On The Inter-cultural Reciprocal Learning Of Schools

Since the reform and opening up, and with the continuous expansion of the exchange in China’s economy, technology and culture area, the demand of inter-culture communication is growing. And the convenience of the ways of transportation and communication also provide a necessary condition for promoting the inter-culture exchanges. At present, there is a new tendency in intercultural communication in the field of education in China in which agents of educational practice conduct exchanges and learning directly. In the context of globalization, more and more schools begin to try cross-border exchange and seek to find a new opportunity for the development. In the field of education in our country, the universities and schools regard inter-culture communication as the main part. Compared with other types of schools or organizations, university possess more international cooperation and exchange of resources. This study is based on the research background of Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education between Canada and China which was settled up since 2013, selected Minzhu primary school in Shanghai and Senrui community school in Toronto as the sister schools to do a reciprocal learning research for seven years. From September 2013 to December 2015, the sister schools and the research group had gone through more than two years. In this process, what stage of the construction of sister schools has gone through? What is the driving force for the development of sister schools? What’s the obstructive factor of the further development of sister schools? This study is based on these three issues, combing the status quo basis to analyze the motivation and obstacle, in order to answer the question:what’s the reciprocity condition for the sister schools and teachers?The framework of this paper was based on the above four issues. Firstly, what stage had the sister schools experienced during the two-year. And analyzed the motivation of the teachers’ reciprocal learning by presenting the factual features. Then analyzed the reasons that affected the better development of the teachers’reciprocal learning. Finally, at the conclusion, we found the conditions to realize the teachers’reciprocal learning.Throughout the whole study, we used the participatory observational methods, interviews and document analysis methods. Especially in the participant observation, we used the narrative inquiry. During the reciprocal learning between Min Zhu primary school and Senrui community school, we went to the classroom without the prediction of research. With the recording of observation, we reverted the scene to a vivid story and analyzed the facts and data in order to understand the reason behind the teachers’behaviors.Besides the introduction part, the whole paper is composed of five parts. The first chapter introduces the background of the research, explaining the reason, the target, the research base and the subjects; the second chapter focuses on the two different stages of sister-school inter-cultural reciprocal learning during the two years; the third chapter analyzes the motivation for teachers to participate in the project; the fourth chapter analyzes the obstacles which have a negative influence on the teacher’s inter-cultural reciprocal learning; the fifth, also the last conclusion part brings back to our problem, that is what are the conditions to promote teacher’s inter-cultural reciprocal learning.Based on our research,we found that motivations for teacher to participate in the inter-cultural reciprocal learning comes from five elements:the collaboration desire based on mutual-trust;the order of principal;the education difference which brings the new experience;teacher’s professional development;student’s development. Meanwhile, we need to accept that some obstacle have influenced the project. There are mainly four reasons, for teacher, such as participation motivation and reciprocal expectation; for difference between China and Canada education system; for project itself, we lack supervision system; for research system, we need more tacit understanding. In order to achieve teacher’s goals in the inter-cultural reciprocal learning, some basic conditions need to be required. The basic one is that participators need to take full use of online tools. And for whom have already in the project, we have he following suggestions. For principals, they need to build a environment for teacher to practice their ideas; for research team, they need to assist teachers in variable ways; for teachers themselves, they need to improve their ability of inter-cultural understanding.try to find the new resources that come for the inter-cultural context. And also teacher need to connect their personal professional development with the inter-cultural reciprocal learning to transfer it into the resources of daily teaching practice.