Pedagogy of Life

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.

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.

“I recommend this book to anyone interested in literacy and how our lives shape our uses of literacy, as well as the many values it has. This book is a moving document of one person’s experience, a fascinating exploration of others’ experiences, and a scholarly account of the uses and values of literacy, all wrapped in a clear and coherent description of curriculum ideas and practices. The reader will gain an understanding of literacy’s uses in repressive social and political contexts and the ways these can be resisted and overcome. A heartfelt book about vivid events and ideas that will engage anyone interested in literacy and education.”
Kieran Egan, Emeritus Professor of Education, Simon Fraser University

“This creative, courageous work provides an absorbing account of educational life. Connecting East with West and blending the artistic with the philosophical, Rosa Hong Chen offers a fresh perspective on literacy and pedagogy. She pays particular attention to the importance of names and naming, showing how personal experiences can be shaped significantly by wider social events. This book opens up opportunities for readers to examine their own educational histories in a new light. It acknowledges the realities of suffering and despair while also signaling possibilities for hope, joy, and fulfilment in education.”
Peter Roberts, Professor of Education, University of Canterbury

“Rosa Hong Chen’s engaging «Pedagogy of Life» is a most thoughtful, poetic, and elegant philosophical and educational inquiry into traumatic memory and its endurance, history and its teachings, as well as into the future and its engulfed optimism. The autobiographical element powerfully illuminates and is illuminated by the subjective effects of those diverse temporalities of multiple modernities that were destructively obsessed with order. In this way, the theme of the subject-as-narrative takes in this book a refreshing and profoundly edifying turn toward new cultural, ethical, and political sensibilities.”
Marianna Papastephanou, Associate Professor, University of Cyprus

“Rosa Hong Chen’s groundbreaking contribution to literacy studies is lived reality, Chinese social history, and a poetics of memory brought together: naming and unnaming are always political.”
Allan Luke, Emeritus Professor of Education, Queensland University of Technology

“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