ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the cultural scripts and indigenisation in China by turning our attention to the educational paradigm. Using the reform at Shandong Dulangkou Secondary School as a classic example, the classroom reform in the rural school is bottom-up and spontaneous, relying on grassroots energy to spread rapidly, thus profoundly affecting and changing the face of many rural schools. An interesting development in China's educational borrowing from the West is how some schools achieve academic success by adopting teaching approaches that are strikingly similar to the Western pedagogies promoted in the New Curriculum Reform (NCR) within an EOE paradigm. It is worth mentioning that these schools tend to be low-performing rural schools rather than high-performing urban schools. The chapter explores a brief introduction of the decentralised landscape in China, followed by a description of the general challenges faced by rural schools in the country.
