Rethinking China’s Digital Curriculum: With and Beyond a Modernity-Coloniality Perspective

• In Event: Unsettling the Coloniality of Knowledge: Curricula as Inscriptions of Westernized Order

Abstract

Objectives:
In contemporary educational debate digital technologies and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are powerfully positioned as a “technical magic” to open up the future education and enhance teacher’s teaching capability (OECD, 2018). Recently, China has initiated several policy documents to further digital curriculum, with the aim of navigating the country’s own resolutions to the global educational crisis in these turbulent times (Huai, 2023). Nevertheless, the swift evolution of multiple novel technologies and applications, such as ChatGPT, has both expedited the process of digitization and underscored an array of challenges and contradictions between the educator and technology. This paper problematizes and investigates how the discourses of China’s digital curriculum are (re)configured along a modernity episteme, and subsequently scrutinizes the manifestation of modernity-coloniality in the production of educational knowledge and meaning-making.

Theoretical Framework:
This study is anchored on Foucault’s (1970) critique of modern forms of rationality and the present iteration of “coloniality” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012) or onto-epistemic coloniality (Zhao & Popkewitz, 2022) imposed by Western-centric epistemologies on other form knowledge. That is to say, as a modern form and the result or legacy of colonialism, coloniality works as the “matrix of knowledge, power and being” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012) that are defining today’s knowledge production, culture, labor and intersubjective relations.

Methods:
Foucauldian discourse analysis (Foucault, 1970) is employed to scrutinize and re-examine China’s discourse on educational digitalization and the obscured pedagogical rationalities, thereby inviting a reconsideration of the existing order and the exploration of new possibilities. Specifically, the analysis focuses on discursive practice of teacher-technology dynamics, subsequently delving into the mechanisms of knowledge production and specific “episteme”.

Data:
The analysis presented in this study principally relies on a series of policy documents on educational digital transformation issued in recent years, such as Digital Literacy of Teachers (Ministry of Education, 2022), prominent figures’ speeches, scholarly viewpoints, and so forth.

Results:
Viewed as a nonhuman entity, according to this study, AI technology is regarded either as a potent resource awaiting exploitation to resolve educational issues, or as a precarious force threatening teachers’ subjectivity. Both perspectives reflect a modernity instrumental rationality and an anthropocentric way of thinking. Such human-technology binary relations, as posited by Murris (2020), reflect the substance ontology of Western metaphysics that underpins colonialism and the colonizing notions of human-nonhuman relationships. This colonialist thought promotes a non-relational ontology and a competitive, individualistic subjectivity that continues to view human, nonhuman material, and knowledge as property (Patel, 2016), thereby establishing a modality of modernity-coloniality in knowledge (re)production. To reconceptualize human-technology interactions, this paper further proposes that the Chinese correlative and complementary relationship between the concepts of dao (道 way) and qi (器 technology) offers a unique onto-epistemic relationality that disrupts the colonizing binary logic deeply ingrained in Western metaphysics.

Scholarly Significance:
This paper provides a new perspective for understanding the digital transformation of education in China and more broadly. It facilitates contemplation on the issue of teacher agency within the evolving educational landscape.

Author

• Min Lin, Beijing Normal University