Request for ideas: Context: I teach Western high school school (for non-Americans, that means 16-18-year-olds) at a college prep school in Singapore. Students are sharp, and very interested in Chinese philosophy from their slight exposure to it in my History of China course. So I was approved to teach a Chinese literature course to extend that exposure. After a couple of trial semesters reading selections from Analects, Mengzi, Xunzi, DDJ, Zhuangzi, and some popularizations (e.g., Ivanhoe’s Confucian Reflections), I’m still not satisfied. A couple of years ago, after several years of trying to get students to “turn on” to these philosophies via readings of those texts, seminars and blogging about them, on and on, it hit me that maybe Chinese philosophies can’t be “learned” by reading them–because, after all, they’re all based on praxis. So for the past couple of semesters I experimented with a “Self-Cultivation Project” in which students aimed to apply the Confucian and Daoist insights in their daily lives for three weeks. That was interesting, but: it still relied on them getting these insights through reading the Classics. I’m thinking now that there’s one more trick I could try to bring this philosophy home to them more effectively: using fiction and poetry. What scenes from Chinese novels, what poems, what stories (Sima Qian? Zuo Zhuan? Three Kingdoms? Water Margins? on and on) might be used to exemplify, concretely, the central insights of the Confucian and Daoist Dao? What scenes from films? I’m asking any interested readers to play along with a simple “[Scene X] in [text Y] would be cool to teach [philosophical concept Z]” response. An example I have used with some success: The “Zhuge Liang gets 10,000 arrows” scene from the movie, “Red Cliff” exemplifies Sunzi’s Daoist influences in the Art of War. (And I know that scene’s not in the original, but since it works, don’t care. See it here: https://youtube/watch?v=Sp8JDsOAJOw ) Hoping some of you will play along, and links or copy/pastes of any resources would be icing on the cake.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 15:27:28 +0000
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