This paper concerns reform to Shanghai’s Gaokao, a university entrance qualification, and its effects on curriculum making by teachers. In 2014, the Shanghai government launched a reform to allow students to complete the geography examination one year earlier than other academic subjects. For those who took geography as a subject for their university qualification examinations, the test took place at the end of Year 11 from May 2016. The sudden reform changed geography’s status from a marginal subject with around 4,800 examinees to a subject with over 34,000 examinees. The numbers of examinees kept rising. Over 52,000 examinees took the geography exam in May 2022. The dramatic rise in students opting for the subject also brought an increased demand for geography teachers. 

This study, therefore, asks: How does qualifications change influence teachers’ curriculum making conceptions in Shanghai? This study investigates Shanghai geography teachers in two cohorts: teachers who entered before the 2014 reform, known as the Pre-Reform cohort; teachers who entered after the reform as the Post-Reform cohort. This study uses an existing framework of geography curriculum making (Lambert and Morgan, 2010; Lambert, Solem and Tani, 2015) but applies it to the Chinese context. This framework started off as a product of Action Plan for Geography in England, and travelled to American and European countries through international GeoCapabilities Project partners. It depicts teacher choices, student experiences and school geography as a Venn diagram, and locates them in the context of the discipline of geography, then stressing that discipline-oriented teaching is situated within the context of broad educational aims. 

For this study, Lambert’s framework provides five elements for teachers to play with when drawing out their conceptions of curriculum making: teachers, students, school geography, academic geography and education. Instead of presenting the Lambert model to participant teachers, this study offers teachers the five elements and invite them to use their own words to describe the relationship. This diagram-making process was at the end of two one-to-one interviews with each participant. In previous semi-structured interviews, teachers had talked about their work as a teacher, including their work besides teaching geography, their students, their experience of teaching the subject and studying the discipline at universities. These interview topics laid a foundation to prepare teachers to comfortably talk about their conceptions of the role that they and their students play in relation to school geography, academic geography and education. This data collection process was conducted online via Teams. I first presented the same slide which had the five elements in same size. Teachers then instructed me to draw out their conceptions by asking me to move around these elements or change their shapes, and sometimes add arrows. This process also brought up deep conversations about why they prefer to organise the elements in particular ways, and how they justify their arrangement of locating and connecting the five elements.

The result reveals a homogeneity within the Post-Reform cohort, contrasting with the heterogeneity inside the Pre-Reform cohort. For example, the post-Reformers tend to view them and students as being connected by the curriculum. Only one of the pre-Reform teachers holds this view, the others either view the student-teacher relationship as direct interactions or triadic interactions between teachers, students and the curriculum. The heterogeneity between the two cohorts helps to explain teachers’ different curriculum-making conceptions. The diagram-making process serves as a dialogical tool for teachers and teacher educators to visually imagine and interpret their understanding of teacher roles. The finding stresses the cross-cultural communicative potential for the existing geography curriculum making framework and its limitations. While Lambert’s framework shows a researcher’s optimal vision of teacher choices in curriculum making, teachers draw diagrams to reflect their choices at work. Their different starting points as well as the difference between English and Shanghai context brought diversity to interpret teachers’ curriculum making process. This research finds that a static diagram may not fully reflect teachers’ growth in different stages of their careers, nor showing the influence of their accessible resources. To conclude, the Lambert framework provides a lens to analyse teachers’ diagrams, identifying aligned patterns and differences. It is inappropriate to import the Lambert framework to Shanghai directly. Teachers’ diagrams clearly show that their cultures and the social structures create particular conditions which necessitates a modification of the Shanghai model. Nevertheless, using the Lambert framework helps to communicate geography curriculum making in same terms across cultural contexts. It visualises the shrink of diversity when the exam orientation overrides the subject by showing two cohorts’ different interpretations on how the five elements are connected. Overall, the qualifications change has hindered Shanghai geography teachers’ imaginations of their role as curriculum makers.

Lambert, D. and Morgan, J. (2010) Teaching Geography 11-18 – A Conceptual Approach. MaidenHead: Open University Press. Lambert, D., Solem, M. and Tani, S. (2015) ‘Achieving Human Potential Through Geography Education: A Capabilities Approach to Curriculum Making in Schools’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, pp. 1–13. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2015.1022128.