Text / Zhong Zhou
Abstract:Education is an art, not just a skill or method of knowledge transfer, it realizes the regeneration and rebirth of "wisdom" and "beauty". Conversational pedagogy is a common Chinese and foreign educational tradition, which aims to cultivate talents who can think critically and know themselves through dialogue and interaction between teachers and students. This article explores the artistic nature of teaching and its role in educational conversations, showing how teaching can transcend traditional definitions and become an art that stimulates creativity, critical thinking, and aesthetics. By comparing the cases of educational dialogue in the Eastern and Western classics, this paper examines how educational dialogue in different cultural contexts presents diverse artistic characteristics, especially the fascinating spiritual exploration of teachers and students in the pedagogical dialogue between finding the "path" and inquiring about the "context". This paper also analyzes the potential impact of artificial intelligence in the era of digital intelligence and the transformation of traditional conversational teaching. This paper advocates for understanding and appreciating the richness, spontaneity, and unpredictability of human dialogue, and values the importance of these conversational arts for teaching and learning according to their aptitude. This paper advocates finding a balance between integrity and innovation in educational culture, so as to achieve the continuous revival and renewal of education as an art.
Keywords: education, art, travel, Q&A, conversational teaching, artificial intelligence
Education is an "art", but it is not limited to the Academy of Fine Arts. Through many forms of dialogue and interaction, education is able to stimulate creativity, criticality, and aesthetics. Education is first and foremost based on the premise of cultural inheritance, and it is neither a creation out of nothing divorced from reality, nor is it limited to the dramatic originality of the giants of thought. Education promotes the regeneration and rebirth of "wisdom" and "beauty" in the balance between inheritance and innovation.
From the tour: teaching by example and teaching by practice are mutually beneficial
Confucius regarded the art of learning by man as one, "aspiring to the Tao, according to virtue, relying on benevolence, and playing in art". Mei Yiqi advocated the cultivation of "knowledge, affection, and ambition" with "travel", and especially the "self-evident" "teaching by example": "The ancients and students learned from teachers, which is called traveling...... The school is like water, the teachers and students are like fish, and their actions are like swimming. The big fish leads, and the small fish follows, and it is from the swim also. From the long time of travel, the effect of its contamination and observation is not to be sought, not to become. ”〔1〕
There is no shortage of similar forms of conversational learning in China and abroad, which are more like "education" than today's "(professional) art learning". When referring to concepts such as "art" and "beauty", they have nothing to do with forms and patterns, but the context and facts carried and invented by these concepts, and seek positive and effective interaction between the cognitive subject and the cognitive object, and between the cognitive subject and the cognitive subject.
The most famous example of this is the Analects of Confucius[2], which records a dialogue in which Confucius encouraged his students to establish clear aspirations in life. Confucius first eliminated the restraints of the four disciples with a humble attitude, and then patiently listened and guided them to speak freely, without interrupting or judging the ideas of the disciples in person. In the end, what he praised was not a utilitarian realistic goal, but an ideal picture of "bathing in Yi, dancing in the wind, and returning home", the end point of the dialogue was the landscape and landscape, and the focus of education was still "Hua", which faintly foreshadowed the overall trend of Chinese art in the next two thousand years.
Art as an educational intermediary in the context of education - here we are not limited to "learning art (creative techniques and tools)" that are mainly concerned with the students of art academies today, but "learning (through) art". In the scriptures, the dialogue that is both educational, sacred, and aesthetic is the discussion between the Buddha and his disciple Ananda in the Lengyan Sutra [3]. The Buddha patiently inspired Ananda by asking questions: The mind is in the body, the mind is outside the body, the mind is at the root of the eye, the mind is in the darkness, the mind is between the inner and outer light and dark, the mind is in the middle, and the mind is in nothingness? "Zheng" is a process of exploration and discovery, and "heart" refers to the nature of the mind and the inner nature. These continuous questions and answers lead Ananda to see through the layers of appearances that he sees and hears in his daily life, recognizing the limitations of self-knowledge and the formlessness and omnipresence of the mind.
Through art, the practitioner lets go of inherent concepts, logic, language, reason, and self, and obtains a "spur-and-feel" insight or insight in personal direct experience—not that similar art requires thought, but that thought is art. Zen Buddhism's "edge" is like the "four drinks" method of the Rinzai Zen master, "sometimes a drink is like the sword of King Kong, sometimes a drink is like a golden haired master, sometimes a drink is like a probe rod shadow grass, and sometimes a drink is not used for a drink." [4] Taking "words" as the right or "drinking" as the right, both of them take the "environment" as the "opportunity", grasp the opportunity between flashes, suddenly open up, and the words and actions that reveal the true feelings are naturally concise and clear, rather than thoughtful and deliberate. This kind of artistic dialogue is characterized by the expression of the opportunity of the Reason, which is full of stories and interactions, and takes Zen painting as an opportunity to help the growth of ink painting, a unique art style in China.
