Interpretation, autonomy, and transformation: Chinese pedagogic discourse in a cross-cultural perspective

have been normalized as their own. In stating this, I am not only refer-

ring to the fact that modern Chinese language has embraced new terms

translated from the West as well as appropriating syntactical structures

for assimilating the particularities of Western-derived notions, but, more

importantly, to the fact that the ways of doing things with words have

been fundamentally changed (cf. Chuang 2007). Discursive practices in

law, media, education, government, management, business, organization,

etc. are, to a large degree, ‘translated’ or imagined from the West (Liu

1995).

The transformation of pedagogic discourse is perhaps the most per-

vasive: the Western educational system that accompanied Western

knowledge became the only legitimate system of study and schooling.

Confucianism as a form of pedagogy was thoroughly marginalized. The

discourse of modern epistemology—in terms of ways of looking, valu-

ing, and thinking—dominates most Chinese academic circles. The

superiority of modern epistemology is so accepted that even those who

wish to affirm the traditional discourse feel it necessary to justify them-

selves by showing how the Chinese world-views contained the seeds of

modernity even before the advent of the West (cf. Zhang 2009). The

tradition could be affirmed only insofar as it already had modern ele-

ments.

With the distance created by the history and space, people lose the

memory of when, where, and for what reasons such a discourse was

imported or imagined, and what social forces enacted such a process. The

Chinese people may take it for granted that the language they speak and

write is the language of their own, without being aware that others’ dis-

course has taken on a fundamental and deep significance in the formation

of Chinese social life. As Bakhtin (1981: 342) put it:

Another’s discourse performs here no longer as information, directions,

rules, models and so forth—but strives rather to determine the very bases

of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behav-

iour; it performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persua-

sive discourse.

For many people education in the Chinese context is thought to be

very different from the Western, with Chinese students characterized as

dependent and silent, teachers as authorities and being ‘all-knowing’, and

learning being directed to memorization and literary interpretation (Har-

vey 1985, Biggs 1996, Cortazzi and Jin 1999, Kim 2009). In contrast

with the Western educational tradition, where students are encouraged to

develop analytical and speculative abilities by engaging in disputation and

interaction, in the Confucian heritage ‘the education systems are mainly

oriented towards conserving knowledge, and the learning approach fos-

tered emphasizes the reproductive ability of students’ (Ballard and Clan-

chy 1991: 11). This is usually thought to be the heritage of the Chinese

traditional culture, especially that of Confucius, where education con-

sisted primarily of rote memorization of the classics and students were

usually required to demonstrate the ability of text interpretation rather

than challenging a particular premise. This pattern of learning has been

570

Z. WU

interpreted as a way to construct a hierarchical authoritative order of soci-

ety. Merson (1990: 86) comments that the purpose of the scholar class

was to create ‘bureaucratic generalists familiar with an accepted ethical

outlook and body of knowledge, not with the growth of knowledge or

with academic specialization’.

Rhetoric blaming the Confucian heritage for educational failure in

China continues to be commonplace. Nonetheless, many people also

observe a paradox in the Chinese behaviour seen as ‘rote learning’. Thus,

Watkins and Biggs (2001: 277) admit that ‘teachers in Chinese class-

rooms produce positive learning outcomes under conditions that Western

researchers would regard as most unpromising’. Saravanamuthu (2008;

see also Saravanamuthu and Tinker 2008) notes in his reviews that inter-

national comparison of educational performance reveals that students

from Confucian-heritage cultures tend to outperform Western students.

. (2007; 2009) find Chinese students who were brought up in a

context where education tends to be rigid, knowledge-oriented, teacher-

centred, and even harmful to learning turned out to be very successful in

English-speaking environments. The contradictions have triggered interest

in Chinese learners’ deep learning process in terms of their mode of

inquiry and interpretation.

