http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/united-states/other-way-knowing

This site offers a really interesting personal account of Native American ways of knowing. The author tells of her childhood experience growing up in a Christian family and witnessing her grandmothers traditional Salish ways from a kind of outside perspective. She tells of her grandmothers actions that might look totally insane to non-native peoples and how those actions just seemed normal to her because she had always witnessed them. She explains the maiming and function of some of the actions. I found this story very interesting.

http://www.queensu.ca/news/articles/aboriginal-ways-knowing-focus-symposium

An introductory page for a symposium on aboriginal ways of knowing that was held at Queens University. Many indigenous scholars presented on the topic. The list of names and titles as well as links is useful for further research in the area.

http://www.usask.ca/education/people/aikenhead/IKS_revisited.pdf

This article gets into three different cultural ways of knowing: North American indigenous, neo-indigenous mainly based on Japanese, and Euro American. Its a good source of introductory information on a selection of approaches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycQtQZ9y3lc&feature=related

A video on “Native Science” and “Western Science.” A little long, but interesting.

http://library.educationworld.net/a12/a12-166.html

This is a short article on learning styles and the different learning styles that are particular to certain cultures. The learning styles are determined via research that is also briefly explained. Some controversy on this research and the practical use of the findings in education are presented.

Module 3~! So, I was looking for anything that connected orality and literacy to this modules topics of indigenous identity contrast with the culture of the colonizer and tradition, technology, and youth. These are some of the interesting things I found.

http://www.academia.edu/1074970/Indigenous_literacies_Moving_from_social_construction_towards_social_justice

This is an interesting article for teachers to read. It focuses on the indigenous cultures of Australia rather than North America, but some of the ideas are good.

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss1/art6/

The Ecology and Society website presents an article outlining a shared project involving government and a local indigenous group working together in forest management and conservation of habitat. One group brings science-based knowledge to the project, and the other brings their own cultural knowledge to the project. It is an interesting example of the possibilities.

http://www.socialworkers.org/diversity/ethnic/weaver.pdf

This article presents a study done with social workers to determine what values and needs were different for Native American peoples than for dominant Euro culture. The goal was to generate more culturally competent social workers.

http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/mods/theme_c/mod10.html

This site is actually a course site for another teacher education program. It pulls together some interesting materials and ideas all on one site, so it’s got a lot to offer. The particular course is titled “Culture and Religion for a Sustainable Future.” The nature of the content naturally follows suit with that title.

http://orgs.tigweb.org/arctic-indigenous-youth-alliance

This is an information page for the Arctic Indigenous Youth Alliance. It outlines goals, activities, opportunities for youth, and ways that anyone can get involved. Their main goal is to connect youth with the knowledge and wisdom of Elders and keep that connection alive.

Soooo~~~ This module focused on the colonial gaze, Nanook of the North, and cultural rights. I scraped together these links that I thought presented some quite interesting ideas. Again, my focus is on connections between orality and literacy, so the links show that~~

PDF available – Canadian Literature

An article on Thomas King’s Medicine River. It presents a lot of issues that come up in the novel that are relevant to the discourse we are engaging.

http://mit4036ero.blogspot.kr/2010/10/eye-of-power-and-sousveillance.html

This link leads to a short article discussing Foucault’s idea of the Gaze, how that Gaze has become something more extreme in the present, the Gaze as an element in power struggle, and how much we are aware of this and its effects in our lives. The article does not directly address issues of a colonizing culture’s gaze on an indigenous culture, but the power struggle may have a lot of similarity.

http://mycultureisnotatrend.tumblr.com/

A blog page on which some interesting points are made. I am mainly interested in the video posted near the top of the page though.

http://www.hrea.org/index.php?doc_id=423

The Human Rights Education Association page on rights to culture. It outlines some of the legalities involving right to culture. It introduces some of the international bodies that are responsible for cultural rights, and it presents some of their subgroups and the goals they are attempting to achieve. At the bottom, some related lessons for educators are offered.

http://www.krachtvancultuur.nl/en/theme/ethics.html

A collection of news stories and articles on culture and ethics that were published on the Power of Culture webpage between 2003 and 2010. The articles deal with culture issues worldwide, and many are interesting to read.

Hi all~! I have been thinking about my final paper and roaming the web a bit collecting useful links and materials. Now that I have a good chunk of stuff that I think might be interesting for the group I’ll post some of it. I am interested in transitions from oral to literate culture and how that transition affects culture, so most of my links are going to have some connection to that field, and I also tried to choose things that were appropriate to the topics in each module. Have a look~!^^

http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/?pg=53

This is a link to a short article titled “Oral traditions and expressions including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage.” The article points out some ways in which language is a direct carrier of culture that may not be obvious to everyone. It also makes some interesting points about how language and its functional spaces need to be maintained in order to preserve culture. It points out some things that I hadn’t thought much about prior to reading.

Oral Culture: a useful concept relevant to information … – CiteSeer

This is an interesting presentation of some ideas regarding literacy, information-technology, and the responsibilities of the literate mainstream to anyone non-literate. I can’t recall ever reading anything about responsibilities of the literate society to anyone orally based, so this caught my attention.

The Complexity of Oral Tradition – Oral Tradition Journal

This article goes some distance in defining oral tradition and gives a synopsis of some major writing that has been done in that field. It is a useful introduction to the field, and it offers a lot of names and titles that can be pursued for further study.

http://www.yorku.ca/aviseu/eng_assessmclu_content.html

This article presents a very interesting argument that written, mechanical representation systems moved culture away from oral traditions, but that more recent digital representation systems are taking us back to a more orally based culture. It is not directly applied to indigenous situations, but the ideas are relevant. There is some interesting talk of the balance of senses that is promoted by oral traditions, and I feel some connection between this balance and some of the other balances that I have read that indigenous cultures revere.

http://oralhistoryeducation.com/

This links a video that talks about using oral history projects in classrooms. I think the accounts that the participants give are quite interesting, and I am going to try to find a way to work this into my own ELA classes.

http://jsse.revues.org/index792.html

This article presents a lot of very pertinent and interesting ideas about how orality and literacy are actually not successive stages, but are rather necessarily intertwined and coexisting modes. The author refers to several authors, including Thomas King and Harry Robinson, whose work is a part of this discourse.

http://www.albany.edu/faculty/rpy95/webtext/critique.htm

This page offers another criticism of the orality vs. literacy binary. It is short, and it makes some worth while points. It offers a lot of names and titles that could be pursued for more in-depth study.

There are so many interesting areas related to the general subject matter of this course. I’ve definitely been having trouble choosing a focused field of study.

I took an undergrad course way back when I was doing my undergrad that focused on oral storytelling and particularly on the oral stories of a man named Harry Robinson. His stories had been transcribed by a woman who seemed to be very interested in preserving their oral nature in textual format. I can’t quite recall her name now (sorry to any of you who may be friends, family, or fans of that particular person!). I was always interested in that crossover space after experiencing Robinson’s oral stories in textual format. In the course of seminar discussions for that course a story, now foggy in my memory (my own lack of the skills and abilities that come with oral tradition I suppose), about a court case in which the chief of an indigenous group was accused of abandoning his tradition because he had at some point suggested ordering pizza during a recess came up. I guess one doesn’t live in a vacuum forever; ordering pizza doesn’t constitute abandonment of tradition in my mind, and neither does modification of oral to print format. I suspect my research will follow this sort of path. This is still a huge area to ponder, so I have some more narrowing to do. It’s a start though~! Ideas?