Education as the Practice of Freedom

Author(s):  
Marva S. McClean ◽  
Marcus Woolombi Waters

As a result of the complex, multilayered, and problematic environment in which they work, two scholars collaborating between the continents of Australia and North America complicate the data from standardized testing in their communities to argue for the implementation of indigenous knowledge epistemology as a strategy to achieve social justice and equity in global classrooms. The chapter explores the residual effects of imperialism on the formerly colonized and investigates postcolonial themes such as the indigenous self, gender constructs, cultural and communal identity. The study reveals just how critical it is to global research to have the benefit of scholars collaborating across borders. The study provides findings and offers recommendations in direct response to the question: How can educators engage students as collaborators within a third space that elevates their voices as successful students?

Author(s):  
Marva McClean ◽  
Marcus Woolombi Waters

As a result of the complex, multilayered, and problematic environment in which they work, two scholars (Black Jamaican and Aboriginal), collaborating across the continents of North America and Australia, complicate the data from standardized testing in their communities to argue for the integration of the historical empowerment of Black, Aboriginal, and Indigenous peoples as a necessity to achieve social justice and equity in global classrooms. The chapter presents the engagement of students in this collaborative inquiry in acknowledgment of the critical role students must play in the transformation of global education. The study reveals just how critical it is to global research to have the benefit of scholars collaborating across borders. The study provides findings and offer recommendations in direct response to the question: How can educators engage students as collaborators within a third space that elevates their voices as successful students?


Author(s):  
John Joseph Norris ◽  
Richard D. Sawyer

This chapter summarizes the advancement of duoethnography throughout its fifteen-year history, employing examples from a variety of topics in education and social justice to provide a wide range of approaches that one may take when conducting a duoethnography. A checklist articulates what its cofounders consider the core elements of duoethnographies, additional features that may or may not be employed and how some studies purporting to be duoethnographies may not be so. The chapter indicates connections between duoethnography and a number of methodological concepts including the third space, the problematics of representation, feminist inquiry, and critical theory using published examples by several duoethnographers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Rajesh Singh ◽  
Kevin Rioux

The goal of the Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals at St. John’s University (SJU) is to offer both current LIS practitioners and LIS students a curriculum explicitly grounded in social justice principles and concepts that builds and enhances capabilities to substantively counter racism and other challenges to social justice that are reflected in the information sphere of the 2020’s. This article reports on the contexts, motivations and considerations for developing the Certificate. Included is a brief overview of current courses related to social justice offered by ALA-accredited graduate programs in North America, and a list of thematic emphases based in social justice frameworks that will drive the Certificate upon its launch.


2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (S1) ◽  
pp. 14-24
Author(s):  
Terri Janke

Abstract Indigenous knowledge is an integral part of Indigenous cultural heritage. Knowledge about land, seas, places and associated songs, stories, social practices, and oral traditions are important assets for Indigenous communities. Transmitted from generation to generation, Indigenous knowledge is constantly reinterpreted by Indigenous people. Through the existence and transmission of this intangible cultural heritage, Indigenous people are able to associate with a communal identity. The recording and fixing of Indigenous knowledge creates intellectual property (IP), rights of ownership to the material which the written or recorded in documents, sound recordings or films. Intellectual property rights allow the rights owners to control reproductions of the fixed form. IP laws are individual based and economic in nature. A concern for Indigenous people is that the ownership of the intellectual property which is generated from such processes, if often, not owned by them. The IP laws impact on the rights of traditional and Indigenous communities to their cultural heritage. This paper will explore the international developments, case studies, published protocols and policy initiatives concerning the recording, dissemination, digitisation, and commercial use of Indigenous knowledge.