It may be envisaged that contemporary Chinese pedagogy, including

the pedagogues of many eastern Asian countries, is the result of a cultural

interaction embedding ‘modern’ Western epistemology into a ‘traditional’

Eastern framework. Such a process of cultural hybridization is usually

seen as inevitable—as well as desirable to the progress of education. How-

ever, the crucial point underlining the discourse hybridization is the disso-

lution of cultural diversity, whereby the ancient vision of Confucian

pedagogy becomes lost in the name of progress and integration, which

poses a threat to cultural plurality. How can we recover the authentic

meanings of Chinese pedagogy in its indigenous tradition? What is the

cultural mixture that creates either ‘problems’ or ‘merits’ in the Confu-

can-heritage education as we see it, or assume we see it?

To embark on an investigation of these questions, I undertake a criti-

cal discourse analysis of pedagogic texts from both the Chinese classics

and the contemporary classroom (Fairclough 2003). I assume that the

mode and the structure of discourse at a given time and in a given culture

render its deep concerns with pedagogy: what counts as ‘knowledge’;

what occurs as learning; and what kinds of pedagogic process it presumes

and fosters (Cazden 2001). The cultural uniqueness of pedagogy is

revealed in the analysis of discourse.

I select two pieces of ‘classroom’ text for analysis, one a short dialogue

between Confucius and his student and the other an excerpt of classroom

transcription from a contemporary language lesson teaching Chinese clas-

sics. I try

not

to explore the text from the point of view of the individuals

who are speaking, to avoid making a comparison of the ‘quality’ of the

classrooms. I want to place them in the historical contexts where peda-

gogy comes into play in discourses the speakers may not be aware of. The

investigation is not an empirical one, but an analytical ethnography in the

philosophical perspective of language.

571

CHINESE PEDAGOGIC DISCOURSE

Interpretation towards growth and autonomy

First I present a text illustrating a dialogue between Confucius and a stu-

dent which I read and analyse as ‘ordinary’ classroom discourse rather

than as words of wisdom or ideas. In doing so, the characteristics of Con-

fucian pedagogic discourse emerge and spark an inquiry into questions

such as: What is the pedagogic vision unveiled and organized in the dia-

logue? How do patterns of interaction affect what counts as knowledge

and what occurs as learning? and At what level of interpretation does the

meaning-making process occur within the pedagogic discourse?

Tsze-kung said, ‘What do you pronounce concerning the poor man who

does not flatter, and the rich man who is not proud?’ The Master replied,

‘They will do; but they are not equal to him who, although poor, is yet

cheerful, and to him who, although rich, loves the rules of propriety’. Tsetse-

kung replied, ‘It is said in the

Odes

, “As you cut and then file, as you carve

and then polish”. The meaning is the same, I apprehend, as that which you

have just expressed’. The Master said, ‘Tsze, I can begin to talk about the

Odes

. I told you one point, and you knew its proper sequence’. (

Analects

15; translation modified)

One of the distinctive features of modern classrooms is the pedagogic

pattern that follows the Initiate–Respond–Evaluation (IRE) procedure

(Cazden 2001). The pattern gets teachers through their lessons and

allows the accomplishment of goals—the assimilation of prescribed infor-

mation and ideas which have a value of right or wrong—and defines

learners as the unknowing and the teacher as the knowing. In ways that

are different from modern pedagogic discourse dominated by IRE pat-

terns, it is the student rather than the teacher who initiates the inquiry in

Confucius’ discourse. Throughout the

Analects

, Confucius is unwilling to

take the initiative to ask students questions. It is usually the student who

should have something to say

before

the teacher can think of advising, or

not advising, him or her. Confucius offers the following expression of his

principles of teaching:

I never enlighten anyone who has not been driven into being

fen

(

who has not got into being

). When I have pointed out one corner of

a square to anyone and he does not come back with the other three, I will

not point it out to him a second time. (

Analects

7: 8)

In this brief statement, Confucius indicates a vision of autonomy, a

prerequisite for teaching with understanding and articulation. The

Chinese character

fen

describes the inner frenzy when one’s heart

gets deeply touched. This character is not a semantic representation of

a particular mood, but an image to make sense holistically of a student

moving towards understanding. With understanding so pre-occupied in

students’ hearts, they become eager to search for a language to

572

Z. WU

articulate it. This is the moment when the teacher can help. The char-

acter

fei

(

) describes the facial expression when a person stammers to

put understandings into words.

