Epistemological flashpoint in China’s classroom reform: (How) can a ‘Confucian do-after-me pedagogy’ cultivate critical thinking?

ABSTRACT

China’s 2017 ‘classroom revolution’ call intends to transform current teacher-centered pedagogies with brand-new philosophies and technologies. As a new entry point for classroom research, I problematize a naturalized (mis)belief—teacher-centered (Confucian) didactic pedagogies are not conducive to critical thinking cultivation—that has enthralled Chinese teachers in an epistemological-moral-pedagogical dilemma. My problematization, philosophically informed and practice-research grounded, unfolds in four steps. First, I explicate the presumed clash between the claimed Confucian pedagogies and critical thinking. Second, I historicize the Confucian pedagogical philosophy to implode the naturalized (mis)belief and some stereotypical (mis)understandings of Confucian teaching and learning, demonstrating instead an epistemological compatibility therebetween. Third, I unpack how my phenomenological case study discerns an unrecognized yet educative ‘repair moment’ in a Chinese math classroom, generating a possible re-conjoining between teachers’ self-despised yet habitually implemented ‘Confucian do-after-me pedagogy’ and critical mathematical reasoning. Through observations and interviews, I illustrate how this ‘repair moment’ can become pedagogically significant, overturning teachers’ naturalized (mis)belief, redeeming them from the moral-practical dilemma, and cultivating their critical pedagogical consciousness. Finally, I argue that this paper not only provides a philosophical-plus-empirical paradigm for teaching invention in China and beyond but also sheds new light on cross-cultural learning in transnational curriculum studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom revolution
• critical thinking
• Confucian do-after-me pedagogy
• phenomenological
• critical pedagogical consciousness
• teaching intervention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Direct Grant [4058054].

Notes on contributors

Weili Zhao

Weili Zhao obtained her Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With intellectual training in both discourse analysis and curriculum studies, she is interested in unpacking China’s current educational thinking and practices at the nexus, and as the (dis)assemblage, of tradition and modernity, East and West. Specifically, her research explicates the historical-cultural-philosophical insights of Chinese knowledge, curriculum, and educational thinking, say, Yijing, Daoist, and Confucian wisdom, to hopefully dialogue with, for mutual informing and clarifications, the latest intellectual linguistic-body-cultural-study turns in the Western scholarship. Furthermore, she explores the possible challenges, new openings, as well as intervention strategies, of embodying and translating the above theoretical thinking into classroom practices in Hong Kong and Mainland China to enhance teaching and learning efficacy. She has published her monograph, China’s Education, Curriculum Knowledge and Cultural Inscriptions: Dancing with The Wind (2019) with Routledge, and ten articles over the past four years in the SSCI journals of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory. She is co-editing a special issue on themes of learning, unlearning and study for Studies in Philosophy and Education (with Derek Ford and Tyson Lewis), a special issue on the theme of epistemic translation on translational curriculum studies for Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (with Thomas Popkewitz and Tero Autio), a book, Historicizing Curriculum Knowledge Translation on a Global Landscape (Routledge, under contract, with Thomas Popkewitz and Tero Autio), and writing her second monograph, Edusemiotics, (New) Materialism, and (Body) Governance: Flashpoints in 21st -Century Education in China and Beyond (Routledge).