NAMA : MAYASARI LESTARI SIREGAR

NPM : 17140062
GRUB : B
M.KULIAH : SBM. EKONOMI

Living Within the Tensions:

A Narrative Inquiry into Teachers’ Personal Practical Knowledge

in the Midst of Chinese Curriculum Reform

Yucui Ju

21.1 Introduction

There is a popular metaphor in China, “If teachers want to give students a cup of water,
teachers must have a bucket of water (knowledge).” With the recent changes in Chinese
society, the metaphor may well now be described as “If teachers want to give students a cup
of fresh water, they need knowledge fl owing like tap water.” The metaphor draws attention
to two things: the fi rst suggests that because the water in the bucket may be obsolete,
teachers should continually refresh their knowledge; the second suggests that teachers’
knowledge should always be on tap and should not be bounded in any way. Students can
always turn on the tap and expect to

receive knowledge (Chen 2001 ). These are common metaphors that seem to create a kind
of metaphor to live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980 ), which impact almost everyone, especially
teachers. These social and cultural metaphors shaped, and continue to shape, teachers’
personal practical knowledge from their experiences as students in school and onward as they
learned to teach and as they taught. Teachers’ knowledge, that is, their personal practical
knowledge shaped by these familial, institutional, social, and cultural metaphors, is deeply
embodied and not easy to change (Clandinin and Connelly 1992 , 1995 ). The current
curriculum reform in China requires a massive shift in the landscape of schools with a move
toward curriculum making, with a starting point of the student/learner rather than a starting
point of subject matter and teachers. Furthermore, there was a shift in how teachers were to
engage with students; they were to shift from working as knowledge transmitters to working
as facilitators of learning and refl ective practitioners. point of students, a high-stakes testing
plotline continues to structure the landscape. The entrance examination for higher education
(Gao Kao) is the most signifi cant in the lives of students. To a large extent, the lives of
students are determined by their performance on this examination. A small difference in score
can make a big difference in whether a student enters a university or not as well as the
university he/she enters. Both are connected to how he/she lives his/her future life. The
furious competition around this examination impacts the lives of the students, parents, and
teachers. Students focus all their activities around their performance on these examinations.
Parents and families go to great extremes to create conditions in which their child can achieve
at the highest level. Finally, for teachers, they focus their instruction on the examinations in
an effort to help their students receive high scores

21.2 Literature Review

21.2.1 The Demands of the Curriculum Reform

In the past, pressures from high-stakes testing and the ways teachers taught as transmitters of
knowledge created many problems for students, such as high stress from learning, hating to
learn, a lack of creativity, going against democratic teacherstudent relationships, and so on
(Zeng 2009 ; Huang 1999 ). Using the water metaphor, the high-stakes testing and resulting
curriculum as well as the teaching practices were therefore criticised. Curricular critiques
included subject matter that did not engage the experiences of students as they lived within
their social milieus, a teacher-centred focus, an overemphasis on textbooks, hindering the
development of student creativity and their ability to practice, a sole assessment focus on test
achievement, and neglect of student development as whole human beings (Zhong et al. 2001 ,
p. 5). In response to problems of the previous educational system, Shanghai took the lead in
curriculum reform in 1988. The Chinese government issued a series of documents on
educational reform from 1999 to 2001. The Communist Party of China (CPC) Central
Committee and State Council ( 1999 ) put forward a plan that required educators to change
their educational notions and teaching styles, adopt active elicitation and discussion
approaches, and encourage students to think independently and innovatively.

