TITLE:
Establishing a Student-Centered University-Government-Kindergarten Collaborative Education System
AUTHORS:
Beibei Zhang, Guohua Zheng, Shizhu Gou, Deqiang Wang
KEYWORDS:
Early Childhood Teacher Education, UGK Collaboration, Student Perspective, Interorganizational Relationship Theory
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.17 No.3,
March
2,
2026
ABSTRACT: In response to the strategic demand for “high-quality early childhood education” in the new era, the training system for early childhood teacher candidates (TCs) in universities is undergoing a profound transformation from “scale expansion” to “quality enhancement.” The traditional University-Government-Kindergarten (UGK) collaborative model has fallen into a state of collaborative inertia due to issues such as fragmented objectives, ambiguous responsibilities, and loose interactions, making it difficult to meet the requirements for cultivating high-quality early childhood teachers. Drawing on interorganizational relationship theory, this study systematically elucidates the applicability and guiding value of this framework for resolving collaboration challenges. It explicitly proposes establishing a student-centered UGK collaborative education system, whose core lies in achieving “quadruple coordination” of roles, optimizing “bidirectional interaction” of relationships, and innovating “trust-building mechanisms.” Subsequently, the paper outlines a four-pronged pathway for system construction—targeting objectives, institutional frameworks, resource allocation, and student engagement—aiming to provide theoretical reference and practical frameworks for deepening reforms in China’s preschool education teacher preparation model and establishing a dynamic, sustainable collaborative education ecosystem.