China, a hybrid assemblage: symbol, metaphor, and identity in a Mandarin language program

Against the backdrop of Australia in the Asian century (White Paper, 2012), the active promotion of a Chinese language and culture program at a Melbourne suburban public primary school provides me with a platform to recognise the complexity, fluidity and heterogeneity along the processes associated with implementing this program. As a frontline language teacher and early career social researcher, my lived professional teaching and researching experiences within this newly launched, experimental program intertwine with my personal self-reinvention in pursuing a life of my own (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Bauman, 1998). These personal, professional and academic encounters as a single, female, immigrant, ethnic Han, Chinese language teacher, early career researcher, and "the researched", interweave multiple, complex, elusive, and heterogeneous realities, that together produce various "emotional costs of globalisation" (Elliott & Lemert, 2009). The thesis does not have a primary focus on the teaching, learning practices, and outcomes of the curriculum. Instead, it examines the cultural practices, processes and small "p" politics that shape the design, development and delivery of this language program. In order to disentangle and understand these complex and heterogeneous realties, and the sociocultural meanings embedded in this program, I employ John Law's (2004) concept of "method assemblage" - an alternative and less Euro-American ontology - as my research epistemology. In partially connecting the concept of method assemblage with Chinese Daoist concepts, the main body of this autoethnographic thesis is structured through tian-di-ren (heaven, earth, human). I use tian (Heaven) to refer to the general impact of globalisation on Australian students and teachers' perceptions of China; di (Earth) to signify the school organisational practices, especially my professional teaching implementation of "bringing China into classrooms"; and ren to capture my embodiment of China as a Chinese language teacher. From this perspective, the "knowing, sort-of-knowing and not-knowing" of "what is China" by Australian students, teachers and other stakeholders, means that China in the Australian context is no longer a stable, fixed, single, rigid and definite country or sovereign entity. Rather, China has been destabilised, de/reconstructed and assembled metaphorically and symbolically as a hybrid assemblage that is fluid, multiple, complex, unstable, indefinite and heterogeneous. This eight-year, longitudinal, autoethnographic research process, and the relational, generative and ramifying forces of sociocultural and educational investigation have, like "lines of flight" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988), produced a number of research findings, including: the concept of "China as method" to rethink Australian identity, multiculturalism, reconciliation of First Nations, and second language education in an English-spoken society; the knowledge flow from China (Daoist concepts) sociologically and epistemologically to western sociological research; the potential employment of method assemblage and autoethnography in contemporary educational research; and a model of knowledge flow that identifies the teacher-student knowledge exchange in today's multicultural, globalising classrooms. Finally, the research examines the outcomes and consequences of the emergence of a more individualistic identity - as a single, female, immigrant, ethnic Han, Chinese language teacher, and early career researcher - in this fluid and precarious globalised world.