ABSTRACT
The new century has witnessed rapid political, economic and social global change. To keep up with this change, wide-ranging reforms have been introduced in different countries. In the developing world in particular, to meet the challenges of a new global economy and of social transformation, various imported reforms have been initiated in different areas and at different levels. Yet, these reforms have encountered the same difficulty, namely, meeting both domestic needs and international standards. A typical reification of the interaction of the local and the global is the coexistence of two systems at the same time. In Chinese education, similar change has been taking place. To ‘align with the world’, many educational reforms reflecting ‘a world culture of schooling’ (Anderson-Levitt 2003) have been initiated. Liberal pedagogy has been imported and adopted, with experts from the West invited to act as advisers. In actual implementation, however, many reforms are met with resistance from the local community. As a consequence, it is common to see two pedagogical systems operating at the same time within one institution, with the traditional pedagogy featuring the textbook-governed and teacher-led way of teaching on the one hand and the liberal pedagogy emphasizing student-centredness and a communicative way of teaching on the other. The present research is situated within such a context of ‘one community, two systems’ (Liu 2009). It was conducted in a university department in China, offering a BEd degree programme in English education1 for preservice teachers. Within the department, liberal pedagogy was strongly promoted and the student teachers enrolled on the programme were expected to transform into liberal practitioners whose use of new teaching methods would affect their own students after graduation. In the course of development of the programme, however, this liberal pedagogy was met with strong resistance from some student teachers, who still identified very
well with the traditional pedagogy. Using the third generation of activity theory as a conceptual framework, this chapter aims to uncover how different voices, of traditionalism and liberalism, reveal the incongruities of different cultures of learning that underpin the co-existing pedagogies in the community. The analysis is guided by the following two questions:
1 How do the foreign experts and student teachers in the community view the liberal pedagogy featuring communicative teaching and student-centred learning?
