A Critical Scholar's Journey in China: A Brief Freirean Analysis of Insider-Outsider Tensions

• In Event: 43.058 - Re-Visioning Education Research for the Post-Truth Era

Abstract

As a full-time foreign faculty member in the Chinese Normal university system for the past five years, I analyze the contested terrain of being a critical, Freirean educator/researcher as an insider and outsider of Chinese and Western academic systems and societies overall. This autobiographical analysis is within the contexts of China’s academic focus on raising their global higher education rankings, along with self-reflectivity of my own multiple, often-conflicting identities and Western-centric Orientalism (Said), in my legitimization of academic work. The following themes are analyzed through critical frameworks: pursuit for top rankings coinciding and conflicting with scholarship breadth and depth, academic freedom, and politics of education; constructs of “harmony”; and select pedagogical commonalities/differences between the East, Global South, and West.

Author

• Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University