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Indigenous Education and Epistemic Violence
Comments Off on Indigenous Education and Epistemic ViolenceCanada’s continuing failures to adequately address the training and educational needs of its First Nation, Métis, and Inuit learners are so profound as to be beyond all serious dispute, and so unconscionable as to constitute a national disgrace. Isolated pockets of academic excellence notwithstanding, a disproportionate number of Indigenous students in every province routinely underperform academically, drop out of school at inexcusably tender ages, fail to graduate from high school in heart-stopping numbers, and are woefully under-represented in institutions of “higher” learning. Put in the language of the final report of the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,[1] educational institutions at every level regularly “replicate the negative features; including scant attention to Aboriginal world views and Indigenous knowledge; that have led [Indigenous] students to drop out of school in the first place.”
Although reactions to such bad-news reports may vary (some are angry, others indifferent or filled with aimless resolve to do better), no one is in the least surprised. Rather, your standard-issue, deeply inured, non-Indigenous onlooker is so well-habituated to the defamatory idea that all First Nation, Métis, and Inuit persons are interchangeable members of a common, always impoverished, and perpetually disease-ridden underclass that further information about across-the-board academic failures serves only to round out their already bleak picture of the Indigenous world. If pressed to account for such well documented academic shortcomings, other and better-intended onlookers more generously point accusing fingers at poverty, or isolation, or the continuing aftermath of historically earlier colonialist practices – ideas that are, no doubt, at least partially correct. Anyone living in abject poverty, cut off from otherwise available opportunities for cultural enrichment, or a victim of systemic prejudice can be equally understood to be a poor candidate for academic success. Perhaps this is all there is to it. Perhaps, if given a fair economic shake, and more warmly clutched to the bosom of mainstream-Canadian culture, existing educational inequities would conveniently disappear. More money and more efficient assimilative practices are not, however, the only available answers on offer.
Alternatively, the educational crisis that so deeply affects many of Canada’s Indigenous communities is, arguably, better understood, not as a symptom of one group’s ineffective struggles to play “catch-up” with their “betters”, but, rather, as an ongoing David-and-Goliath style cultural war – a war in which anyone caught out failing to reflexively subscribe to what Battiste has called the “classic Eurocentric order of life”[2] is automatically demeaned and discounted; a “take no prisoners” war in which adherents to any and all contrasting (and perhaps incommensurable) “epistemologies”, or “ways of knowing”, are simply written off as having failed to grasp the taken-for-true essentials of “Westernized” standards of truth and rightness. In such a wartorn climate, Indigenous students are, then, alternatively understood, not as slackers, but as the innocent victims of an avoidable collision between contrasting ideologies and their associated pedagogical practices – cannon fodder of a cultural clash in which the unrequited educational aspirations of Indigenous learners are too often shrugged off as a sanctioned form of collateral damage reluctantly paid in order to bolster the presumptive supremacy of Westernized, essentialized, post-enlightenment, Judeo-Christian notions of what is right and true. On this alternative account, responsibility for our collective failure to close the many educational gaps that separate Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners is, then, re-read as a natural byproduct of all of those hegemonic ways in which culturally-mainstream pedagogic practices have traditionally ridden roughshod over those epistemic differences that set Indigenous knowers apart from their non-Indigenous counterparts.
How, in this culture versus that, is it to be decided what constitutes bona fide knowledge? Is truth context-specific or is “real” knowledge universal, equally true in all places and for all times?
Among the challenges that such a “paradigm-wars” approach naturally throws down is an obligation (on everyone’s part) to first get clear about how the arbiters of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures have approached a handful of key questions about knowledge acquisition. How, for example, in this culture versus that, is it to be decided what constitutes bona fide knowledge? Is truth context-specific, for example, or is “real” knowledge universal, equally true in all places and for all times? How are we to best proceed when knowledge stakeholders disagree? How might novices optimally acquire some journeyman-like appreciation of what is standardly held to be right and true? Such classic epistemic alternatives not only pose questions for professional philosophers, but have equally puzzled knowledge stakeholders in every time and culture. More pointedly, and for present purposes, they are also questions that demand answers of anyone presuming to set the pedagogical course for others.
Epistemic Violence
Given the root-and-branch ways in which Indigenous epistemologies have been overturned, it is worth reflecting on the common fate of aspiring learners in just about every previously colonized group one might care to mention. In considering such matters, I tend to imagine myself authoring an apocryphal “self-help” book, entitled something like Epistemic Violence: A User’s Guide – a “how-to” book written for the benefit of anyone aspiring to become an especially good colonizer. Chapter One of this fictional “Operations Manual” is given over to detailing how one might successfully pacify a newly encountered indigenous population by bringing to bear available bits of technological wizardry (gunpowder, antibiotics, etc.), all carefully calculated to persuade the “Indigenes” that what they have traditionally taken to be right and true is actually the mistaken by-product of their own earlier, and now evidently dated, proclivity for “magical” or “mystical” or “child-like” thinking. Successfully duped in this fashion, even members of otherwise well-functioning cultural groups can reputedly be persuaded that assimilation is their only practicable course. There is, of course, nothing fanciful about such Machiavellian maneuvers. Rather it is a piece of the history of very many Indigenous peoples, including many of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.
