Full Description
As Asian education systems increasingly take on a stronger presence on the global educational landscape, of special interest is an understanding of the ways in which many of these states direct their schools towards higher achievement. What is missing, however, are accounts that take seriously the particular construction of the strong, developmental state witnessed across many Asian societies, and that seek to understand the politics and possibilities of curriculum change vis a vis precisely the dominance of such a state.
By engaging in analyses based on some of the best current social and cultural theories, and by illuminating the interactions among various state and non-state pedagogic agents, the chapters in this volume account for the complex post-colonial, historical and cultural consciousnesses that many Asian states and societies experience. At a time when much of the educational politics in Asia remains in a state of transition and as many of these states seek out through the curriculum new forms of social control and novel bases of political legitimacy, such a volume offers enduring insights into the real if not also always relative autonomy that schools and communities maintain in countering the hegemonic presence of strong states.
Contents
1.Acknowledgements
2.List of Contributors
3.Chapter 1: Introducing the Strong State and Curriculum Reform in Asia
Section One: Ideology and the Strong State: The Tensions and Limits of State Curricular Control
4. Chapter 2: Global City, Illiberal Ideology: Curriculum Control and the Politics of Pedagogy in Singapore
5. Chapter 3: Strong State Politics of the National History Curriculum and Struggles for Knowledge, Ideology, and Power in South Korea
6. Chapter 4: Unintended Hegemonic Effects: Institutional Incorporation of Chinese Schools in Postwar Hong Kong
Section Two: Praxis and Change: Teachers, Social Movements and Pedagogic Agents
7. Chapter 5: National Education in Hong Kong: Curriculum as a site of struggle between "One Country" and "Two Systems"
8. Chapter 6: Social Movements and Educational Change in China: The Case of Migrant Children Schools
9. Chapter 7: The Struggles of Teachers Unions in South Korea and the Politics of Educational Change
Section Three: Globalizing Hegemony: Resisting and Recontextualizing International Reforms
10. Chapter 8: Teach For/Future China and the Politics of Alternative Teacher Certification Programs in China
11. Chapter 9: The Politics of Neoliberal Loanwords in South Korean Cross-National Policy Borrowing
12. Chapter 10: Provincializing and Globalizing Critical Studies of School Knowledge: Insights from the Japanese History Textbook Controversy over "Comfort Women"
13. Chapter 11: Afterword
