Decolonizing Education
My classroom is a noisy place. It isn’t the kids who make most of the noise, though. No, the noise comes from the echoes of all the researchers, the rules & laws, newspaper articles and letters to the editor, parent comments, curriculum guides, “best practices” recommendations, my sense of the kids’ needs, and all of my own personal experiences as a student and teacher that continually inform me about what should be happening in my classroom. The noise is in my head, and it gets in the way of seeing clearly what needs to be done. I try to imagine what I would do if I could start from scratch, choose the schedule and the curriculum for each group, each year and work away from all the noise. What would that look like?
Colonialism
A discussion in the comments about fleadom on Borderland and Around the Corner has me still thinking about the problem of collateral damage in education, and the dilemma of working in a system that seems to be moving people in a direction I don’t want to go.
I liked Jason’s comment,
“We are guerillas of compassion. We win our battles every day, on the ground, in our classrooms. We change the world every day, right under their noses.”
It reminds me of Lao Tzu who said that
The invincible shield
Of caring
Is a weapon from the sky
Against being dead.
But still I am not satisfied. When I listen to myself in the classroom, I hear a voice that I don’t always recognize and don’t always like. I hate teaching my students what is “appropriate” for school. This is nothing new, but I’ve lately become more sensitized to some of the effects that I’m called upon to produce, indoctrinating children into ways of thinking that are both necessary and abhorrent: Necessary, to be successful in the academy, and abhorrent to my sense of the dignity owed a sovereign being. It’s a dilemma for me.
Teacher voices are discounted by people looking for “objective data” because our stories are considered anecdotal and subjective. From too many angles, teacher voices are irrelevant. Our authority to speak for ourselves has been undermined. We’ve been colonized by the State, by Business, by the Media, by Psychology, by Science, by the Academy.
In Linda Smith’s, “Decolonizing Methodologies,” she explained the research of indigenous peoples as having been a function of ideologies which resulted in “creeping policies” that affected every aspect of their lives. Smith, a Maori, argued for the right of indigenous peoples to represent themselves and tell their own stories. Smith said that in terms of colonialism
“Understanding is viewed as being akin to measuring. As the ways we try to understand the world are reduced to issues of measurement, the focus of understanding becomes more concerned with procedural problems….Research is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions.”
A belief in the data provided by standardized tests is one of the fundamental errors made by all who report on the condition of our educational programs. The tests may have internal validity, one of Smith’s “procedural problems,” but I challenge the construct validity of the tests. They do not measure what most people think of when we talk about math or reading. Reading and math are contrived for the tests so that they can be engineered to fit into discreet bubble-able units, but that’s not how we find reading and math in the world.
Sadly, public school teachers have come to believe that tests will tell us something about ourselves, and we’ve lost touch with who we are. We’ve been defined by a set of foregone conclusions. We’re more than our students’ test scores. I want to reclaim my Self, and learn to recognize what I truly know. Belief in the power of objectivity to guide our decision-making is a denial of our human need to live in spiritually fulfilling ways. What about other literacies? Poetry, art, music, and dance are all important sign systems that are ignored when we attempt to quantify knowledge as a measure of achievement. What would it mean if we measured aesthetics and ethics as well? The thought makes me cringe.
Anti-Colonialism
Smith recommended “researching back.” I think that is where teacher-researchers and teacher-bloggers may begin working to balance the power dynamic. We can talk about test scores, or we can talk about what we do. The internet gives us the platform from which to tell our own stories.
I echo Mark’s declaration of value for the voices of teachers. We need allies from other quarters too, as Mark admits. Critics and visionaries there will always be. I hear them, but I can only work on my Self, which is why I say that teaching is a spiritual path.
Stephen Downes returns with this declaration:
There will be no revolution, no rennaissance, until we change ourselves, until we ourselves become the embodiment of the caring and compassionate society we want to create. How hard that is!
It’s great to see Stephen back. It’s cool that Jason was moved to comment on Borderland. Janice (who introduced herself to me as one flea to another) caught the fleadom bug.
This blog post is an outline for a new personal agenda. It is inspired by an article by Gina Thésée, called A Tool of Massive Erosion: Scientific Knowledge in the Neo Colonial Enterprise. The article is found in Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance, by George J. Sefa Dei and Arlo Kempf, [www.sensepublishers.com/catalog/files/90-77874-18-6.pdf], or at Amazon.
Gina Thésée proposed a resistance model to colonial thought which I paraphrase and personalize:
- Refuse to accept as common sense, discourses that present strong symbolic content that may contribute to stereotypes and erroneous beliefs. I will be especially alert to the dangers of accepting claims based on scientific findings, because they carry great power in the modern world.
- Re-question the aims of education: To focus on ethical consequences of my activity, and not simply on quantitative measures of my effectiveness.
- Redefine knowledge: To better understand how I come to know and value. Aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics must all be rethought and revalued so that I begin to assign a proper role for Science and other ostensibly objective forms of knowledge which have come to dominate my vision of the world.
- Reaffirm my Self through personal expressions of affiliation with others, and to appreciate my own sense impressions and the meaning that I attach to my experience of who I am and how I came to be.
