Keywords

About a century ago, when the Fourth of May Movement was in full bloom in 1919, professor Hu Shih, then a Chinese philosopher and later chancellor of Peking University, called upon the Chinese academia by stating that it was time for Chinese intellectuals to begin to ‘explore issues and problems, introduce new theories and methods from the West, to sort out China’s heritage culture, and regenerate a new civilization’ (‘研究问题，输入学理，整理国故，再造文明’), for both China and the world. It is important to note that here Hu Shih emphasizes the importance of both introducing new theories and methods from the West and, at the same time, sorting out national heritage culture and combining them together to regenerate a new civilization in China. Clearly, this is a huge task that has been left unfinished over the past century, and today it is relegated to later generations of intellectuals for its realization.

In terms of the study of education, in the late Qing dynasty (during the period of 1860–1911) and the early nationalist governments (during the period of 1912–1927) of the Republic of China, newly transplanted school systems were patterned first after those of Japan and later after those of the U.S. in the early 1920s. Consistent with the newly established school systems, a new teacher education system was also adopted from other countries, including Japan, Germany, France, and above all, the U.S. It was in those times that Herbartian pedagogicsFootnote 1, Footnote 2 and didactics were introduced into China at the beginning of the new century (1901–1919) via Japan, followed by the Anglo-American educational sciences and curriculum studies in the 1920s until the 1940s. This is a point that I emphasise, partly because it has set the tone for the study of education later in China, in fact, until today. Pedagogics and didactics have merged traditions in modern China, as Chinese educators, like their Nordic counterparts, have embraced pedagogics and didactics in the teacher education programs in our teacher education universities. Theorizing education and schooling in terms of pedagogics and didactics has remained with us, although the Anglo-American influence of educational sciences (including curriculum studies) has become increasingly dominant in Mainland China over the past few decades.

Now let us reflect on the introduction of U.S. educational theories in general and on theories of teaching and learning and methods in particular during the period of 1919–1949. This was a time of dominant U.S. influence on Chinese educational theory and practice. At that time, Chinese researchers in education extracted what they thought were universal educational ‘truths’ from the U.S. educational sciences. These ideas were then put into the framework of pedagogics and didactics that had been introduced earlier from Germany through Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the US also inherited the framework of pedagogics and didactics in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in preparing common schoolteachers in normal schools, we know that in the U.S. they no longer have pedagogics and didactics as academic disciplines of education.

Later, around the turn of the century, they shifted from the European pedagogical tradition and towards a new tradition of their own—the tradition of the sciences of education. To replace pedagogics and didactics, they developed what they called the ‘foundations of education’, that is, the psychology of education, the sociology of education, the history of education, the philosophy of science, and curriculum theory. In addition, there were teaching approaches like the Project Method, the Dalton Plan, etc. Another misunderstanding on the part of Chinese education researchers stemmed from the perception that American educational theories were modern and that modernity was superior to tradition. So, the influential Project Method and Dalton Plan were both tried out within Chinese schools in the 1920s, and these new teaching methods were (mis)treated as didactics in China, which is, in my view, clearly a misreading and misunderstanding.

For the roughly three decades from 1919 to 1949, curriculum studies, introduced from the U.S., dominated Chinese educational theory, practice, and policy. In 1919, John Dewey was invited to China. He stayed for more than 2 years, lecturing about his philosophical, social, and pedagogical theories across the country in many universities and associations. According to Hua Zhang (2017), in the 1922 curriculum reform in China, the main leaders in education were Dewey’s former students such as Hu Shih, Tao Xingzhi, and Zhu Jingnong, etc., and what is more, John Dewey, Paul Monroe, and William Head Kilpatrick directly participated in this curriculum reform and contributed their thoughts and wisdom to it.

After 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in Mainland China, the U. S. influence in the humanities and social sciences was thoroughly expunged from the Chinese academia, including educational theories from the U. S. In place of them were the Soviet (Russian) pedagogics and didactics as the dominant influence on the Chinese educational landscape of theory, practice, and policy. This dominance lasted for only about 10 years until 1959 when the rift in Sino-Soviet relations broke out, but its pedagogical influence remained, however. As Russian pedagogics and didactics were also rooted in Germany, so Chinese educational theory and practice once again connected with German pedagogics and didactics, this time via the Soviet Union as a channel. Especially the pedagogics textbook compiled by the Russian educator I. A. Kairov is thought to have inherited Herbartian thought of pedagogics, with the addition of the Soviet educational reform experiences in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 3 So, under the circumstances of siding with the Soviet Union politically and ideologically at the time, it was readily accepted by Chinese educators and teachers alike. The Russian pedagogy textbook was mandatory reading for both student teachers and practicing schoolteachers. Dewey was replaced by I. A. Kairov as the authoritative figure in education in the Chinese educational community.