Fen

and

fei

here together portray a lear-

ner’s status of knowing and commitment, ‘a fore-having, a fore-sight,

and a fore-conception’, so attuned in heart that it opens itself only

through body and action in a way that makes manifest who he or she

is, and where he or she is moving to.

What the student has already understood and the struggle for its lin-

guistic articulation make up the pedagogic possibility in the embodied

readiness of

fen

and

fei

. In Student Tsze-kung’s question, we sense his

current moment of engagement (‘the poor man who yet does not flatter’)

and his fore-sight (‘the poor man is yet cheerful’) that he wants to catch

with the help of the teacher’s words. As Confucius says, ‘Learn as if you

could not reach your object, and were always fearing also lest you should

lose it’ (

Analects

, 8: 17). ‘

Object

’ is a word added by

the translator. In the original text, what you want to catch is open for any

interpretation. It is a ‘fore-sight’. For Confucius, a teacher’s capacity for

teaching is not that he or she is clever and more knowledgeable than his

or her students; rather it is the interpretive capacity to detect the horizon

of a learner’s fore-sight or pre-understanding, and to offer a language to

help the learner to hear for himself or herself the articulation of what calls

in this particular pedagogic engagement. I could perhaps use Heidegger’s

(1968: 8, 15) expressions ‘to let learn’ to comment on the pedagogic

interaction between Confucius and his student:

Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely

think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not

because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it

always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teach-

ing calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else

be learned than learning … The teacher is far ahead of his apprentices in

this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they—he has to learn to

let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than

the apprentices.

My second question to the

Analects

asks what counts as learning, and

what kind of learning process the dialogue presumes or fosters. Tsze-

kung’s response to Confucius is not merely to accept what his teacher

told him, nor to know better what a

Junzi

(noble man,

子

) means, but

to engage in a further inquiry into the process of becoming a

Junzi

. Tsze-

kung quotes a stanza from the

Book of Odes

to reveal his understanding

of how to become a

Junzi

, as described in his question: ‘“As you cut and

then file, as you carve and then polish”. The meaning is the same, I

apprehend, as that which you have just expressed’. The poem is a descrip-

tion of an elegant and accomplished minister and his successive steps of

self-cultivation. His way of learning could be conceived as a model of cul-

tivation for the attainment of self-accomplishments. Nevertheless what is

significant in the poetic description is perhaps the ‘hollowness’ inside the

words,

which can only be revealed in the totality of a person’s (here

Tsze-kung’s) movement towards understanding and becoming.

573

CHINESE PEDAGOGIC DISCOURSE

It was with Tsze-kung’s commitment to this poetic revelation that

Confucius was given a pedagogic opportunity for teaching the Odes.

‘With one like Tsze, I can begin to talk about the Odes. I told him one

point, and he knew its proper sequence’. Confucius notices the moment

of Tsze-kung’s awareness of the relationships between thought, language,

and poetry. The speech of Tao is by nature poetic, rather than proposi-

tional; as Heidegger (1975: 74) holds, the voice of thought must be poetic

because poetry is the saying of truth, the saying of the unconcealedness of

beings. ‘The Odes serve to stimulate the mind. They may be used for

purposes of self-contemplation’ (

Analects

17: 9). Zhang (2009: 107) com-

ments on this that

xing

, being inspired) rather than being indoctri-

nated is the key to the existential generation of meanings. Poetry plays a

primordial role in the way of ‘becoming and happening’. Therefore, Con-

fucius said to his son, ‘If you do not learn the Odes, you will not know

how to speak’ (

Analects

16: 13).

We may recognize that the process of learning is not to absorb new

ideas. To learn is to know the way of growing. ‘Growing’ means polish-

ing, carving, transforming, and becoming. The ultimate purpose for learn-

ing is to become a better polished person (

junzi

) for the enhancement of

the quality-of-life in the world. Thus, a poor man who does not flatter

‘polishes’ himself to the status of being a poor man, yet with happiness.

What Confucius offers is not a new idea, or even a new concept of

Junzi

;

rather it is a handover of a learning opportunity whereby students can

make sense of their lives insofar as a current status of

Junzi

grows towards

the next thing unarticulated in the soil out of which they are becoming.

