Abstract
This book, as Weili Zhao’s doctoral dissertation, recounts her research journey from noticing a Chinese school’s motto written in three categories: school wind, teaching wind, and learning wind. Wondering what “wind education” was, Zhao had, in Jacques Derrida’s phrasing, an “aporia” experience, which she describes as one does not know where to go when stuck at a juncture (p. 1). Being aware of the limitations of modern grammar and the developmental comparative paradigm in cross-cultural studies, Zhao decided to apply an archaeological-historical mode of inquiry and an ontological language-discourse perspective to trace the etymological meaning and diachronic development of the character “風”/“wind” in its original texts and tones. Building on this understanding, the goal of this book is to, on an onto-epistemological level and a cross-cultural landscape, “discover on what basis knowledge and styles of reasoning about China’s education and curriculum become possible, and within what space of order are they constructed” (p. xx) as a way to address the epistemicide issue in Chinese curriculum knowledge (Paraskeva, 2016).
Chapter 1 starts with discussing the definition of “Epistemicide”, denotating the suppression and elimination of the existence of other forms of knowledges in the Global South and developing countries by the prevalent “West-Eurocentric Anglophone discourses and practices” (p. 26). Zhao contends that this started in China in the mid-19th century and continues even now to influence Chinese education and curriculum knowledge. For instance, many scholars and educators have called into question a recent Chinese curriculum reform which aims to develop Chinese students’ “hexin suyang” (核心素养), officially translated to “key competency” (Luo & Chan, 2023). According to Zhao, it is a “signifier-signified mode of reasoning” (a form of epistemicide) that we fail to inquire about the semantic meaning of “suyang” in its history but fill it up with a set of competencies (p. 38). To address this issue in Chinese education and curriculum knowledge, Zhao adopted de Sousa Santos’ (2007) and Paraskeva’s (2016) decolonial frameworks about exploring and recognizing “an ecological co-existence of varying epistemological forms of knowledge around the world” (p. 27).
Grounded in the criticism discussed in Chapter 1 about the developmental comparative paradigm which normally uses the western-northern discourses to gauge other epistemologies, Zhao absorbs the ideas of Agamben, Heidegger and Foucault, and proposes in Chapter 2 a historical-archaeological mode of inquiry in the landscape of cross-cultural studies. It means to track down and interpret how a culture’s knowledge system is (con)textualized historically and ethnographically, and capture its trajectory with time and varied contexts. This mode of inquiry seeks to understand with genuine efforts, rather than to compare a culture’s knowledge and its way of knowing with others.
In Chapter 3, Zhao employs, in Foucault’s phrasing, trap of philology (1973) to reason her previous “aporia” experience with the school-motto wall inscription. Namely, she argues that our prior experiences with the words we speak and the modern grammatical habits of our thinking have blinded us from comprehending the textures and tones of some Chinese characters, in this case “風” (feng-wind). Therefore, Zhao adopts an ontological language-discourse lens to explore the “etymological source” of the character “風” in its original text, which leads her to Yijing (The book of Change).
Chapter 4 continues to unpack Yijing and its “image-number” style of thought, and how it, as the primordial source, renders Chinese ontology and epistemology. By identifying and explaining a few onto-epistemic themes, Zhao demonstrates a “correlative style of thinking” and lays the foundation for explicating how Confucius interpreted the meaning of Yijing and conditioned it in his whole education and knowledge system.
Chapter 5 bases its discussion on one Yijing hexagram--guan-hexagram, which has an image of “wind blowing over the earth” (p. 100) and depicts a King performing a ritual ceremony with his subjects observing. Confucius interpreted this in an educational context where a teacher performs the knowledge and the principles they teach while students observe, imitate, and ultimately transform themselves. In addition, Zhao analyses how this body-action, observe or guan (觀), reveals Chinese ontological body-thinking, as opposed to Western mind-thinking.
Confucius’ envisioning of guan-hexagram in the act of teaching-learning movement signifies that the ordering of teacher-student is of hierarchical importance, which is seen as different from a modern democratic representation, and thus entails divided opinions in current China (Liang et al., 2020). Zhao argues in Chapter 6 that this is an example of utilizing a comparative cultural perspective to view teacher-student relationship, i.e. “a hierarchical vs. egalitarian binary pendulum” (p.18). Zhao calls for learning from a Daoist wisdom, the yin-yang movement, to rethink the ordering of this relationship.
The last chapter of this book revisits the author’s intellectual journey from her “aporia” experience with the character “風” (feng-wind) in a school setting to exploring Chinese onto-epistemology in its education, curriculum knowledge, and student-teacher relations. Zhao describes this journey as a “Daoist onto-un-learning way”, a post-foundational case study which “doesn’t start with [a] priori theory and method...but is on its way of wandering and wondering, with way intersecting a journey, a method, and a Dao movement...” (p. 172).
Zhao’s book Dancing with the wind offers a unique value for graduate students, researchers, scholars and practitioners who work in the fields of education, curriculum, teaching and learning from a cross-cultural perspective (e.g., Che, 2023), and insights for those who draw upon their Chinese onto-epistemological framework to understand a western framework of knowledge and thinking, and vice versa. It invites readers like me, who encountered wind on various occasions in my schooling experience but never probed into it, to envision this invisible natural element in a reasoning system that orders Chinese education, schooling and teacher-student relationships. Most importantly, the archaeological-historical inquiry method and ontological language-discourse perspective that Zhao endorses in the landscape of cross-cultural studies will inspire more readers to begin their Daoist onto-un-learning-thinking experiences.