Over the past three decades—largely from 1979 to 2009 and beyond, when Mainland China opened to the world under Deng Xiaoping’s new policy of reforms and opening, Chinese educational discourses have increasingly changed and shifted towards the U. S. paradigm of educational sciences once again, especially in the field of curriculum studies. Simultaneously, contemporary German Didaktik has been introduced into China as well. For example, Wolfgang Klafki was invited to East-China Normal University (ECNU) for an academic visit in the mid-1980s, and Martin Wagenschein’s theory of exemplary teaching was introduced to Chinese educators and teachers, which is quite popular with Chinese teachers. Lastly, Dietrich Benner has been invited to work with colleagues of ECNU for 20 years (Benner, 2023, p. 26), where he shares with Chinese educators and teachers his ideas of non-affirmative theory of education.

In the rest of this chapter, I first outline, in more detail the shifts and changes that have taken place in the Chinese educational landscape. I then try to reflect on these shifts and changes by pointing out the misreading and misunderstanding of didactics introduced from Germany and Russia, respectively, on the one hand, and Anglo-American educational sciences in general and curriculum studies (including teaching and instruction theory) in particular, on the other hand. I argue that didactics as a discipline for teacher education that originates in European culture, and particularly in German culture, is quite different from teaching/instruction theory and teaching methods stemming from the Anglo-American tradition in the English-speaking world. Second, I examine the relationship of education to politics and economy in the history of Chinese education from the perspective of a non-affirmative approach. Finally, I try to offer my thinking about how to integrate the two great traditions of education studies from the west and ground them in the Chinese tradition of culture and educational practice, so that we may create a new pedagogical and educational paradigm on the foundation of the philosophical idea of Chinese HarmonismFootnote 4 (和而不同) in the twenty-first century.

A Reflection on the Shifts and Changes That Have Taken Place in Chinese Pedagogics and Didactics

As noted above, great changes have taken place during the past three decades in educational research in general and in didactical research in particular. These changes can be characterized as manifesting themselves in the following ways:

First, with the restoration of college entrance examinations in 1977, educational research was resumed after the Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) both in the department, college, or school of education in higher education institutions and in the National Institute of Education Sciences (NIES). Among the educational researchers, many did didactics research. Beginning in the mid-80s, some teacher education universities (which are devoted to preparing school teachers), for the first time in Chinese higher education history, started to train PhD students in didactics. Now there are 21 universities where PhD programs in didactics, subject didactics, or curriculum studies are offered, which has had great impacts on knowledge production as regards research on teaching, learning, assessment, and curriculum on the one hand, and improvement of teaching and learning practices on the other. Under this situation, didactics as a university sub-discipline has separated from pedagogics and become an independent sub-discipline in its own right among educational sciences since the 1980s. In 1985, the National Association for Research on Didactics was established, which holds academic meetings every 2 years.

Second, curriculum studies as a sub-discipline were resumed in Mainland China after a hiatus of three decades, from 1949 through 1979. The emancipation of ideology (sixiang jiefang or 思想解放) appeared across the country in 1978 when the CCP intended to shift its focus of work from the class struggle to economic construction. Now the modernization project has brought with it the flowering of many social sciences that had been forbidden to exist during the past three decades. Curriculum studies were one of those social science disciplines that disappeared from the list of bourgeois sciences. As a university sub-discipline, Anglo-American Curriculum Studies was reinstated. At the beginning of the 1980s, curriculum researchers who had trained in the field before 1949 resumed their research and published their works again (Lü, 1994). A new generation of curriculum researchers with PhDs has since grown up and contributed to research into curriculum theories and reforms. A significant event that marked the re-emergence of curriculum studies was the 1981 founding of the journal Curriculum, Teaching Material, and Method, a major educational journal that publishes papers on curriculum research in Mainland China. Finally, in 1997, the National Association for Curriculum Studies was established officially.