[Southern Song Dynasty] Muxi, Six Persimmons, ink on paper, Collection of Ryuko-in Temple, Daitokuji Temple, Kyoto, Japan
Inquiry: Spiritual Exploration of Speculation and Co-creation
There are also many educational dialogues in Western classics, which also show the image of teachers who are good at asking questions and answering, but the learning model of Western culture seems to focus more on criticism than immersion in the imagery created by teachers and students, leading people to different "wins". The Socratic method is a classic of "critical thinking", which is intended to cultivate thinking about thinking, that is, to analyze and evaluate thinking itself to improve thinking. [5] In The Ideal Republic, Socrates and his students engage in a wonderful debate about "justice." [6] Through concise and accurate descriptions, the teacher creates a series of life scenes from simple to complex, inspiring students to "enter" and sometimes "exit" (such as medicine, horsemanship, cooking, business, shipbuilding, performance, etc.) in imaginary scenarios, to feel and experience in their shoes, and to "jump out" to make analogies, reasoning, and judgments from onlookers.
In both Chinese and Western cultures, critical thinking is a common pursuit, with the goal of keeping thoughts and thoughts in a clear awareness, and "self-reflection" due to "self-awareness". However, in the Socratic dialogue of art, seeking common ground is better than seeking differences, and he often brings a wonderful world of thought, but it is difficult to make people relax, and they have to reflexively examine themselves, and the Zen "edge" is transformed between "image" and "detachment", while the prisoner of Socrates is concerned with understanding and breaking through the "dilemma". In the subsequent development of Western art, we cannot but find the ideological roots and external characteristics of this different cultural form in the baroque visual effects, the dramatic nature of the expressionist compositions, the tension of theological themes, etc., and the dialogue aimed at creating conflict, bringing about division, and then unexpectedly reconciling – the main characteristics of Western modern art in the 20th century.
In the cave dialogue in the Imaginary Republic[7], you can see all the above roots and characteristics, as if later works of art were destined to be illustrations of this idea, rather than the other way around, allowing us to find in the classical works of art the annotations of today's works of art. The teacher first led the students to look at the panorama of the cave from afar, and then guided the students to walk down the tunnel and approach the prisoner who was tied to the stone wall, and guided the students to observe the prisoner's posture and surrounding environment, and to experience the seeing, smelling, feeling, and thinking of the kidnapper, and then took the students to focus on a prisoner who was suddenly untied, and followed him to get up, look around, watch the fire, climb the slope, get out of the hole, look at the pool shadow, look at the stars and the moon, Looking at the sun, he felt that he returned to the cave because he missed his fellow prisoners, but was attacked and reprimanded by his fellow prisoners. This cave expedition is all imaginary, and the teacher uses vivid and detailed descriptions for students to observe and experience the prisoner's experiences and feelings inside and outside the cave. Sometimes the teacher just stops and waits for the student to respond, and sometimes asks the student directly, "Is that so?" "Isn't it?" "Don't you think that's going to happen?" "You don't think...... The student responds to every pause and question from the teacher in concise language, such as "yes", "of course", "undoubtedly", "of course not", "very likely", "it must be so", "it will be true", "it must be so", etc. The students followed the teacher's "footsteps" and tried to understand the prisoners and the inside and outside of the cave that the teacher had given him to see.
Zhong Zhou reads "Ideal Country" in the class "The Mystery of Teaching" Drawing/Qin Yexuan, Ph.D. student, Department of Painting, Academy of Fine Arts, Tsinghua University, September 26, 2021 at Tsinghua University
"Witty" intelligence: the similarity of language and arithmetic skills
Today, with the development of artificial intelligence, a new generation of conversational teaching based on human-computer interaction is being developed. The "omnipotent teacher" erases the boundaries between artistic teaching and ordinary teaching. AI image generation software such as Midjourney is actually a "linguist" (based on a large language model) at its core, but it can produce the desired image. There seems to be no half-step from language to art (in fact, art), and the step of "translation" no longer seems necessary.
Can ChatGPT and similar AI technologies enable more personalized, responsive, collaborative, and interactive learning that can contribute to the continuation of human culture? AI may have the potential to revive and enhance traditional conversational pedagogy by simulating similar "artistic conversations." For example, ChatGPT can play the role of a teacher, student, or other conversation, stimulating thinking by providing a wealth of information, enlightening questions, and diverse perspectives, and engaging in Q&A, discussions, suggestions, evaluations, designs, and other communications with learners to help learners become more active in learning. ChatGPT's "personality" traits, such as kindness, patience, erudition, responsiveness, fluency and standardization, are beneficial to stimulate learners' curiosity and motivation for continuous learning – but they are not enough to be an "artist" who travels with learners, and we need to see a clear ideological rift between teaching and receiving.
