Zen and the Art of Grad School

The first paragraph of the syllabus for Lecturer Liao Cheng’s spring course at the Ed School begins with this sentence: “What we see is shaped by how we look, and rarely do we look with innocent eyes.” 

It’s intriguing — and exactly why Cheng, Ed.M.’12, Ph.D.’20, wanted to teach a class to educators focused on psychology (understanding how the mind works and why people react) and Zen philosophy (using introspection to know the nature of the mind). 

“As an educator, it’s important to be self-reflective and mindful of our assumptions about our students and about what education means and what learning looks like,” she says. “And that could be shaped by our own experiences as students or the information that we receive.” 

Unfortunately, self-reflection isn’t something educators are typically trained to do.

“There are two broad categories of knowledge: knowledge about the world and knowledge about the self,” she says. “And there are two broad categories of skills: skills to transform the world and skills to transform the self. I feel that in education, both K–12 and in higher ed, there’s a lot of training for getting knowledge and skills about the world, but very little education about how to understand and improve ourselves. There is a real need for that.” 

Cheng has taught the course, Becoming a Self-Reflective and Autonomous Educator: Lessons From Zen and Psychology, twice before, and leans heavily on case studies and stories to get students looking inward — a common element of Zen, she says. 

For example, one case study looks at the interaction between a white teacher and a Latino student as a way to recognize assumptions brought into the classroom. “The student is often late to class, and the teacher assumes, without communicating with the student, that the student is lazy and doesn’t care about school — that’s why the student is always late,” Cheng says, describing the case study. “But the teacher doesn’t know that the student comes from a low-income family and the parents work the night shift, leaving the student to do a lot of housework every night. The student really cares about school and wants to succeed but has this obstacle in her life. That’s an example of how important it is for us to uncover our own assumptions.” 

Asked what she hopes her students take away from the course, she says, first and foremost, “I want them to realize the importance of paying attention to our inner world because I think our psychological world is in our blind spot. It’s very easy to pay attention to things that are happening outside in the external world.” 

One reason she specifically chose Zen philosophy, she says, “is because the pedagogy used in Zen is very radical from today’s perspective. There’s no authority, no following a certain practice or treating teachers as authorities. Any authority is torn down because the goal is about self-actualization.” 

Teaching with this kind of approach, she says, has really allowed her students to get to know who they are, “and no one else can stand in the way of that.”