Page 138 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

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Women and technology in the teaching
profession
Multi-literacy and curriculum impact

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald*

Education (jiaoyu) is the basis of the socialist modernization drive, and the
State (guojia) ensures priority to the development of educational
undertakings. The entire society should show concern for and give support
to the development of educational undertakings. The entire society should
respect teachers (jiaoshi).
(Education Law of the People’s Republic of China (article 4) 1995)

This chapter discusses the experience of modernisation for China’s population of primary,
secondary and tertiary teachers. In particular, the suggestion is made that the teaching
profession, although statistically gender-neutral, has a somewhat higher proportion of
women teachers at primary levels, and that this has served to feminise the state’s policy to
promote nine years of compulsory education. I further argue that this may be to good
effect, as modernisation and education are understood in China to be utterly
commensurate and co-dependent projects. If education reform is an indication of
modernisation in China, then women are at the forefront of those efforts as they play out
in the primary schools, where the largest proportion of children are enrolled nationwide.
Education reform is itself symptomatic of the need to move away from the chaotic
radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Pepper 1996:381), and to modernise
China’s economy. Modernisation is of course thematic in a book dealing with the labour of
women in transitional times. I will assume therefore that the state’s commitment to a
modernised economy, as well as the uneven and fragmented social processes that follow
that commitment, is a contextual given in the discussion that follows. The educational
responses to economic change have been discussed in important studies and scholarly
collections (Hayhoe 1992a, 1992b; Pepper 1996; Rosen 1992), and continue to be
debated in the light of curriculum development and the intensification of the modernising
process.
The focus on women teachers as opposed to women as students arises from the
author’s work with children and media technologies (Donald and Richardson 2002), and

* This research was greatly assisted by the wisdom of Fan Wenfang, and the research assistance of Wang
Qian and Zou Luwei, all of Tsinghua University.