Interpretation and Translation: How an Education Policy Is Distorted and Reoriented by Official Education Systems

From the Bernsteinian perspective, education policy interpretation and translation, as a process of recontextualising policy discourse into proposed pedagogic modes, follow certain regulative discourses and rules of social orders. This study illustrates this argument by investigating 15 discipline heads’ experiences concerning their exposure to the interpretation and translation of the higher vocational education curriculum reform policy in China. The policy emphasised industry-led curricula, which is opposite to the general regulative discourse of state dominance in the Chinese education system. Given this contradiction, the government and its vocational colleges attempted to find a compromise, and thus their agents interpreted and translated the policy discourse into regionalised modes where the official education system could still control knowledge selection with limited influence from employers. It is argued that the regulative discourse in an education policy originating in realistic and economic considerations might be contrary to the general regulative discourse in official education systems, so that the policy could not be faithfully interpreted based on its own regulative discourse but had to be interpreted by largely following the general regulative discourse that is opposed to that of the policy. Thus, the policy was distorted and reoriented into a pedagogic mode that diverges from the aim of the policy.