Reconceptualising equity: Pedagogy for Chinese students in Australian schools

Education Queensland’s New Basics project has extended conceptions of ‘equity’ to incorporate dimensions such as higher order thinking and student control of classroom activity. This requires a critique of the outcomes attained by even high achieving students. It is therefore useful to interrogate professional discourses that shape pedagogies for particular groups of students. In this paper, discourses on ‘the Chinese learner’ are reviewed. The review raises new issues of equity because Chinese students are often high achievers in Australian schools, but are frequently criticised for learning in ways that seem to fit uneasily with the types of pedagogy now valorised in Queensland. The paper concludes with a note of caution about the definition of high quality academic outcomes in the new policy, and the effects of a gap between understandings of equity and professional discourses and practice.

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