The “Rugg Textbook Controversy” refers to the debate on the textbooks designed by Harold Rugg in the social study curriculum reform from the 1920s to the 1940s. Rugg’s social study curriculum reform was one of the most important experiments in the Progressive Education Movement. The textbooks he designed, as an important element of the curriculum reform, went through five basic stages of development and orientation during the 20-year period: preparation and mass promotion during 1920s-1930s, early opposition at the end of 1930s, the rise of mass boycotts, mass withdrawal of textbooks in early 1940s, and the defense of Rugg’s textbooks. Through the development of the "Rugg Textbook Controversy," it can be found that the content defects of the textbooks, Rugg’s idealization of social reconstructionism, and the extreme nationalist sentiment in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s were the reasons for the failure of the " social studies" curriculum reform and the removal of the textbooks. The historical study of this controversy reveals that the lager textbook controversy is not only about the content of the text, but also signifies a more profound conflict in the political, economic, and cultural spheres, and the social study reform has become a battleground for conservatives and other power relations around official knowledge and ideology.
Disciplinary practice refers to personal practice which has disciplinary values and provides opportunities to learn by doing. Strengthening disciplinary practice in compulsory education conforms to the intrinsic relation between subject and practice, instructional goals and educational aims, students’ cognitive features and practical demands of social transformation. Strengthening disciplinary practice may encounter multiple path dependences, deep resource dependences, the resistance from test-oriented traditions, while the vagueness of disciplinary practice may add up the difficulties of implementation. Educational reformers should build a multi-dimensional advancing structure involving philosophical guidance,resource insurance, quality improvement and institutional forces. The demands for strengthening disciplinary practice should be analyzed in details,the resources required by it should be provided, the abilities and willingness of teachers should be enhanced and institutions in favor of disciplinary practice should be created.
Promoting the digital transformation of classroom teaching has become a new engine and inevitable choice for the high-quality development of basic education in the new era. To understand the essence of digital empowerment on classroom teaching, it is necessary to make clear that cultivating people with al-round development is the first priority, the data linkage of multi-scenario and full-process is the fundamental guarantee, and the coordination and adaptive optimization of all elements of the classroom system is the core key. From the current practice, the digital transformation of classroom teaching still faces the difficulties of inaccurate direction of digital empowerment, inadequate innovation of empowerment teaching, incomplete evaluation of empowerment teaching,unsystematic process of empowerment teaching, and inadequate learning of empowerment personality. Based on this, we should clarify the bottleneck of classroom teaching, explore the technical solution path; establish a team of teachers to continue to carry out model innovation research; perceive multimodal data to achieve the evaluation of all elements of teaching; clarify the research and development of integrated support system for teaching and learning needs; provide high-quality education services based on the personality of the learning road network; and form a new thinking and systematic method and put it into practice.
In the field of curriculum and teaching of basic education, the perspective of the learners has gradually emerged worldwide since the end of last century. Through studying on the comprehensive data and information of teachers and students and focusing on the process of classroom teaching, the core of learner’s perspective study theory is to understand the deconstruction and reconstruction of classroom meaning by students and teachers and to explore the relationship between teaching and learning. Picture books have become a kind of unique resources for school curriculum and teaching due to their combination of contents and forms and child-oriented values. When applying picture books,school teachers must insist in the perspective of learners, respecting students’ nature, stimulating students’ desire and curiosity, protecting and developing students’ imagination, so that students can grow and progress. From the perspective of learners, picture-book-based curriculum and teaching present the characteristics of being close to children’s interests, respecting the starting point of cognition, promoting two-way thinking, and connecting the development of multiple fields. Thus, a picture-book-based curriculum design of "student-oriented, study of picture books, two lines of advancement, internal and external integration" is formed, as well as a picture-book-based teaching implementation strategy of "reading first, problem triggering, activity guidance, and expansion and extension". Thus, picture-book-based curriculum and teaching is expected to adapt to and break through the current educational development trend, and to shape the new curriculum view, teaching view, teacher view and student view.
As the third way beyond hierarchical and egalitarian relationship, "respectful paternalism" can be refined into three types of practices:empowering, protecting, and caring, and emphasizes the interactive and emotional nature of the parent-child relationship, providing precise descriptions and effective norms for the modern parent-child relationship. By weighing the adverse consequences of behavior, the probability of occurrence of adverse consequences, the urgency of the consequences, the subject’s possession of information and self-awareness, the three types can be better selected and paired to respond to the tension between the protection of children’s interests and the need for autonomy in family education.
