ABSTRACT
Zhang sensitises different realties when she disentangles the complexity and multiplicity of the Chinese language education. This ontological thinking is inspired by STS scholar John Law's method assemblage, a less Euro-American ontology, which is inclusive towards the ontological difference. By building the partial connections between Chinese Daoist concepts and method assemblage, a hybrid ontology is created when differentiating multiple realities of Chinese language education. It provides a theoretical support for the “water-like” dialogical pedagogy in which teacher and students’ knowing, sort-of-knowing and not-knowing are swirling with each other, creating an “epistemological chaos” in the Chinese language classroom. Engaging cultural complexity and multiplicity in teaching, Zhang uses concepts of tian-di-ren (heaven, earth and humans) to categorise different relations that interweaving around each other, depicting an image of a globalised Chinese language teaching. Since method assemblage and its combination with Daoist concepts are relatively new and rare in social inquiry, Zhang uses an autoethnographic story If only chá/tea was so simple to exemplify the important ontological concepts and terms that she will use throughout the book.