Of late, however, as the hegemony of classic Western-European epistemologies have been increasingly undermined from within, various Indigenous groups in Canada, and around the world, have similarly come to have their own second thoughts. What was it, exactly, they ask, that – in some all but forgotten pre-contact moment – once defined Indigenous ways of knowing, and why were these homegrown accounts so readily cast aside? Has something of such once-robust ways of knowing persisted into the present, and, if so, how have they served to define what is true about more contemporary Indigenous epistemologies? What costs have been paid by Indigenous cultures of having been bereft (in whole or part) of their own traditional beliefs about belief, and what might potentially be done to rehabilitate those Indigenous knowledge system now eroded by generations of assimilationist practices? Obviously, any attempt to address these and other similarly crucial questions necessarily requires that we somehow get as clear as possible about the particulars of whatever distinctive epistemology, or system of knowledge, might currently be operating within a given Indigenous community, and whether there is any prospect of generalizing such insights across what, in Canada alone, amounts to more than 600 unique indigenous communities. And, more important still, if – as is being proposed here – some important part of our collective failure to adequately meet the educational needs of Indigenous learners does, in fact, turn on our first having failed to adequately take into account those differences that do divide the culturally sanctioned ways of knowing practiced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, what, you might well ask, ought we to do next?
If it were the case that the particulars of such unique Indigenous knowledge systems were already well understood; and if, in some imagined spirit of intercultural sharing and mutual respect, there were a sufficient appetite for real educational change; then everyone’s marching orders would be reasonably straightforward. As Marlene Brant-Castellano made clear in the 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: “For Aboriginal people the challenge [would be] to go beyond the deconstruction of oppressive ideologies and practices, [and] to give [renewed] expression to aboriginal philosophies, world-views, and social relations. For non-Aboriginal people the challenge [would be] to open up space for Aboriginal initiatives in schools and colleges, work sites and organizations so that Indigenous ways of knowing can flourish.”[3]
Unsurprisingly, this is not the world in which we currently live. Even where openness to change and mutual respect do exist, it still remains the case, according to Battiste, that “when educators encounter cultural differences, they have very little theory, scholarship, research, or tested practice to engage Aboriginal education in a way that is not [strictly] assimilative.”[4] The consequence has been that existing educational practices have too often functioned as an exercise in “thought control” imposed upon Indigenous learners, rather than as instruments of true intellectual exchange.
The aim of this brief essay is to contribute to this ongoing critique by alerting readers to some of that Battiste calls the missing “theory, scholarship and research” required to bring real change about.
A Closing Agenda
Any hope for real progress in coming to some better understanding the distinctive “ways of knowing” characteristic of Canada’s First Nation, Métis, and Inuit populations necessarily requires first getting clear about what it is, exactly, that talk of “epistemology”, and, more particularly, “folk” or Indigenous epistemologies, is meant to be talked about – all before attempting to work out what it is that contemporary Indigenous and non-indigenous philosophers, ethnologists, and social scientists imagine to be distinct about Indigenous, as opposed to non-Indigenous epistemologies.
As a way of unfolding this agenda, what remains of the present account proceeds in three quick steps. The first of these simply ventures to make plain what is intended by talk of epistemology, Indigenous or not. Step Two briefly hints at some part of what is currently being said about what might constitute the unique particulars of Indigenous, as opposed to non-Indigenous, epistemologies. Finally, and by way of conclusion, there will be room left only for a brief remarks about the ways in which a more careful study of Indigenous epistemologies might serve to redress some of the educational inequities currently suffered by First Nation, Métis, and Inuit learners.
Persons reared in different cultures are regularly said to frame and defend their understanding of truth and rightness in often radically different ways – ways that promote misunderstandings, tensions, and conflict between colliding cultures.
Step I: Epistemologies in General and Indigenous Epistemologies in Particular.
Although talk about warring epistemologies (i.e., standpoints, paradigms, frames of reference, rhetorical postures, world-views, knowledge systems, etc.) is everywhere thick on the ground, one could easily be excused for wondering what all these heady terms actually mean. Like other similarly hard-to-pin-down notions, “epistemology” in general, and “folk” or “indigenous epistemologies” in particular, risk qualifying as further instances of those loose, baggy, portmanteau sorts of concepts that can be used to describe just about anything one might wish. Reduced to its barest of bones, however, the word “epistemology” – plain and simple – ordinarily functions as a covering term that references “a branch of… [scholarship]…concerned with the origins, nature, methods of determination, and limits of human knowledge.”[5] “Folk” or “Indigenous epistemologies”, by contrast, amount to more or less the same thing, with the important proviso that they tend to be collectively authored (not by professional philosophers, but by whole cultural communities), and by the fact that they represent implicit or tacit forms of knowledge and practice that commonly ghost beneath the surface of conscious or declarative thought.
