Weili Zhao

• PhD
• Professor at Hangzhou Normal University

Beginnings of a sort: beginnings and/as ongoings For feminists, working in/with the ‘posts’ is, always has been, and must be, a collective and collaborative endeavour. Increasingly, post-inquiry involves taking seriously multiplicities of humans, nonhumans, more-than-and-other-than-humans, multispecies and naturecul�ture entities, including viral,...

As animprint and reinvigoration of Confucian culture, China foregrounds its 21st-century state-run education as to make national(istic) citizens, reinvoking lideshuren (establishing personhood by cultivating moral excellence) as its signature discourse beyond Western frameworks. Drawing upon Foucault’s thinking, this article untangles China’s effor...

Decolonial studies, initiated by Southern scholars, scrutinize the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being as a constitutive condition of Western modernity, and explicate otherwise suppressed non-Western onto-epistemes. This paper examines Chinese academia's ‘building Chinese education’ as a decolonial, ‘self-awakening’, effort against the Euro-...

n this paper, I revisit a spontaneous laughter event in a college classroom in China to decolonize in three steps my/our otherwise naturalized modernity/coloniality assumptions about teaching/ teachers, learning/learners, gender, objects, and classroom space toward a Daoist affective ecological imaginary. First, I invoke postcritical pedagogy...

Purpose This article takes a postfoundational lens to reflect upon my ethnographic (re)searching experience in a Hong Kong high school biology classroom to expose ignorant theoretical–methodological assumptions of researchers and teachers on critical thinking for new realizations. Design/Approach/Methods Using an encountered embodied thinking mome...

Western modernity, as a globalized episteme, has largely colonised curriculum in theory and praxis worldwide. As a decolonial gesture against Western modernity, this paper examines China’s efforts post-1980s to rehumanise the school curriculum, efforts at the crossroads between nationalism and globalism. Specifically, it focuses on one non-official...

This book advances new ways of thinking about emergence and impact of Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT).Written by authors based in Algeria, Brazil, Chile, China, Estonia, South Korea, Spain and the USA, the chapters examine the opportunities and challenges paved by ICT in the struggle to open up and decolonize curriculum policies. The contributors...

This paper investigates the making and governing of Hong Kong teachers along and beyond a Foucauldian governmentality lens, untangling how the three technologies along neoliberalism, Confucian thesis, and affective dimensions play with and against one another in conducting the conduct of teachers. Through a discourse analysis of 27 local teachers’...

This chapter untangles the implication of moder�nity, epistemological colonialism, and translation in imperial-modern China’s (re)making of “science/scientific knowledge” through encoun�tering Western epistemes-discourses. We argue that epistemological struggle, confrontation, and negotiation are always constitutive of, rather than merely deriva...

This chapter reviews my research on the cultural-historical-philosophical foundations of China's curriculum and its implications for international curriculum in four steps. First is an introduction of my entry into the field of curriculum and globalization. Second, it summarizes my research on language as (de)colonial gesture in untangling transnat...

Intro to edited book: W. Zhao, T S. Popkewitz & T. Autio, eds

This paper examines translation as a political-textual-epistemological battlefield of colonialism-coloniality and counter wise, which construes and constructs day-to-day communications/confrontations between people both within and across empires. It examines the Tongwen Guan 1867 debate on calling on prospective Confucian scholars to learn Western...

With the end of the Cold War in 1989, a view of current and future world affairs that assumed harmony, uniformity, and stability took hold. The magic word used to conceptualize this view was “globalization.” “Globalization” was the epitome of the supposed analytical description of world development after 1989, which, in the meantime, called for an...

Globalization and localization never occur simply as one against the other along a power vs. resistance dynamic. Instead, they are contested and entangled in a multi-layered power relation wherein varying mechanisms, say, nationalism, globalism, culture, ideology, epistemology, social control, and state governance, are interpellated in play with an...

Over the past 10 years and from a Heideggerian-Foucauldian language-discourse perspective, I have been problematizing both the modernization of the Chinese language and the popularization of West-centric discourses in China as an imprint of modernity-coloniality. That is, modernity-coloniality is essentially a form of linguistic-epistemic genocide....

This book offers a geographically unique cultural comparative lens to examine the issue of transnational curriculum knowledge (re)production. Prompted by the ongoing competency-based curriculum reforms on a global scale, this book examines where global frameworks like the OECD’s core competency definitions are rooted and how they are borrowed, resi...

Study is recently re-invoked as an alternative educational formation to disrupt the learning trap and trope. This paper calibrates study and learning as two hermeneutic principles and correlates them with seeing, hearing, and observing as three onto-epistemic modes that respectively underpin Greco-Christian, Rabbinic, and ancient Chinese exegetical...

