This paper is aimed at exploring distinctive features of the decentralization of basic education in Shanghai by drawing on data from Shanghai Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) 2012. While doing the research for this paper, the author found that from a policy perspective, Shanghai had launched a reform policy aimed at transforming the highly centralized education system. This included a devolution of the decision-making authority to local departments of education and a reduction of control over schools. Private school policies were also initiated with the understanding that private schools ought to enjoy autonomy in almost every aspect of decision-making. From the perspective of practice, decentralization of basic education could be categorized as county-based school decentralization. In such a situation, the county bureaus of education wielded decision-making authority over a number of areas in the public school sector, while gradually devolving some decision-making authority to the public schools themselves; and the private schools enjoyed autonomy within their major decision-making areas. Given both the policy and practice of the decentralization of basic education in Shanghai, some suggestions are provided regarding: (1) how to promote school decentralization, and (2) how to balance it with accountability.

Based on an ethnographic study on two cohorts of teachers and parents in China, this article reveals that social networking sites (SNS) have widened the channel for parents and teachers to establish and maintain a relationship, and has formed an online “community of practice” to promote such collaborations. Yet, this could be accomplished only at the expense of teachers’ professional and personal boundaries becoming increasingly blurred, which has emerged as a potential risk for their professionalism. Moreover, such a “community of practice” has also opened up a new space for winning or losing at the educational game for parents from different background, which has inadvertently led to widening the arena for the operation of old mechanisms of social inequality. This study suggests that further investigation should be conducted to examine the potential of SNS in the parent-teacher relationship.

Teaching and learning a language are influenced by an imagined community involving interaction among members in possible worlds. From an empirical standpoint, relatively little is known about how Chinese language lecturers see their possible memberships to the communities wherein students from different countries participate, or how this perception affects their teaching practice and innovative pedagogies. In order to address this gap, this study explores the teaching lives of four lecturers who teach Chinese as a second language (CSL) to foreign students in China. Drawing upon a three-year longitudinal study of interview data triangulated with journal entries and classroom observation, the findings reveal that lecturers’ imagined identities may transform into practical identities due to the idea of treating foreign students as legitimate foreigners but illegitimate Chinese language users, and the intensified pressures and insecurities of being a part-time lecturer. However, the combined efforts of lecturers’ perseverance, knowledge and competence, institutional support, available educational resources, and positive evolution of identity may prevent lecturers’ imagined communities from collapsing, and possibly facilitate a shift in identification from “struggling teacher” to “determined teacher.” Relevant implications for teaching Chinese and teacher education are discussed.

Increasing numbers of studies have been done on parenting in Chinese immigrant families due to the growing population of Chinese immigrants in Western countries. This paper systematically reviews 35 peer-reviewed journal articles relevant to parenting in Chinese immigrant families, categorizing them into descriptive studies, simple explanatory studies, and dialectical and dynamic studies, and identifying their major findings and limitations. It finds that descriptive studies tend to describe parenting as a collection of static characteristics, and simple explanatory studies are likely to define parenting as an independent factor mechanically related to other factors. Thus these two types of studies are barely able to reveal the real essence of parenting in immigrant Chinese families. To solve the limitations of descriptive studies and simple explanatory studies, this paper argues for conducting dynamic and dialectical studies, which conceptualize parenting as a dynamic process dialectically related to cultural differences and other processes.