During these first few weeks of classes in the Global Citizens Stream, we have touched on a few important questions: How do our backgrounds and cultures affect our memories? What is Globalization? and What does it mean to be a Global Citizen? In the last few classes in Literature, we have been discussing Farhat Shahzad’s article on The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning. In her article, Shahzad showed the importance we take in our ‘Interpretive Communities,’ such as our families, friends and teachers when learning and remembering. In her study she found that although media affects the way we create memories of events, it is our ‘Interpretive Communities’ that guide us to make personal meanings. Throughout reading this article, I could not help but wonder, how do the interpretive communities in which we find ourselves affect the way we find meaning?
The word Globalization is very broad, in many ways it is a positive term, but in others, it can be negative. A recent encounter with globalization I have had was with the documentary Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden, directed by Carol Black. Black’s documentary portrays the negative effects of globalization within education. The documentary shows how the western culture’s, or ‘the white man’s,’ devotion to educating the world, especially developing countries, is destructive to many ancient cultures and generational ways of life. Black even compares this westernized education system to the residential schools that the Aboriginal people were forced into by the settlers, in order to assimilate the culture.
My question is: When these people leave their own culture and ‘Interpretive Communities’ to be educated in order to have ‘a better life,’ who then becomes their ‘Interpretive Community’ from which they can base their trust and form their own memories and meanings? Do they resent their new community, or do they completely leave their previous life and community behind, to fully accept and embrace their new ‘Interpretive Community’ to form new memories and meanings?
Except from Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden:
