Preparing for the 4th Industrial Revolution: Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning for Education 4.0

Literature Review

China has the largest education system in the world. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China (2014), there are almost 260 million students and over 15 million teachers in about 514,000 schools in China. China’s education system is state-run, but in the past decade it has been increasingly decentralized (OECD, 2016).

Deng (2011) explains that China is a unique, sophisticated case for studying complex issues concerning the transformation of pedagogy especially in relation with Western educational thinking and indigenous cultural heritage (p. 562). This forms the premise of investigating the shift in pedagogy in China. On further reading this journal, it is clear that modernisation and globalisation are pushing countries like China to adapt an approach towards education that will meet the future needs. Hence, the popularity of International Schools is China is rising every day. Although there is a push to modernise the Chinese education system, it has uniquely maintained its bond with the age-old philosophy of Confucianism while opening doors to Western pedagogy (Deng, 2011). Hence there is a massive upsurge in the number of International Baccalaureate (IB) schools. The IB framework has introduced different ways of teaching and learning approaches which are gaining popularity in international and bilingual schools in China.