Understanding Chinese Education through Cross-cultural Lens: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Educational Culture

This research book comprises three sections, which are written in Chinese. The first section (from page 1 to page 26) is an autoethnography study of Chinese educational culture through self-reflection that explores the author’s personal experience linking his autobiographical story to Chines educational culture. The main contents include the definition of educational culture, autoethnography study of Chinese educational culture and methodologies for researching educational culture. The second section (from page 27 to page 190) is a comparative study of Chinese and Australian educational culture by case studies that investigates the differences and similarities of educational policies and practices between the Australian and Chinese schools. The major contents include literature review of comparison of educational achievement between Eastern and Western countries and case studies of Australian and Chinese schools. The third section (page 191 to page 219) reports case studies of four Chinese background teacher-researchers, who participated in the Research-Oriented School-Engaged Teacher Education Program, which is an Australian-Chinese collaborative research project for developing teacher-researchers from China. These teacher-researchers were interviewed about their English learning experience in China and their Mandarin teaching experience in Australian public schools, and their perspective on Australian and Chinese educational cultures, and its influence on their teaching and research in Australia. Their theses and self-reflective diaries were analysed to explore evidence of their understanding of differences and similarities of Australian and Chinese educational cultures.