Methodological–Axiological Alignment for Cultural Heritage Education

Abstract

Across the Asia-Pacific region, schools face a dual mandate: cultivating students’ national cultural identity while developing globally competitive cross-disciplinary competencies. This article advances the concept of methodological–axiological alignment—a theorised distinction between the curriculum methodology a school borrows from an international framework and the locally determined values that methodology is made to serve. The concept is developed through a study of a four-year design-based research programme at a junior secondary school in a large city in western China, which used the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (IB MYP) as an inquiry architecture while anchoring its value orientation in China’s Core Competencies framework. Survey data from 1,077 students and 74 teachers were integrated with thematic analysis of four iterative design cycles (2021–2025). The findings document a demand–supply mismatch—strong student interest alongside limited teacher interdisciplinary design capacity—and elicit four conversion mechanisms whose process observations are consistent with cultural confidence development. The article offers a transferable analytical framework for global–local curriculum integration of relevance across Asia-Pacific systems navigating analogous tensions.