My third aspect of inquiry is the epistemological question about peda-

gogical interaction. Pedagogic dialogue should not be seen as something

made up of various patterns of questions and answers. Pedagogic dialogue

at its deep level is an encounter of interpretations wherein ‘what is said

remains unsaid’ (Heidegger, quoted in Standish 2002: 151). In response

to what Confucius said about a

Junzi

, Tsze-kung returned with his inter-

pretation of what was unsaid by Confucius: the value of poetic language

for articulating one’s understanding of how to become a

Junzi

. Doing so

unfolds a new phase of inquiry into the possibility of teaching the

Odes

Only when a student knows how to engage into the interaction of inter-

pretations, or a revealing of what is unsaid, can she or he be taught. Con-

fucius was hopeful as a result of Tsze-kung’s reply because he was offered

a pedagogic opportunity—first laid down by himself as a signpost, and

then being established in its full course by the student—whereby both of

them can learn from each other. As Confucius remarks, ‘When I have

pointed out one corner of a square to anyone and he does not come back

with the other three, I will not point it out to him a second time’ (

), an image to hold understanding holistically grounded

in the nameless, points to a possibility of pedagogic engagement. By hold-

ing it up as an elucidation, Confucius invites learners into the opening of

enlightenment whereby learners can in turn respond with the other three

corners of a square. In Tsze-kung’s reply by quoting a stanza of poem, we

notice how the three ‘corners’ of interpretations are simultaneously

574

Z. WU

returned and established: his awareness of the gap for self-cultivation; his

understanding of how to fill the gap in terms of incessant self-polishing

(

); and his way of using poetic language to articu-

late his interpretation. With the horizons of interpretation so established,

teachers and learners engage themselves in a heart-to-heart rather than a

word-to-word dialogue so that they can mutually constitute and illumi-

nate the world of learning with four corners.

To sum up, in the Confucian perspective knowledge is not a set of

propositions about truth, but a situated intuitive insight that goes beyond

the propositional representation. Learning is a process of incessant modi-

fication of self, undertaken for the attainment of enlightenment and hap-

piness. And the role of teaching is to detect the horizon of student

readiness and make it a handover of a learning opportunity. Pedagogy as

a heart-to-heart encounter of inter-subjective interpretation is activated by

words in order to exercise the power of interpretation of the living. For

this reason language must be kept to a minimum so that understanding

and interpretation can prevail. Long arguments and rigorous definition

were considered to be unhelpful; they were seen as limiting, and under-

mining the value of discourse.

In the Chinese tradition, simplicity, poeticity, and indirectness are

conceived of as the necessities for conveying the deepest meanings—and

this cannot be done otherwise (Jullien 2000: 141). The Chinese classics

generally take the form of brief conversations, short axioms, verses, sto-

ries, etc., rather than complicated arguments. For example, the

Analects

Confucius, a book which has greatly influenced Chinese thought, consists

exclusively of short aphorisms and brief dialogues. A verse consisting of

merely four characters (for instance,

, ‘The gentleman is no ves-

sel’) might guide a person for the whole life. It is the genre, the style of

speaking, or the contour of thought, that makes the

Analects

a great work

within Chinese civilization. For thousands of years, it has served as the

source of meanings that plunges generations of Chinese people into ‘the

sea of interpretation’ (Clark 2006: 109). In a similar way,

Tao Te Jing

book which initiated the whole Taoist philosophical tradition, has only

6000 words. Feng (1952: 14) contends that Chinese philosophical con-

cepts and teachings are highly ‘suggestive and creative’, providing signifi-

cant flexibility, which in turn leaves enough room for situated meaning to

be grasped personally. In a word, the ultimate function of Confucian lan-

guage is heuristic—creating a space for situated understanding rather than

presenting a conscious thesis of its own. Language is a tool to make the

world intelligible, a signpost to show us the Way (

Tao

The language–

world relation is that between language and action, not that between lan-

guage and objects (Hansen 1992: 139). As soon as one gains access to

what is unsaid, one can forget the exterior of propositional expressions.

