Daoism in educating: Exploring nature as a metaphor for teaching and learning

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Remaking education: beyond the classroom

Proposal

Daoism is a worldview that focus on human beings and their relationship with their world, with nature as its reference.1 With these relationships the foci of the philosophy, the proposed paper will look to it as a resource for identifying a learning process that is shaped by and at the same time shapes our environment, addressing the conference theme of education for sustainability.
Researchers have found various educational elements in the forms of dao (Glanz, 1997; Moon, 2015; Roberts, 2012; Sloane & Zhao, 2014; Sta. Maria, 2017), a process Peter Roberts (2012) describes as ‘a particular type of learning that can sometimes be lost’ (p. 950). While learning with dao is generally not seen as an approach to educating (Roberts, 2012; Sloane & Zhao, 2014), others consider its possibilities. Andrew Pickering (2017), for example, describes this type of learning as the Daoist ‘graceful adaptation to an emergent world and real-time responses to the moment’ (p. 145).
In agreement with Pickering, this paper will explore the view that dao is a state in search of definition and the product of knowing the mysteries of the world, and as such, a metaphor for teaching and learning.


An educational treatise

Exploring Daoism to identify a teaching and learning process that is defined by nature relies mainly on the Daoist text, Daodejing. This study will reference an interpretation that views the philosophy as an educational treatise. This perspective, as presented in the translation and commentary of the text by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (2003), centers on the notion that the Daoist ‘would look to the cadence of nature as a resource for educating and refining our natural sensibilities’ (p. 53).
Ames and Hall describe the Daoist view of a process of becoming in humans. The process is characterized by the integration of the individual and environment to form an aesthetic basis that mediates how we know and the nature of reality. In bringing nature to learning, they view the human imagination as the process of dao. To enable this process, the text also describes conditions that will cultivate a dao disposition for interacting with the world, which in turn defines teacher practices.

A type of learning

The Daoist way of knowing, Pickering (2017) suggests, represents an ‘ontological turn,’ in contrast to worlds that center on the fixed ‘islands of stability’ of modernity. It is juxtaposition to the realities set by others who have moved away from nature and divided our world, contributing to the abuse of our world and ultimately to a threat to human existence. Daoism offers what is needed in our education—a more encompassing and a more compassionate way of interacting with our environment, fulfilling its promise that dao ‘gives them life and nurtures them, rears and develops them. It brings them to fruition and maturation’ (Daodejing, Ch. 51).

Note
1. This paper uses the pinyin system of writing Chinese words in Romanization.
 

Author

• Wilma Maki, Independent