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I am happy for my musings to have this purpose but do not think that I can speak of my practice within the frame of formal teaching or even academic standards in the sense of tertiary education institutions - as a publication from this network may wish to present. And yet - your response to Brian below, is very close to my own way of working. So I guess I am asking for some clarification – Susie

…we seek compassionate critical feedback on what we speak of – Pip
 
A prominent Maori academic, Dr Linda Tuhiwai Smith, wrote the following questions that she believes should be asked by any researcher - Pip

Salaam Alaikum
 
Susie’s vital sentiment is so important. Likewise, I don’t imagine my living theory practice presented within a frame of formal teaching or even academic standards in the sense of tertiary education systems that are also whiteness centred in UK [1]. Contemporary British education is whiteness centred and the damaging implications for continuing exclusion are clear to all of us whose teaching contains a commitment to eliminating racism (among a welter of exclusions, all equally ugly, though I’ve chosen to focus my practice on racial exclusion in the spirit of al tadbir). Talking recently with Dr Rob Barker, deputy director of the Runnymede Trust, he made the point to a group of UK police officers that racism in UK, not Islam, continues to be the cleavage plane for social cohesion in Britain. Since 1987 Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah (University of Kent, UK) has published six novels that eloquently frame the ideological nature of ‘colonial’ education the vestiges of which internationally are implicated in the violence of globalizing capitalism [2], and what some educational researchers have recognised as the educational complexity of social change [3]. I value and appreciate Susie’s insight because it is vitally aware of these issues. The standard of judgement I bring to my appreciative engagement of Susie’s insight is that of ‘purpose’.
 
What is the purpose of my life, my teaching, and my educational research if not to commit my actions (as activism) to the psycho-social transformation of educational practices that are still colonial through my own postcolonial practice as I develop and re-develop my living and propositional standards of judgement to critically support my postcolonial practice as a compassionate and responsible teacher and social activist? I’m arriving at this recognition of connection with Susie’s insight through a ten year nomadic decolonizing ‘self-safir’; by which I mean a journey of the self, or a journey of self study. In my work with southern African students of European origin, and action research peers, I’ve learned from living my emergent postcolonial values and ‘living contradiction’.
 
Kia Ora Pip. A brief lovely story that links to your mention of Linda’s decolonizing methodologies. Around 2000’ish my dear friend Nceku Nyathi, an ex-undergraduate student tipped me off to a book that, at that time for Nceku, was a real eye opener. Nceku’s undergrad thesis was supervised by me and it was exploration into the ethnocentricity and whiteness of management and organizational discourses. Nceku’s doctoral thesis poses difficult questions about the absence of African worldview in Western dominated management and organizational discourses when there are African forms of knowledge vital to organization theory and studies (one such is Ubuntu). Nceku’s thesis is that postcolonial theory is not a ‘complement’ to organization theory but rather postcolonial theory is an ‘other-inflected’ discourse re-organizing the white-discourses of organization theory.
 
Nceku’s excitement with Linda’s work infected me. Hot foot, I took Linda’s work into the Bath Educational Action Research community and ignited Jack’s interest, as I’d done earlier with the notion of Ubuntu. From both of those personal postcolonial activisms in white space Jack and I crafted an emotional paper for presentation at AERA New Orleans (White and Black with White Identities, Murray and Whitehead, 2000)at which Jean Clandinnin gently touched my forearm and said, ‘Paulus, you must write your story!’ In that space I began to stir in the direction of purpose – my teacherly research narrative would have to have purpose otherwise it felt as if it was only my story.
 
During this period, and simultaneously, Dr Robyn Pound was completing her doctoral thesis of alongsideness. A short while after gaining her doctorate Robyn went home to New Zealand and on return we met at the Bath session. Robyn came over to me, sheepishly, and showed me these nostalgia-hued sepia-grey photo’s (they felt so 1950’s!!) with Robyn standing next to her childhood mate. Robyn said something like (forgive any lapse of memory), ‘that’s me with my best mate Linda, only she wasn’t Tuhiwai then’. Robyn had not mentioned her childhood friendship with Linda before. Two tousle-haired school girls with gangly legs and nobly knees caught in the fading light of a colonial era with no premonition of the postcolonial aura they were to inherit, and whose life projects support humanity, differently, through the decolonization of systems in order to facilitate the emergence of stronger and more purposeful personal consciousness.
 
In that moment I recognised that Linda could have only become Tuhiwai through her own decolonization, a reformation of self I was attempting, though my reforming identity was wafer-thin and fragile. I simply couldn’t stand up to any prodding. At that time I felt like one of those lizards with see through skin that my Grandmother BiAsiya Hilal so hates! But in that same moment a seed of recognition was sown and it took me a lot of time to appreciate its significance: that Robyn was also working through her own postcolonial metamorphosis, though I was colour-blind to that awareness at the time. Reading Pip’s references to Linda Tuhiwai Smith I wanted to acknowledge how I can see that Robyn’s thesis of alongsideness has a tap-root of authenticity and ontological integrity going way back into her childhood.
 
This reinforces my alongsideness with Susie’s insight, and Pip’s reference to Linda’s research questions that are for all of us committed to decolonizing the systems, structures and curricula of whiteness that Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton referred to in Black Power (1967) as ‘institutional racism’.
 
My purpose in educational research given ‘steel willed’ focus by the principle of al-tadbir is to work in those ways alluded to by Susie and Pip.
 
In this way purpose becomes a vital living standard of critical and compassionate judgement. Count me in, please, ‘alongside’ (after Robyn Pound) and ‘near by’ (after Trinh Minh-Ha, 1993).
 
 
Yaakub
 
References-

[1] Ifekwunigwe, J. (2001) Re-Membering Race, in Parker, D., and Song, M. (eds.) (2001) Re-Thinking Mixed Race. London: Pluto Books
 
[2] McLaren, P., and Farahmandpur, R. (2005) Teaching Against Global Capitalism And The New Imperialism. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield
 
[3] Lauder, H, brown, P, Dillabough, A, and Halsey, A. eds., 2006, Education, Globalization and Social Change. Oxford: oxford University Press).