Toward Weaving a “Common Faith” in the Age of Climate Change

Purpose: This article aims to reimagine education—and our selves—within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone are interrelated. Design/Approach/Methods: The aim is achieved by pursuing two speculative thought experiments to connect and bring into conversation seemingly unrelated knowledge systems across space and time—European “paganism” and 13th-century Japanese Buddhism, as well as excerpts from indigenous, ecofeminist, and decolonial scholarship. These thought experiments are conducted through a series of “and if” questions around education and schooling. Findings: The article proposes to radically reimagine education in two ways. First, it invites readers to reconfigure education as a “connective tissue” between different worlds, bringing together rather than hierarchizing them. Second, it proposes to reframe education as an opportunity to learn how to anticipate and animate our ongoing entanglement with more-than-human worlds. Originality/Value: Using the concept of “metamorphosis” as an antidote to Western metaphysics, the article re-situates education within a wider set of possibilities in relation to the taken-for-granted ways of knowing and being, as well as the notions of space and time.

Section: And If … Learning Was a Becoming-with And Worlding-with Expementioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipating Other Worlds, Animating OurSelves: An Invitation to Comparative Education

Silova

2020

“…Thus, tianrenheyi , or the process of ren (人)—becoming one with the whole—is not just “within the bounds of immediate experience” but also consummately realized in the immediate experience. The unity is consummated as indicated in the notion of he —a harmonious integration among all correlative parts of a whole (Hall & Ames, 1987, p. 207), which characterizes tianrenheyi with aesthetics and religiousness (see Li, 2020).…”

Section: Understanding Experience Through Confuciusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Experience: An Alternative Understanding Inspired by Thinking Through Confucius

You

2020

Purpose: This article aims to provide an alternative understanding of learning experience in contrast to the dominant constructivist interpretation, and discuss its implication for pedagogy. Design/Approach/Methods: The aim is specifically achieved in the comparison between a review of how experience is understood in constructivism and its philosophical underpinnings and an exploration of how it can be understood alternatively inspired by Confucius’ educational thought and premised on his ontology. Drawing on this philosophical discussion, learning experience is reinterpreted. Findings: Beyond rationally translating experience into knowledge or gaining knowledge on the basis of experience, learning leads students to immediately and consistently experience dao in which tian and ren harmoniously unit. This experience renders aesthetics and religiousness in learning and moral transformation in life events. Originality/Value: By illustrating this ontological alternative of learning experience, this article is an attempt to fundamentally decolonize thinking about pedagogy.

“…Li (2020) continues to the praxis of reclaiming by focusing on the notion of “self” in her article “Toward Weaving a ‘Common Faith’ in the Age of Climate Change.” Noting the limitations of autonomous “self,” which has been consistently cultivated through modernist schooling, she proposes to reclaim a more relational notion of self to foster inclusive and extensive ethical commitment to the flourishing of all living beings in the universe. To pursue this philosophical inquiry, she explores the conceptual linkages among the Buddhist doctrine of no-self, the Confucian conception of the human–nature unity, and Deweyan notion of “common faith” in the context of climate change.…”

Section: Weaving Interdependency: Outline Of the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Drawing on Confucius thought, she elaborates learning experience as a process that leads students to approach dao (or "world-making") in which tian and ren harmoniously unite, thus evoking students' experience of aesthetic and religious existence in the continuous and harmonious encounters with all life forms. By illustrating this ontological alternative of learning experience, You's paper is an important attempt to decolonize our thinking about pedagogy beyond the Western horizon Li (2020). continues to the praxis of reclaiming by focusing on the notion of "self" in her article "Toward Weaving a 'Common Faith' in the Age of Climate Change."…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the Western Horizon in Educational Research: Toward a Deeper Dialogue About Our Interdependent Futures

Silova

Rappleye

You

2020

Despite awareness that simple dichotomies are cul-de-sacs for our research imagination, these academic standoffs continue to shape cultural space and research alike. Two of the most salient, if conflicting, currents in educational research gaining momentum over the past decade have been what Mignolo (2011) has usefully termed "Rewesternization" and "Dewesternization." The former indicates an array of projects, both theoretical and empirical, that seek to expand the scope and depth of the modern Western paradigm, in particular liberal truths and neoliberal orthodoxies. Salient examples include the Western-led expansion of international large-scale learning assessments, the apparent triumph of Knowledge Capital Theory, and the shaping of the Sustainable Development Goals toward liberal (and often neoliberal) policies long preferred in Anglo-American policy circles.The latter indicates a recognition and forceful reaction against these trends, refusing consumption by the resurgent Western (neo)liberal model through calls to return to "non-Western" ideas and pasts