Third, like in Germany and some other European countries, including Russia, school subjects (i.e., mathematics, the Chinese language, biology, physics, chemistry, etc.) have corresponding teaching methods, research, or subject didactics in Mainland China. In the early 1980s, for school subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography, and the Chinese language, etc., the national associations for teaching and learning them were established. In teacher education colleges and universities, there are faculty members and researchers who are responsible for teaching subject didactic courses to teacher education students, or shifansheng (师范生). These professionals join hands with teaching researchers, or jiaoyanyuanFootnote 5 (教研员), as well as practicing school teachers, to improve teaching and learning of various school subjects. For example, the National Association for Physics Teaching-Learning was established in 1981, and among the members of the association are physics didactics researchers from teacher education colleges and universities, physics teaching researchers or jiaoyanyuan, and leading physics teachers from schools. In universities, we find that didactics researchers from the department or school of education have little academic communication with subject didactics faculty members who are located institutionally in various departments or colleges of their subjects (e.g., the department of physics, chemistry, or biology). Subject didactics researchers attend their academic conferences with school subject teachers and teaching researchers or jiaoyanyuan, and few of them attend general didactics conferences sponsored by the National Society for Research on Didactics, according to a survey that I conducted recently. This situation creates a huge gap between general didactics and subject didactics researchers, thus blocking communications between the two groups.

Before 1985, teaching methods courses offered to teacher education students were called teaching-learning methods (jiaoxuefa or 教学法). In order to improve the quality of the courses, some university researchers emphasized the theorizing of the course and insisted on changing the title of the courses from teaching methods, or jiaoxuefa to didactics, or jiaoxuelun (教学论)(Ding, 2015). Correspondingly, subject teaching-learning methods (学科教学法) were changed into subject didactics (xueke jiaoxuelun or 学科教学论), and since around the turn of the century, they have become the curriculum and didactics of their school subjects (xueke kecheng yu jiaoxuelun or 学科课程与教学论), like physics curriculum and didactics, chemistry curriculum and didactics, etc. With the changes in the titles comes the rising status of the disciplines among the academic communities in Mainland China, according to some didactics researchers (Liu, 2005). This is so because of the context of school curriculum reforms, in which these university subject didactics play an increasingly important role in curriculum planning, development, and implementation.

Despite the changes in the title of the discipline, a cursory reading of any textbook of didactics and/or subject didactics will find that Anglo-American research findings on teaching and instruction are widely cited and used in them. In other words, the educational discourses are mixed in that some didactic languages are mingled with curriculum languages in both journal articles and textbooks of teacher education. The discrepancy and conflict between the two traditions loom so large that one of the leading didacticians in a prodigious teacher education university divides his edited textbook content into two main parts: one devoted to didactics and another devoted to curriculum theory, despite the title name of the book, entitled Curriculum and Didactics (Wang, 2004).

Fourth, the relationship between didactics and curriculum studies has been identified as an issue that lends itself to debate between didacticians and curriculum researchers in Mainland China. For one thing, didacticians think that curriculum content should be part of didactics research, and therefore they include the study of curriculum in their didactics textbooks. These didacticians argue that it is unnecessary for curriculum studies to claim itself as an independent discipline. Hence their discipline being called ‘large didactics’. On the other hand, curriculum scholars—most of them of the younger generation—opine that teaching and instruction are parts of curriculum studies, and therefore they should belong to curriculum studies, forming the ‘large curriculum studies’ (Huang, 2006). Other pedagogical scholars argue that both didactics and curriculum studies are considered sub-disciplines under pedagogics, and therefore they are parallel and independent from each other (Wang, 1995). In their view, there can be a division of research between didactics and curriculum researchers, with the former being tasked with researching classroom teaching-learning and the latter being concerned with curriculum development, i.e., the content aspect of schooling. From the cross-cultural perspective of comparative didactics and pedagogy, however, it is well known that didactics originate in the European culture, especially in the German tradition of Pädagogik, with both didactics and Pädagogik being regarded as normal sciences, while curriculum studies stem from the Anglo-American culture, representing the social science perspective of education. Seen this way, it is easily understood that both didacticians and curriculum researchers in Mainland China have misunderstood the nature of didactics and curriculum studies.