Cultural transformation of Chinese pedagogic discourse

My analysis of a pedagogic dialogue of Confucius is not merely for the

purpose of recovering the meaning of the past, but for shedding light on

575

CHINESE PEDAGOGIC DISCOURSE

the present. What we see in the

Analects

is a pedagogic vision completely

different from what modern people normally assume to be the Confucian

heritage of pedagogy. However, Chinese pedagogic discourse, since its

encounter with the West, has undergone a fundamental transformation in

its cultural connotation and linguistic exactitude (Wang 1999, Guo and

Hu 2003, Wen 2006). What we see in today’s classroom, even when the

task is the teaching of Chinese traditions, has become a part of modernity

enterprise bringing interpretation to representation, knowing to the

enclosed relation of signifier and signified.

The transcripts that follow come from a demonstration lesson given

by one of the best middle-school teachers in China. It is a language-arts

lesson that accommodates the learning of Chinese classics. The text, writ-

ten in Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), is about a child genius having his

talents wasted in the absence of an appropriate education. The composi-

tion of the text itself was not influenced by any Western discourse.

In the classroom excerpts the teacher encourages students to explore

the meaning of the text. I think this is a good lesson which fosters collab-

orative learning and creative discussion. Nevertheless my interest is not in

the ‘quality’ of lesson, but in the discourse, the grammatical totality by

which the whole mass of contemporary Chinese literacy texts are pro-

duced: ‘For the word to be able to say what it says, it must belong to a

grammatical totality which, in relation to the word, is primary, fundamen-

tal, and determining’ (Foucault 2002: 306). I ask what kind of pedagogic

discourse is deployed and what meanings are decoded in a lesson which is

presumably to teach Chinese classics.

。

Teacher

: Wang Anshi, known as one of the eight e

lites of the Tang and

Song literary traditions, was a politician, philosopher, and litterateur of his

time. … This essay in our textbook is written by him to tell a story which

sets out his attitudes, feelings, or particular opinion. Now let’s look into this

essay.

[

[The students read the text loudly in chorus.]

师

Teacher

: Do you have any difficulty in reading this on your own? Or does

anything sound new to you which you would like to share with the class to

initiate some discussion?

生

Student

: The problem with our group comes from the sentence,

shao shao

bin ke

[guest]

qi fu

[father], and we don’t understand why the noun

bin ke

[guest] is translated as

dang bin ke dui dai

[treat … like a guest].

Teacher

[applauding]: Very good! A good student is the one who can ‘return

three corners out of one’ [i.e. draw inferences from one instance] and accu-

mulate learned knowledge to deal with unknown knowledge, which, accord-

ing to Confucius, can be described as …?

。

Students

: [Answering in chorus] He who by reanimating the Old can gain

knowledge of the New is fit to be a teacher.

师

。

Teacher

: Great, this defines the proper path to reach the essence of knowl-

edge and by doing so we truly transform the knowledge into an ability of

our own. There are many other similar usages up for grabs in this essay.

Let’s see which group can find them in a correct and efficient way.

The dialogue is oriented to interpreting the text in terms of linguistic

knowledge and its representation. For Confucius interpretation operates

in the horizon of the lived world where something already understood

becomes unveiled in the manner of ‘

). Representation

establishes itself by a codified and normative system; instead of opening

up the world as transparent entities, representation ‘reproduces thought

in its exactitude’ (Foucault 2002: 86). Signs of concepts and their internal

coherences determine the intelligibility of the world.

Since China met the West, these signs of concepts gradually appeared

in Chinese pedagogic discourse, and eventually became a pedagogic inter-

pretive framework according to which the lived world, including Chinese

classics, is analysed, classified, ordered into consciousness, and related as

objects of the discourse framework. Thus, we see from the excerpt that

577

CHINESE PEDAGOGIC DISCOURSE

Last Completed Projects

topic title	academic level	Writer	delivered

Are you looking for a similar paper or any other quality academic essay? Then look no further. Our research paper writing service is what you require. Our team of experienced writers is on standby to deliver to you an original paper as per your specified instructions with zero plagiarism guaranteed. This is the perfect way you can prepare your own unique academic paper and score the grades you deserve.

Use the order calculator below and get started! Contact our live support team for any assistance or inquiry.

[order_calculator]