What the West could learn from the East: a reflective analysis

Abstract

Drawing on Lugones’ ideas of world traveling, Dewey’s notion of education as experience, and Greene’s vision of seeing small/seeing big, this article inquires into lives lived in an Eastern educational milieu with attention reflectively paid to what educators in the West could learn from those in the East. Rather than focusing on mega narratives largely created by policy-makers and derived from accumulations of theory and/or political decision-making, this practical research in the reflective vein takes a ‘big’ look at three ‘small stories’ that emerged in a narrative inquiry we conducted in a Chinese elementary school and imagines their portability to Western educational contexts. Reflective attention is specifically paid to: (1) teaching without words, (2) principal images, and (3) shared responsibility for failure. What these small stories from our narrative inquiry research might disrupt, if introduced to Western educational settings, is especially taken up.

Keywords:

• Intercultural education
• globalism
• serial interpretation
• narrative inquiry

Acknowledgments

The authors thank ‘Xiaozhang Xu’ for her willing and helpful participation in this work. Special appreciation is also extended to Deputy Principal ‘Shijing He’, other Hexie Elementary Faculty, and the international office of Tianjin University for helping make this research possible.

Notes

1. A sincere thank you is extended to Wu Zongjie for introducing us to this important piece of historical literature.

2. Hexie Elementary School is a pseudonym. In Mandarin, Hexie means harmony.

3. The names of the principal, the deputy principal, and the three teachers are also pseudonyms.

4. The name of our assigned driver is an English pseudonym, reflecting how she initially introduced herself to us.