Tag Archives: Curriculum as Cultural Practice

Module 4 Post 3: Teaching History from an Indigenous Perspective: Four Winding Paths up the Mountain, Michael Marker

Marker, M. (n.d.) Teaching history from an indigenous perspective: Four winding paths up the mountain. [Course Materials] Retrieved from http://connect.ubc.ca

This chapter by Marker gives key insight into the development of a culturally responsive curriculum from the context of teaching history, though its application is in many ways cross curricular. Marker identifies and elaborates on four themes of indigenous historical understanding that do not integrate well into Western world views and pedagogies. These are:

“the circular nature of time and the ways oral tradition is integrated with recurring events…
the central theme of relationships with landscape and non-humans
an emphasis on the local landscapes as containing the meaning of both time and place rather than on analyses of global social and political change; and
indigenous narratives and perspectives on the histories of colonization that have attempted to displace and replace indigenous knowledge.”

Frequent within these themes are colonial dichotomies that minimize and devalue indigenous world views and limit the opportunities for indigenous self-determination and decolonization. These appear to develop from the differing world view in which the dominant culture strives for “progress” in an objective materialistic sense –“bigger, higher, newer, faster being preferred over smaller, lower, older or slower” and the indigenous cultures’ world view of primarily seeking to live better in a holistic sense that honours relationships with place, people and non-humans alike. The resulting values and beliefs (of both the dominant culture and the indigenous) are thus cemented in childhood–long before formal First Nations Studies courses (BC Curriculum) in high school address them. This emphasizes the necessity for culturally responsive curricula much earlier in elementary, both to slow the (sometimes unintentional) colonization progress by the culturally ignorant dominant culture and provide legitimacy to aboriginal students making sense of their traditional world view within the Western hegemony, as colonization is not only a physical, social and economic occurrence, it is a cognitive one as well.

Module 4, Post 5 – Do your readings support colonial ideals?

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Johnston, I. (2006). Engaged Differences: School Reading Practices, Postcolonial Literatures, and Their Discontents. . In Yatta Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as Cultural Practice (116 – 130). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

For any of you language arts teachers out there, this one is worth a read. The author discusses the phenomenon that exists in Canadian language arts classrooms, in which certain texts have become ‘canonized’. How many of you think of “Romeo & Juliet” as the Grade 10 play, “Macbeth” as the Grade 11 play, and “Hamlet” as the Grade 12 play, when the curriculum actually doesn’t even call for Shakespeare, just an understanding of drama? We have an option to change the readings, making choices that reflect the place and cultures of our students. Nothing says that “All Quiet on the Western Front” has to be read – why not check out Thomas King’s new novel, “The Inconvenient Indian”? One reason that resistant teachers might have is that there aren’t established lesson plans or public support for new materials, another might be that teachers are unwilling to introduce material with controversial topics because of anxiety about how to facilitate the conversations that will ensue. The thing is, to teach all students effectively, teachers must be willing to step outside of their comfort zones and make readings choices that support the removal of colonial ideals. Johnston makes a strong argument towards this case.

Module 4, Post 4 – Is Hybridity a Good Thing, or a New Word for an Old Idea?

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Richardson, G. (2006). Singular Nation, Plural Possibilities: Reimagining Curriculum as Third Space . In Yatta Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as Cultural Practice (283-301). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

“The question arises of how to reconceptualize curriculum in terms that do not maintain colonial structures of privilege and dominance” (284). Indeed.

This chapter calls for a deconstruction of the current cultural biases that exist within curriculum, so that a new curriculum, “open to multiple discourses, and plural assumptions and strategies” (284) can be realized. This newly realized curriculum would be the Third Space, a place of cultural hybridity. I support the goal of classrooms that encompass multiple discourses and plural assumptions, but I’m not sure that I understand this author accurately – all the other essays and studies in this book resonate as sensitive and accurate arguments, but to me this Third Space seems like a reincarnation of the ‘cultural melting pot’ idea. I agree that there is a need to deconstruct biased curriculum and replace it with culturally sensitive/inclusive material, I just am not certain that cultural hybridity should be the end goal. The author states that with cultural hybridity, “national identity is seen to be [a] continual and dynamic process of encounter, negotiation, and dislocation among and between cultural groups” (285); to me, negotiation and dislocation sound like assimilative terms.

Module 4, Post 3 – Postcolonial Poetry Project

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Willinksy, J. (2006). High School Postcolonial: As the Students Ran Ahead with the Theory . In Yatta Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as Cultural Practice (95-115). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

This chapter reads as a narrative case study, by an academic who joined a Grade 12 English class in Vancouver as a guest teacher. The purpose was for the guest teacher to teach a postcolonial poetry unit that was an accurate reflection of the time and place that the students were learning in. One idea that stood out for me was that it is misleading for teachers to teach about colonialism as if it was over, if their curriculum still reinforces colonial or assimilative ideals.

The writer engaged the students in a collaborative poetry project wherein each student had to source a poem that reflected their cultural heritage, in its original language and in an English language translation. Each student created a section of their new postcolonial poetry anthology, including the bilingual poetry presentation, a poetry analysis, and discussion questions. The hope was that other teachers would choose to use this new anthology as well, rather than the previously used one which represented an older, Caucasian view of Canada. The students in the study “were engaged in nothing more than providing an additional sense of Canadian identity and landscape to the scope of their curriculum” (110).

Module 4, Post 2 – Teaching ESL in a Non-Assimilative Way

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MacPherson, S. (2006). To STEAL or to TELL: Teaching English in the Global Era . In Yatta Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as Cultural Practice (71-94). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

The acronyms in the title are: STEAL (Surreptitiously Teach English as an Assimilative Language) and TELL (Teach English as a Liberatory Language).

This chapter tackles the assimilative goals of English language instruction head on. It provides quotations from historical documents that unabashedly claim the goal of assimilation, and it also uncovers less purposeful but still harmful effects of current instructional practices.

MacPherson makes the point that it is not sufficient for minority languages to be used in the personal realm alone – this might help to ensure the languages’ survival, but only at a conversational level. For the full texture and depth of a language to survive, it must be used academically and professionally.

The author is not against the teaching of the English language; she/he teaches English to speakers of other languages. The point is that the English language is not necessarily fit to convey the ideas of other cultures, and so must not be allowed to dominate minority languages. When the higher level words of a language are lost through disuse, because the language has been relegated to the private conversational realm, then the ideas that those words expressed can also be lost.

Module 4, Post 1 – Kinder Curriculum

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Mason, R.T. (2006). A Kinder Mathematics for Nunavut. In Yatta Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as Cultural Practice (131-148). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

This chapter introduced me to the idea of “ethnomathematics”. It’s exactly what it sounds like – the acknowledgment that there are cultural aspects in math curriculum. I don’t teach math, but the idea is transferable to any discipline, in my opinion. “It is most useful to view the curriculum as a site of struggle in which pupils, teachers, parents, as well as voices from industrial, commercial, and other settings have at various times competed in various ways and with varying relative strengths to assert their priorities…From this perspective, the curriculum is neither free from nor determined by the economic and political space in which it operates: it makes more sense to ask how ideas fit with society, how they encourage particular ways of seeing particular ideologies” (135). I found this quote striking because of course the curriculum that we teach is value-laden – someone has chosen to prioritize some knowledge over others, and as such the chosen knowledge is laden with the beliefs and values of the curriculum-maker. It does make sense to question the curriculum and to make choices that create culturally sensitive lessons, as this chapter instructs.