Fifth, the core concepts and terms of scholarship concerned with didactics are confused and misunderstood as well. In Chinese, a series of core concepts and terms of scholarship in relation to didactics is chaotic. For example, didactics (jiaoxuelun or 教学论) is the official term prevalent in the Chinese pedagogical and educational community, meaning a sub-discipline within pedagogics or educational science, whereas teaching theory (jiaoxue lilun or 教学理论) is another term also denoting the sub-discipline as well as referring to any specific theory of teaching. Many Chinese educational researchers, including didacticians, do not distinguish between them, however. By disallowing the difference between the two core concepts in use, they cover up the cross-cultural nuances of meaning between them. For one thing, according to these educational researchers, in the U.S., there is a sub-discipline called the theory of teaching within the U.S. educational sciences that seems to be equal to continental-European didactics. However, a leading U.S. professor of curriculum and instruction, Ian Westbury (2000, p. 15), of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, clearly notes that “Didaktik is a tradition of thinking about teaching and learning that is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world.” In other words, the theory of teaching and instruction within the Anglo-American tradition of the curriculum in the English-speaking world is not didactic in the German sense of the word, although both deal with thinking about teaching and learning in the context of schooling.

Because of the confusion on the part of many Chinese pedagogical researchers without awareness of its European origin and the teaching theory in the sense of its Anglo-American tradition, in the Chinese educational community, there is a misreading and misunderstanding of both didactics and curriculum studies together with its teaching theory (Ding, 2009). For example, one of Jerome Bruner’s books—Toward A Theory of Instruction—was translated into Chinese, and ironically, its Chinese title was Jiaoxuelun (literally meaning Didactics) (trans. by Yao & Guo, 2008). Similarly, another common misunderstanding happens when the term ‘theory of teaching or instruction’ is used when translating the Chinese term Jiaoxuelun (didactics) in the English abstracts of journal papers on didactics.

Sixth, confusing didactics with teaching-learning methods (jiaoxuefa) on the part of many Chinese educators and researchers is another issue that demands correcting (Ding, 2015). Historically, this confusion arises out of the fact that Chinese pedagogic scholars first translated didactics of the Herbartian school in the first decades of the twentieth century. In a second step, they introduced U.S. educational theory (especially John Dewey’s theory of education) and teaching approaches such as the Project Method introduced by the American educationist William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965) and the Dalton Plan proposed by the American teacher Helen Parkhurst (1886–1973) in the 1920s. These Chinese pedagogics scholars all emphasized the teaching methods aspects of both German didactics and the new American educational approaches, thus constructing a teacher education (in China, it is also called normal education or shifan education, 师范教育) course out of them named jiaoxuefa (教学法, literally meaning teaching-learning methods) in Chinese. In many of the jiaoxuefa textbooks compiled by teacher educators from normal colleges and universities in the 1920s through 1940s, one can find that much of the content came from American textbooks of a similar kind at those times, plus the practical experiences of Chinese teachers. In fact, many of the authors of those jiaoxuefa textbooks were schoolteachers themselves before they came to teach in normal colleges and universities. This course (i.e., jiaoxuefa), and the teacher educator or jiaoxuefa instructor who teaches the course to prospective teachers, were warmly welcomed when they gave such lectures to practicing teachers, according to Professor Chen Guisheng (2007, 2014) of ECNU when he recollects his personal experience with his mentor during his university days in the 1950s, as they knew exactly what the teachers wanted to know, that is, the concrete methods of teaching and learning.

Later, after 1949, when Mainland China became a communist country under the CCP’s rule, the American educational influence was radially eliminated and replaced by the pedagogy and didactics of the Soviet Union. However, the teacher education course of teaching-learning methods, or jiaoxuefa remained, but the content was changed—mostly borrowed from the Soviet (Russian) textbooks of didactics and subject didactics, and of course, with the Chinese teaching experiences of school teachers. Like their predecessors in the Nationalist era during the 1920s and 1940s, these teacher educators, or jiaoxuefa specialist teachers, were placed towards the periphery in the normal colleges and universities, partly because they were located institutionally in the departments of sciences rather than in the department of education, and partly because they were recruited from experienced school teachers.

It is important to point out here that generations of Chinese educators and teachers seem to have misunderstood the nature of continental European didactics,. Among other things, German Didaktik means, first of all, that teachers who know and understand it has a command of pedagogical thinking that empowers them as professionals in teaching and learning. Second, teachers who know didactics have the autonomy and freedom to transform and translate content knowledge and teach it to their students in any way they think professionally appropriate; third, that didactics means teachers teaching less (i.e., restrained teaching) while promoting students to learn more (Hopmann, 2007, 2011). However, Chinese pre-service and in-service teachers alike learn didactics, if any, only to find that it teaches them how to teach students to master the knowledge and skills contained in the textbook. Put another way, didactics only means a technical tool that teachers are told to use as the teaching method when giving a lesson, and it cannot guarantee them the autonomy and freedom to teach in a professional way. Similarly, curriculum studies present Chinese teachers with more of a technical tool to deal with curriculum and instruction. It is this technical-instrumental view of curriculum studies and didactics, common for many Chinese educators, that allows them to mix and mingle the content of didactics and curriculum studies together without finding them sometimes somewhat incongruent with each other.

