To date, research on elite interviews has primarily focused on political or business settings in European and Anglo-American contexts. In this study, we examine the procedures involved in conducting elite interviews in academic settings, drawing on fieldwork with 53 senior scholars at 10 universities across five regions of northern China. We…

This article reports on an international mixed-method study on student leadership that sought to maximize opportunities for students to be engaged as researchers. Applying the conceptual lens of student voice, we reflect on students' contributions to each stage of the research. This included efforts to integrate the components of Mitra's 'pyramid…

Religion is becoming increasingly popular among students in post-Mao China, especially in the higher education arena. This growing interest in religion poses a potential challenge to the compulsory Marxist ideology taught in the school curriculum. Focusing on a group of university student believers from different religious traditions, this study…

This study explores the challenges faced by young lecturers in managerial transformation in elite Chinese academic institutions which aim to develop into world-class universities. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews, the paper discusses how a group of lecturers on tenure-track contracts at a research university in China perceived the impacts…

This article describes the origin and curriculum of Identity Dialogues, a program which facilitates conversations about power and privilege among international and domestic students. It was developed as a result of findings from an ethnographic study of an unstructured conversation partner program at the same institution. The study found that…

Many scholarly works have examined school leadership, and many others have studied models for teaching citizenship education. Research combining both school leadership and citizenship education, however, is rare. The leadership of China's school party secretaries (SPSs), who are the equivalent of school principals in the Chinese school system and…

The present case study aims to revisit the role of Chinese traditional cultural issues in group peer feedback by examining how Chinese EFL students respond to several typical Chinese cultural issues that have emerged from the literature--"collectivism and group harmony," "face-saving," and "power distance" and what…

In a globalized world, universities face challenges adapting to changing environmental pressures and expectations of legitimacy. Studies on the topic have tended to focus on universities in North America and Europe, while Chinese universities have received less attention, perhaps due to their status as latecomers to global higher education. Based…

Since 2010, the number of urban Chinese high-school students applying to US universities has rapidly grown. Many of these students have chosen emerging international curriculum programs established by elite public high schools in China. These programs prepare wealthy Chinese students for the US college application process by exposing them to an…

The scale of English language education in China is astounding, but recent research has shown that the latest national English education policy for Chinese schools has not been implemented successfully due to various reasons. One reason given for the lack of success is the impracticability of the top-down policy itself excluding teachers'…

This study explores how two language teachers constructed and reconstructed their professional identities through their action research (AR) facilitated by university researchers in China. Informed by the theory of 'community of practice', the findings of the study show that AR exerted a transformative impact on the teachers' identity development.…

Background/Context: There is a pressing need to consider how citizens should live together, especially in societies that are increasingly ethnically and politically diverse. Even though multicultural education is constructed very differently and serves very different purposes in different national contexts, relatively little attention has been…

As in other parts of the world, private tutoring has expanded significantly in Mainland China during the past decade. This has been driven by factors including dramatic economic growth, high-stakes examinations, and the traditions of a Confucian culture at the macro-level, and school leadership and family incomes, at the micro-level. This paper…

This study reports on a longitudinal inquiry into professional identity construction among six novice cross-border English language teachers from mainland China, who completed their pre-service teacher education in Hong Kong (HK) and began their teaching practice in local HK schools. The findings indicate that the participants navigated obstacles…

This article explores how Sino-African relations are affected by the growing number of Africans who pursue higher education in China. China actively recruits African university students in order to increase soft power and generate income from the export of education services. Semi-structured interviews with African university students suggest that…