Border Crossing of an Educational Policy Towards an Analytical Framework to Study Educational Transfer

This paper aims to better understand the process of educational transfer from Western countries to developing ones by proposing an analytical framework. The framework, besides counting for the major challenges of a specific educational transfer, also proposes to analyse some of the factors of different cultural-educational contexts that may help or burden institutional innovation. The framework had been tested by case study research focusing on the educational transfer of liberal arts colleges from the Netherlands to China. In the cities of Chongqing and Taigu, two undergraduate colleges grounded the case of investigation in order to study the experiential perceptions of stakeholders shortly after the implementation of liberal arts programmes (2012). Meanwhile, the data revealed different interest groups and particular institutional constrains, and the analytical framework greatly helped to understand and illustrate issues of compatibility, acceptance, mobilization of different stakeholders, and strategies for both individual and institutional agency. As the research contributed to a dissertation essay completed in 2016 at Beijing Normal University, the present study’s objective is to highlight the importance of analytical framework(s) in the process of interpreting data into research findings.