Author(s):  
Maluleka Khazamula Jan

The main issue that bothers indigenous people is an unequal and unjust representation of their knowledge in relation to the formalized Western education system. Despite the affirmation of indigenous knowledge by the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Western formal education system defines what knowledge and teaching methods are authentic or not. The purpose of this chapter is to determine the value of the indigenous knowledge and their pedagogic methods for preschool and school teachers. The data collected has been critically analyzed through John Rawls' theory of social justice. There is an agreement between authors and teachers that indigenous people had education systems that sustained them for years. This chapter provides some recommendations on how these valuable methods of teaching can be incorporated into the mainstream education systems.


Author(s):  
Kathy Bussert-Webb ◽  
Karin Lewis

The authors explore children's and mothers' perceptions and experiences regarding school and an after-school tutorial agency. The latter serves a South Texas colonia, an unincorporated Southwestern settlement lacking basic services. They asked, “What are participants' perceptions and experiences regarding this agency and school?” Latinx participants, who spoke Spanish as a mother tongue, included 19 children, their eight mothers, two agency staff, and 15 teacher candidates (TCs). TCs were Bussert-Webb's university students who tutored the children and used iPads for multimodal, multilingual experiences. Using Third Space and social justice frameworks and qualitative analysis, these themes emerged: power, engagement, and diversity; participants described traditional educational experiences at school and nontraditional ones at the agency. Implications connect to hybridity and power redistributions in and out of schools to affirm and extend the languages, cultures, and modalities of nondominant children and families.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Vondey

The essay contrasts two distinct ways of Pentecostal formation: (1) social activism and (2) social passivism. The former identifies Christian formation as participation and leadership in the struggle against poverty, deprivation, and oppression; the latter withdraws into a sectarian mindset of individualism, self-improvement, and triumphalism. A focus on Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America brings the two accounts into dialogue on the identity of contemporary Pentecostal formation. The results suggest that Christian formation among Pentecostals is confronted with significant diversity influenced by cultural and socioeconomic factors. Johns’ classic study of Pentecostal formation and its emphasis on conscientization leading to redemptive participation in the struggle among the oppressed demands further attention. This essay shows that conscientization among Pentecostals is not only a psychological and sociocritical form of assessment but a personal and communal coming to consciousness subject to long-term cultural influences and sociohistorical developments.


2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-110
Author(s):  
Ali Hassan Zaidi

One effect of 9/11 has been that Muslim voices, which until then had beenmostly ignored, are increasingly reaching a wider audience of other Muslimsand non-Muslims. In Europe and North America, this has meant that selfidentified“progressive” Muslim scholars who emphasize social justice, aswell as “traditional” Muslims who emphasize Islam’s spiritual or esotericdimension, have been contributing in a much more vocal manner to the contemporaryinterpretation of what it means to be Muslim. Since most of theleading figures presented herein are Sufi Muslims of a particular strand ofesoteric Islam, this book helps fill an important lacuna concerning the developmentof the traditionalist position – a position that has been voiced bysuch Muslim scholars as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Martin Lings.Sedgwick promotes the book as a biography of René Guénon (1886-1951) and an intellectual history of the traditionalist movement that heinaugurated in the early twentieth century. Guénon’s movement combineselements of perennial philosophy, which holds that certain perennial problemsrecur in humanity’s philosophical concerns, and that this perennialwisdom is now only found in the traditional forms of the world religions ...


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 52-71
Author(s):  
Chay Brown

Aboriginal people in Alice Springs mapped the safe places in their Town Camps. This participatory research led to the implementation of safety features. Safety mapping was developed in response to deficit-based research which pathologized Aboriginal people in Alice Springs. Safety mapping was conducted with Aboriginal people in Town Camps to identify safe places and improve safety. A strengths-based approach showed that problems and their solutions are known, and there are considerable safety assets within Town Camps. The safety mapping centred the voices and experiences of Aboriginal people to produce research that was of benefit to Town Campers, over which Indigenous people retained ownership. This paper highlights that an Indigenist approach to participatory action research is strengthened by Indigenous knowledge in driving social justice.


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