Abstract
This chapter reflects on my history of teaching in China and the USA to interrogate the pedagogical perspective of teaching as the giving of truth. My interconnected reading of Heidegger, Lao Tzu, and Dewey led me to a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks, a teaching philosophy to empower teachers to teach through non-teaching without implying a binary opposition between the two. Drawing on Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and his analysis of the nature of language, Lao Tzu’s Tao of inaction, and Dewey’s critique of traditional direct teaching, I see a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks as a “non-willing” (Heidegger in Discourse on thinking: A translation of Gelassenheit. Harper & Row, New York, p. 60, 1944–1945/1966), a refusal of the will to control.
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Notes
- 1.
Both top normal and military universities in China have first priorities to choose their undergraduate students unless students specify clearly on application forms that they do not want to attend either of these universities. Since those universities usually provide free tuitions and stable job offers, most high school graduates would not reject them.
- 2.
Compared with the notion of curriculum as a static running track, William Pinar (1975) understands curriculum in its Latin root of “currere” —the curriculum in the active and verb form. Madeline Grumet (1976) argues that currere seeks to know “the experience of the running of one particular runner, on one particular track, on one particular day, in one particular wind” (p. 36).
- 3.
Personal communication in the summer of 2007.
- 4.
I borrow the phrase of “teaching-as-telling” from Donna Trueit and Sarah Smitherman’s (2006) “Beyond Teaching-as-Telling: Occasioning Conversation” in which they quote Kimball Wiles’ questioning that “Is teaching for efficient learning directing and telling?”
- 5.
Sheehan says this lifelong research focus for Heidegger changes throughout his career—from the question of “the meaning of Being” to “the truth of Being” and then “the place of Being” (p. vii, emphasis original).
- 6.
This is a gift Heidegger dedicates to his father’s 80th birthday (2008, Letters to His Wife, p. 135).
- 7.
For more on the parallel between Heidegger’s thoughts and Taoism, see “Heidegger and Asian Thought” (1987) edited by Parkes.
- 8.
All sayings in the conversation boxes are direct quotations from the referenced sources; but no quotation mark is inserted to interrupt the flow in conversations. All quotations from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (500 B.C./2004) are translated by the author except for the ones referenced as translated by Mair (1990).
- 9.
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Yu, J. (2018). A Long, Unsettling Journey into a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks. In: The Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks. Spirituality, Religion, and Education. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01605-0_2
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