21.2.2 The Tension Between the New Curriculum and the High-Stakes Testing Plotline

Many objectives of the new curriculum, such as a spirit of creativity and practical ability, are
hard to measure. The assessment of schools, teachers, and students still focuses on student
achievement. Caught between the new curricular objectives and the former methods of
assessment, teachers fi nd it diffi cult to live out the new ideas in their practice (Jin and
Zhang 2004 ). Zhou and Lei ( 2008 ) argued that norm-referenced tests, such as the entrance
examination of higher education, which evaluates students according to their positions in a
group, are not useful or helpful in assisting teachers to teachIn this view, knowledge needs
continual updating and is seen as something that can be packaged and given to teachers
through training or practice sessions. It is also seen as something that can be applied directly,
and in relatively standardised ways, in classroom practice. Teachers and students as learners
are usually seen as the receptacles, or the endpoints, for the knowledge sent down the
conduit. This focus on what knowledge teachers need to know has diverted the attention of
educators away from the teachers’ personal practical knowledge, which fi nds expression in
those practices, and curriculum making (p. 53). This view of knowledge, consistent with the
system of high-stakes testing, however, confl icts with what the curriculum reform requests.
In the current curriculum reform context in China, with the system of high-stakes testing,
there have been discussions on what teachers should do, should be, and should know as
curriculum makers, while there is little discussion about what teachers know, what they are
doing, what challenges they face, and what support they need to transform their practices and
achieve reform goals. This is especially in view of the tension between the new curriculum
and the student achievement test plotline.

21.2.3 Knowledge for Teachers or Teachers’ Personal Practical Knowledge

According to MoE ( 2001 ), “teacher in-service training should focus on the curriculum
reform of basic education.” However, Bitan-Friedlander et al. ( 2004 ) demonstrated that
“training towards the task of implementing an innovation is a lengthy enterprise because
teachers go through various stages of assessing the task in terms of concerns, i.e., personal
ability, consequences, cost and benefi ts, efforts and rewards, etc. Time may be a necessary
condition but not a suffi cient one” (p. 617). 21 Living Within the Tensions: A Narrative
Inquiry into Teachers’… 356 Cao and Lu ( 2003 ) cited Richardson’s ( 1998 ) idea that
following the usual pattern in teacher education, experts from outside of the schools tell
teachers to try different teaching methods, implement new curriculum, and change their
attitudes toward students. When teachers appear reluctant to accept and implement the new
ideas and methods, they are regarded as conservative and are blamed when the reform fails.
Jiang ( 2005 ) cited Carter’s ( 1992 ) review to show that many studies have found that when
the beliefs of teachers did not match with curriculum reforms, most teachers continued to
teach in their old ways. Zhao and Zhang ( 2005 ) noted that, even though teachers were
familiar with the new notions, many did not apply them. Clandinin and Connelly
characterised the social of school, that is, school contexts, through the metaphor of a
professional knowledge landscape:

Imaginative reconceptualisation of knowledge has the possibility of shifting the discourse

around teachers and knowledge from a discourse in which teachers are seen as holders of
theoretical knowledge, as conduits for applying theory to practice, to a discourse of teachers
as holders of personal practical knowledge. But teachers’ personal practical knowledge which
teachers construct and reconstruct in life and work contexts and that fi nds expression in their
practices is given little or no attention in policy statements designed to reform curriculum
(Clandinin 2009 , p. 49).

In China, teachers’ personal practical knowledge has been studied by researchers in recent
years; however, most of the research is syllogistic, and far away from teacher and “practice”.
Few studies have investigated the practice of teachers (Wu 2007 ). When reforms do not
attend to teachers’ personal practical knowledge, educational reform and teacher education
are not rooted in practice.

21.3 Methodology

I draw on Clandinin’s ( 2009 ) view of personal practical knowledge as experiential, moral,