Whatever else might be said about them, Indigenous epistemologies are widely understood to vary – often dramatically – from one culture or historical moment to the next. As a consequence, persons reared in different cultures are regularly said to frame and defend their understanding of truth and rightness in often radically different, even incommensurable ways – ways that promote misunderstandings, tensions, and conflict between colliding cultures.
As thus understood, it turns out that the several foundational epistemologies that have dominated the more analytic branches of 20th century Anglo-American philosophy have played to extremely poor reviews among many Indigenous scholars. Such criticisms are owed primarily to the complex relations that are assumed to obtain between power and knowledge – relations that give talk of Indigenous epistemologies an almost inescapable political character. Nevertheless, and because it “barters [well] within the currency of mainstream academia” [6], many contemporary Indigenous scholars have, nevertheless, chosen not to abandon the otherwise suspect study of epistemology, but have instead worked to “ decolonize” and re-“colour” such efforts by taking up the task of “rediscovering and reaffirming” [7] Indigenous ways of knowing. Reclaimed in these ways, the study of Indigenous epistemologies is, according to Meyer, widely regarded, not only as a “sword against anthropological arrogance and [a] shield against philosophical universalisms,” but also as a new key plank in the shared platform of Indigenous studies.[8]
Step II: Demarcation Criteria
Owed in important part to what has recently become an international renaissance in cross-cultural scholarship, a multicultural cadre of Indigenous philosophers, ethnologists, and social historians have recently mounted ambitious efforts to document and give pride of place to their own non-Western systems of knowledge. Notwithstanding a shared commitment to the context-dependent or situated character of such ideas, certain common claims repeatedly pop up within this literature, perhaps because many of these groups have suffered a common plight.
Key among the common “demarcation criteria” thought to distinguish Western from non-Western ways of knowing are the recurring claims that Indigenous epistemologies tend to be holistic rather than analytic;[9] are context-sensitive and responsive to lived experiences and the social reality of Indigenous authenticity and voice;[10] view knowledge as ecologically situated and unique to specific settings;[11] employ physical geography as a foundation stone of Indigenous knowledge building;[12] make room for the sacred, as opposed to only the mundane;[13] consider certain animals and plants as stewards to certain doors of knowledge;[14] regard, not just individuals, but whole communities as “epistemological agents”; and, consequently, view true knowledge as the result of a process that can only be validated by cultural groups.
Despite this much in the way of agreement among those Indigenous scholars responsible for this concert of opinion, many stalwarts within the “Academy” judge such claims as overly anecdotal and as relying too exclusively on expert testimony, introspection, and informal observations as sources of insight. While such criticisms are not entirely out of place, they have not, for the most part, been followed by any evident sense of obligation to undertake the necessary programs of empirical research required to produce a better rounded picture of what is and is not definitional of Indigenous epistemologies. Where all of this leaves us is that, notwithstanding a welter of ethnographic claims and strong testimonial about the uniqueness of various Indigenous ways of knowing, there currently exist almost no empirically-based accounts of what may be distinctive about the Indigenous or “folk” epistemologies of Indigenous peoples in Canada or elsewhere.[15]
Step III: Epistemic Violence Goes to School
Among the places where the tensions raised by competing epistemological claims are first and most sorely felt are precisely those explicitly given over to the cultivation of new knowledge – our schools. That is, if – as is widely argued to be the case – Indigenous learners routinely subscribe to culturally sanctioned ways of knowing that are at variance with those of the economically dominant culture, and if the systems of mainstream pedagogy to which they are exposed are principally set within some foreign epistemological frame, then trouble is automatically afoot, and school failures and lost opportunities are sure to follow. Available space allows for only one working example that suggests the rightness of such views – an example owed to the First Nations researcher Stephany Fryberg.
Fryberg’s work-in-progress turns upon what the developmental psychologist Carolyn Dweck has termed “incremental” as opposed to “entity” accounts of learning.[16] Those who subscribe to “entity-based” learning models assume (in keeping with classical Western-European traditions) that competencies are fixed, that academic successes are proof of such latent abilities, and that failures call assumptions about a learner’s basic competencies into deep question. By contrast, those that maintain an “incremental” view (Canada’s Indigenous communities, for example) assign success to effort, and treat failure as a signal that still more effort is required. Working with young elementary school students, what Fryberg has shown is that, in contrast to their culturally mainstream counterparts, Indigenous youth begin their academic life with a commitment to an incremental view of learning, but quickly find themselves out of step with the pedagogic models favoured by their teachers. The heavy price extracted as a result of these children’s forced assimilation is conversion to an entity-based view of themselves as fundamentally incompetent. Fryberg’s work, I suggest, offers something of a template for future studies. It draws upon ethnographic insights emerging from contemporary Indigenous scholarship, it trades upon empirical measurement procedures borrowed from some of the best of recent social science research, and it points to possible ways in which educational institutions might work to better accommodate demonstrated differences in Indigenous and non-Indigenous epistemologies.
