A Study Of The Teacher Education Policies In China In The Era Of Great Transformation

As teacher education is often seen as a mother machine for the whole educational enterprises, its quality is directly related to the success or failure of acountry's education, and even a country's future and destiny. Based on such a consensus, teacher education has aroused wide attention and concerns in the world.It can be said affirmatively that teacher education has become the focus of education reforms in the world since the turn of the century. China is no exception. With the deepening of the opening up and the stablishment and improvement of socialist market economic system, Chinese society is undergoing a particular stage-social transformation. This transformation began in the economic field, and soon extended to all areas of society. Education, as a subsystem of the social system, is also undergoing its own transformation. As an important part of education, teacher education is facing unprecedented challenges.It can be said that teacher education also entered a significant transition period.In the transition period, how to research, develop and implement the most effective teacher education policy, and establish a modern teacher education system and operating mechanism with Chinese characteristics, which can meet the needs of social and economical development and education reforms, is a major task for education reform in China.But China's current teacher education policy has been in the "transition" state mixed with old and new. Traditional teacher education policy is made in the context of planned economy, may have its necessity and rationality in the planned economy era, but with the development of the times, its shortcomings exposed. People of all walks of life have recognized this problem, and gradually broadened and deepened the teacher education policy research and reform efforts. Since the late 20th century, China has introduced a series of new teacher education policy, including "open teacher education policy" which pursues openness against t closure of teacher education, "integration of teacher education policy" which pursues integration against separation of preservice and in-service teacher education, and "high end of teacher education policy" which pursues high-level against low-level of teacher education,etc.However, any reform can not be achieved at a single leap.The issues such as if the old policy should becompletely abandoned and the new policy is fully justified, are important issues worth exploring.In view of this, the thesis attempts to make a multi-dimension and in-depth investigation and analysis of the transition policy of teacher education in China in order to summarize the experiences and lessons of the educational policies up to now, and do some forward-looking thinking about the formulation of future teacher education policy in China. The thesis consists of the introduction and the main body of the seven chapters.In Introduction, research quanestions, research values, literature review and research design, etc are covered; in Chapter 1,a longitudinal study about the historical evolution of chinese teacher education policies is made in order to make clear the necessity and direction of teacher education transformation in China on the one hand, and to clarify the historical basis of the teacher education transition policy in China on the other; in Chapter 2,the reality bachground such as Chinese society, education and the conditions of the teaching force during the social transformation era are examined in order to clarify the need for restructuring of teacher education on the one hand, and to explore the reality base for the transformation of teacher education policy in China on on the other;in Chapter 3,the philosophies and objectives on which the teacher education policies are formulated and implemented in the trasformation era are reviewed and analyzed;in Chapter 4 to 6, the three main teacher education policies in the transformation era, which are the "open teacher education policy","integration of teacher education policy" and "high end of teacher education policy",were analyzed comprehensively anddeeply from the aspects of the origin, process and content, effectiveness and problems of the policies and others.Based on the previous investigation and analysis, some suggestions and recommendation for future teacher education policies in the transformation era are made, including:firstly, to improve the policy of involving comprehensive universities in teacher education; secondly, to move the focus of teacher education from preservice to in-service and lifelong education; Thirdly,to implement standard-based teacher education managment; Fourthly, to actively refine and improve teacher education legislation; Fifthly, to reform and improve the teacher certification system;Sixthly, to deepen the reform of teacher education curriculum and instruction.