The tour guide pulled up in a Jeep Cherokee clad with purple and gold tiger plates. But, the tour wasn’t on the LSU campus, it was in Xian. Through a rich history of academic ties, College of Education Dean M. Jayne Fleener led a group of four faculty members and five graduate students on a whirlwind three-week tour of Chinese universities and public schools throughout five different provinces. The faculty and students made 20 presentations in a variety of different venues.

According to some estimates, China is home to about 20 percent of the world’s population and one of the top five producing nations in the world economy. While China’s population and GDP set the stage for the country’s ascent into global power, the Chinese government’s focus on education as an economic stimulus generates equal excitement about this country’s decision to revolutionize its curriculum.

The Chinese government invited LSU to lead workshops and host talks on educational reform and reinventing curriculum, a topic on which several College of Education faculty have published books that are being translated into Chinese.

Instead of focusing on a traditional curriculum, the Chinese are reinventing their public education system and moving toward a post-modern, philosophical approach to education. The easiest way to distinguish a traditional curriculum from a post-modern curriculum deals with the rigidness of the lessons and the relationship of learning. A traditional approach to curriculum maintains the role of teacher, student, and lesson separated via discipline. On the other hand, the post-modern curriculum is a more dynamic version of learning in which the role of teacher and student is intertwined and inverted, lessons blurred across disciplines, and curriculum and culture intermingled.

“A Post-Modern Curriculum provides dynamic opportunities to go deeper, to explore in depth, to revisit from different perspectives, to be more divergent than convergent,” explained Fleener.

Since John Dewey visited the Chinese mainland in 1920, the Chinese have taken an innovative approach to education. They are studying methods that will not only keep their test scores competitive but also will nurture creativity in students.

Some of the classes the LSU group toured were already initiating post-modern curricular concepts. For example, an art class used origami constructions not only as an opportunity to teach a traditional Chinese art-form but also to teach geometry. Another class used origami structures to create model cars propelled by balloons and held a race to see who could go the fastest. In essence, they used physics to calculate speed in a culture and arts class.

“It’s an interesting academic exchange,” noted Fleener, “They are looking to us for ways to stimulate creativity while we’re looking at them for improving our testing performance and traditional academic achievement.”

The LSU group was amazed at some of the accommodations they encountered while researching assessment activities in the universities and schools. For instance, one elementary school had about 6,000 students enrolled, placing the class distribution to about 1,000 students per grade. For a physical education component, they had all 1,000 fifth-graders outside doing coordinated calisthenic activities. Academic classes typically had 50 to 75 students, some often sharing desks or benches. One high school English classroom accommodated 65 students in one room, sitting three to a small bench. Despite the difficult class size, the lesson was full of interaction and creative activities.

Just as China is undergoing major change in its educational system, so is the United States. The accountability movement has changed American education.

“What happens in high poverty areas, is that the curriculum often becomes lock-stepped. It loses room for chance and creativity,” noted Fleener.

In focusing on accountability and transparency, some argue the U.S. has lost appreciation for having multiple routes to the same ends. Just as no two students are the same, no two classes are ever identical, even when taught by the same teacher. Fleener added, “Just as there are many routes to a mountain top, and choices of routes often depend on the skill of the climber or weather conditions, we need to recognize that there are many ways to nurture academic excellence and obtain educational goals.”

While a large section of the trip was devoted to assessment initiatives, the dean cautioned this cannot be the sole value in assessing achievement here in the United States. “We must see schooling as a place driven by relationships and meaning rather than test scores and standards. While we may agree on the end goals of high achievement and increasing graduation rates among all our student sub-populations, we can never, with children, adopt the attitude that the ends justify the means. If we do not ignite a passion to learn or nurture the creativity of our students, high test scores will not mean anything to the future of this country.”

The dean added that the people of China recognize, in a very real way, the impact education has on their economy and on their culture. They have committed a huge amount of resources from the highest levels of government to change what is not working and to explore in depth what is working.

“While we say we respect education in the United States, it is a different realization of what that actually means,” said Fleener.

When innovation challenges tradition, tension arises. Fleener added, “We are at a time in history, to borrow a term from Thomas Friedman, when the world is becoming surprisingly flat—interconnected, and, not surprisingly, interdependent.”

Through a Post-Modern Curriculum, LSU educational theorists are challenging the distinctive roles of teacher versus student, child versus the curriculum, and the nature of the individual versus the culture of the society.

Blurring these borders becomes essential not only to addressing future educational challenges but in connecting to Friedman’s flat world, pregnant with the possibility of prosperity and hope.