Minority Education in China: Balancing Unity and Diversity in an Era of Critical Pluralism

Acknowledgements

This volume, like most edited volumes, was several years in the making and would not have been published without the generous support and forbearance of numerous individuals and organizations. The project had its origins in early 2010 with the idea of gathering several of Professor Gerard Postiglione’s former PhD students and colleagues together to review the state of ethnic minority education in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)sincethe1999publicationofhislandmarkeditedvolumeChina’sNational Minority Education: Culture, Schooling and Development. In December 2010, over two-dozen experts from mainland China, Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States gathered at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, to present their initial papers and discuss some of the crucial issues confronting minority education in China’s new millennium. In September 2011, a follow-up workshop was held at the University of Hong Kong, which allowed individual authors to further refine their contributions while continuing our discussions with a special emphasis on practical policy suggestions and outcomes. The editors would like to thank our contributors for their valuable contributions, ungrudging patience, and professional assistance in meeting numerous deadlines associated with this project. Together the twenty-one contributors to this volume bring a range of diverse and critical perspectives to the challenges associated with balancing unity and diversity in minority education in China while improving pedagogic outcomes. Several organizations provided necessary funding support for the two workshops and subsequent work on the manuscript. They include: the Australian Academy of Humanities (through its International Science Linkages— Acknowledgements xx Acknowledgements Humanities and Creative Arts Programme funding scheme); the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University; the Ford Foundation; the Wah Ching Centre of Research on Education in China at the University of Hong Kong; the Centre for Chinese Studies and the China Small Grants Scheme, La Trobe University. At various stages throughout the project, the following individuals also provided generous assistance or advice: Qin Can, Colin Mackerras, He Jin, Pei Likun, Jean Zhang, Julian Zhang, Tim Brown, Judith Brett, Marilyn Lake, Kaori Okano, Amanda Dunn, Chanel Zhang, Karen Chiu, and Hong Yanbi. The editors would like to thank Hong Kong University Press and its super-efficient and friendly staff for their assistance with the peer-review and production processes , especially Michael Duckworth, Clara Ho, Maria Yim, Christy Leung, and Jessica Wang, and we are also grateful to the press’ anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, which have helped to greatly strengthen this volume. We are also deeply appreciative to Professor James A. Banks, a pioneering light and now leading expert in the field of multicultural education in the United States and other Western countries, for agreeing to write the foreword for this volume. Finally, we would like to thank Gerard Postiglione for his unyielding support of, assistance with, and inspiration for this project; without his enthusiastic commitment over the last three years, this volume would have remained a mere thought. James Leibold, Beijing Chen Yangbin, Melbourne September 2013 ...