A Chinese model of the implementation of teacher education policy: A case study approach

Since the 1990s, China’s teacher education has been undergoing radical transformations brought about by national policies for achieving educational excellence in the context of globalization and localization. This paper adopts a case study approach to investigate and compare how two teacher education institutions have implemented the national policy in the Chinese socio-political context from critical perspectives. The following research questions are examined to understand the implementation process: 1. in what ways the national policy is transferred to local policy players, and how the national policy is interpreted by local actors; 2. how the institutional missions and programs have been changed to implement the national reform; and 3. who mostly benefits from the implementation, and how. The author finds that the implementation of the teacher education policy is a one-way process with a top-down approach, and is employed as an instrument to redistribute political and financial resources in teacher education institutions. The study concludes that there exists a Chinese model of policy implementation in the East Asian context, and unearths some hidden policy issues for better understanding the complicated process of implementation which is deemed as a key to achieving policy success.