That’s my plan. Without a framework for filtering the noise, I can’t think clearly. I’m simply trying to get a sense of what I’m about before the fog gets any thicker. I don’t want to trust the State or the Academy for guidance any longer. The work is critical.
Sources:
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand, University of Otago Press.
Thésése, G. (2006). A Tool of Massive Erosion: Scientific Knowledge in the Neo Colonial Enterprise in Dei, G.S and Kempf, A., (eds) in Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance. Rotterdam, Sense Publishers.
Al wrote,
You’ve clarified and organized much of what I’ve felt subconciously through much of my career. Thank you.
Link | May 9th, 2006 at 3:45 am
Ran Priem wrote,
As usual, Doug, your writing is clear, powerful and provocative. I confess it took a few days’ rumination before I felt brave enough to comment.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages from William James, where he argues for the necessity of educational observation made “without brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual, by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.”
A recent Wilson Quarterly article uses a term it credits to one Harvard sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin: “ ‘quantophrenia,’ a psychological compulsion to grasp for the numeric.” It would seem that much of the educational superstructure of our nation is indeed afflicted with this malady.
I wonder why so many committed teachers are attracted, as we both are, to phenomenological, “third force” understandings of our practice? And why administrators and politicians have seemed to consistently embrace number-fetishizing, “quantophrenial,” approaches? And, importantly, is there a media via, a middle way?
I agree that we as teachers have been, in a sense, colonized. I doubly agree that we are artists, not scientists. The tools of the expert teacher are creativity, playfulness, empathy, wisdom, and, above all, love. These tools have nothing to do with latest quasi-scientific fashions—they are our birthright as humans. Their perfection is, as you so profoundly noted, a lifelong, “spiritual path.” A Liberation Theology of education must not just reject the dominant discourse—it must treasure and nurture these qualities, these Chomskian “deep structures” of real teaching.
Again, thanks for your always thoughtful and thought-provoking ideas.
Link | May 11th, 2006 at 11:28 am
Ran Priem wrote,
Can’t help myself: had to post another comment! Your point about the colonization of teachers still has me thinking. Teachers are just cogs in the machine. I think the real colonizing is of the school itself. The age of formal, geographic empires may be over. But what are schools but an attempt at a temporal empire, a colonizing of the future? And we’re the Victorian Indian Civil Service of the enterprise, the idealistic youngsters thrown into the jungles to keep order and pull the reluctant natives into civilization, all in the name of Queen and Country.
Just like the ICS, the schools do a lot of good. They may not abolish sati, but most kids do learn to read, write, an’ cipher. And schools have a stronger moral mandate then the raj did; it’s less than clear (to say the least) that the Subcontinent needed to be colonized, but kids really do need someone to instruct and protect them. Many educational policy-makers in the US, like the bureaucrats of the imperial Foreign Office, truly have the best of intentions.
But, as you’ve so powerfully noted, Doug, the colonial mind-set is a recipe for control, not true education. We must resist it.
Occasionally ICS agents would “go native,” a la Condrad’s Kurtz. Instead of carving out little empires for themselves, though, they would come to identify so much with their “charges” that they would actively fight their own government when it tried to break a treaty or otherwise harm them. When we follow your Four Part Plan, or something like it, we begin to “go native” for our kids. We stop caring that The Children Are Our Future, and start caring about our students’ own futures. Love is the cornerstone of an anti-imperialist pedagogy: loving kids as ends in themselves, not just the means to one.
Link | May 11th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Doug wrote,
Ran, I’m grateful for the eloquent support for a point of view that seems, from my direct experience, to be under-represented in practice. I try to imagine what another instantiation of a system like this would mean. There are experimental and theoretical propositions and even a few that have been implemented on a small scale. I believe the Glossary of Sociological Terms explains the “how” of what bothers me: . Cultural reproduction refers to the mechanisms by which continuity of cultural experience is sustained across time. The processes of schooling in modern societies are among the main mechanisms of cultural reproduction, and do not operate solely through what is taught in courses of formal instruction. Cultural reproduction occurs in a more profound way through the hidden curriculum - aspects of behaviour which individuals learn in an informal way while at school.
I’m trying to find a how-not. I knew when I began this work, long ago, that cynicism was a likely outcome. I was naive to think that I could avoid it. It’s time for a new why. The caring part is, as you point out, the key to redemptive grace.
And summer vacation is almost here. That never fails.
Link | May 11th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Kriti Sharma wrote,
Thank you for this. I was Googling “anti-imperialist pedagogy” and came upon it–sometimes the Internet actually takes you to what you were looking for
I’m a graduate student in biology. I play with bacteria, and dream of a “liberation biology” that seeks to have people feel at home in their bodies and in the world, and not so convinced that “nature” means “law” or “constraint”. I look forward to new schools where we can send our children in hopes that they won’t grow up learning the same lies and hatreds as we did.
Link | August 16th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Doug Noon wrote,
This is so interesting, the idea of “being at home” in our bodies can be both addressed on many levels, biological to societal. An ethical position that recognizes the need for resistance to abuses of power, joined with a skeptical approach to prevailing trends seems to be the common starting point for people who want to make a difference regardless of what field they may be working in.
I’m glad you found something useful here. Best wishes in your efforts.
Link | August 16th, 2007 at 10:54 am