Dreaming in China: The Impossibility of Possibility

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Developing Our Humanity in Community

Abstract

Do I have the right to dream?
Do I have the right to have a right? (Chinese student, 2019)

These are the words of a graduate student in a Critical Pedagogy class in Changchun, China.
Teaching critical pedagogy in a communist country for the past three summers has richly informed this self-study research and informed my initial research questions:

What does critical pedagogy look like within the context of China’s “communism”?
Are there intersections of possibility within Chinese values of harmony, stability and authority? What are the tensions?
How can critical pedagogy create conditions that empower and transform social inequalities in China?
How do we walk the fine line between conformity and transgression, between change agent and cultural preservationist, between docility and action? (Wang, 2017).

I was challenged to find “a portal of liberation” in which to bring in notions of critical pedagogy and opportunities to invite atypical discourse in my courses and lectures in China. While we must be careful not to question government policies, we are able to assess teaching and learning and pursue one human right that belongs to everyone – the right to dream. Critical pedagogy is about critique and possibility. Consequently, within a carefully sequenced cultivation of classroom community, we explored dreams as a context of possibility to support courage and agency. This dreaming, so profoundly beautiful and necessary a practice for liberation (Freire, 2007) was new for many students but allowed us to consider paths that might be taken to reach these presumed illusive futures, develop hope, and come to understand that dreaming could be a collective endeavor, a humanizing pedagogy.
Due to perceived constraints about broaching politically sensitive issues and to be ethically responsible to participants, this study is confined to a self-study. “The particular methods used in self-study emerge as a function of the particular context within which the study is being pursued” (Tidwell et al. 2009, p. xiii). I examined three years of data, including my research journal, I AM poems, systematic analysis of discussions and artifacts from a 10 session course and guest lectures at two universities and one primary school. My position was one of a teacher-educator interested in studying and developing her classroom practice in China.


“I am losing my primitive wonder and becoming a testing machine.” (Student)

“our world view is shaped by teachers, rules and regulation. This environment obliterates creativity and criticism and shapes students to passively adapt to the world.”

While participants were motivated to consider their dreams, many believed themselves unable to dream. They named barriers or social/cultural/political constraints – family and government loyalties – that surpass the privilege of dreaming and sustain a banking model and an inability to identify the “I” in the “We.” These conditions support the concepts of harmony and stability and because participants feel their fates are predetermined, the “ideas of possibilities are trapped in predictability” (Greene, 1995,124). Our job is to identify the forces can transform “inevitability” into the ability to forge new pathways.

Author

• Suzanne SooHoo, Chapman University