Book Series: Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education
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BOOK REVIEW
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11516-020-0022-8 Book Series: Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education. Michael Connelly & Shijing Xu (Eds.). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. It is a special time in which to be writing this review of a series of books that are based on a seven-year project between teachers and educational researchers in different cities and regions of China and Canada. Entitled “Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education between Canada and China,” the project, co-directed by Shijing Xu at the University of Windsor and Michael Connelly at OISE/University of Toronto, has run from 2013 to 2020 and may now move forward into a wider circle of collaboration that enables educators, in collaboration with water scientists, to bring concerns around water and environmental sustainability into their pre-service programs and school classrooms. Before commenting on the books themselves, I would like to begin with some general points. The first is to highlight the concept of reciprocity and how significant it has been to have a focus on mutuality of learning in the rich relationships fostered among students, teachers, school principals, teacher educators, and educational researchers in Canada and China. As a scholar of comparative education focusing on education in China, I had been engaged with the Canadian International Development Agency and the World Bank in a series of projects intended to support Chinese universities recover from the losses of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966 to 1976) not long after China’s opening up to the world under Deng Xiaoping in 1978. It was a struggle to persuade governmental and educational leaders in North America that we had anything to learn from China in the “development aid” mentality that dominated thinking at that time. How refreshing, therefore, to see a project emerge in the 21st century that recognizes and celebrates the richness of Chinese educational culture and China’s civilizational heritage and has demonstrated how much Canadian schools, teachers, and researchers had to learn from its remarkable educational traditions and the rapid economic and social development that has been spurred by its educational reforms!
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Another element in the collaborations that has special significance in this era of pandemic with increased dependence on internet-based interactions has been the new sense of spatiality, as teachers, students, and researchers used digital platforms to communicate between the two sides of the world, sharing classroom experiences, examples of pedagogy, projects around water and ideas for the learning of mathematics, science and languages! This all predated the emergence of Zoom and Microsoft TEAMS in the COVID-19 era and showed the possibilities embodied in these technologies. Perhaps the greatest challenge was the 12-hour time difference, which made early mornings and evenings the best times for genuine synchronicity in communication and learning across cultures and languages
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