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This study aims to measure social enterprises’ (SEs’) social objectives under the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework, and explore the impact of SEs’ social objectives on their choices of legal forms.

This study used semi-structured questionnaires followed up by field interviews and observations of the sampled SEs. The survey sample includes 80 participants of Social Entrepreneurs Stars Competition in Zhejiang Province of China. The authors conduct content analysis to measure the objectives of SEs. The authors also perform descriptive analysis, chi-square test and regression analysis on the data.

The findings confirm the theoretical discussions that SEs’ choices of legal forms reflect SEs’ strategies toward achieving social objectives. Similar to certain countries, some SEs in China register as nonprofit entities to concentrate on nonprofitable sustainability objectives, while others register as commercial enterprises or hybrid organizations to generate profits. However, some SEs focus on profitable non-sustainability issues and fail to prioritize social objectives over economic objectives. There are positive effects of social entrepreneurs’ background similarity and negative effects of social entrepreneurs’ educational level on their SEs’ choices to register as commercial enterprises.

Due to the small size and nonrepresentative sample this study is based on, the findings need be further tested by a larger sample. SEs in different service domains rely on different types of financial resources (Mair et al., 2012; Doherty et al., 2014). In future research, the model can be expanded to test the effects of service domains and types of financial sources on SEs’ choices of legal forms.

To encourage more societal resources being allocated toward achieving the United Nations’ SDGs, policymakers and SE certification programs are recommended to explicitly incorporate sustainability objectives into the evaluation standards and supportive policies for SEs. Social entrepreneurs who aim to balance the social and economic objectives in their business are suggested to target the population with whom they share similar community background. Training or consulting programs for social entrepreneurs are suggested to provide advice tailored to their socio-economic background and personal experiences.

To the best of the authors’ this study is the first quantitative analysis to identify factors that associate with SEs’ choice of legal forms in China. The authors developed new instruments to measure SEs’ social objectives and service targets, access to financial resources and social entrepreneurs’ social-economic backgrounds.

As one of the earliest high-level programming languages, Fortran with easy accessibility and computational efficiency is widely used in the engineering field. The purpose of this paper is to present a Fortran implementation of isogeometric analysis (IGA) for thin plate problems.

IGA based on non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) offers exact geometries and is more accurate than finite element analysis (FEA). Unlike the basis functions in FEA, NURBS basis functions are non-interpolated. Hence, the penalty method is used to enforce boundary conditions.

Several thin plate examples based on the Kirchhoff-Love theory were illustrated to demonstrate the accuracy of the implementation in contrast with analytical solutions, and the efficiency was validated in comparison with another open method.

A Fortran implementation of NURBS-based IGA was developed to solve Kirchhoff-Love plate problems. It easily obtained high-continuity basis functions, which are necessary for Kirchhoff formulation. In comparison with theoretical solutions, the numerical examples demonstrated higher accuracy and faster convergence of the Fortran implementation. The Fortran implementation can well solve the time-consuming problem, and it was validated by the time-consumption comparison with the Matlab implementation. Due to the non-interpolation of NURBS, the penalty method was used to impose boundary conditions. A suggestion of the selection of penalty coefficients was given.

When college entrance examinations act as gatekeepers to modern-sector jobs, the entire education system then becomes oriented toward these examinations. This occurs at the expense of learning for the sake of learning and other aspects of education that address the holistic development and well-being of students. In recent years in China, there has been growing concern that examination competition has compromised the quality of classroom teaching and learning and is detrimental to the development of skills necessary for the global knowledge economy. These concerns have given rise to a far-reaching set of education reforms known as the New Curriculum reforms which have aimed to move students to the center of teaching and learning and to transform teaching and learning so as to foster such capacities as creativity, innovation, collaboration, self-expression, engagement, enjoyment of learning, inquiry skills, problem-solving abilities, and ability to apply knowledge in practice. In this chapter, we use videotaped high school New Curriculum demonstration lessons to examine teaching and learning practices that are regarded as exemplary in the current reform context. We investigate how teachers are negotiating the competing demands of preparing students for the examinations and addressing the aims of the New Curriculum reforms. The nature of student participation in the classroom emerges in the analysis as a key indicator of the success of this negotiation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a preliminary model of instructional leadership in the Chinese educational context and explore the ways in which Chinese school principals locate their instructional-leadership practices in response to traditional expectations and the requirements of recent reforms.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 22 selected primary school principals in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. A qualitative analysis was conducted to categorize the major leadership practices enacted by these principals.

An initial model of instructional leadership in China with six major dimensions is constructed. The paper also illustrates and elaborates on three dimensions with the greatest context-specific meanings for Chinese principals.

The paper explores the ways in which Chinese principals enact their instructional leadership in a context in which “the west wind meets the east wind”; that is, when they are required to accommodate both imported reform initiatives and traditional expectations. The paper contributes to the sparse existing research on principals’ instructional leadership in non-western cultural and social contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the cultural roots of Chinese lesson study (LS) so as to account for its persistence in the Chinese education history as well as its importance in Chinese teacher professional development and student learning.

The overarching research question is: “How can Chinese lesson study be theorized from a cultural perspective?” The sub-questions include: “What cultural features do Chinese teachers demonstrate in their LS activities? How can traditional Chinese cultural resources be utilized in explaining the existence and development of these features?” Based on a close reading of firsthand classic texts on Chinese cultural thoughts and related literature, the researchers collected data from Chinese teachers’ LS activities, stimulated recall interviews and focus groups, and related documents. An analysis is conducted with interplay among the theoretical framework, the data, and the researchers’ personal insights.

The findings of the study include three aspects. First, in terms of their actions, the Chinese teachers enact their understanding of teaching in public lessons through unity of knowing and doing (知行合一) more than conceptual explication. Second, with regard to their thinking, the Chinese teachers use practical reasoning (实践推理) in deliberate practice of repeated teaching through group inquiry and reflection. Third, a tendency of emulating those better than oneself (见贤思齐) is evident in novice teachers’ learning from “good” examples by expert teachers.

The revelation of these cultural features can not only contribute to a deeper understanding about the persistence and importance of LS in the Chinese education history, but also provide an example of analyzing LS from a cultural perspective to the world LS community.

The purpose of this paper is to respond to a recent article published in this journal by Stoll and Kools (2017) on the “School as a Learning Organisation” (SLO). It critiques Stoll and Kools’ integrated model of a SLO by investigating whether the model can be applied to a specific socio-cultural schooling context using the example of mainland China.

This paper reviews the extant published works on SLO with a focus on Stoll and Kools’ integrated model of a SLO. The paper also reviews the existing literature on schooling practices in China.

It is argued that the application of Stoll and Kools’ integrated model of a SLO in China needs to take into consideration and incorporate the prevailing centralised, hierarchical and collective characteristics in the country.

The paper questions the universal application of the seven action-oriented dimensions of the SLO for all schools regardless of socio-cultural contexts. It highlights the mediating and moderating effects of local histories, conditions and developments when promoting SLO in a specific learning site.

Policymakers, researchers and educators need to contextualise the ideal of the SLO by interpreting and appropriating it in ways that are compatible with the dominant socio-cultural norms and practices in a particular locality.

This paper fills a current gap by relating the notion of SLO model to the schooling settings in China. It offers a collective slant to SLO that is tailored for the educational realities and experiences in China.