Zhuangzi and the phenomenology of expertise: Implications for educators

This chapter is an exploration of Zhuangzi’s illustration of wu wei in order to explore Helen King’s work on expertise in higher education. It gives a close reading of a short ‘knack’ passage about Butcher Ding in order to explore how a text from the Warring States period of Chinese history can inform the contemporary discussion about expertise, specifically as embodied in teaching in higher education. In this case, the activity is revisiting an ancient text from an intellectual tradition not usually considered in Western thinking about learning and teaching to see how we might increase the depth and breadth of our toolkit in approaching staff development as curators of pedagogical environments; in short, what expertise looks like and feels like in a specific local and historical model in order to encourage the exploration of pedagogical expertise across cultures and contexts.