embodied, and storied knowledge. She conceptualised teacher knowledge in narrative terms,
and described it in terms of narrative life constructions. The stories these narratives are built
on are both personal, refl ecting a person’s life history, and social, refl ecting the professional
knowledge contexts in which teachers live (p. 50). Ding ( 2003 ) argued that any theoretical
framework would fall into the narrative tension because of the complexity, abundance, and
diversity of educational experience. Clandinin and Connelly’s ( 1998 , 2000 ) methodology
for studying teachers’ personal practical knowledge within school contexts is narrative
inquiry, which “is a way of understanding experience…is stories lived and told” ( 2000 , p.
20). It focuses on contextuality, temporality, and inter-subjectivity of human experiences and
pays attention to what happens in certain landscapes over time (i.e., how people think about,
feel, understand, compose, and live their lives). The research described here is a narrative
inquiry into the experiences of teachers in the landscape of curriculum reform and high-
stakes testing in a Chinese senior high school (Z school). The research purposes were social,
practical, and personal (Clandinin et al. 2007 ). Social purposes were to narratively
understand the daily lives and personal experiences of teachers, with a central focus on
deepening the understanding of teachers’ personal practical knowledge in the curriculum
reform.

“bewilderment and amelioration,” and “the experimenter in the reform landscape” as titles for
their stories. They all agreed that the titles represented what they experienced. I found that
different teachers lived with the tensions in different ways. Embodied in the fi eld texts I
identifi ed four distinct coping approaches: engaging, quasiinquiring, zigzagging and adding.
In conversations about my fi eld texts with Jean Clandinin, we realised the teachers were
experiencing two forms of tension (i.e., double tensions), between the expectations of
curriculum reform and the teachers’ personal practical knowledge (Tension I) and the
demands of curriculum reform and the high-stakes testing plotline (Tension II). In what
follows, I detail story fragments that illustrate these four approaches of coping with these
interrelated tensions as the teachers lived in their landscapes.

21.4 Story Fragments

21.4.1 Engaging

Guo 1 had approximately 10 years of teaching experience; she was a doctoral candidate in
education. She paid much attention to study the theories about curriculum reform, and she
intended to transform her teaching by activating curriculum that engaged the experiences of
her students. Complex tensions arose because of a discrepancy between Guo’s activated
curriculum and the traditional ideas of the other teachers as well as the pressure of
examinations. She told me:

‘In the course of social study, there is a theme on rules. In our school, the students are often
opposed to school rules; I therefore encouraged the students to research the reasonableness of
our school rules. The students asked me, “Can we change the rules if we fi nd there are some
irrational rules through our research?” I promised them, “If we can present a convincing
report on the basis of our research, we can submit it to the principal and invite him to have a
discussion. Our school is committed to the development of students; as long as what we say
is reasonable, those unreasonable rules will be cancelled or changed.”

However, the teachers in my Teaching and Research Group often wondered after observing
my classes “what knowledge did the students learn?” Someone said directly, “the knowledge
disappeared into the air.” I feel that I cannot have a dialogue with them; we are in a different
frame – we have bifurcation on epistemology. They believe that teachers should pass
objective, certain, and universal knowledge, but I focus on student engagement and
development, and I pay attention to activate subject matter to personal, contextual, and
tentative knowledge. Certainly, I must pay attention to exams. If the evaluation system does
not change, we teachers have to dance handcuffed and fettered. But I always try to engage the
experience of the students and activate subject matter, even though I give lectures or let the
students read textbooks. I emphasise that the students can use the principles learned from
social studies to think about social problems.’

21.4.2 Quasi-Inquiring

Working in a harmonious and cooperative Teaching and Research Group for about 10 years
and mentored by an expert teacher, Bing was encouraged to explore new ways of curriculum
reform. His students learned very fast; many of them had learned by themselves before he
instructed the classes. Bing refl ected on his own experiences as a student when often his
teachers could not answer his questions. From then on, he was aware that “at the end of the
day, study depends on students themselves rather than teachers.” Bing therefore believed that
if he taught by lecture, his teaching would be ineffective.

In response to the curriculum reform and congruent with his own personal practical
knowledge, Bing created a model of teaching that had as its purpose the development of self-
regulated study and inquiry for each of his students. The basic process he followed was that
before class, students were asked to study the textbook by themselves, and they were
encouraged to get relevant information through library and Internet searches. The students
wrote self-study summaries, putting forward some questions. Bing reviewed the summaries,
sorted the questions of the students, and chose the ones to be discussed in class. In the
classes, students took turns teaching and discussing the questions. The teacher’s role was
encouraging and guiding the students to inquire. Bing’s model produced certain effects in
local mathematics curriculum reform; it was praised as embodying the spirit of reform, and
named by some experts as “question-based teaching.”

