“While I like and use the following idea of influence it does seem crucial for the theme of the seminar to focus on similarities and differences in our meanings of 'educational'..”

 

I agree with the above statement.

Research, educational or otherwise, that claims to be educational but is whiteness centred ceases to be ‘educational’ following Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) idea of a category mistake.

 

” ...I am specifically concerned with 'educational influence' - not 'influence' ....”

 

But is my education influenced by this statement? No, not really. You see, I am specifically concerned with the damaging influence of whiteness-centred education – not merely ‘educational influence’ (by whiteness-centred I mean whiteness as privilege and/or as hate) – for making progress in social justice.  

 

However, in my personal education (i.e. the growth of my ‘own’ educational knowledge), in my teaching practice (i.e., how I reflexively prepare for and work with students in learning), and in my commitment to educational research as radical social praxis (i.e., my ontological revelation that I want to write for myself as an educator of colour ‘into whiteness’ as a radicalized contribution to anti-racist activism) I’m excitedly influenced by educational research that takes into account the psycho-social relations of knowledge construction and how these are mediated by the hegemony of state violence in its totalizing appearance as class, gender and racialised oppression. I now understand how and why I am thoroughly alienated by educational research that is whiteness-centred.

 

I recognise in the work of Apple, Giroux, Macedo, Chomsky, McLaren, Farahmandpur, and Callas the defining characteristics of socio-politically informed educational research. Their writing’s teem with those standards of judgement – educational and sociopolitical – that influence me to read them, and to take their politically focused educational research projects very seriously, and with utmost respect. By politically focused I am referring to visible standards of personal judgement in their work that takes the violence of capitalism and racism with conjoint gravity, and concern. Reading their work I know how and why I’m in the presence of educational researchers whose standards of judgment are not whiteness-centred.

 

Educational theses of all kinds – positivistic, postpositivistic, grounded theory, narrative based, econometric – that are informed by educational and sociopolitical standards of judgment that aren’t whiteness-centred should be treated with utmost respect.

 

This appreciation is an educational standard of judgment that has emerged as a lodestar of my purpose and meaning as an educator of colour.  

 

 

Yaakub Murray       

 

 

 

 

 

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