Teachers in the People's Republic of China : a study on authoritarian professionalism

Abstract

Teachers’ professional work in China has been extensively examined over the last three decades. However, there is also a “paradox of the Chinese teacher as a professional” among existing literature. On the one hand, teachers in China are believed to have a high level of professional performance, while on the other hand, they rarely demonstrate the typical “autonomous professionalism” enjoyed by their western colleagues. Since existing scholarship generally views autonomous work as a pre-requisite for a professional, and further links it to professional performance, a paradox emerges. To resolve this paradox, the present study carried out an institutional analysis on teachers’ professional work in China. By understanding a profession as an occupational social closure based on institutionalized knowledge, the present study examined three essential components which could define teachers’ professional work, namely, (i) their socially constructed teaching tasks (jurisdiction), (ii) the content and formation of their professional knowledge, and (iii) the ways of organizing their professional work. Besides using open access data sources to understand the macro- and meso-institutional environments for teachers’ professional work in China, a half-year fieldwork on public junior secondary school teachers’ professional work was conducted at two selected districts. This fieldwork used semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analyses to probe how teachers’ professional work is embedded in their micro-institutional environment. The present study has three major findings. Firstly, given the existence of both centralized explicit curriculum standards and implicit curriculum standards (i.e. high-stakes student examinations), teachers’ jurisdiction in China has largely become for “teaching prescribed knowledge effectively”. Since this jurisdiction has both implied technical complexity and a technically defined teaching environment, it has directly contributed to the development of a particular kind of teacher knowledge in China, i.e. clinical teaching knowledge, to deal with the technically defined complexity. Secondly, rather than relying on the teacher preparation system for institutionalizing knowledge, teachers’ applied knowledge is largely institutionalized in China’s education system. Within it, the state-endorsed authority serves as the basic mechanism for knowledge to obtain its legitimacy and to be diffused. Thirdly, compared to the traditional “loosely coupled” educational organizations, as schools in China are situated in an organizational environment in which their technical efficiency of instruction can be precisely measured and which largely determines their organizational success, they are more appropriately understood as “tightly coupled systems”. Meanwhile, there also exists both merit-based teacher evaluation and promotion systems in China’s education system, especially in terms of a “teacher professional promotion tournament” which has both provided strong incentives for teachers’ intensive professional competition and sustained knowledge circulation in China’s education system. Given these findings, the present study responds to the paradox of the Chinese teacher as a professional. A unique conceptualization called “authoritarian professionalism” is also introduced to describe some institutional features of teachers’ professional work in China. Compared to the traditional “autonomous professionalism”, it is discussed that “authoritarian professionalism” also has the potential to illustrate other professionals’ work in China and capture changing trends of professionals’ work across the world.