassion through contemplative practices deeply rooted in world wisdom traditions. The article reports on the formidable challenges facing humanity, including wars, conflicts, climate change, species extinction, social divisiveness, and moral breakdown. Lin further critiques contemporary education as it rarely provides practical solutions to address these challenges. Instead, it often directs learners to seek external answers while neglecting their inner wisdom. Drawing on the philosophy of Daoism, converged with modern scientific insights through meditation, Lin points to how contemplative inquiry offers a path to rediscovering our interconnectedness, fostering a profound sense of interbeing, and nurturing love for all beings and the world at large. Evidenced by the positive outcomes in Lin’s graduate classroom upon incorporating contemplative pedagogies, this article provides contemporary insights into how classrooms and schools can serve as centers of cultivation, nurturing the hearts and spirits of learners, transitioning them from mere knowledge seekers to conscious beings who understand the essence of interbeing and collective togetherness. Lin advocates that we can contribute to creating an equitable, sustainable, and peaceful world through this holistic approach, embracing our role in the concept of “Economic Ubuntu”.

Jae Hyung Park and Tamara Savelyeva’s article, “Peace Education for an Equitable and Sustainable World,” provides a theoretical structure to model an ecology of peace conceptualizations, that is, an interpretive instrument for a co-existing, inter-dependent and complex system of peace concepts without attempting to identify the fittest or embracing any particular one. Drawing on four concepts of peace, namely Negative peace, Positive peace, Homeostatic peace, and Futuristic peace, the authors examine how the aim, content, and scope of peace education greatly depend on the concept of peace in the minds of education stakeholders. Furthermore, the authors report that peace education is as multifaceted and heterogeneous as the concepts of peace by discussing peace education in major religious traditions and current mainstream scholarship on peace education. The article argues that justice and peace are inseparable and calls for the inclusion of justice theories and practices in peace education curriculum and pedagogy. The authors’ analysis troubles the extent to which educational responses for addressing massive social disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global wars. Their insights add a critical layer to the ongoing conversation of creating a more equitable world by highlighting the significance of peace education.

Jingwun Liang considers how the long-term misinterpreted connotation of “internationalization” and the entrenched “world-class” ideology within policy discourses have overlooked and systemically denied the Western hegemony of epistemic violence, as well as the Anglo-American dominated academic coloniality in her article “Educational Improvement to Whose Images? – A Coloniality Perspective of Higher Education Policy in Taiwan”. Using the example of the Higher Education Sprout Project, one of the current governmental higher education policies in Taiwan, Liang examines the problem representation of the policy discourse and how one regionally selective university responds to the policies. As the author points out, the policies favour institutions with better ranking performance and more substantial research productivity by offering competitive funding and research grants. The findings from the study provide important insights into understanding higher education policies in Taiwan. Drawing on Mignolo’s (2003) theory of coloniality, the article further argues that the ongoing colonial logic has been promoted and perpetuated by current higher education policies, which have reshaped the institutional mission of Taiwanese universities.

In parallel, Shoko Yamada critiques the obsession with global university rankings and hierarchical measurements in her article, “Can We Achieve Equitable Learning Beyond Hierarchical Measurement? Challenges in the Era of Lifelong Learning”, as she intersects with achieving the goal of equity in lifelong learning. In this article, Yamada argues that equitable learning goes beyond equal access to formal schooling and extends to lifelong learning initiated by the learners themselves. As the author points out, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to circumstances where we have the chance to rethink learning opportunities beyond the domain of formal schooling. In order to comprehend equity in informal education, the author highlights that the objective of equity can only be accomplished by creating a society where individuals are encouraged to learn throughout their lives. This demands constant support to offer equal access to educational services.

The scholars in this special collection have approached improvement in education from a variety of perspectives and applied a wide range of approaches to provide valuable insights into the ongoing discourse on improving education for a more equitable world. We appreciate their efforts and the lessons they teach through their work, which inspires us to continue working toward leveraging policies and practices aimed at educational improvement.

IJCE grows community

This publishing project, cultivated over several years with the growing global community of English-language scholars and journals focused on Chinese education, is one example of the ever-expanding growth and sophistication of IJCE.

Education, as with academic publishing, is about communities. Journals differ in China than in other countries inasmuch as they tend to be based at institutions rather than with networks. IJCE has been located at Tsinghua University’s Institute of Education (IOE) since its inception in 2012. This provides the important scholarly community and global platform for the journal. The Editorial Office is based at IOE which serves as the focal point of the Editorial Board, review work, and dissemination of academic ideas.

In 2024 IJCE made an important publishing shift. After a decade of foundation work as an elite paper-based journal with Brill, IJCE shifted to Sage on 1 January 2021 as a fully platinum open-access online journal. The idea was to put IJCE on a sustainable footing to make even more widespread and deeper contributions to education. In mid-2024, IJCE switched its base of publishing operations from the Sage United Kingdom to Sage Beijing. The shift to Sage open access and to Beijing has set a firm course of IJCE as a first-rate platform for publishing English language research on China-related education.

In the last few decades, of course, the field of bibliometrics has grown not just to transform research and publication but via rankings and evaluations the field of higher education itself. IJCE has ‘grown bibliometrically’ as well. As of mid 2024, it has been ranked by Scopus with a 2023 CiteScore (the yearly average number of citations to recent articles) of 2.4, placing the journal in the second quartile globally ranked 700 of 1543 journals in the research discipline of education. In mid 2024 the h-index is 13, and SJR (rank of citations) has improved from around 0.2 to 0.5. International collaboration, author diversity, self-citation (showing community development), and documents related to SDGs are all on the rise. In itself, these are just numbers, and like any metric, they distill huge complexity into a very small piece of information. However, they signal participation, engagement, contribution, and value.

As IJCE moves forward, it is important to keep refining and developing the platform itself. Journals, like education, rarely stand still. In 2024, the Editorial Office will keep innovating the journal’s aims and scope, enhancing the Editorial Board, and targeting new and exciting areas of education research. The suite of article formats has been broadened beyond research papers, book reviews, and editorials to include essays, viewpoints, and commentaries. As described online (IJCE, 2024), “essays should be around 7000 words long and provide a critical reflection on a specific issue. Essays can be more subjective than research articles and usually do not include original research. Viewpoints should be around 1500 words long and will provide a novel perspective on a controversial or undecided issue. Commentaries should be around 2500 words long and discuss the findings, implications, or outcomes of specific research or wider research on a general topic”. The articles in the special collection presented in this editorial make use of these new features.

Thank you for engaging with IJCE. Please engage more often and more deeply by authoring papers, reviewing books, reviewing papers, and of course reading the published materials. The next phase of growth will be strong, and we look forward to welcoming you into the academic community.