Recently, the Ministry of Education (MOE) announced the list of winners of the 8th Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scientific Research in Higher Education (Humanities and Social Sciences), with a total of 1,539 awards (including the awards for achievements of universities in Hong Kong and Macau). Six professors from the Department of Education and the Institute of Schooling Reform and Development won the 8th Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scientific Research in Higher Education.
Congratulations to Lan Ye, Shuguang Huang, Zhengtao Li, Zhengguo Yuan, Guorui Fan and Liang Cheng for their awards!
01
Awards for Publications and Papers
First Prize: Reoccurence and Breakthrough: An Outline of “Life·Practice” Educology
Author: Lan Ye
Tenured professor and doctoral supervisor at East China Normal University, leader of the research on New Basic Education and the Life·Practice Educology
Is pedagogy a discipline? This “Herbart dilemma” is the most important question that all education scholars expect to get a positive answer to, and it is also a question of concern to education practitioners, especially primary and secondary school teachers since it is about their social status, threshold of entry into the profession and the treatment. Based on 20 years of research on New Basic Education and more than 30 years of research on basic theories and methodologies in pedagogy, Lan Ye, the tenured professor at East China Normal University, published her monograph Reoccurence and Breakthrough: An Outline of “Life·Practice”Educology, which consists of five chapters, including Introduction ,the First Half and the Second Half, focusing on answering two basic questions about pedagogy as an independent discipline: "What is pedagogy" at the level of meta-research and "What is pedagogy" at the level of basic theory. In this sense, this book is not only the academic masterpiece of Professor Lan Ye, but also a non-exclusive representative work that faces the world and gives voice to contemporary Chinese pedagogy.
Second Prize: Change and Transformation: The Modern Fate of Traditional Chinese Cultivation
Author: Shuguang Huang
Professor, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Schooling Reform and Development
This book adopts a multidisciplinary comparative research perspective, advocates historical materialism and dialectical materialism as the guiding ideology of methodology, and focuses on absorbing relevant research results from history, education, sociology, folklore, communication, culture, philosophy, religion and other disciplines to conduct a comprehensive and multidimensional theoretical examination of the modern fate of traditional Chinese cultivation. The book insists on drawing conclusions from history while combining conclusions and history together and analyzes traditional cultivation in the context of modern China's social and economic changes and the integration of Chinese and foreign cultures to provide a profound reflection on the direction of changes, developmental characteristics, transformation dynamics, and lessons learned of the traditional cultivation in the modern era, and to provide the necessary historical reference for the moral education of citizens and the cultural strategy of "governing the country with morality" in contemporary China.
Second Prize: The Video-image Turn in Current Education Research: Production of Educational Theory in the Video-image Age
Author: Zhengtao Li
Professor, Director of the National Institute of Schooling Reform and Development, ECNU, Director of Institute of Life·Practice Educology
Video and image are now used in education in three different perspectives and approaches: as a medium of instruction, a tool of exploring classroom interaction and a way of promoting teacher professional development. Traditionally, video and image were understood in terms of medium, tool, application, method or means, which underestimated the unique value of video and image in theory production including educational theory production. That is to say, they can create a new source of knowledge, new research perspectives and paradigms, and a new world of theory. The video-image turn in current education research means a shift from instrumental orientation to theoretical orientation. In addition, the ways of understanding pedagogy, research methods and creation will change from analysis through video and image to analysis of video and image. Pedagogical ways of presentation，as well as rhetoric and writing styles will turn to the integration of text, language, video and image．
Second Prize: Empirical Research: Towards Scientific Pedagogy
Author: Zhenguo Yuan
Tenured professor, Dean of Faculty of Education of East China Normal University
This paper, based on a systematic analysis of the history of empirical research, its meaning and constructs, discusses the leading role empirical research plays in the process of pedagogy towards scientific pedagogy. Meanwhile, for the first time, the paper points out that empirical research is above all a spirit, and that it’s a research rule, a system of methods, and an integration of the three. Then the paper analyzes the universal applicability of empirical research in both natural sciences and social sciences like education science, while stressing the importance of quantitative research in empirical research, and clarifying some misunderstanding of empirical research in educational research field. In discussing the paradigm of educational research, this paper explores the future development of pedagogy. It is mainly written for the researchers, but it has challenged the educational research policy, the evaluation of educational achievement standards, and the quality of educational journals and educational researchers.
02
Advisory Service Report Award
Second Prize: Policy Suggestions for Strengthening and Promoting the Construction of High-level Scientific and Technological Innovation Talents in China
Author: Guorui Fan
Professor, Researcher of the National Institute of Schooling Reform and Development, Director of Institute of Educational Governance.
03
Youth Achievement Award
The Moral Foundation of Education - An Introduction to Educational Ethics
Author: Liang Cheng
Professor, Deputy Chairman of Department of Education, ECNU, Researcher of the National Institute of Schooling Reform and Development
As an introductory work, this book identifies in detail the origins of the concept of educational ethics and its various streams, and defines the moral basis and theoretical scope of educational ethics in a detailed manner, and combines typical cases to explain and analyze the position and relationship between educational ethics and the concepts in educational philosophy, which are closely related to educational ethics, of freedom, equality, justice and democracy. This book can provide a basic framework and path for primary and secondary school teachers and administrators as well as professional researchers to consider educational issues from an ethical perspective.
