Tu Weiming: Contested Curriculum Traditions in China

• In Event: 41.019 - Curriculum of Love, Justice, and Peace? Genocide of Education? Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Abstract

This panelist will provide revision or correction of dominant Western notions of education and curriculum embedded in Confucius’s Great Learning and education for community and individual growth. Drawing on neo-Confucian theory of Tu Weiming (1996), which counters simplistic Western interpretations of Confucius being primarily a promoter of traditional rules, she will relate how ideas of Laoze (6th-5th Century BCE – 531 BCE), Confucius (551-479 BCE), 7th Century neo-Taoist poets such as Tu Fu and Li Po (or Li Bai), along with many other works of philosophy and literature were passed along by memory of itinerant scholars in peril of doing so, during her lived experience on Mao’s Reform Farms during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Connections between Japanese educators Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Diasaku Ikeda, see below, will be related to her experience in China, and that of her family.

The panelist will share her cross-cultural perspectives on contested curriculum traditions in China drawing upon a wide array of theoretical traditions such as Confucianism (Confucius), Daoism (Laozi; Zhuangzi), concrete humanism and embodied Confucianism (Tu, 2010), and various iterations and articulations of “democracy” mentioned above and in the extant scholarship [e.g., radical narrative imagination (Greene, 1995), radical possibilities (Anyon, 2005), freedom dreams (Freire, 2007), Black protest thought (Watkins, 2005), radical love (King, 1963/1981; Schubert, 2009a), sociological imagination (Mills, 1959/2000), dialogic imagination (Bakhtin, 1981), spaces of hope (Harvey, 2000), curriculum imagination (Lake, 2013), womanist love’s knowledge (Nussbaum, 1997, also 2000, 2010), educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit (Archibald, 2008), and revolution or social activism (Lee, 2012)].

Author

• Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University