TITLE:
Pathways for Ideological and Political Education through the Integration of Local Cultural Resources into University Preschool Education Courses—A Case Study of the “Treasures of Hometown” Project
AUTHORS:
Xue Li, Siyi Yang
KEYWORDS:
Local Cultural Resources, Preschool Education Major, Curriculum-Based Ideological and Political Education, Children’s Experience, Project-Based Learning
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.17 No.9,
September
28,
2026
ABSTRACT: Integrating local cultural resources into university preschool education courses is both a professional task for developing preservice teachers’ competence in kindergarten curriculum design and an important means of fostering cultural identity, a child-centered perspective, and professional responsibility. To address the display-oriented use of cultural materials, the absence of children’s experience, and the external addition of value objectives, the “Treasures of Hometown” action-learning project was implemented in the course Kindergarten Curriculum. The teaching case involved 52 second-year students organized into 10 groups. A purposively selected corpus of 10 matched initial and final plans, 10 peer-review records, 10 reflections, and 10 teaching field-note records was independently coded by two researchers and reviewed by a third. The analysis examined observable changes in cultural understanding, child-centered judgment, and professional responsibility across linked materials. Within this corpus, students’ work shifted from displaying cultural symbols toward justifying educational value, designing experiences through which children could perceive, manipulate, inquire, interact, and express, and documenting responsibility for cultural accuracy and curriculum quality. These case-based findings suggest that ideological and political education in preschool education courses can be embedded in disciplinary judgment through authentic tasks and developmental assessment; they are not intended as population-level or causal estimates.