Dr Janette Ryan
Janette Ryan is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Melbourne University majoring in Chinese language, a Bachelor of Education (Post Graduate) from Deakin University and a Doctorate of Education from Ballarat University. After graduating from Melbourne University, she spent two years on a Chinese/Australian Government scholarship in the early 1980s studying the Chinese language and Modern Chinese literature at Beijing Languages University and Nanjing University. She then worked for the Victorian State Government in Australia establishing the first sister-State relationship with Jiangsu Province and later completed a Bachelor of Education and taught Chinese at primary and secondary levels for several years before returning to academia.
Her research interests include cross-cultural teaching and learning, the experiences of international students, and Western and Confucian notions of scholarship and learning. She is the author of “A guide to teaching international students” (Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, 2000) and co-editor of “Teaching international students: Improving learning for all” (Routledge, 2005) and “International schooling and the Chinese learner” (University of Hong Kong Press, forthcoming). For the last three years, she has been part of a three country (China, Australia and Canada) research project working with schools and school leaders on China’s curriculum reform with schools in Beijing and Dongsheng, Inner Mongolia.
Her current research is on Western and Chinese notions of scholarship and learning as a response to the current ill-informed debates about ‘the Chinese learner’. Her most recent research on this topic is: Ryan, J. & Louie, K. (2007). False dichotomy?: ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ concepts of scholarship and learning, Educational Philosophy and Learning (39)4, 404-417. She is interviewing senior scholars in Western countries (including the UK) and countries with Confucian heritage cultures as part of this project and will be working on English and Chinese language sources during her stay as visiting scholar at the Contemporary China Studies Programme.