Reconfiguring the notion of teacher: Memories, thought experiments and encounters with alternative ways of teaching and learning in China

• In Event: Childhood and Schooling Beyond the Western Horizon Encounters with Memories, Matter, and More-than-Human Worlds

Proposal

The word ‘teacher’ is one of the most archaic in the vocabulary of Chinese culture. Its meaning has undergone various shifts and transformations throughout Chinese history. This fluid concept has been gradually narrowed down. In modern China, the notion of a ‘teacher’ basically refers to human beings who have the nationally authorized and professionally licensed certification, regard teaching as their social job, and work in public or private schools. Compared to its evolution before modern times, defining ‘teacher’ as merely a social profession in China implies that its diverse connotations must be confined by the current social life and habits which represent a relatively short historical time and limited space dominated by human species. Today’s dominant interpretation of a ‘teacher’ has lost its diversity and breadth, becoming disconnected from its other possible meanings beyond modernity.

This study proposes to reconsider the concept of a teacher from a broader perspective by reimagining and redefining the concept to bring into focus the diversity of its connotations in ontological and epistemological terms. The purpose of this study is to (a) break the dominance of the perception that the concept of a teacher is merely and habitually interpreted as a profession; (b) delink the connotations of a teacher from the Western, modernist, socialist, and political coloniality by examining them through decolonial perspectives; and (c) challenge the hegemony of human-centrism and open possibilities for more-than-human worlds in conceptualizing the teacher notion.

Theoretically, I follow the collective guide of four theoretical frameworks-- Mignolo’s five trajectories (Mignolo, 2011; Silova, Rappleye, & Auld, 2020), Confucianism (Hall and Ames, 1997; Wang, 2006), Taoism (Laozi, 2011; Zhao, 2019; Zhuangzi & Sun, 2007), and posthumanism (Escobar, 2011; Haraway, 2016; Latour, 2004; Taylor and Giugni, 2012) in proceeding my study. Cata collection process includes memory work (Barad, 2007; Davies & Gannon, 2006; Keightley, 2010), re-animating senses (Barad, 2007; Gershon, 2013; Hernández Silva, 2021), and speculative fabulations (Haraway, 2013, 2016) as thought experiments (Silova, 2020), including sitting meditation (Ma, 2020; Wang, 2008), as well as learning from objects and phenomena ([Ge wu zhi zhi], Zhu, 2002).

To explore the concept of a teacher in memories, I conducted re-membering activities with three family members-my mom (Wei), my grandmother (Ding), and me - in my grandmother’s old house in Anqing, Anhui province, which is full of memories about their experiences of being a teacher as well as about my growing up experience. Here, I conducted our fluid and interwoven memory work (Keightley & Pickering, 2012) related to the concept of teacher based on our experiences with human teachers, more-than-human teachers, and broadly defined teachers as a career, a social role, and ways of being and living. I invited the three of us to collectively recall our memories and stories (Davies & Gannon, 2006, 2012; Gardner, 2003) about what it means to be a teacher in different life experiences, who are the teachers in those memories, and why. This paper highlights preliminary findings to begin the process of reimagining the concept of a teacher beyond the Western horizon.

Author

• Jieyu Jiang, Arizona State University