Ma Xiangbo was born in 1840 and became a pioneer of educational reform during the republican period. He was responsible for introducing the idea that science and humanities should be valued equally in liberal arts education, a concept that became key to the model of university education. Ma’s view of education combined Western humanism and science with classical Confucian humanism. His ideas still have a referential value for contemporary Chinese higher education and society.

This article presents the findings of a historically-informed comparative study that juxtaposes the lives of three missionary educators in China in the early 20th century with three Christian educators in China today. Data sources included hundreds of letters from the women written in China to their families and friends over several decades and transcripts of over a dozen interviews. Wenger’s social theory of identity formation was used to analyze the data and address the questions of why they went to China, the intended and actual results, and the impact it had on the women and their identity construction. The findings show that although there were major differences across the two centuries, as was expected, there were surprisingly many similarities among the individual teachers, as are noted in the common communities of practice that emerged: “educator,” “missionary,” “gender advocate,” “Chinese advocate,” “leader,” and “learner.”

This paper is a personal reflection on a lifetime experience of bridging the values and ideas of two distinctive faith traditions: the Christian and the Confucian. The author has chosen to focus on the lives and beliefs of two great teachers: St. Paul in Europe of the first century CE and Confucius in China of the 5th century BCE First the context in which they lived their lives is sketched out and then their core messages are abstracted from the texts they left behind and juxtaposed. Of particular interest is the way in which they viewed the end of life, given the fact that neither could have known the enormous influence their teachings were to have on future generations.

This paper explores the relationship between girls’ schooling and empowerment in western China in the first decade of the 21st century. This paper adopted a capability-empowerment framework based on Sen’s capability approach into which were integrated concepts by Bourdieu, Appadurai, Nussbaum, Kabeer, and Unterhalter, to help to understand the tenacity with which village girls pursued schooling. In interviews with a group of 23 girls and young women, several valued functionings of intrinsic capability sets in the freedom dimensions of well-being and agency and their association with rising levels of school attainment were found. The girls were found to be gaining empowering capabilities through schooling, but that these were not equally distributed, neatly slicing the group into two sharply defined groups with different life paths. One set dropped out in the middle school years with a smaller set of empowerment capabilities to work in low-skilled jobs in cities, which offered them new places to change. The other set remained in school longer to achieve a larger set of empowering functionings that they converted into more substantive freedoms in a variety of settings.

While quality in education has long been a significant issue, definitions of quality are often taken for granted rather than argued for, allowing the possibility that the criteria used by researchers and planners to judge quality may differ from local stakeholders’ perspectives, particularly regarding the place within quality education of the knowledge, culture and language of non-dominant groups. However, there is an accumulating convergence of research that calls for assessments of quality in education of non-dominant linguistic and cultural groups that engage local stakeholders’ understandings. This paper presents a recent study that attempts to do this, investigating the perspectives of students, parents, teachers, and administrators in Sunan Yughur Autonomous County, a multiethnic, multilingual district in rural Gansu, inhabited by several nationalities. Over one hundred participants in three schools were asked what was important for children to learn in school; including what aspects of local (minority) knowledge, culture and language should be taught as part of school-based curriculum. The study found three educational visions in local schools: regular urban education; Chinese-medium, multicultural education; and bilingual, multicultural education. The study also found that stakeholders support the latter vision, which reflects society’s actual cultural and linguistic pluralism, as well as much research on quality education for non-dominant groups. The paper concludes with a call for a comparative approach, both domestic and international, towards the investigation of quality education of non-dominant groups in China.

This article aims at a comprehensive examination of the Chinese model of teacher education by critically revisiting the developmental trajectory of the teacher education system in China over the past century, with a particular focus on policy trends since the 1990s. It interrogates the Chinese model of teacher education with two macro lenses: the historical and the comparative. The historical lens looks deeply into the Chinese way of reform with a catch-up mentality in various stages, while the comparative lens locates the Chinese model of teacher education in an international context. The paper begins with a comprehensive review of the related literature, surveys the historical pathway of China’s modern teacher education system since its birth in 1897, presents an overview of the current provisions of the system, and examines recent policy trends in the landscape of China’s teacher education. Finally, the article concludes that the Chinese model consists of a hybrid system of teacher education provided by normal schools, normal colleges and universities, with the participation of comprehensive universities and internet-based higher education institutions, and accompanied by a consistent licensing system for the teaching profession. With such core features as independence, openness, adaptability and diversity based on Confucian epistemology and pragmatism, the Chinese model of teacher education is likely to illuminate new paths for the development of education and the pursuit of excellence in the global community.

This paper is a critical examination of the life and work of David Crook (1910–2000) as an English teacher in China from just prior to 1949 through the 1980’s. It describes Crook’s struggle to transcend attitudes of superiority commonly associated with native speaking English teachers at the time as well as his efforts to introduce innovations in English language teaching that were appropriate for the circumstances in China. The article concludes that an understanding of Edward Said’s notion of intellectual exile can assist in understanding Crook’s success at adjusting to a challenging social, political and educational environment in China and transcending the dichotomies separating native and non-native speaking teachers as well as Chinese and non-Chinese teachers.