‘now I know the key reason of my dissatisfaction: even though the students could repeat the
knowledge in the textbook, they did not enjoy the process of inquiring. The textbook presents
the conclusions, without process of inquiring, which is different to the real process of

knowing and problem solving. In my opinion, the thinking method and spirit of inquiry are
more important than conclusions themselves. The “question-based model” attends to the
process of inquiring; however, many students pay more attention to scores in examinations
rather than inquiry. In fact, Gaokao has been getting more fl exible, rote learning does not
work well. Learning how to learn is very important for Gaokao now. Certainly, I agree that
the “question-based model” needs more time than teacher speech. When all the classes
applied this model, it was too dense, and the students therefore lost their passion. Now I don’t
apply this model in each class. In most of my classes, I pay more attention to facilitate the
students’ thinking deeply by asking questions. I realised that whether the students learned
before the class or not, learning to ask questions and thinking deeply are more important than
the “model” itself.’

21.4.3 Zigzagging

Dong was a new teacher in social studies. In her short teaching career, she moved from
teacher-centred to student-centred and then back to a teacher-centred teaching style. She told
me that in accordance with the spring tide of curriculum reform, her Teaching and Research
Group conducted some experiments called “self-regulated study.” The leader of the group
encouraged her to try this new style of teaching. Her students were the top students in the
school and they learned very quickly. She therefore attempted to instruct the content of the
textbook quickly, followed by having her students conduct projects. Her students explored
themes they were interested in, such as hot topics that were currently being discussed in the
media. They explored in groups and then presented and discussed them in class. Dong
reviewed their work at the end of the classes.

She said:

“I feel that the exploring was broad and deep. The students felt more interested than they
would have been if they had only listened to teachers. The self-regulated study went for about
two months. However, one teacher criticised that this kind of teaching was not teaching; it
delayed the development of the students. This teacher has very good relations with the leader
of my school, so I felt scared. In fact, I’m not sure whether self-regulated study is correct or
not, and I’m afraid that the students will not grasp the knowledge from the textbook well.
After all, they must attend to the test. I therefore gave up self-regulated study and returned to
a lecture format.”

21.4.4 Adding

Participant Jin was an experienced teacher in biology, having worked more than 30 years, and
he felt quite confi dent with his teaching. In the face of the tensions he continued with a
lecture teaching approach while also adding some inquiry-based activities.

Jin said:

“I think constructing knowledge is very important. It was hard for me to remember what I
learned well as a student, and I managed to organise what I learned into a structure that was
very helpful for remembering and understanding. When I became a teacher, I tried to transfer
the structure I organised to my students, and my students can get quite high scores on the
examinations. That’s the main reason why I am well known in teaching in the fi eld of
biology and why I became the leader of my Teaching and Research Group. Now informed by
the new ideas from curriculum reform, I attempt to let the students construct their own
knowledge structure and fi nd their own conclusions.

The top students in my school can learn knowledge very quickly, and examinations that still
focus on knowledge and remembering are not so hard for them. In my opinion, this kind of
top students can apply for exemption. When the other students have these classes, top
students can go to the library or laboratory to conduct inquiries. I think this would helpful for
the development of the students. I put forward this suggestion to my school, but it was not
accepted.

