Engaging Chinese ideas through Australian education research: using chéngyŭ to connect intellectual projects across ‘peripheral’ nations

Abstract

The increasing number of higher degree research students from China in the universities of multicultural Australia as elsewhere has added to the mounting interest in pedagogies of postgraduate supervision. This paper explores the proposition that efforts to articulate Chinese ideas through research in, for and about Australia have to negotiate positions that would allow or disallow their embedding in the Australian education research community. To do so, the literature on higher degree research supervision in multicultural contexts is reviewed. Then the co-operative approach used to document a higher degree research student's experiences of integrating knowledge from her Chinese intellectual heritage into her research is explained. The third section illustrates a research intervention whereby Chinese knowledge was articulated through research in, for and about teacher education in Australia. The fourth section presents evidence of three different responses to this move to embed Chinese ideas in the Australian education research community. Specifically, the responses of Australian academics to her use of chéngyŭ to theorise her evidence is explored.

Keywords:

• chéngyŭ
• Chinese intellectual heritage
• Chinese research students
• postgraduate supervisory pedagogy
• other knowledge traditions
• scholary argumentation

Acknowledgements

This research was supported under the Australian Research Council's ‘Discovery Projects’ funding scheme (Project DP0988108). The rigorous critiques from anonymous peer reviewers provided a valuable basis for strengthening this research report.