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Hello, Susan,
Thank you for your questions.
As it is quite late here and I have to teach all day tomorrow,
I try to exemplify the case to pinpoint the issue in a nutshell:
A teacher who has a strong emphasis on testing students’ competence in reading or writing only through quantitatively approved and established methods ultimately comes up with the proposition: “only quantitative analysis ought to define who is good at reading and who is not”. The archeological excavation of his statement traces back to the underlying statement with a message close to the following proposition “quantitative analysis or quantitative method serves as the best [is the best]”. This prescribes approaches and practices, actions and behaviors within that realm and proscribes the use of any method which is not moving in line with the said premises. Emotions can go up if the contender faces up with comments and feedbacks that implicitly or explicitly challenge the issue. He may comply with what is said in his/her rational mind but his experiential mind says some thing else as the experiential mind is directly connected to the subconscious, automatic, unconscious thoughts and emotions.
I wish you sharing the fragrance of water on the sun-seared sidewalks,
Mohsen
Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi, Ph.D.
Lecturer in Language Education, Psychology and Communication
The University of British Columbia
Tel: 604 2224495
Emails: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
From: Susan Goff <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: BERA Practitioner-Researcher <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 18:37:15 +1100
Hmm, hello Mohsen, happy Monday’s to you. Now that cherry has an interesting stone and a strange mix of sweet and sharp. I would appreciate it, if you have the time and the inclination, to tell us more about your musings on aught and is, the concept of proscriptive and prescriptive “sources”, (I am into sources in a big, non casual way!), and how you see emotion and judgement at work with each other within yourself....
I wish you not to crack your filling on the cherry stone!
Susie
On 6/11/06 5:14 PM, "sayyedmohsen fatemi" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hello, Susan,
Your response to Brian reminds me of the book "Reality isn't what it used to be" by Walter Truett Anderson (1990).
And your response to Yaakub again is the reminiscent of the poem "Piano" by D. H. Lawrence where he says: „The glamour of childish says is upon me, my manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past".
And Paulo Freire's book „Pedagogy of the heart, under the mango tree" where he talks about the return to the backyard where the roots are located.
On the other hand, I found some more interesting points in your responses and that is the acknowledgement of a very significant philosophical propositions: ought is inextricably embedded within the heart of is" .Thus, an assessment or a criteria for the assessment unfolds, ontologically layers that highlight the presence of "is" and subsequently "ought". A focus on "ought" needs to be associated with an excavation of the underlying "is" where the presreptive and proscriptive sources lie. No matter what form of teaching or training we are subscribed to or we promote, we carry along those underlying constituents, albeit unconscious. Many an ought whose is may have been concealed to oblivion in the midst of the hurricane of perfunctory judgments being intertwined with cyclones of emotions.
Thank you, Susan.
I wish you and ever one on the list an insightful taste of cherries beyond the syntagmatic tyranny of the ordinary discourse,
Mohsen
Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi, Ph.D.
Lecturer in Language Education, Psychology and Communication
The University of British Columbia
Tel: 604 2224495
Emails: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
From: Susan Goff <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: BERA Practitioner-Researcher <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 16:40:08 +1100
Greetings Yaakub ˆ thank you for this beautiful winding journey; it is a window into your life stream which is ever more present it seems in your unfolding sense of identity and purpose ˆ I love the connections with childhood, recontextualised but not rewritten in the light of adulthood ˆ it links us back to when all our feet were smaller on our pathways that amazingly led to each other here and now! Where next I wonder.
S
On 3/11/06 7:57 PM, "Paul Murray" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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 ˆ Susie
∑we seek compassionate critical feedback on what we speak of ˆ 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 Œcolonial‚ 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 Œpurpose‚.
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 Œself-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 Œliving 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 Œcomplement‚ to organization theory but rather postcolonial theory is an Œother-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, ŒPaulus, you must write your story!‚ In that space I began to stir in the direction of purpose ˆ 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), Œthat‚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 Œinstitutional racism‚.
My purpose in educational research given Œsteel 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, Œalongside‚ (after Robyn Pound) and Œnear 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).
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