Hi Kevin et al,
I broadly agree with Kevin, but I WOULD argue that more people have more
ways of knowing and more diverse social contexts in which knowing occurs
than in the past, and that there are consequences of that. Is not literacy
itself a gateway to participation in more multiple contexts than are
otthewise accessible?
Let me take an example from my own country. Urban Maori youth today move
daily between schools, which largely reproduce European - even 19th century
European - social relationships and understandings of what counts as
legitimate knowledge; iwi (i.e tribal) contexts with wholly different sets
of social relationships, attitudes to authority and ideas about what
constitutes legitimate knowledge; hip hop, rap and other appropriations from
an alien culture that has been transmitted almost exclusively via electronic
technologies (that is, boundary objects), and which aggressively discount
much of mainstream legitimated knowledge; and families that are often a
complex synthesis of all the foregoing. Many of them use the mechanical
technologies of aeroplanes (a boundary object) to settle in New York,
London, Sydney, where (as a recent excellent documentary (another boundary
object) about Maori in New York demonstrated) they synthsise their existing
sets of knowledges to enter the Julliard, the dockyards of New Jersey, the
offices of the United Nations, or a hospital in the Bronx, without in any
way rejecting or abandoning their essential essence as Maori. Then they have
children......
How widespread, and to what level of complexity, was such experience
accessible even a hundred years ago? In such a world educational
insititutions (and I include here the educational institutions of tribal
tohunga and kaumatua) have ceased to be dominant mediators of knowledge and
have to compete in a swirling marketplace of cognitive assonance and
dissonance. It is my view that they are struggling in such an environment by
trying to preserve the fundamentals of their historical practice.
I acknowledge that if Kevin is correct, and things have not changed as much
as I assert, then my thesis is flawed. But I have said why I do not share
that analysis. However I do agree with Kevin when he talks about the ways in
which educational institutions (as shaman before them) have engaged in
pracices of mystification
Phillip Capper,
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd. (WEB Research),
Level 13
114 The Terrace
(PO Box 2855)
WELLINGTON
New Zealand
Ph: +64 4 499 8140
Fx: +64 4 499 8395
Mb: +64 021 519 741
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Rocap [mailto:krocap@csulb.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, 9 July 2002 1:33 p.m.
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: FW: ISCRAT: Epistemic Activity
Dear Phillip et al,
By your description Phillip can you really say that there are many more
ways of knowing today than in the past? Well maybe a few technologically
specific ways more ;-)
But it seems to me that knowing and knowers were always already plural.
The real hinge point seems, imho, to be the issue you raise of
privileged ways of knowing.
But even there it seems to me historically that there may have been many
more acknowledged ways of knowing prior to the advent of schools than
may currently be widely acknowledged even today.
It seems that it is not knowledge that has been democratized, but
perhaps rather that the awareness of how democratic knowing has always
been is coming to the fore, after a period of school-induced
mystification, and primarily coming to the fore for those who have up
until now rather safely inhabited and believed in the realm of
schools/colleges/universities as the appropriate sites for knowledge.
So I would suggest that some of that awareness is likely fairly
class-bound, and that many folks who were never part of the privileged
academy did not tend to underestimate their own or others multiple ways
of knowing in the way academicians may have. Just a thought.
In Peace,
K.
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