Beyond State Planned School-Based Curriculum Development: One Chinese School's Story

Abstract

View through a power perspective, this article critically evaluates tensions involved in China's school-based curriculum development (SBCD) in middle schools: the state's concern about control, accountability, and schools’ eagerness to struggle for more decision-making power. This article examines how a Chinese school and its teachers go beyond state-planned SBCD through analysis of power relationships in three stages of SBCD: goal setting, content and pedagogy selection, and implementation. It finds that the school and teachers negotiated with the governments and empowered themselves to gain more influence by taking the lead in collaborations with external groups, making major SBCD decisions, and distributing power democratically among school staff. The main purpose of the article is to highlight the complexity of the power redistribution in SBCD and to draw attention to the need for improved understandings of school power in Chinese context.