Chinese Early Years Education

Since the launch of the “14th Five-Year Special Education Development and Promotion Plan” (2021–2025) and accompanying guidelines on early year inclusion, China has intensified efforts to support children with diverse needs in mainstream settings. Existing research often depicts Chinese inclusion as driven by medical assessments that frame children’s needs as individual deficits. However, such characterisations risk reinforcing a binary between “medical” and “rights-based” approaches and obscure the ongoing value debates within China, as well as the ways early years teachers interpret inclusion in their own pedagogical and institutional contexts. Despite increasing policy attention, little empirical work examines how early years teachers understand and enact inclusion or how this shapes their professional identities.

Drawing on narrative inquiry with four teachers in a kindergarten in Zhejiang, this study analyses interviews, observations and informal interactions to explore how teachers position themselves and navigate children’s differences in everyday practice. Findings show that teachers negotiate parental expectations, managerial demands and local policy interpretations, using play-based pedagogies to support participation. Inclusive practice emerges as a “third space” where teachers interpret policy, reconcile competing values and develop new forms of agency. Inclusion is thus understood as a contextually grounded process of meaning-making and professional development.

Jianing Zhou is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education, supervised by Professor Joseph Mintz and Dr Jie Gao. Her doctoral research examines early years educators’ professional identities within the context of inclusive education in China, England and Scotland. Her broader research interests include inclusive and autism education, teacher professionalism, comparative education, and narrative inquiry.

MCI’s PGR workshops are lunchtime seminars held in person at the Manchester China Institute. They seek to bring together students, faculty and staff who can best provide feedback as postgraduate researchers develop their ideas. Free lunch will be provided.

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