This book engages Canadian and Chinese language educators, graduate students, pre-service teachers, school principals and teachers in an enhanced reciprocal learning process by collaboratively reflecting on and writing up the school-based language curriculum projects and school-based language teachers’ professional development activities in Canada-China sister schools. The objective is to develop a knowledge base for generating positive, reciprocal, practitioner knowledge and methods to improve language teaching effectiveness in either context. In this way, it contributes to a public discussion of the reciprocal educational impacts on the knowledge-based society in Canada and China.

This edited volume examines new ways of teaching mathematics through a cross-cultural reciprocal learning project between sister schools in Canada and China. Situating teacher learning in the intersection of the two different school systems, curriculums, and cultures of mathematics learning and teaching in both nations, this volume offers teachers a unique and much-needed perspective on how practices between countries become more and more likely shaped by each other in the emerging global society. Born out of a comparative study project sponsored by the SSHRC, this volume compiles five years' worth of findings from reciprocal partnerships between researchers, teachers, school administrators, and students from both nations. Through the process of reciprocal learning and narrative inquiry, the research described in these chapters illuminates the unknown and shares newly-created mathematics education knowledge.

This edited volume explores how Chinese school-based educators learn from others and attain awareness in dialogue with the world in an era of increasing globalization and information exchange. Minzhu Primary School in Shanghai, China, and Bay Street School in Toronto, Canada, have been connected as sister schools of cross-cultural exchange since 2008. Together, they have explored ways to reciprocally learn in a cross-cultural partnership while remaining grounded in their home culture and language. In this book, chapter authors examine how Chinese school-based educators view themselves, understand others, and grow and develop as a consequence of a decade of cross-cultural reciprocal learning as sister schools. Further, the authors discuss prospects for future educational interactions between Canada and China.

This book presents a narrative inquiry into the cross-cultural educational experiences of a family living in Hong Kong and Toronto, Canada. At heart a go-and-return story, Lau reflects on the difficulties of adjusting to the different practices of teaching and learning in two places with their own distinctive cultures. Ever more prescient now amid the current social and political upheavals in Hong Kong and around the world, the book considers the profound impacts such transitions have on families. By delving into the challenges of living, working, and learning across cultures, he reflects upon the deep-rooted values in both family and school landscapes to gain new insights about educational and cultural practices in Hong Kong and Toronto.

This book explores the unique experiences of a sister school network in Canada and China contextualized through the lens of the Reciprocal Learning Project, which supports the relationship between a school network and teacher education exchange program of two countries. Huang uses theoretical viewpoints from teacher learning and comparative education research to analyse and interpret what has happened in the emerging cross-cultural school network. The book juxtaposes teacher learning and comparative education research from Shanghai and Ontario as teachers in the two places interact and provides detailed descriptions of teacher collaboration to show how these collaborations were initiated, developed, and sustained, as well as the impact brought about from these collaborations. The book offers a unique opportunity to examine how Canadian and Chinese teachers receive and react to opportunities of cross-cultural collaboration and learning.

This book examines Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education in different countries with a focus on recent developments and emerging trends. STEM education has become a gateway for socio-economic and technological development of nation-states. In light of this, many countries have prioritized STEM education and made it an integral part of their education at all levels. Moreover, many approaches have been used to develop STEM education and teach students to compete with the fast-developing world. However, despite its infinite benefits, it is also important to note that there is inequality in the access and delivery of STEM education within and across countries, which requires new approaches to improve STEM education and its teaching and learning. Therefore, this book consists of chapters on the development, teaching, and access of STEM education from different education levels, countries, and perspectives. The chapters discuss the concept of STEM education in general or on a particular level of education (. g., PreK–12 education, vocational education, and higher education), or subjects such as mathematics, computer science, and architecture. Moreover, the book includes chapters based on the nexus of STEM education and other subjects, including arts and culture, to teaching STEM education. The book contributes to understanding and improving STEM education and instruction globally.

This book presents Arab immigrant youths’ voices through storytelling that reveals the challenges and achievements they experience at school and at home in a Canadian educational context. While Arab immigration to Canada dates back to the late eighteenth century, Canada has witnessed a significant rise in Arab immigration rates over the last twenty-five years, marking the fastest growth among all immigrant groups.These stories highlight the complexity of Arab-Canadian youths’ cross-cultural schooling experiences and provide valuable opportunities for reciprocal learning among all stakeholders in Canadian schools. With an educator’s vision, Elkord foregrounds the tensions between Arab youths’ home and school experiences to help build bridges and make high school less opaque to Arab immigrant students and their parents, while offering insights into multicultural education and resources for teacher education.

This book enriches the discourse around Global Citizenship Education in teacher education through the example of a teacher's experience in a Canada-China Sister School reciprocal learning landscape. Instead of positioning global citizenship teaching and learning as a set of fixed goals to be attained by teachers alone, this book approaches global citizenship teaching and learning as unfinished lifework in progress and as situated curriculum problems to be inquired together by university researchers, school teachers, and students under the spirit of reciprocity and community. This reimagination of narratives, theory, and action start from collaborative and reciprocal learning partnerships among Chinese and Canadian researchers and teachers in the practicality of re-searching and re-enacting the purpose and meanings of twenty-first century education in a Canada-China Sister School setting.

In 2000, the “Western Development” plan of the Chinese Mainland attracted attention of educators and policy makers. Around that period, the Chinese government also launched large scale and systemic curriculum reforms in basic education and secondary education in achieving quality education across the vast country. Despite significant progress that has been made in educational investments and attainments in China, issues of quality and regional disparities across China remain, especially in the less developed, western part of China where the significance of ethnic diversity, urban-rural disparity and variations in school development exists. In addition, there have been entrenched problems of teacher and teaching quality, resources inadequacy and ‘left-behind’ children. Written by a group of Chinese and international scholars, the book provides an updated analysis and discussion of educational development and related issues in the less developed part of Western China. These chapters cover broad contextual issues of educational development and reforms, issues of quality and equality in different sectors of education, as well as curriculum implementation, teaching innovations and professional development of teachers.

Over the past decade there has been radical reform at all levels of China’s education system as it attempts to meet changing economic and social needs and aspirations. Changes have been made to pedagogy and teacher professional learning and also to the curriculum - both at the basic education level, from kindergarten to year 12, and at the higher education level. This book focuses on reform at the early childhood, primary and secondary levels, and is the companion book to China’s Higher Education Reform and Internationalisation, which covers reform at the higher education level. Education Reform in China outlines the systematic transformation that has occurred of school curriculum goals, structure and content, teaching and learning approaches, and assessment and administrative structures, including the increasing devolvement of control from the centre to provincial, district and school levels. As well as illustrating the changes that are occurring within classrooms, it demonstrates the continuity of cultural and educational ideas and values in the midst of these changes, showing that reform does not just involve the adoption of foreign ideas, but builds on and even resurrects traditional Chinese educational values. Importantly, it considers how exchanges of people and ideas can contribute to new ways of working between Western and Chinese educational systems.