EN BREF – Notre échec à combler les écarts d’éducation séparant les apprenants autochtones et non autochtones du Canada peut s’expliquer comme étant un sous-produit d’une pédagogie générique, qui n’a pas fait de cas des différences épistémiques – c’est-à-dire de différences dans les façons de connaître – qui distinguent les connaissants autochtones de leurs pairs non autochtones. On dit que les personnes élevées dans différentes cultures formulent et défendent leur perception de la vérité de différentes façons – des façons qui engendrent des malentendus, des tensions et des conflits entre les cultures qui se heurtent. Et ces tensions se manifestent particulièrement dans nos écoles. Si, comme on le soutient souvent, les apprenants autochtones souscrivent habituellement à des manières de savoir qui s’écartent de celles de la culture économiquement dominante, et si les systèmes de pédagogie générique auxquels ils sont exposés sont principalement fondés sur le cadre épistémique de cette culture, il s’ensuivra nécessairement des échecs des écoles et des occasions perdues.
[1] Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, vol. 5, Renewal: A Twenty-Year Commitment (Ottawa: Canada Communications Group, 1996).
[2] Marie Battiste, Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education -A Literature Review with Recommendations (Report prepared for the National Working Group on Education, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Ottawa, 2002).
[3] Royal Commission on Aboriginal People.
[4] Battise.
[5] P. Fitzsimons and G. Smith, “Philosophy and Indigenous Cultural Transformation,” Educational Philosophy & Theory 32, no. 1(2000) 25-41, 25.
[6] A. M. Meyer, “Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no.1 (2001): 124-148, 146.
[7] L. I. Rigney, “Internalization of an Indigenous Anticolonial Culture Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles,” Wicazo Sa Review (1999): 109-121, 113.
[8] Meyer, 123
[9] W. J. Ermine, “Aboriginal Epistemology,” in First Nations Education in Canada: The circle unfolds, eds. M. Battiste and J. Barman (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), 101-112; Japangka E. W. West, Speaking Towards an Aboriginal Philosophy (Indigenous Philosophy Conference, Linga Longa, Australia, 1998).
[10] D. W. Gegeo, “Indigenous Knowledge and Empowerment: Rural Development Examined from Within,” The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 289-316.
[11] Ibid.
[12] D. Foley, “Indigenous Epistemology and Indigenous Standpoint Theory,” Social Alternatives 22, no. 1 (2003): 44-52.
[13] Ermine.
[14] M. J. Chandler, C. Lalonde, B. Sokol, and D. Hallett, “Personal Persistence, Identity Development, and Suicide: A Study of Native and Non-native North American Adolescents,,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, serial no. 273, 68, no. 2, 2003.
[15] (for rare exceptions to this generalization see Ibid., and M. J. Chandler, D. Hallett, and B. W, Sokol, “Competing Claims about Competing Knowledge Claims,” in Personal Epistemologies, eds. B. K. Hofer & P. R. Pintrich (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 145-168.
[16] C. Dweck, Mindset (New York: Randomhouse Inc., 2006).
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Composing Lives: Listening and Responding to Marginalized Youth
Comments Off on Composing Lives: Listening and Responding to Marginalized YouthI lived up to the troublemaker
I was treated differentlyI wanted to change
I proved my teachers wrong and was able to break the stigma
for the first time I enjoyed handing in my work-Samuel, National Youth in Care Network, 2008[1]
Sometimes the stories we hear write our responses, they bring forth a knowing that our lives are intertwined and that lives are always complex. These responses grow out of a deep listening, a recognition of uncertainty, and a celebration of surprise, which demand that we stay close to the stories we hear. Shifting perspectives in childhood research have moved us away from the objectified status of the child to a view of children and young people as competent social actors who take an active role in sharing their experiences and pose challenges for rethinking the power relationships implicit in many research paradigms.[2] We have listened to youth’s stories in our respective research projects – youth who have left school early, youth who have experienced the onset of early psychosis, and youth who are homeless.
In listening to youths talk about their lives, we reflect upon our own lives as we respond and are carried backwards to our own stories. Samuel’s story reminds Vera of her own life; it brings forth memories of dropping out of high school. It is the confidence in his voice as he speaks, as he finds his way back into school; it speaks of the possibility of finding voice in a system that too often is disempowering; it is this certainty that leads Vera to inquire more deeply. Who are the people standing beside Samuel as he lives, tells, and retells his story? Where are the openings in our educational system that allowed him to return to school? What are the turning points in his life? These questions bring us back to our own life stories, urging us to inquire more deeply, taking us to a potentially dangerous place – a place sketchy with forgetfulness, but perhaps much richer in terms of possibilities and inquiry. In listening to stories, we become implicated in a complex ethical relationship, one we can’t so easily evade, one in which we as listeners are also positioned as thinkers.
The youth we listened to do not necessarily describe themselves as victims, but as imaginative, creative, and resourceful human beings with social, cultural, and political agency.
School engagement – and particularly disengagement – challenges our perceptions of schooling and our understanding of education by raising questions about meaningful engagement. Decades of research have highlighted that social class, ethnicity, gender, special needs, and sexualities have predicted school disengagement; however, the ways in which youth describe this process is relatively unknown. Rehabilitative educational programs are frequently posited as the solution to reduce these assumed deficits – programs that inherently ignore or minimize the social and economic realities of the daily lives of young people.
We hear marginalized youth described as “deviant, criminals, substance users, culturally impoverished, overtly different, bored and powerless”, [3]but it is important to listen to their own stories. The youth we listened to do not necessarily describe themselves as victims, but as imaginative, creative, and resourceful human beings with social, cultural, and political agency.[4] Serena and Shannen Koostachin’s voices echo from the screen as they lead a national movement to get a school built in their community, the community of Attawapiskat First Nation:
I would like to talk to you what it is like to be a child who grows up never seeing a real school. I want to tell you about the children who give up hope and start dropping out in Grade 4 or 5. But I want to also tell you about the determination in our community to build a better world. School should be a time for hopes and dreams of the future. Every kid deserves this.[5]
Serena and Shannen spearhead a campaign called Education is a Human Right. Their story reminds us that many life choices are made against a backdrop of imposed social conditions, such as being aboriginal. Both Serena and Shannon leave their makeshift school on the reserve to attend a non-native high school, and in doing so they are forced to move away from their immediate family and community; social, cultural, and institutional narratives are shaping their storied landscape. Understanding the youths’ stories as embedded in social contexts leads us to ask questions about the social and political funding structures of schools, yet it also leads us to ask questions similar to McLaughlin’s: Whose knowledge counts as school curriculum? How is this knowledge organized? What are the underlying values, assumptions, and beliefs that structure school curriculum? What kind of cultural systems does this knowledge work from and legitimate? Whose interests are served by the organization and legitimizing of school curriculum?[6]
Smyth and Hattam argue that the dominant regimes of school leadership within current school reform approaches are failing because of their inability to listen to the voices of students and teachers. They argue that a different “sociological imagination” is required – one that attends to the lifeworlds of young people, is more reflexive of its own agenda, and is sensitive to the broader political context within which “dropping out” is experienced.[7]
By listening to marginalized youths, we ground our knowledge in their lives, accounting for the intersection of representation and identity as well as the multi-faceted mingling of the social, cultural, and psychological elements in their lives. Thus, the stories they tell us are interlocutors of our storying of their lives; they ask us to engage, to inquire. While we listen to the stories we often imagine, and we remind ourselves to open doors of possibility and, as Greene would say, to break with the ordinary, to look at things as if they could be otherwise.[8] These responses arise from our own situated lives. People hear differently, listen differently – the youth we talk with are not just telling us a good story; they often come to tell because they believe that their stories can awaken us to see more and, to call again upon Greene, to release the imagination, to release the power of empathy, to become more present to those around, perhaps to care. In these moments we can only make sense if we talk out of our own memories with a feeling of commitment and hope.
Young people in these studies are resisting an identity constructed for them by the institution of schooling.
Frank notes that “storytelling is an occasion when people co-author responses to Tolstoy’s great question of what shall we do and how shall we live; not permanent answers applicable for the rest of their lives, but the crucial if provisional answers that guide what to do next and how to live now.”[9] How do we create stories of school that open benign or inspiring or stimulating possibility? Can we really separate the imaginary from the political or the ethical? Or do we have to weave them together? If we want to think about this, then we have to make openings for many voices, voices that have not been heard.
In our work on early school leaving, we heard the voices of Aboriginal, Francophone, newcomer, second generation immigrant and refugee, third plus generation, visible minority, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered, and rural youth. For example, our consultation with Aboriginal young people provided direction for the content and ordering of the interview protocol itself. These youth indicated the importance of asking about the influence of the residential school system and about their experiences with the Children’s Aid Society. They approved of our plan to have youth participants complete the socio-demographic fact sheet after the interview and of having the interviewer review the questions with them. Finally, they indicated a preference for the ordering of questions and prompts in the interview instruments, demonstrating the need to make adaptations for urban aboriginal youth versus rural aboriginal youth.
In further consultations, early school leavers responded positively to probes on issues beyond personal blame for leaving school; they were comfortable with beginning to speak about their everyday lives and working up from there to other levels of influence in home, school, and community; and they also appreciated the use of the term “early school leaver” as opposed to “dropout”. Further, many of them did not identify as early school leavers, but as just not in school for now.[10] Smyth notes a number of studies that portray young people as active agents with power rather than passive victims in challenging relational contexts.[11] Young people in these studies are resisting an identity constructed for them by the institution of schooling.
With respect to school disengagement, we have many questions: why do we keep applying standards, achievement tests, curricula? Who makes them up? What do we accomplish by this? How can we install a belief that we can be the best that we could possibly be amidst this? What does it mean to be cheated in life? How do we make human rights and social justice a reality? How can we go on living as if we were untouched by their stories? How can we abdicate our responsibility? We are not talking about transforming the world; this is about honouring what we believe in: that education matters, that schools can be educative, safe, and caring places. It is a recognition that the stories are not only text, but reflections of lives that continue to be lived and that their lives are intertwined with our own.
This relational responsibility, which we carry as narrative inquirers and arts-based researchers, provides us with an approach to understanding experience in our own lives as well. By investigating our storied lives and experiences, we arrive at a narrative vantage point from which we can create a collaborative, reciprocal, and relational process to understand lived and learned experiences of others. Our hope is that we can emphasize inquiry rather than finding final answers or solutions, to reflect upon the diversity of experiences and the continuous unfolding of lives lived. We are engaged in collaborative research, research that is at it is core relational.
In the words of Powers et al, “Although most would agree that one of the overarching goals of education is to promote self-sufficiency and competency among youth, many or most of our own efforts to assist youth have been fairly directive, aimed at providing youth with informational and experiential building blocks upon which they might somehow spontaneously launch their lives after leaving school.”[12] These building blocks reflect the dominant social, cultural, and institutional narratives of white, middle class cultures. As Kevlar states “there’s always the people who have the perfect lives, the perfect parents […]school is built for them.”[13] Our narratives reflect moments in our lives and at times open possibilities to our imaginations, allowing us to create hope and social vision. The significance of the narratives told is therefore not always in the recalling of the experience but in the process of the telling, which gives rise to a kind of embodied theory. This embodiment attends to the relationship between language and the experiencing body and has the capacity to bring the lived experience of individuals to the forefront.
Paying attention to the unfolding of our own lives is an important aspect of trying to understand the experience of others.
We know that many of the youth (as do many of us) impose a linearity and coherence to the unfolding of events, places, and stories that were never part of the lived experiences. In many ways they might have constructed these experiences to emphasize their understanding and the personal significance of their experience. Paying attention to the unfolding of our own lives is an important aspect of trying to understand the experience of others; it is a relational knowing; a recognition that an embodied response is drawn forth within each relationship and within our memories and imaginations. The stories of marginalization on the school landscape thus become embedded in relationships and in places of community.
In studying and understanding experience narratively, we recognize the centrality of relationships, as participants relate and live through stories that speak of their experiences. Throughout this process, we need to remain attentive to ethical tensions, obligations, and responsibilities in our relationships with those who tell, and to address questions of how larger social, institutional, and political narratives inform our understanding and shape youths’ stories. Paying attention to these larger narratives enables us to further understand the complexity of the living and telling of stories, to understand the role of both context and relationships.
This is the intersection between the theoretical and our autobiographical coming to know. There is no easy place within any one theory or within any one discipline to see, write, and think about the world; it becomes even more complex, yet necessary, for theory and personal experience to interact and inform one other. As Boer notes, we see that in the process of theorizing that includes self-reflection, one indeed leaves the ontological home to return to the same location, but not quite as the same person.[14] The story of a life is both less than the actual life – because it is selective, partial, contextually constructed and because the life is not yet over – and more than the life – because its contours and meanings allegorically extend to others. To us, listening to the youth stories is a reminder of becoming: students and teachers becoming, and the possibility of educational becoming. We concur with Thiessen’s assertion that “students have both authorship of and authority in their lives at school.”[15] In the words of one young student:
More and more people these days, like myself included, we wanna become something. We don’t just want to become lawyers and astronauts, and firefighters and all of that. We wanna make a change for the world.
As researchers and citizens, we see it as our responsibility to inquire, alongside and in collaboration with youth. In the telling and retelling of stories, we continuously recognize that lives matter, that each listening brings forth a response, a retelling, and a possibility to shift common plotlines and lives.
EN BREF – Écouter les récits des jeunes nous amène à réfléchir à nos propres expériences vécues, ce qui nous ouvre la possibilité de mieux comprendre la vie qu’ils nous racontent. La signification des récits racontés ne réside pas toujours dans la narration elle-même, mais dans le processus consistant à exposer et à trouver des résonances dans nos vies et dans les réactions aux récits racontés. À titre d’auditeurs, porter attention au déploiement d’une vie devant nous, d’une vie en devenir, nous amène à engager de façon relationnelle avec d’autres et souligne un engagement envers une connaissance relationnelle et contextuelle. S’occuper d’une vie qui se déploie et des résonances dans notre propre vie nous permet d’aller au-delà des catégories, des stéréotypes et des jugements auxquels font face les jeunes marginalisés et de voir ces jeunes comme des êtres imaginatifs, créatifs et ingénieux ayant un ressort social, culturel et politique.
[1] Samuel’s digital story was played at the Marginalized Youth conference in Toronto in the spring of 2009. As part of the conference Vera introduced the youth in person or their stories/videos to the audience. The words of the youth were strong reminders of the importance of our work and form the background of our paper. Samuel’s words were arranged as a found poem by Vera, his digital story can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dTzP56qVjA
[2] M. John, Children’s Rights and Power: Charging up for a New Century (London, England: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003).
[3] D. Palmer, “Talking About the Problems of Young Nyungars,” in Australian Youth Subculture. On the Margins and in the Mainstream, ed. R. White (Hobart, Tasmania: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies), 110.
[4] D. J. Clandinin, P. Steeves, Y. Li, J. R. Mickelson, G. Buck, M. Pearce, V. Caine, S. Lessard, C. Desrochers, M. Stewart, and M. Huber, Composing Lives: A Narrative Account into the Experiences of Youth who Left School Early (Unpublished manuscript, 2010). Retrieved from: https://www.ualberta.ca/.
[5] To view their public speaking engagements and to access additional information in the campaign, see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=w17r5atzNUI and www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp-TkDv6te0
[6] D. McLaughlin, “Personal Narratives for School Change in Navajo Settings,” in Naming silenced lives. Personal Narratives and Processes of Educational Change, eds. D. McLaughlin & W. G. Tierney (New York: Routledge, 1993).
[7] J. Smyth and R. Hattam, “Voiced Research as a Sociology for Understanding “Dropping-out” of School, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22 (2001): 401-415; J. Smyth and R. Hatta, “Early School Learning ang the Cultural Geography of High Schools,” British Educational Research Journal 28 (2002): 375-377.
[8] M. Greene, Releasing the Imagination. Essays on Education, the Art, and Social change (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1995).
[9] A. Frank, “Why Study People’s Stories? The Dialogical Ethics of Narrative Analysis,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 1, no. 1 (2002), Article 6. Retrieved from http://www.ualberta.ca/~ijqm/
[10] Clandinin et al.
[11] J. Smyth, When Students Have ‘Relational Power’: The School as a Site for Identity Formation around Engagement and School Retention. Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Adelaide, 27-30 November 2006.
[12] L. E. Powers, R. Wilson, J. Matuszewski, A. Phillips, C. Rein, D. Schumacher, and J. Gensert, “Facilitaing Adolescent Self-determination: What Does it Take?” in Self-determination Across the Life Span: Independence and Choice for People with Disabilities, eds. D. J. Sands and M. L. Wehmeyer (Baltimore, MD: P.H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1996), 258.
[13] Clandinin et al, 229.
[14] I. E. Boer, Uncertain Territories. Boundaries in Cultural Analysis (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2006).
[15] D. Thiessen, “Researching Student Experiences in Elementary and Secondary School: An Evolving Field of Study,” in International Handbook of Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School, eds. D. Thiessen and A. Cook-Sather (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springerm, 2007), 40.
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Editor’s Note
Comments Off on Editor’s NoteIn her Endnote column of the upcoming Theme issue of Education Canada, Penny Milton notes that preparation for retirement as CEO of the Canadian Education Association is a prime time for reflection. Her approaching retirement is giving me cause to reflect as well – on more than two decades of shared interests, intersecting commitments, and friendship.
I’ve had the good fortune to work with Penny in several capacities since the early 1990s, most recently as editor of this magazine for the past ten years. In every situation, I have been in awe of her ability to size up and analyze the ideas or issues before her. But a sharp mind is only as valuable as the tasks it sets for itself. Penny’s passion for young people has been the hallmark of her career. She has been unflagging in her dedication to public education – not as a system, but as a vehicle for reaching, teaching, and understanding Canada’s young people, and as our best hope for a more equitable, compassionate society.
Penny’s creative, flexible, non-dogmatic approach has brought together educators and thinkers from across the political and ideological spectrum – both in Canada and abroad. Her boundless confidence in young people themselves has empowered them to share their own truths about schools and learning in many contexts, including in the pages of this magazine.
All this is true, and others will repeat it in other words. But as Penny prepares to leave her role as CEO of CEA and as Executive Editor of Education Canada, I am most conscious of the personal support she has provided to me, as editor. I will miss her forthright advice, her vast network of contacts, her keen eye for the relevant, her willingness to brainstorm at the drop of a hat. I will even miss that feeling – at the end of a conversation – that I really couldn’t process ideas a fast as she could generate them!
I’m sure I speak for all of us involved in the production of this magazine when I say thank you and bonne chance, Penny. Stay in touch with us.
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Waiting for Superman: A Canadian Perspective
Comments Off on Waiting for Superman: A Canadian PerspectiveCanada has consistently performed well in international achievement assessments and is a top performer internationally in Reading, Math and Science. Canada has a unique decentralized education system where funding and policy decisions are made by provincial and territorial governments. Variations in achievement levels and in funding reflect differences in population, geography and economy. Canada’s public education system is open to all children and several provinces provide partial financial support to support independent schools making them more affordable to some families. In response to the desire for choice by families many local school districts allow parents to choose which public school their children will attend. Alberta is the only province that has incorporated charter schools into their public education system. Many school districts, especially in large urban areas offer alternative schools or programs, specialist schools or programs for arts, sports, languages, science and technology. While parents can choose these schools for their children pre-qualifications or lotteries may be used if programs are over-subscribed.
