Book Description

Inter-national and cross-cultural comparative studies in general and in education continue to confront a paradigmatic conundrum. That is, how is it possible to map out and render intelligible local-historical-cultural sensibilities as they are and in the English language, without getting bogged down to the indispensable yet insufficient globalized (Western) categories, frameworks, and a planetary (modern) conceptual-metaphysical way of reasoning? With China’s current educational discourses as its object of critique, this dissertation story-tells the author’s intellectual way – a journey, a method, and a daoist un-learning experience – that loosens up and turns around, if not beaks apart, such a conundrum, by strategically enacting an alternative research paradigm. This alternative research paradigm, drawing upon a post-modern, linguistic, cross-cultural, and historical mode of inquiry, intersects the domains of philosophy and praxis of education, narrative studies, discourse studies, and comparative studies. Through hermeneutically and evocatively dialoguing with both classical and modern texts, it not only cuts into the issues of educational language, body, and teacher-student difference in current China from a cross-cultural and historical perspective, but also envisions new gestures. This dissertation unpacks the author’s intellectual way along with her three serendipitous encounters, that can only be re-counted backwards, one intersecting with and building upon another: 1) A cross-cultural detour enables the author to encounter the Chinese ‘wind’ and ‘body’ as a culturally unique way of reasoning related to teaching, learning and teacher-student engagement; 2) Following the dancing ‘wind’ to ancient Chinese texts, say, Confucius’ commentary on the Yijing Guan-Hexagram, encounters her to a historical holistic mode of reasoning, which provides the author an alternative perspective to re-problematizing what she otherwise takes for granted as Chinese language, body, and teacher-student ordering; 3) This cross-cultural and historical detour furthermore un-learns the author’s habituated subject-vs.-object attitude toward language, body, and teacher-student difference as a specter of the modern conceptual-metaphysical mode of reasoning, gesturing toward an envisioning of a holistic co-dwelling between words and things, man and the world, teaching and learning, mind and body, and teachers and students.