Local Consciousness Changes And Vernacular Writing

Studying the history of local teaching material is a research into educational phenomena in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Over the past hundred years, the development of China’s local teaching material has contributed to an education that promotes love for one’s hometown and nation and fosters people, who incorporate physical, mental and moral strength. Since the establishment of a modern concept of global-national-local, China’s education has been faced with the question of how to redefine the two words---national and local. The answer will exert a great influence on Chinese people’s identification with the nation and their hometown, and different answers may lead China to totally different directions. As an essential carrier of local knowledge, local teaching material emerges and evolves with an inherent regularity and rationality, which can serve as a great enlightenment for today’s educational enterprise.Nowadays, the nation assumes primary responsibility for the writing of textbooks in China. Therefore, local teaching material, a form of textbook itself, has become the key to the development of a diverse society; for it progresses as a cultural practice in nature, presents the lifestyles and self-expressive modes of different ethnic groups and has a complicated relationship with the symbolic power in society that must have taken shape in certain historical and political context. My research is intended to reorient the study of local teaching material to a new direction, one that treats it as a tool of recording culture created by the real society but not a symbol or code only, and focuses on its interaction with the awareness of people and the wider society but not its content only.According to some key concepts in Bourdieu’s theory of practice, local teaching material should owe its development to an active and situational interaction between structured cultural resources and authoritative book writers. In this way, a common, even a worm-eaten book is imprinted with the social structure of its time and was once a tool of promoting social and cultural reproduction.Based on documental and field research, my study is attempted to use the concept of local awareness as an explanatory tool to study the social change and educational development of borderland provinces in China in the20th century. By stmcturing local awareness of Heilongjiang people and analyzing the content of their local teaching material, my dissertation mainly concerns the following issues:1) explicating the emergence and evolvement of Heilongjiang’s local teaching material since the late Qing Dynasty with a special focus on certain historical periods;2) summarizing the ways the transformation of Heilongjiang people’s local awareness in different historical periods influenced the native and migrant ethnic minorities;3) examining in a tridimensional way the relationship between local awareness and local teaching material of ethnic minorities with lesser-sized population in the context of modernization;4) analyzing the interactions between local teaching material and local awareness, and the ties link the transformation of local awareness with cultural self-consciousness;5) discussing if local awareness can become a approach to explaining social change and local modernization process;6) orienting the development of local teaching material to the new era.The past hundred years has witnessed the transformation of local awareness of Heilongjiang people, featured by a combination of local and national identity, a love for their hometown and the Chinese nation, an integration of the awakened national spirit and the conventional culture and psychology, a balance among individual, local and national interests, and a consciousness of their own culture. The emergence of local annals and local teaching material, such as textbooks during the Anti-Japanese War, spelling books for farmers, and reading materials of ethnic cultures, should all give credit to this transformation; for without this trinity of individual-local-national, it would never be possible. In general, local awareness of Heilongjiang people is growing stronger as the evolving process well proceeds through local, national and patriotic education, and cultural self-consciousness of people.The difficulty faces the development of local teaching material is that the shift of local awareness is not well examined in modern education, which results in the misplacement of local teaching material in the field-habitus model. Only through reorientation of goals, restructuring of contents and expansion of curriculum development system can local teaching material has a better future.From the research conducted, the following conclusions are drawn:1) local awareness reflects the in-depth psychological structure of the local culture;2) social change and shift of local awareness cause most of the ups and downs in the development of local teaching material;3) local annals emerge to meet the nation’s political demands and reflects the nation’s awareness;4) modern local awareness is a combination of local, ethnic and national awareness;5) the development of local teaching material signifies the existence of cultural self-consciousness;6)local teaching material can be a crucial carrier of culture of ethnic minorities with smaller population;7) local teaching material gives local people a chance to express their unfulfilled demands;8) the sustainable development of local teaching material relies mainly on school education;9) there exist misunderstanding and exaggeration of the functions of local teaching material among current studies.Writing local teaching material is more of a means than a goal, since we write it with a noble intention to help people know more about and identify more with their hometown by spreading local knowledge and encourage them to dedicate themselves to the development of their hometown and the nation with uncompromising passion. We’ve seen some have already consciously tried to search for a place for local culture in the popular global-national configuration when writing local teaching material, which was exactly a positive response to the question mentioned earlier. It has helped some knowledge communities in modern times build their local identification and find their identification with the nation in the local one. Hard as it is, we can’t ignore the role the writing of local teaching material and education on the historical development of local awareness play in reconstructing Chinese people’s space-time concept and sense of responsibility in this new era.