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Pedagogy of Life takes its readers through the echoing stories of the half-century, historical Cultural Revolution of China to the literate lifeworld today. Rosa Hong Chen offers a gripping array of personal and kindred stories woven into the power of words and empathy of art through the volutes of writing and dancing for life, expressing genera of warm melancholy, weighty sensations, compulsive sobs, and refrained elation. It is for the existential history of individual lives and communal sharing that life creates a pedagogical condition of possible experiences. Life itself forms a historical and social path of human growth and maturation. In a philosophical and educational autoethnographical inquiry, the author examines the nature of literacy for those marginalized and oppressed; Chen explores how one's name and the ways in which that name is used affect a person's self-knowing and knowing of the world. This book exemplifies the idea that individuals' autobiographical stories are importantly connected to wider cultural, political, and social meaning and understanding. Pedagogy of Life echoes readers' musings, affects, relations, imagination, choice, learning, teaching, and much more, because we, each and all, have our own names, ways of uttering, writing, and dancing, and, ultimately, our own ways of living, knowing, and becoming.
List of contents
Note on the Cover Image -Figures - Preface and Acknowledgments - An Echo of Silence - Prologue - Sentiment, Pathway, and Pedagogy - Life Stories, Currere, and Aspirations - Part I: In a Place, at a Time, with Kinship - Ebb and Flow: Relation of Incidents - Ties of Life and Death: Our Names and Naming - Names and Literacy: A Braiding of Two Strands - Part II: Life Sentiment and Literate Assimilation - The Weight of Names and Words - The Bearing of the Named - Connection and the Narrow Escape - Social Deprivation and Action - Part III: Pedagogy of Life - A Pedagogy of Necessity - A Pedagogy of Contingency - Postscript - Post-postscript - Index.
About the author
Rosa Hong Chen is a visiting scholar at Teachers College of Columbia University. She has studied in China, the United States, and Canada in the disciplines of educational philosophy, curriculum studies, linguistics, literature, literacy education, and performing arts. She is an accomplished artist, published poet, and philosopher of education.
Report
"Rosa Hong Chen speaks from her memories of childhood suffering during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Many in China still try to bury their knowledge of that trauma. Chen argues that remembering is itself an action of resistance, generating 'a powerful language of survival.' Education should help us to understand that language and to heed her warning that 'a human heart shall die away if it loses the power of remembering.'" Paul Delany, Emeritus Professor of English, Simon Fraser University
