Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education

This book enriches the discourse around Global Citizenship Education in teacher education through the example of a teacher's experience in a Canada-China Sister School reciprocal learning landscape. Instead of positioning global citizenship teaching and learning as a set of fixed goals to be attained by teachers alone, this book approaches global citizenship teaching and learning as unfinished lifework in progress and as situated curriculum problems to be inquired together by university researchers, school teachers, and students under the spirit of reciprocity and community. This reimagination of narratives, theory, and action start from collaborative and reciprocal learning partnerships among Chinese and Canadian researchers and teachers in the practicality of re-searching and re-enacting the purpose and meanings of twenty-first century education in a Canada-China Sister School setting. 

This book engages Canadian and Chinese language educators, graduate students, pre-service teachers, school principals and teachers in an enhanced reciprocal learning process by collaboratively reflecting on and writing up the school-based language curriculum projects and school-based language teachers’ professional development activities in Canada-China sister schools. The objective is to develop a knowledge base for generating positive, reciprocal, practitioner knowledge and methods to improve language teaching effectiveness in either context. In this way, it contributes to a public discussion of the reciprocal educational impacts on the knowledge-based society in Canada and China.