A Study On The Developmental Strategy For Promoting Tertiary Teacher Education In Yunnan

At the turn of this new century, a new age of reform is ushered in the national tertiary teacher education of China which is mainly characterized as follows. First, the tertiary teacher education is changing from its original unitary and closed system to a diversified and open one. Second, the original separated pre-service and post-service teacher education are becoming united and systematized. Further, the social demand for teachers is characterized with an increasing emphasis on their quality rather than merely their quantity. These changes, which are basic and fundamental, also mark and constitute the new trends and tendencies in the ongoing reform and development in the present tertiary teacher education.However, with a vast territory and a large population, China is confronted with a series of complicated national conditions, and its social, economic, cultural and educational development tends to differ significantly across regions and areas. In such a case, the whole national tertiary teacher education has to be guided by a scientific and developmental view, and strategies for developing appropriate tertiary teacher training systems for different regions and areas have to be designed so that zone planning, classified direction and step execution will be achieved.Requirements for the modern tertiary education, the direction for the development of the present tertiary teacher education and the present situation of the tertiary teacher education of Yunnan, the problems therein and the causes of these problems all constitute the prerequisite and basis for the study of the developmental strategy in this thesis. For the present, tertiary education is marked with five major tendencies, i.e. internationalization, modernization, diversification, popularization as well as individualization. And its development can be specified as two major trends: an open teacher training system is coming into being and teacher education is becoming a professional and lifetime pursuit; the teacher training system is developing from its traditional teacher training model to a modern institutionalized one. Teacher training institutions as separate units will remain for a longer period of time, and the labor and competition involved in teacher education will be intensified. Located in Southwest China, Yunnan is a multinational province with an extremely uneven development, a scattered population, a backward social economy and a poor primary education. Against such a general background, the tertiary teacher education of this province suffers from a number of drawbacks. These drawbacks are mainly represented as a series of contradictions between, namely, the increasing competition in tertiary education and the competitive power exhibited by the tertiary teacher education of the whole province, the changes of people's values which occur at the time of a social change and the development of a highly qualified group of teachers, the social demand for highly competent talents and the backward traditional teacher training pattern, as well as the traditional tertiary teacher education management pattern and requirements made by the modern teacher education.Confronted with the new contradictions and new problems which have arisen out of the new situation and the new tasks, how and to what extent shall we reform the system, structure, content and method of the whole tertiary teacher education of Yunnan? And how shall we optimize the resources involved? To achieve these, explorations have to be made from a prospective and developmental strategic perspective. To cope with the educational requirements made by "developing Yunnan by science and technology and strengthening this province by talents", the tertiary teacher education of the whole province has to implement the ideas of the "three represents" and the "three orients", serving its primary education, developing its teacher resources, quality education and creativity education. Meanwhile, six major principles have to be followed, including the appropriate advance development...