A Reconsideration of the Relationship of Chinese Education to Politics and Economy from the Perspective of the Non-affirmative Theory of Education

Going beyond the reflection on the shifts and changes in Chinese pedagogics and didactics, it is now imperative to examine the relationship of Chinese education to politics and the economy at this point in history. Growing up and going to school during the cultural revolution (1966–1976), the present author’s personal experience in those years shows that schooling and education served the purpose of politics in that students trained as ‘red and expert’ political beings, as Chairman Mao said something to the effect that politics is the command, the soul, and the lifeline of all work. In the Chinese context of politics of this kind, education was subordinated to politics, which meant following the CCP beyond doubt. In the communist lexicon, the ideal society was said to be ‘Marxist’ communism, achieved through continuous class struggles politically and nationalized and collectivized planned work units economically, and Chinese people were led by the CCP to strive for it. This social experiment in the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China proved to be a failure economically, politically, as well as educationally, hence the reform and opening since 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.

If the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China could be said to have been subordinated to politics, then the education in the second three decades (1979–2009) of its history (and beyond) might be regarded as being subordinated to the economy—as the country’s dominant policy agenda turned to the so-called socialist market-oriented economy. Again, education has lost itself, now in the national wealth-producing movement. With accepting the idea of education as a driving force for the economy, a hidden privatization of education developed. For example, the 9-year compulsory schooling, which began in 1986 when the law of compulsory education was enacted and enforced, was declared free of charge; however, parents of students have had to pay more fees for shadow education, both in and outside of schools, thus having a somewhat heavier burden than before. In higher education, most students have had to pay tuition fees to colleges and universities since 1989, and because of this, some students whose parents are poor have difficulties continuing to university.

Now is the time for the Chinese to reflect on what purpose education should serve in the process of modernization. In hindsight, education should not play the dominant role in politics, as education is not equal to politics, nor should it play the dominant role in economics, as education is not equivalent to economics. In perspective, education has its own role to play: to cultivate individual persons who are open to any ideas and have knowledge, competencies, and skills through which to create the new society that people desire. This resonates with the German educationalist Dietrich Benner’s theory of non-affirmative education. In his argument for non-affirmative education, Benner (2023) develops “an idea of education that does not seek to educate future generations either to affirm an existing order or to recognize an order conceived of by educators.” (p. 5). He further points out that “the concept of a non-affirmative education...prohibited indoctrination in both directions. In the perspective that I presented, young people were not to be educated to affirm existing conditions or to affirm pedagogical actors as representatives of anticipated conditions but must be enabled to participate in discourses on what is to be preserved and what is to be changed.” (p. 5).

Based on Benner’s theory of non-affirmative education, Uljens and Ylimaki (2017) further discuss the relation of education to politics, economy, and culture. In their paper, one can identify three existing explanations of how education is related to politics, the economy, and culture. The first mode of thought “understands education as being located within the existing society or culture. This is a socialization-oriented or reproduction-oriented model of education. The second form is, since Rousseau, to conceptualize education as a revolutionary force with respect to societal practices and, therefore, as too radical or utopian in character. A third view, a non-affirmative position, opposes the previous ones by criticizing them for their normative nature in the sense that what is either valuable in an existing society or valued as ideal for a future society is decided upon in advance. Therefore, it is supposed that the previous two models run the risk of indoctrination. Another problem with these two models is that they do not leave room for developing the principal’s, teacher’s or learner’s ability to decide upon what is to be considered valuable and meaningful. This non-affirmative position represents a pedagogics challenging normality without defining in advance how the future should look like” (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015, p. 37).

This open and dialectic attitude towards education in relation to politics, economy, and culture serves to place education in perspective; that is, it sees education as education, and it regards education as equal to and alongside such fundamental areas of human practice as politics, art, religion, work, and ethics, in a non-hierarchical order (Benner, 2023, p. 10). In the following section below, I will make use of this concept of non-affirmative education to discuss how to reinvent Chinese didactics and pedagogics in the twenty-first century.

