Toward a Curriculum of Vulnerability and Blandness: Insights From Levinas and Classical Chinese Thoughts

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: War, Vulnerability, Suffering, and Being: Human Existence and Education

Abstract

This article examines two counterintuitive notions to rethink the possibility of ethics and the capacity of education to forge potentials and bonds in curriculum spaces. By reading Emanuel Levinas and classical Chinese thoughts, this article considers vulnerability and blandness not as the limits of human existence, but as the very condition of how to live as humans. A curriculum of vulnerability and blandness is unthinkable within the ontological structure of the curriculum studies canon. It provokes a deep moral tenor through the Levinasian “awe” with which we approach the others, and through the Taoist “blandness” with which we strive for the true flavor. Blandness and vulnerability, prompting one to perpetual discovery, is a rich and meditative pedagogical mode.

Author

• Jinting Wu, University of Macau