Policies, achievements and problems of full-time higher vocational education teacher development in China：1983-2013

Abstract

Through analysis of policies of China’s higher vocational education (HVE) from 1983 to 2013, we find that full-time teachers at vocational colleges have undergone four stages of development: conceptual exploration of full-time teacher development, forming of the notion “dually-qualified teachers”, clarification of the notion “dually-qualified teachers”, and - development of formal training systems and platforms for “dually qualified teachers”. This process has seen a rapid expansion in the number of full-time teachers in HVE institutions, as well as great improvement in the overall quality of these teachers. There are, however, several areas which require improvement. There still exists a lack of professional standards for these teachers’ performance, weakness of research ability of these teachers, and low efficiency of programs fostering “dually qualified teachers”. In the future more efforts should be made to accelerate composition of professional standards for full-time teachers in HVE institutions and to improve their practical skills and applied research abilities.