Conflicts And Ideas Generating In School Change

In the current education reform, one of the core issues is the transformation and formation between the theory (philosophy) and practice (behavior). From the perspective of teachers, this is a process of the ideas-generating, namely the process of the new ideas acquisition and the new behavior formation. There are great practical and academic values to explore the conflicts and the plights,to find the process mechanisms and conversing mechanisms in the process of the idea generating. In order to respond to the above problems, this paper conducted a fieldwork on a primary school which participated in the U-S Cooperation Reform Research ("New Basic Education") from the perspective of education anthropological.The community that School is located in and the histories of school itself are the starting point of this research. Related narrations clearly showed the profound influence which caused by the community history, demographic and other factors on the school. The geographic location of the school also paves the way for the subsequent school change and even its development."A day at school" presented the disciplines and travails of the teachers’and students’everyday life and highlighted the state of teachers’ and students’ daily life.How the change happened is one of the papers’ focuses. The narrations of change process focused on the previous and present situations of the cooperative school in the research. The cooperative school in the "new basic education" has experienced four stages:the "originating and buding" stage, the "hovering and following "stage, the "attempting and exploring" stage and the "promoting and burgeoning" stage. The narration of four stages presented the participation motivations of different subjects in the school reformation, the influence of macro environment, the subjects’ efforts and attempts and the hardships and difficulties experienced by the school.Conflicts in the school change are another focus of this study. In a sense, school change is the continuous process of conflicts-arousing and solving. Teachers confronted different conflicts in the school change, which can be roughly divided into three categories. The first type is "idea-cognition" conflict; the second type is "practice-transforming" conflict; the third type of conflict is "the former-me and the present-me" conflict. There are underlying reasons for the conflicts in the school reform. One of the reasons is different social structures or social fields that agents belonged to. Another underlying reason lies in the uncertainty.Facing with conflict and uncertainty, reform agents usually took three types of responsive initiatives. The first initiative is the resistance, which include "quiting directky" and "going through the motions". The second action is integration. It included the integration of day-to-day affairs and the integration of values. In addition to these two major initiatives, there was another kind of initiatives, which was debugging. It contains cognitive, mentality, behavior and decision-making debugging, etc. No matter "Resistance","Integration" or "Debugging", all of them were the agents’responsive actions when they were in the uncertain conditions. The underlying logic of agents was looking for certainty in uncertainty or adapting to the uncertainty, this was fit for the agents’ logic.There are three components of teachers’idea formation. The first component is the "collision". Its role is to make the agents aware of the differences of the different values and behaviors. The second component is "heart-touching", which includes "affective touching " and "effective touching", and affects teachers’ recognition and commitment to change project. In addition to the "collision" and "heart-touching","comprehension" is extremely critical."Collision","heart-touching" and "comprehension" are not a lineal progressive relationship; they are not synchronized, nor gradually advancing. There is no necessary connection among them.Teachers’ideas generating is the key question of this paper. The generating process is complicated, which have two major mechanisms:one is interaction mechanism, and another is trial-and-error updating mechanism. The ideas generating of teachers depends on the interaction between teachers themselves and experts (includes colleagues). Ideas generating is a process, rather than a one-time results; it is a continuous process of interaction between agents (teachers) and the environment, and a dual construction process of ideas and practice. The mechanism of trial-and-error means that ideas-generating is formed in the continuing interactive practice process with teachers’ and experts’ correcting, debugging, updating their understanding of ideas. The process of ideas generating is a cumulative and progressive process, it can not accomplish at one stroke. Ideas generating is not infallible, it involves a lot of factors, which include individual quality and action devotion, interaction style and positive practice experience.