Epistemicide happens when globalizing West-centric discourses and practices dominate non-Western societies, suppressing and killing the latter’s cultural systems of knowledge production. Though scholars worldwide are starting to recognize this fact, China is still forcefully transplanting Western policies and practices in the name of “going global,...

As an imprint of Confucian culture, China's education intersects state governance in making and governing educational subjects as 'talent', an official translation of the Chinese term 'rencai' (literally, human-talent). Whereas the English word 'talent' itself denotes '[people with] natural aptitude or skill', 'talent' is currently mobilized in Chi...

As a linguistic signifier, “wind” is commonly defined as “air in movement.” However, this chapter suspends such a conceptual mode of signification and re-treats “wind” as a cultural, philosophical, and even educational style of reasoning. For example, China’s schooling bespeaks a prevalent discourse of “school wind, teaching wind, and learning wind...

This chapter will unfold in three steps. First, we explicate the theoretical force of Huebner’s notion of “response-ability” by placing it into a dialogue with the Chinese Yijing onto-cosmological observation and the Gurdjieffian three centers of intelligence thought as onto-epistemological grounding for today’s contemplative (re)-turn in education...

China’s 2017 ‘classroom revolution’ call intends to transform current teacher-centered pedagogies with brand-new philosophies and technologies. As a new entry point for classroom research, I argue to problematize a naturalized (mis)belief – teacher-centered (Confucian) didactic pedagogies are not conducive to critical thinking cultivation – that ha...

Within educational philosophy and theory, there has been an international re-turn to envision study as an alternative formation to disrupt the defining learning logic. As an enrichment, this paper articulates “Daoist onto-un-learning” as an Eastern form of study, drawing upon Roger Ames’s (Confucian role ethics: a vocabulary, Chinese University Pre...

The Chinese tianrenheyi thesis bespeaks a correlative cosmology irreducible to the Western metaphysics. This article historicizes tianrenheyi for new implications to help rethink the given concepts of ‘person/thing,’ ‘environment/nature,’ and ‘relationality’ in contemporary ethical and environmental education in three steps. First, it turns to Yu Y...

With a focus on the role of discourse and language in education, this book examines China’s educational reform from an original perspective that avoids mapping on Westernized educational sensibilities to a Chinese environment. Zhao untangles the tradition-modernity division expressed in China’s educational language about the body and teacher-studen...

Within educational philosophy and theory there has recently been a re-turn to the concept and practices of studying as an alternative or oppositional educational logic to push back against learning as the predominant mode of educational engagement. While promising, we believe that this research on studying has been limited in a few ways. First, whi...

This paper examines China's civic education discourses from a historical and cross-cultural perspective. It unpacks observation as a political-cultural-spatial pedagogy, underpinning Confucius' educational envisioning, Mao's domination in the Cultural Revolution Movement, and Xi's China/ese Dream propaganda. Drawing upon Foucault's provocation of t...

It’s not uncommon for people to make reference to atmospheres, including in relationship with educational spaces. In this article, we investigate educational atmospheres by turning to Western and Chinese literature on the air and wind. We pursue this task in three phases. First, we examine the Western literature to see the possible strings of thoug...

In international educational studies, cultural context matters and demands increased attention by educational researchers worldwide. Along with a globalized discourse, how to map historical–cultural understandings of teaching and learning without getting bogged down in modern Westernized epistemology has become a paradigmatic dilemma. This paper ar...

In 2001, China’s moral education curriculum reform called for a returning to life as a radical shift from its previous empty sermonic pedagogy, hoping to cultivate its twenty-first century children into ethical humans. Accordingly, a notion of ‘human ecology’ appeared in the post-2001 textbook design, which became ‘co-being with’ in the latest 2016...

Contemporary Chinese teachers are being transformed into morally divided subjects by institutional teacher-evaluation governance. They claim such institutional governance can "devour" their basic professional ethics of "teaching with liangxin", a reinvoked Confucian ethical notion. Then, how does liangxin work as a cultural governing thesis in hist...

Cross–cultural and international comparative research embodies a conundrum the very analytics of comparativeness in the social and education science research, with variations in their themes, draw from particular European and North American Enlightenments’ notions of reason and rationality that provide their epistemological “foundations”1

Reinstating Bodily Kneeling-Bowing Rites (???) Sets Education in Pain and Shame in Modern China? Voluntary Servitude as a New Form of Governing Since 1997, students have been called upon to kneel-bow to their teachers/parents as an expression of gratitude. The analysis of the controversy in the wake of these rituals highlights the assembling or dis...

Agamben’s potentiality, and Chinese dao, entail experiencing movement on being. This article presents our experiments with these movements in the context of pedagogy, putting at stake our mode of existence in thinking. We examine Agamben’s potentiality as an aporetic experience in pedagogy. We find echoes of dao movement in a controversial pedagogi...