21.5 Discussion and Conclusion

21.5.1 Teachers Personal Practical Knowledge: Living Within the Tensions

From these story fragments, I show how, in this reform era, teachers’ personal practical
knowledge is expressed in their practices. I show how teachers are coping with the tensions
created by the curriculum reform, in which the experience of students rather than subject
matter is the curricular starting point. In addition, I also show how teachers are coping with
the continuing high-stakes testing plotline. Teachers live in the tensions between the
expectations of the curriculum reform and their personal practical knowledge (Tension I), as
well as the demands of the curriculum reform and maintenance of the same examination
system (Tension II). These tensions that teachers are experiencing are within their own
knowledge, between teachers, and between teachers and students in the professional
landscape. In the old metaphors of tap water, learners were seen as empty vessels, and
teachers were holders and dispensers of knowledge. Teachers were seen “as part of the
conduit that ships knowledge from textbooks to students” (Clandinin 1986 ). Teaching was a
process of transmitting and dispensing knowledge. Teachers’ personal practical knowledge
was congruent with the institutional and cultural narrative of teaching and examining. Almost
all the teachers learned to teach from within these metaphors. Thus, their personal practical
knowledge, which is based on this old cultural narrative, is diffi cult to change. When the
situation changed, teachers still attempted to live out their personal practical knowledge,
knowledge that did not include an inquiry-based way of curriculum- making. Thus, in the
context of reform, teachers’ personal practical knowledge did not fi t. Under the reforms,
teachers are asked to know differently, and they are supposed to learn new things. The
teachers were asked to relearn what they knew and to learn another way of living out
curriculum making in their teaching practice. They had to unlearn their personal practical
knowledge acquired through their own lived experiences. The teachers felt strong tensions
and created different ways to cope with the tensions.
 Under perfect conditions, tests would be congruent with the curriculum. In practice,
however, there is still a long and diffi cult way to go before achieving this ideal. Examination
reform consistent with curriculum reform is a signifi cant challenge.

21.5.2 Teacher Education Should Start with Teachers’ Personal Practical Knowledge

As Connelly and Clandinin ( 1988 ) reviewed, the 1960s and early 1970s were the years in
which a signifi cant effort was made in North America and abroad to reform education
through curriculum materials. However, the results were less than spectacular because the
experiences of teachers and students in their curriculum situations were overlooked and often
dismissed (pp. 137–138). What was missing is the situational and the personal view of the
teachers, as well as any view of their personal practical knowledge, which is embodied,
narrative knowledge, as fundamental in understanding classroom curriculum making
(Clandinin and Connelly 1995 ; Chen 2009 ; Craig 2007 ). The current curriculum reform in
China is attempting to avoid this kind of neglect, and seemingly pays more attention to the
integration of the four curriculum commonplaces, that is, teacher, learner, subject matter, and
milieu (Schwab 1969 ; Zhong et al. 2001 , p. 428). Teachers are regarded as an integral part
of the curriculum constructed and activated in classrooms, and they play an important role in
curriculum development and reform. To create successful curriculum reforms, in-service and
pre-service teacher education, which aims to change the teachers’ personal practical
knowledge is urgently needed. A large amount of training around curriculum reform allowed
the participating teachers to become familiar with new notions and terms, such as
“selfregulated study” and “spirit of inquiry,” etc. However, within the tensions, the journey to

21.5.3 Transforming Teachers Personal Practical Knowledge in Cooperation

Every participant referred to the Teaching and Research Group and the “Open Class” in their
conversations with me. In China, the Teaching and Research Group is an organisation for
teachers to research teaching issues, and is constituted of teachers from the same subject area
in the same school. Experienced teachers are the leaders, and group members meet regularly
to discuss teaching issues. “Open Class” is a typical model for teachers to research teaching
issues.

Group members prepare the same topic together, share their ideas and resources, watch each
other’s classes and put forward suggestions. Sometimes school and district leaders,
curriculum experts, parents and teachers from other schools watch and evaluate the “Open
Class.” This kind of “Big Open Class” is related to a school’s reputation; therefore, the
Teaching and Research Group spends a great deal of energy preparing for it. The “Big Open
Class” in the reform era is designed to communicate experiences during reform. Teachers do
their best to create new approaches to engage students, and they learn from the other teachers.
They express their personal practical knowledge and learn new practical knowledge in these
cooperative processes.