ICI International Conference║Prof. Cui Yunhuo: The New Normal of School Education in the Post-pandemic era

Prof. Cui Yunhuo

The Institute of Curriculum and Instruction, East China Normal University

Title: The New Normal of School Education in the Post-pandemic era

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We publish this report with the permission of Prof. Cui Yunhuo for the use of scholarly communications only.

 Good afternoon everyone, the conference today embodies what we call innovation, new modality, and also risk. The glitch happened this morning indicated that new modalities are not always “sail with the wind”, they are  also risky.

 I would like to take this opportunity to talk about this issue. Considering the theme of this session, I think about three aspects of this issue:

 First, how can we judge the new modality of schools, what are the bases of our judgements?

 Second, what we have changed during the pandemic?

 Third, new modalities are inevitable, as curriculum researchers, what can we do?

01. The hard core of school education

School is a place for students to learn. The learning in school is quite different from that in family and in society.

 There are three elements of school learning: first, learning with other students; second, students need professional support from teachers; third, there are curriculum designed for students. The hard core of school education is the three elements: teachers, curriculum and students, and these three elements need to interact continuously.

02. What has school education changed in the post-pandemic era?

What on earth has our school changed? The question is difficult to answer, because the it is too short for us to see the difference clearly. However, we can still feel the changes. For example, are students more willing to go to school, or are they more reluctant to go to school? Do teachers prefer to teach at home or have a face-to-face class at school? What has changed from the perspective of curriculum?

A teacher said: “Generally speaking, school education has not changed that much, it seems that it is the same as it was a year ago, apart from remembering to wear a mask every day.”

Many teachers in China seem to have gone back to a year ago, feeling that everything is the same. School education has changed, but has not changed that much.

03. The mission of curriculum under new modality

First, even if schools have not changed much, one of the legacies that the pandemic left to us is “uncertainty”, which is significant. We need to consider how to train students to face with uncertainties in the future, so that they can not only achieve themselves, but also contribute to our society.

Second, the new modality does not necessarily require all students to take online curriculum. After 20 years of experiments, it has been proved that it is unreliable to conduct online learning solely.

Third, the new technology has great advantages. Based on new technology, we need to further explore how to integrate individual learning data to build an upgraded version of evidence-based teaching in accordance with their aptitude.