This study examines how Shanghai’s curriculum policy has been influencing teachers’ understanding and enactment of curriculum from a critical perspective. It reflects how the powerful group benefits from current curriculum by influencing the educational culture. It also seeks to identify the Western educational ideas which challenge Chinese education and have a substantial influence on Shanghai's curriculum development. The study was conducted from a critical perspective based on João M. Paraskeva’s Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) and Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory when understanding culture.

ICT believes that education is never neutral but is instead shaped by forces. According to ICT, curriculum is not simply a set of instructional materials or lesson plans but is instead a complex social and cultural artifact that reflects and reinforces power dynamics in society. Apple (2000) and Giroux (1989) also viewed curriculum as developing and reviving forms of consciousness that allow for the maintenance of social power and social control without the need for dominant groups to use overt dominance methods. Therefore, educational research that is truly critical must consider how education interacts with economic, cultural, and political power (Apple, 2000). In this study, culture is the focus. Additionally, teachers, whether consciously or unconsciously, are aiding the dominant group in this domineering conduct (Giroux, 1989). This study tried to identify the level of dominance by analyzing teachers’ perceptions of curriculum.

Culture, according to Stenhouse (1971:55), is ‘‘a kind of mental common denominator, a shared store of complex understandings achieved between mind and mind. It comprises the ideas generally accepted within any group. Education is essentially a group process in schools or classes depending upon communication.’’ However, from a critical perspective, the question locates at ‘who shapes the culture or who’s in the leading position of shaping the culture?’ To answer this questions, Stuart Hall’s work must need to be mentioned. Culture, according to Hall (2007), is a site of interpretive conflict. It changes continuously throughout history as a result of the ongoing "play" of power. The prevailing cultural order is "produced" and "reproduced" by the powerful group for their own purposes. The dominating processing is aided by the media (Ibid, 2007) where curriculum policy is one of in dominating the educational culture. Hall’s (2007) Reception Theory claims that producers encode (create/insert) a range of signals into media texts, which consumers subsequently decode (understand). Simply enough, what we see is a "re-presentation" of what the producers want us to see. Audiences or readers interpret messages into one of three categories: Dominant Messages, Negotiated Messages, or Oppositional Messages, depending on whether they fully or partially agree with the producers. By identifying different categories of messages, this study shows how teachers have been struggling with the current educational culture.

Additionally, the risk of Eurocentric culture is another point raised by ICT. The dissemination of hegemonic forms of Western knowledge, according to Paraskeva (2016:241), "are precisely the institutionalisations of a linguistic or cultural epistemicide." Since 2004, Shanghai has been promoting the concept of "suyangjiaoyu" (TMES, 2004). This concept was heavily influenced by the OECD's and the USA's twenty-first-century competencies-skills frameworks. Shanghai’s curriculum has been enthusiastically embracing these Western epistemic presumptions as an "advanced and scientific" process that will enable Shanghai's curriculum to catch up with the West. But simultaneously, it turns China into "a silenced and different genealogy of thought" (Paraskeva, 2016:80). Shanghai’s curriculum must be decolonized in order to promote "cognitive justice" and "ecologies of knowledges" (Santos, 2016). In this study, teachers' responses reflected which parts of Shanghai’s curriculum have been deeply influenced by the West and which aspects, as they believe, should adhere to traditional Chinese educational ideas.

This study was conducted in a qualitative approach. To gather information, an online interview was used. Every teacher was given a personal invitation to Zoom so they could each discuss how they understood Shanghai’s curriculum and how it was implemented in schools and classes. The recruitment of teachers was done by using snowball sampling approach. Teachers were required for currently working in public primary schools of Shanghai. There were only full-time teachers chosen. Part-time teachers in Shanghai are not subject to any applicable teaching standards, which could cause the data to be skewed because part-timers in Shanghai may not be conversant with curriculum guidelines. While only audio recordings were downloaded and transcribed for analysis, the whole interview process was recorded. Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA), developed by Braun and Clarke (2013), was chosen for data analysis. The researcher worked on the participant's transcripts by familiarizing them, coding them, looking for themes, going through themes, and defining and renaming themes. Based on ICT and Reception Theory’s framework, participants' responses were divided into Dominant Messages, Negotiated Messages, and Oppositional Messages. Subthemes like the explanations and recommendations were also grouped under the "Messages" themes. These revealed the degree to which the powerful group had been influencing the curriculum and the educational culture. On the other hand, based on ICT, topics connected to Shanghai's curriculum being impacted by the West were also significant component. The researcher demonstrated various ways that Shanghai's curriculum had been "colonized" by Western educational ideas by analyzing and improving instructors' responses.

Findings show that although teachers expect Shanghai’s curriculum to be shifted from exam-oriented to ‘‘suyangjiaoyu’’, the educational culture is still dominated by positivism’s ideas. It links closely to the transmission of knowledge and skills that are valued by society in benefiting economy. The main role of the teacher is still to impart this knowledge and skills to the student through structured and standardized methods of instruction. Moreover, there’s a trend that parents and communities are getting more involved in supporting student’s academic progress, which as the researcher believes has strengthened positivism’s influence in Shanghai’s educational culture. This has even further benefited the powerful group in maintaining their power and social position. On the other hand, teachers understanding of ‘‘suyangjiaoyu’’ is replete with modern and Western educational ideas where it has been treated the same as skills/competency-based curriculum. However, the recommended Western teaching and learning strategies in classes such as play-based learning and interdisciplinary learning did not work successfully in Shanghai’s classes. This suggests further research in re-considering the meaning of ‘‘suyangjiaoyu’’ and looking for other teaching and learning strategies extracting from Chinese traditional schools in order to fit Shanghai’s situation.

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