How culture matters in educational borrowing? Chinese teachers’ dilemmas in a global era

Educational borrowing may cause numerous dilemmas that emerge from cross-cultural differences among teachers in the globalization. Through the case study on the flipped classroom introduced from the United States into Chinese middle schools, this article presents an examination of dilemmas that teachers encountered during educational borrowing in the global era. Based on the theoretical literature on cultural-historical activity theory, the study used interviews, field observations, and documents from six secondary schools in mainland China for one and a half years to understand comprehensively the dilemmas that teachers encountered when implementing the flipped classroom. The findings indicate that understandings of knowledge production, transmission, and the goal of education in mainland China differ from those in the west, which is the main reason for the teacher dilemmas. Because of the diversity in social culture, we suggest that teachers should be more culturally sensitive and improve compatibility in the process of educational borrowing.