How A Rural Teacher Responds To Education Reform:A Case Study

In the past 40 years since Reform and Opening-up,China's education has made remarkable achievements,but the development and reform of rural education has been relatively lagging behind.In the reform era of education,rural teachers are the main force to support and construct rural education.How rural teachers view and respond to the education reform not only affects the effectiveness of the reform,but also affects their own lives and professional development.This study takes a rural teacher as a case,focusing on the interaction process between a rural teacher and a series of education reforms he has experienced.The core question that the study tries to answer is: how did rural teachers respond to the education reform they have experienced? Specifically,this core question includes two sub-questions.First,what kind of education reform has a greater impact on rural teachers? Second,what strategies have rural teachers,as actors,adopted to deal with the education reforms they have undergone?This study selects a rural teacher as the research object who has been teaching for more than 30 years.With the application of case study,educational narrative research and personal life history research methods,collecting data with in-depth interviews,personal autobiography,literature and physical collection,this study attempts to do a “deep description” about the interaction process between the rural teacher and education reform,mine the impact of education reform on him,and his response to education reform.The main findings are as follows.First,there are two characteristics of the education reform which has a great influence on rural teachers:the rigid external constraints and being closely related to their vital interests.Second,when the administrative power is strong and the reform is practical,the rural teachers respond to the education reform by the strategy of faithfully implementing,such as the reform of teacher recruitment.Third,when the administrative power is strong and the reform is not practical,the rural teachers tend to respond to the education reform by adopting the strategy of forced compliance,such as local quality education reform.Forth,when the administrative power is small and the reform is not practical,the rural teachers tend to respond to the education reform superficially,such as local new curriculum reform.The conclusions are as follows.First,not all education reforms can be properly implemented for rural teachers,and the reforms divorced from reality are often resisted by rural teachers in various forms.Second,the reason why rural teachers boycott education reforms is that the reforms lack consideration of the vital interests of rural teachers,and the reforms are divorced from reality with few suitable condition for implementation.Third,effective rural education reform requires the support of administrative forces,meeting the practical reality of rural education,the reform measures to be scientific and effective,concerning the vital interests of rural teachers,etc.