Re-Imagining and Transforming the ‘Teacher’ in a More-Than-Human World: Encounters with Alternative Ways of Teaching and Learning

The notion of a teacher is an archaic, dynamic, and diverse concept that is embedded in and therefore revealed in the various complex and coexisting cultural and national contexts, ways of teaching and learning, and the entanglements with beings in multiple worlds. However, under the fundamental impacts of westernization, coloniality, and modernization in the Anthropocene, the concept of a teacher has been endowed with narrow colonial, human-centric, politicalized, as well as vocationalized and secularized connotations. It has been oversimplified to a profession, while other possible interpretations have been omitted and marginalized at the same time. My dissertation questions the implications of the gradual narrowing down of the concept over time and reexamines the concept of a teacher with the aim of ontologically broadening the scope of different connotations and embracing more diverse and inclusive forms as well as contexts of being a ‘teacher.’ In response, this dissertation traces the history, evolution, and cultural contexts of the notion of a teacher in ancient and modern China. It explores the concept of a teacher ontologically through multiple historical and theoretical frames, including decolonial theory in comparative education and several conceptual constructs in Taoism, Confucianism, and posthumanism. Guided by these frames, I introduce innovative (post)qualitative methodologies in data generation and collection, referring to collective re-membering activities, reanimating sense, and speculative fabulation experiences (Haraway, 2013) in terms of “teaching without words/actions,” “sitting and Wu,” and “Ge wu zhi zhi.” This dissertation is designed as a multi-scenario, multi-sense, and multispecies ethnography, and the fieldwork was conducted over three months of summertime in 2022 in a small town and a modern supercity in China. Using a diffractive analysis of memories, stories, and experiences with multiple participants, I attempt to broaden the concept of a teacher by presenting a variety of coexisting conceptualizations of the term and bringing into focus multiple ways of teaching, learning, and being a teacher.