[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [xmca] Taking culture into account/Doing harm?



You stand accursed of Hegelianism, Mike! But strangely it seems to me that the writer is guilty of exactly the crimes usually attributed to the strawman Hegel by this discourse, that of "totalising." I don't doubt that the writer and the Indigenous writers he cites, have very important contributions to make to the problems of Indigenous education within the North American public education system, but he seems determined to totalise the methodological foundations of teacher training with the schooling of Indigenous children, in turn taken to be the totality of the life of Indigenous children, as if their family life did not exist, and as if their teachers did not bring a wider experience to their classroom work. The state's formal education is supposed, by the writer, to provide the entire upbringing of an Indigenous child, and to this end, their teachers have to be trained only in Indigenous theories of knowledge. Why can't the author be content with contributing to the field of Indigenous education, without trying to colonise it and expell all dissenting voices?

I think the problem highlights the contribution of Mariane Hedegaard and others who have make a special topic of the development of the personality in moving between different settings, and in your work, Mike, in aferschool setting and the location of schooling within community-wide collaborations. This is something utterly excluded by the colonising consciousness of the writer. How to work with the dualism of indigenous thought, and allow it to flourish despite participation in the bureaucratic institutions of formal schooling is a problem not unique to indigenous people, but of widespread interest. There has to be a little more tolerance for difference.

Andy

mike cole wrote:
The attached article has been hanging around my desktop for some time now.
It
is critical of people like myself who had sought ways in ways to assist
kids from
non-mainstream cultural communities when they encounter standard schooling.

At least one of the shoes provided seems to fit. Seems worth reflecting on
the critique
as a whole.

Anyone interested?

mike
------------------------------------------------------------------------

__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts

__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca