The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about ‘our ancestors, the Gauls,’ identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries truth to the savages–an all-white truth. (Fanon, 1967: 147)
For Fanon, a psychiatrist born in Martinique and educated in France, this experience–learning in school, as elsewhere, to identify with the oppressor–is at the heart of the psychological dysfunctions particular to colonized peoples that he noticed in his practice. The ANC recognizes this as a problem in the South African educational system, even today, writing,
Psychologists have documented that trauma occurs during these childhood periods when black children read about nothing but white heroes...When eventually these children grow and realize they are Black, a serious identity crisis occurs, for they too are the very 'evil' they have read about. Many of the books on offer here are still written by Whites, and Blacks are forced to look at themselves through the eyes of white people. (ANC Daily Newsbriefing: Aug 18, 1997)
Building on Fanon’s insights, the tradition of liberatory pedagogy has come to many of the same conclusions reached by the authors–Piaget, Papert, Brown and Seely, etc–who we have come in contact with through this class. Liberatory pedagogy argues that we start with the lived experience of our students instead of more abstract forms and approaches, recognize and encourage the bi-directionality of the teacher/student relationship, and re-marry meaningful activity (praxis) to the learning process.
Though in very different contexts, my own teaching experience has borne out the truth of one of Fanon’s primary insights–that education as the practice of freedom starts from the specific cultural context of the learners. I have had experience teaching in three very different institutions–UC Santa Cruz, an experimental and vehemently liberal gradeless college with a humanities focus and heavy stress on independent learning; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a much more conservative and "traditional" technical school; and in community technology centers (like the Ark and Plugged In) and charter schools, which often serve people who have been failed by the traditional school system. In each case, the experience of teaching was very different and it became quickly apparent that my previous pedagogical methods, ported from another context, would not work in the new one. The solutions, though, were much slower in coming (and they still remain partial and incomplete). As a preface to thinking about how to develop a meaningful learning experience in a short but immersive workshop, I’d like to share some of the concepts that have helped guide my thinking and my pedagogical practice thus far. Many of these concepts are also evolving in our class reading and discussion, and I think this constellation of ideas, when taken together, offer a useful rubric for designing personally and creatively significant learning experiences in the design workshop setting.
Cultural Situatedness
In the constructivist and situationist conceptions, students learn
best by doing and what is learned cannot be separated from how
it is learned and used. Brown and Seely et al. write, for example,
that "Learning and cognition...are fundamentally situated," and
further that "activity and situations are integral to cognition
and learning" (1989: 32). While this focus on putting knowledge
into context through design activity is clearly productive, I’m
surprised at how rarely the term culture is included as part of
the context of cognition. As a result, these discussions rarely
point out ways that educators can leverage the learners’ culture
to make design activity that is personally exciting and relevant.
For example, Seymour Papert writes eloquently in favor of radical
change to the educational system in an early memo held in the
MIT collections, "Some Poetic and Social Criteria for Education
Design." He lists three possible starting places: the institution
of the present (in 1976) elementary schools; the technology of
micro-computers which was just coming available at the time; or
the process of learning as he sees it (drawing on Piaget’s explorations
of children’s acquisition of language). Despite his use of Samba
School–which is a deeply-embedded and specific part of Brazilian
culture–as a "successful model" of painless and reliable learning
process, nowhere does he suggest that teachers start from culture. Though the situationist model explicitly addresses the context
of the use of knowledge, no one seems to be concerned with the
context of the learners themselves.
A fine example of how cultural traditions can be leveraged for
learning is offered in "Say, Say Oh Playmate," basic literacy
software for young children (developed by Nichole Pinkard at the
University of Michigan) that builds on the tradition of clapping
games.
A screenshot from Say, Say Oh Playmate, software created by Nichole
Pinkard to help develop early literacy skills in low-income African-American
children.
Pinkard argues that culturally responsive software programs like
this one (and also the Rappin’ Reader, another of her projects) can motivate beginning reluctant readers,
suggesting that culturally defined oral language skills possessed
by African-American children can serve as effective bridges to
developing early literacy skills.
My own teaching experience has taught me a similar lesson, that I must start from the assumptions, cultural contexts, and references of each group of my students. In this way, I can help them make sense of, and use, conceptual or theoretical material in ways that are relevant to their own lives. Each institution in which I have taught has had a unique culture of its own, and the students have come from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds. These particular contexts have become my starting point for pedagogy.
Education as the Practice of Freedom (Praxis)
For Paulo Freire, liberation is a praxis — a practice of cycling
between action and reflection — and an education that encourages
reflection, but does not also include critical intervention, fails
to be truly liberatory. He writes, "Education as the practice
of freedom–as opposed to education as the practice of domination–denies
that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to
the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart
from people...consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows
it. (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 62)" Praxis is analogous with several of the learning/teaching
heuristics we came up with as a class, particularly 1) cycling
between immersion and reflection, 2) a focus on explorative, constructive
learning through activity in the world, and 3) culturally-situated
learning as I described it above. Frere’s work takes these concepts
one step further, though, in relating the practice of pedagogy
to the political goal of an end to oppression. Many of the programs
for revolutionizing education that we’ve read about so far account
for the very tricky and complex power relationship between the
master and the student, but fail to take into account the power
inherent in the context of the students' lived world, their situatedness.
In addition to returning to learners’ cultural contexts for inspiration and grounding, I think we need to return to the political context in which many of the changes in educational thinking in the last thirty years have taken place. These changes have grown out of, and taken place within, the context of a world deeply changed by social movements of the 1960s and 1970s: civil rights, feminism, and postcolonial struggles among them. I’m particularly surprised that there has not been more productive cross-talk between educators interested in situationist approaches and the work of feminists in science and technology studies. Though it appeared ayear after her article "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" appeared, Brown and Seely do not explicitly draw on the highly innovative and powerful work of Donna Haraway (though they implicitly draw on her work in the title of their piece) to support their claims about cognitive situatedness. This lapse reflects a larger tendency in much of the educational literature I’ve been exposed to in this class; like authors using the Antillean schoolboy example without crediting Fanon, there is a tendency to shear theoretical concepts and educational practices of their political contexts. Recognizing, and building on the cultural context of learners is part and parcel with an anti-racist and anti-sexist pedagogy. 1
Asset-Based Approaches
According to Randal Pinkett, asset-based community development
(ABCD) is "a process for ‘mapping’ a community’s assets and mobilizing
these assets to address community-defined issues and solve community-defined
problems." This approach is often put into practice2 in community centers by providing neighborhood residents with
IT tools for collecting, cataloguing and sharing knowledge about
neighborehood resources. For example, Pinkett has worked with
a database-driven website that serves as an interface for internet
services in a community technology center (CTC) at the Camfield
Estates in Roxbury Park. Pinkett cites Kretzmann and McKnight
(1993) characteristics of the ABCD that differentiate it from
other community development models: focus on indigenous assets
as opposed to externally-defined (and often incorrectly presumed)
needs; an internal focus that calls upon community members to
define their own interests and build autochthonous solutions to
problems; and the "ongoing establishment of productive relationships
among community members." In simpler terms, ABCD does two important
things: draws on a framework that considers low-income, inner-city,
and rural communities in terms of their assets instead of their
deficits, and provides a model for teaching technological skills
through grassroots community-organizing efforts with internal,
situated focus and expertise.
Asset-based approaches, which I believe can be ported from the context of community development to the classroom, offer a synthesis of the best of cultural situatedness and praxis. They can help us to foreground the bi-directional, relational nature of the teachers to her students. They help us focus on indigenous strengths (like the oral language skills that Pinkard attempts to leverage for developing reading skills in Say, Say Oh Playmate and the Rappin’ Reader), instead of holding different kinds of students to standardized and abstracted norms. And finally, these approaches call on the community of learners themselves (whether the are grade-school students or adults) to define their own educational agenda and goals.
Conclusion: Ethnographic Method and Collaborative Curriculum-Building
So in Papert’s words, "What’s the big idea?" What I have tried
to express here is that I find it surprising how little cross-talk
exists between these concepts in the incredible variety of contexts
in which they are common: studies of pedagogy, science and technology
scholarship, political science (especially in postcolonial studies),
and community development. I think a productive cross-fertilization
of these fields is well past due. But what do these three concepts
have to do with the question at hand, that is, "What can I teach
or learn in three hours?" The question I have tried to broach
within the limited confines of this paper is whether or not the
practice of liberatory pedagogy is possible within a one-time,
short, but immersive workshop experience. At first glance, the
requirements on which this program depends–a deep understanding
and appreciation of the cultural context of the learners–seems
impossible in such a setting. I’d argue, however, that with minor
modifications, we could come closer to realizing Friere’s ideal
in the workshop format. The best way to make the workshops non-generic
and situated is to start, instead of from our own interests and
passing fancies, from the desires, needs, and strengths of a particular
community of learners.
In other words, I’m trying to argue here that we should start developing our workshops from a more ethnographic point of view, by defining the field. Our first duty, then, is to define the workshop’s audiences, letting research questions to be tackled emerge from the students themselves, and then collaborating to build the educational content and environment with them, instead of for them.
Notes:
1) This is hardly a revoultionary concept. Sesame Street has been
drawing on the culture of urban kids to teach tolerance and respect
for diversity—as well as basic math andliteracy—for thirty years.
2) See, for example, Pinkett’s ongoing project at Camfield Estates
in Roxbury, MA (http://www.media.mit.edu/~rpinkett/papers/camfield-mit.html) or the "Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles" and "I Am LA projects
described in TOP’s "Community Connections" report, described above
(http://www.ntia.doc.gov/otiahome/top/publicationmedia/comm_conn/community_connections_illus.html).
References:
ANC Daily Newsbriefing, "EDUCATION-SOUTH AFRICA: RACISM AND SEXISM
STILL RIFE," August 18, 1997. http://www.anc.org.za/anc/newsbrief/1997/news0818
Brown, J.S., Collins, A., and Daguid, P. 1989. "Situated Cognition
and the Culture of Learning." Educational Researcher, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 32-42.
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
Freire, Paulo. 1997 [orig 1970] Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Papert, Seymour. 1976. "Some Poetic and Political Criteria for
Education Design." LOGO Memo # 27, Artificial Intelligence Memo
# 373, Massachucets Institute of Technology AI Laboratory, June.
Papert, Seymour. 2000. "What’s the Big Idea: Toward a Pedagogy
of Idea Power." IBM Systems Journal, vol. 32, nos. 3 &4: 720-729.
Pinkard, Nichole. Say, Say Oh Playmate Software Description. http://www.umich.edu/~medal/ssopmweb/ssop.html
Pinkard, Nichole. (in review) "Learning to Read in Culturally
Responsive Computer Environments." Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement.
Pinkett, Randall. "Camfield Estates-MIT Creating Community Connections
Project Overview." http://www.media.mit.edu/~rpinkett/papers/camfield-mit.html