Overall, like the best of art, human dialogue is rich, spontaneous, unpredictable, and contextual and socially emotionally embedded, which are key to facilitating deep learning. In contrast, although ChatGPT is able to adjust the content of the conversation according to the learning style, interests, and abilities of the interlocutor to a certain extent, ChatGPT's principle of "answering all questions" may be too direct and single, and it is difficult to teach students according to their aptitude. In the past, teachers could choose to avoid answering students' questions to inspire them to think independently, or to ask new questions or direct rhetorical questions, inviting students to "travel" with their thoughts. Students may have to rack their brains to think for themselves when a teacher asks a question, but now they may be eager to ask ChatGPT and get back to where they are before they even leave the house. After all, whether it is interpersonal interaction or human-computer interaction, the "art" of dialogue needs to be cultivated more than the "technology" of dialogue, and the convenience of human-computer dialogue may forever interrupt the possibility of this "performance art".
Together: The Art of Inheritance and Innovation
From the perspective of modern psychology, in real conversational situations, the teaching of art dialogue conforms to the characteristics of constructivism and social learning. As Manabu Sato advocated, the essence of learning is cooperative, and the teacher's responsibility is to create opportunities for "cooperative learning" between teachers and students and between students, so as to realize the "encounter and dialogue" between individuals and objects (teaching materials), with others (partners and teachers) and with themselves, and to promote individuals to "generate and carve their own thoughts" in the collision with diverse ideas, "start from the known world and explore the journey of the unknown world, and transcend the existing experience and ability to form new experience and ability". [8] As Vygotsky advocated, the teacher's responsibility is to build scaffolding for students to deepen their understanding in learning interactions [9], and Q&A scaffolds can include guidance, demonstration, prompts, explanations, etc., and as learners progress, the scaffolding provided by teachers gradually decreases until they are not needed at all. In this way, learners will be able to "learn and learn from their teachers...... Even though they are separated from the teacher and the auxiliary, they do not rebel" [10].
In this way, the human mind will truly get out of what Plato called the "prisoner's dilemma", and through artistic dialogue, teachers and students will jointly draw a map of knowledge and embark on a creative, exploratory, and cooperative learning journey. Whether traveling to a Chinese landscape or exploring in a rock cave, teachers and students use research questions as a signpost and critical thinking as a navigational tool to traverse the complex terrain of knowledge, ideas, and information, gain insight into the core features of the knowledge landscape (or consensus "landmarks"), explore the edge or frontier, and identify unanswered questions, which also challenge existing perceptions that are easy to be trapped by foresight.
The journey of knowledge is full of complex concepts, different perspectives, ambiguities and misunderstandings, and the interlocutors respond flexibly in open dialogues, discussions, and debates, and in the coordinated efforts of adapting to the situation and local conditions—the key is uncertainty and a changing endpoint.
Just as travel is valuable in its own right, the experiences shared by teachers and students are as valuable as the final destination. In this sense, dialogic teaching truly realizes the continuous transmission of learning objectives, and the continuation of ideas and culture.
Exegesis:
[1] Liu Shuli and Huang Yanfu, eds., Selected Writings of Mei Yiqi's Educational Treatises, People's Education Publishing House, 1993, pp. 99-109.
[2] Yang Bojun, Translation of the Analects, Zhonghua Book Company, 2006, pp. 136-137.
[3] Lai Yonghai, The Thirteen Classics of Buddhism: The Lengyan Sutra, Zhonghua Book Company, 2001, pp. 11-23.
[4] [Tang] Hui Ran Ji, Yang Zengwen ed., Linji Lu, Zhongzhou Ancient Books Publishing House, 2010 edition, p. 36.
〔5〕Richard Paul and Linda Elder, Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge
of Your Learning, 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2014, p. 1.
[6] [Ancient Greek] Plato, translated by Guo Binhe and Zhang Zhuming, The Ideal Country, The Commercial Press, 1986, pp. 17-26.
[7] Ibid., pp. 272-281.
[8] [Japanese] Sato Study, Zhong Qiquan, translated The Challenge of Schools: Creating a Learning Community, East China Normal University Press, 2010, p. 20.
〔9〕D. Wood, J. S. Bruner, & G. Ross, “The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving”, Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciplines, Vol.17, No.2, 1976, pp. 89-100.
[10] Wang Wenjin, "Translation of the Book of Rites", Zhonghua Book Company, 2017 edition, p. 463.
Zhong Zhou is an associate professor at the Institute of Education, Tsinghua University
(This article was originally published in Art Observation, Issue 3, 2024)