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

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

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
>   
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*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

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