Li-fang Zhang
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9789888208135
- eISBN:
- 9789888268283
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888208135.003.0014
- Subject:
- Education, Educational Policy and Politics
In her chapter, Zhang Li-fang asks what intellectual styles are the most conducive for good educational outcomes in a multi-ethnic environment like China. She argues that intellectual styles ...
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In her chapter, Zhang Li-fang asks what intellectual styles are the most conducive for good educational outcomes in a multi-ethnic environment like China. She argues that intellectual styles complicate multicultural education, and stresses the importance of balancing group preferences for learning with individual cognitive styles. Furthermore, rapidly developing multiethnic societies like China, must navigate the desire to cultivate “the adaptive values of Type I styles,” which are more propitious to the “creativity-generating” activities of the global economy, with the more conservative style exhibited by some Chinese minorities like Tibetan and Uyghur students. This is made all the more difficult by the PRC’s unique ethnic policies, and the inflexibility they offer at the curriculum level, and, one might add, the institutional scale.Less
In her chapter, Zhang Li-fang asks what intellectual styles are the most conducive for good educational outcomes in a multi-ethnic environment like China. She argues that intellectual styles complicate multicultural education, and stresses the importance of balancing group preferences for learning with individual cognitive styles. Furthermore, rapidly developing multiethnic societies like China, must navigate the desire to cultivate “the adaptive values of Type I styles,” which are more propitious to the “creativity-generating” activities of the global economy, with the more conservative style exhibited by some Chinese minorities like Tibetan and Uyghur students. This is made all the more difficult by the PRC’s unique ethnic policies, and the inflexibility they offer at the curriculum level, and, one might add, the institutional scale.