While Canadian students are doing well, the public believes the quality of education, needs to improve. Canada’s schools produce more equitable results than almost all other countries but there is much work to do to make sure all children share the benefits of a good education. It’s time to build on Canadian success to make sure that all children and youth thrive in this rapidly changing world. -
Skilled Trades as Intellectual Engagement
Comments Off on Skilled Trades as Intellectual EngagementA review of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford. Penguin Press, 2009. ISBN-1594202230, 9781594202230.
In the 1990’s, many jurisdictions eliminated industrial arts from their elementary schools and dismantled many secondary school technology programs. Ultimately, this short-sighted policy resulted in a critical shortage in the skilled trades. As in many sectors, the retirements among skilled tradespeople are outpacing people coming into those trades. The skills shortage has finally caused politicians to take notice, leading to a resurgence of interest in the trades and in technology programs. Even so, there is a long way to go because there is still an unfair stigma attached to the trades.
Matthew B. Crawford’s recent book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, speaks not only of trades as a worthy vocation but also of their place in a well-rounded education. We do students a genuine disservice if we steer them away from what could be a very rewarding career – or simply an enjoyable pastime.
In his introduction to the book, Crawford says, “While manufacturing jobs have certainly left our shores to a disturbing degree, the manual trades have not. If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help. Because they are in China. And in fact there are chronic labor shortages in both construction and auto repair.” How true: many jobs have gone “offshore”, and not just manufacturing jobs. Even some “knowledge economy” jobs are now outsourced to other countries. When you call for technical help for a computer problem, for example, you could very well be talking to someone in India. However, jobs that require the worker to be onsite and/or face to face with the consumer or client are not going to go away, and these are the very jobs that are in demand today.
Crawford knows whereof he speaks. He has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and has worked in the “knowledge economy” in several capacities – among them, as a writer of abstracts of academic journal articles and as the executive director of a Washington-based think tank. In both cases, he found the work soulless and mind-numbing instead of intellectually stimulating. In the former, it turned out that he had a quota of abstracts to fill every day, and the only “quality control” was that of grammar internal to the abstract, not of whether the abstract did justice to the original article. In the case of the latter, his job was to “com[e] up with the best arguments money could buy.”
Disillusioned, Crawford quit after five months at the think tank and opened up a motorcycle repair shop. He explains how much thinking actually goes on in his bike shop when he is confronted by a motorcycle that doesn’t work: “You come up with an imagined train of causes for manifest symptoms and judge their likelihood before tearing anything down.” Ultimately, he says, “[m]ost surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so.”
Along the way, Crawford also describes how our society evolved from one that valued craftsmanship to one that became increasingly automated, how that evolution changed both the nature of work and how it was regarded, and how those changes, in turn, influenced our education system. With the advent of factory work, federal funding in the United States for manual training came in two forms: as part of general education and as a separate vocational program. Only the former “emphasized the learning of aesthetic, mathematical, and physical principles through the manipulation of material things.” The vocational programs were meant to produce factory workers who would work without questioning and who could be paid less. No wonder people tried to steer their kids away from such programs. However, not all manual work is mindless – the skilled trades certainly aren’t.
Crawford explores his topic in terms of both the work world and the education system. “Corporations portray themselves as results-based and performance-driven. But where there isn’t anything material being produced, objective standards for job performance are hard to come by.” When this type of theory is applied to education, similar problems arise, as Crawford points out: “When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: ‘All human beings by nature desire to know.’ Students become intellectually disengaged.”
Students aren’t widgets; they are human beings. We need to give them a well-rounded education that does not separate thinking from doing, whatever the subject area, and that allows them to live rich and satisfying lives intellectually, socially, and economically. Technology programs need to be expanded and valued so that the skilled trades can be seen and promoted as worthy, rewarding careers.
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Alterative Education Programs in B.C.: Meeting the Needs of Vulnerable Students
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Social Determinants of Educational Outcomes in Indigenous Learners
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Ethical Leadership in Public Education: Living an Ethic of Criticality
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New School Answers the Question: What Do We Value?
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Canadian Foundations Invest Cautiously in Public Schools Innovation, WIER: An Innovative Online Writer’s Salon Marks 20-plus Years
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Making Schools Safer? The Unintended Consequences of Good Intentions
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Ordinary Magic: Lessons from Research or Resilience in Human Development
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Remembering Joel: A Story of Resilience
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Mental Health: The Next Frontier of Health Education
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Debunking Myths: The B.C. Student Transitions Project
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The Times, they are a changin’ … How Demographc Reality is Reshaping Education
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Bringing Student Engagement Through the Classroom Door
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Rethinking the Place of Children and Youth
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Thinking Outside the Box: The Post-modern High School
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