Page 139 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

126 STEPHANIE HEMELRYK DONALD
with her research adviser, Fan Wenfang of Tsinghua University, who has developed and
implemented China-wide teaching strategies for learning the English language. It is clear
in both these fields that the teachers themselves devise responses to curriculum objectives
in their own practice and in their own skills base, so as to meet the challenges of literacy
in an uneven educational environment, and the position of children in national
development.
Women in education have also been documented, but generally from the perspective
of access and achievement or expectations (Rosen 1992, 1995). My focus on women
arises from conversations with teachers in mainly urban schools, most of whom tend to be
women, and who seem to fall into two groups: those who feel pressured by the
technological aspects of reform in the classroom, and those who are highly competent
innovators in multi-modal teaching methods.
In this chapter then, modernisation is understood through its mobilisation in classroom
technology, the professionalisation (or re-professionalisation) of the teaching community,
the interdependence of the nine-year plan with the development of China’s socialist
market, and the impact of English as a medium of communication in some schools. I
approach the conceptualisation of teachers as subjective factors in the modernisation
process from three perspectives: the status of the teacher in China since 1949, the
emergence of the professional teacher in the reform period, and the technologisation of
the workplace in the late 1990s and 2000s.
I am suggesting, perhaps optimistically, that the impact of technology on the Chinese
classroom may prove to be a step forward for female status in the PRC, which is in other
areas under attack from the inherent gender bias of capital in a developing economy.
However, I also accept that there is a measure of in-built ‘female’ failure for older
teachers as they struggle to come to terms with new standards of training and
expectations of new competencies. In-built, that is, in the sense that women’s work in the
classroom is not necessarily measured by the skills which they habitually deploy in the
management and care of the young. I also note that there are significant discrepancies in
opportunity for teachers based in rural and remote locations in respect to those based in
expanding metropolitan centres such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Visual communications and the multi-modal teacher
In the emergence of the professional, technologically literate Chinese teacher, the notions
of ‘visual communication’ and ‘multi-modal literacy’ are of foremost importance and will
be briefly elaborated here (for general studies, see Anstey and Bull 2000; Garton 1997;
Durrant and Green 2000). Visual communications is a broad concept, encompassing all
media communications with a visual component, and has been usefully identified by the
journal of the same name as ‘the use of visual languages and technologies in…multi-
1
modal genres, texts and communicative events’. Communicative events range from the
personal text message embroidered with smiles and scare quotes, to the announcement of
policy changes in The Peoples Daily. They are less often associated with the practice of
education as embodied in teacher-student communications, but it is this everyday practice
that I wish to identify as a chain of communicative events, fundamental to the formation