Integrating German Didactics with Anglo-American Curriculum Studies Based on Chinese Harmonism: A Non-affirmative Approach to Integration

Despite (or perhaps because of) the shifts and changes taking place in Chinese pedagogics and didactics, the approach to mixing and mingling German and Russian didactics with Anglo-American curriculum theory was the main device used by Chinese pedagogical and educational researchers in the process of Sinicizing or indigenizing those pedagogical, didactical, or educational theories. This approach has failed, however, as it cannot integrate the two traditions in an acceptable way. What is important is that it lacks a common ground on which the two transplanted approaches to teaching, learning, assessment, and curriculum can have a dialogue with each other in a way that recognizes differences as well as commonalities between them. An alternative approach to genuinely integrating didactics and curriculum theory, I argue, might be predicated on the heritage wisdom of ‘Chinese Harmonism’ (Tang, 2001; Wang, 2012a, b; Wang, 2009), which repudiates the practice of mixing and mingling different ideas together without producing any new ideas out of them. Rather, ‘Chinese Harmonism’ recognizes, first, the differences between those traditions and then takes advantage of these recognized differences to innovate and make something new and valuable accordingly, just like the chemical change that takes place in different elements when they happen to encounter each other. This is what the non-affirmative theory of education gives to us in terms of implications. According to Benner (2023, p. 33), the non-affirmative theory of education has been discussed in many areas of educational research, including ‘in didactics and science didactics.’ And this is congruent with Zhihe Wang’s ideas about Chinese Harmonism. According to Zhihe Wang (2012b), a Chinese philosopher now working at a US university, Chinese Harmony ‘deals with a range of topics: education, economics, ecology, science, spirituality, and religious diversity. It builds upon the work of Whitehead along with the classical Chinese traditions: Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese Buddhism’ (p. 155). As an epistemological way of knowing, the concept of Chinese Harmony does not try to treat reality or the world as the same; rather, it teaches people how to discriminate between differences, welcoming them as indispensable resources for creating something new. The misreading and misunderstanding of German Didaktik (especially Herbartian Padagogik and Didaktik), Anglo-American curriculum studies (especially John Dewey’s pedagogical thoughts and the Tyler Rationale), and Russian didactics (especially Kairov’s pedagogical and didactical thoughts) on the part of many Chinese educators are mainly due to mistakenly treating them all as universal educational truths—what might be called ‘pedagogical scientism.’ Such an orthodox interpretation of various traditions as representing the ‘truth’ fails to see that there are different pedagogies or pedagogical theories versed in different pedagogical cultures and traditions, although it must be acknowledged that there might be some common elements among them when analysed in a matter-of-fact way.

So, what is of paramount significance for us today in the comparative study of didactics and curriculum studies is, to begin with, to change the way we perceive and treat educational and pedagogical ideas and thoughts from other cultures as well as from our own. This approach means to breaking from the traditional way of knowing—merely treating either Anglo-American curriculum studies or German Didaktik or Russian didactics as ‘modern’ models of pedagogies and/or education, thereby totally disregarding rich Chinese pedagogical traditions. Such an integrative research strategy represents an affirmative way of doing comparative research on pedagogics and education. An alternative, non-affirmative approach to genuinely integrating didactics and curriculum theory, we argue, should first of all, know our own pedagogical traditions and value them as the necessary ‘knowledge base’ upon which to learn from other pedagogical cultures. For the Chinese researchers of didactics and/or curriculum studies, this means that we should, as Wu rightly puts it, ‘recover the authentic mode of traditional Chinese life’, although this is, he also admits, a ‘difficult mission’ (Wu, 2011, p.585). It is difficult not because we, as researchers in education, could not literally return to the ancient life of Confucius’ time, but because we must do a creative transformation of the tradition to suit modern life. In other words, we must create a new modernity that is substantially different and distinct from that merely transplanted from the West or inherited from the past.

With this necessary ‘knowledge base’ in mind, and with the awareness of the danger of being homogenized as regards pedagogical theories merely adopted from the Anglo-American curriculum studies, researchers of education can ‘do[ing] their damndest [sic] with their minds, no holds barred” (Bridgman, 1947; cited in Berliner, 2002, p. 18), in the process of doing a comparative study of didactics and curriculum studies.

Just take the German idea of Bildung as an example. When conducting a comparative study of German Didaktik, the idea of Bildung must be taken into consideration. Without understanding this core idea of German Didaktik, we would miss out on the chance to know the way German teachers conceive and shape their pedagogical activities inside and outside of the classroom. In his recent study of comparative didactics and curriculum, for example, Ding (2009, 2011, 2015) has found that the core idea of German Bildung, although translated into Chinese as jiaohua (教化), taoye (陶冶), or jiaoyang (教养), etc., does not find its way into the discourses of didactics textbooks written by Chinese didacticians. However, this holds true also for the rich meanings of the Russian notion of ‘obrazovanie’ (‘образование’). Also, as mentioned above, this concept has entered the pedagogical literature as an adopted terminology. Nonetheless, in modern Chinese educational discourse, there is a native term ‘bringing up a person through teaching’ (教书育人) embedded in the Confucian idea of becoming a ‘nobleman’ (君子)，which could well be integrated into the German idea of Bildung, and/or the Russian idea of ‘obrazovanie’. All of them are, among other things, concerned with the aim and purpose of schooling and education, although we should be aware that nuances of meaning are available among these constructs from one culture to another. In other words, if we want to integrate the German idea of Bildung or the Russian idea of obrazovanie into Chinese pedagogical theory and practice, it is necessary for researchers to do the analytical, constructive, and creative transformation, thus accommodating those adopted ideas from other cultures to the proper roots or traditions that emphasize the idea of becoming ‘a nobleman’, or bringing up a person through teaching.

On the other hand, while U.S. educational researchers have now argued vehemently for reflective teaching and teacher professionalization over the past several decades, in the Continental European countries where the Didaktik tradition has been handed down for more than 200 years, reflective teaching has been a feature of their teacher education and professional development all the time (Westbury, 2000; Terhart, 2003); and teaching in Europe in general, and in Germany, Norway, and Finland in particular, has always been considered an admirable and established profession, just like medicine, law, engineering, etc. Likewise, in the Chinese tradition of education, teaching has been recognized as a respected career since ancient times, except in extremist periods such as the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1966–1976), when intellectuals, including teachers, were despised or doubted as harmful to the establishment. Given the similarities between the educational tradition in Continental Europe and the educational tradition in China, we have reason to believe that it might be desirable and meaningful for Chinese educational researchers and teachers alike to re-connect with the German Didaktik tradition, especially when the Americanization of the current educational research in China was prominent for quite a long time.

Concluding Remarks

Like many other countries outside of Germany and the U.S., where German Didaktik and Anglo-American curriculum studies have been adopted and integrated into their pedagogical studies in their teacher education programs, China has also followed suit in this aspect, where the process of adoption and integration has been fraught with much more difficulty partly because of its unique history and cultural tradition and partly because of the considerable differences and conflicts between Chinese culture and Western culture. For a long time, Chinese educators have mistaken the different didactic theorizing from Germany and Russia and the Anglo-American curriculum theorizing for the universal scientific truths, without awareness of the distinctions and nuances of cultures between them due to their being embedded in different historical, cultural, and educational contexts. As a result, it follows that much misreading and misunderstanding on the part of Chinese educators have occurred regarding these pedagogical models and theories. In addition, some of them also have, to a certain degree, neglected and despised their own traditions of learning, studying, teaching, and schooling, which might have been conducive to accommodating different western pedagogical traditions and ideas as a cultural foundation to anchor the adopted pedagogical and educational knowledge from other countries. This radicalism in pedagogical and educational thinking in the Chinese educational community reflects the general trend of radicalization in modern intellectual life (see, for example, Yu, 1993), wherein modernity is opposed to tradition.

Now well into the twenty-first century, many Chinese educators (e.g., Ding, 2009; Huang, 2006) have at last recognized the misreading and misunderstanding of Western pedagogical and educational traditions and learned from the past century of academic communication with the West. With the rise of China in the economy and other fields, such as science and technology over the past decades and a re-evaluation of Chinese traditions, comes a new confidence that they should rebuild pedagogical discourses and disciplines, including curriculum studies, didactics, and curriculum & didactics as a blended new discipline (See, e.g., Deng, 2012; Ding, 2015; Ye, 2009). In conclusion, I would like to close with Deng’s (2011) statement that ‘Both Western thinking and indigenous tradition have to undergo a process of modification, adaptation, and transformation in a particular socio-cultural context, creating hybrid kinds of pedagogy.’