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& On the continuity of learning, teaching, schooling- Mead’s educational proposal, from the perspective of decolonization and land or place-based education

Notes

Workflow

References

• Number the quotes by idea, then by order in the paper
  • ex) land-based would be 3.2

Highlights

• Yellow
  • Important parts that support the idea
  • or new learnings
• Green
  • Thought-provoking, relevant messages
• Red
  • To revisit
• Blue
  • Familiar ideas that can be connected to the main idea through discussion

Abstract

What

• Understanding the presence of continuity and land-based learning in school systems

Problem/But

• Two impediments to acknowledging land-based education:
  • making learning productive
  • a colonial society
• We genuinely do not have the tools to think about land-based education to combat these issues

Solution/How

• Put learning as the primary emphasis, overthrow the current notions of measurement and achievement-based learning
• Encourage and partake in acts of land-based learning

Definitions

pedagogy:

• the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept
  • ex) A type of pedagogy is one where the teacher allows for collaboration before individual assignments

Continuous:

• Learning positions us
• About how learning plays a part in the entire education process
• Disruption of land based learning through continuity

Land-based learning:

• Not just the outcome, but also the connection to the rest of the world, physically and socially
• uses an Indigenized and environmentally-focused approach to education by first recognizing the deep, physical, mental, and spiritual connection to the land that is a part of Indigenous cultures

Pragmatic:

• dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations

Colonial mindset:

• Less of a focus on learning, more of a focus on outcomes related to wealth and career growth

Highlights

Structure

• Problem/but
  • I argue that Mead’s call alerts us to two major impediments to the widespread flourishment of decolonized, place/land-based education, both of which are deeply intertwined with the effects and ongoing processes of colonization and the forms of anti-Indigeneity implicit in mainstream notions and practices of schooling. The first impediment concerns the external demands for efficiency and productivity placed upon schools, teachers and learners; the second concerns the interior (personal/spiritual/cognitive) manifestations of colonization that impact upon our ability to understand land and place as educationally significant in the first place (land/place as school)
  • 2021-09-30 2:32 PM
• Solution/how
  • In conclusion, I outline the significance of this reconceptualization for the possibility and controversies of decolonized, place- and land-based education.
  • 2021-09-30 2:33 PM
• Reasons for lack of land-based and indigenous learning

  • I argue that the general inability (or unwillingness) to meaningfully and widely incorporate both place-based and Indigenous land-based educational perspectives within formal schooling and curriculum stems largely from two ongoing histories or paradigms of educational practice, both identified by Mead as being incompatible with an understanding of education as intergenerational renewal and adaptation: 1) globalist and technocratic educational aims that learning, teaching, schooling be productive and tethered to the accumulation of both economic and social capital, and; 2) the colonial and anti-Indigenous indoctrination practices implicit to the concept of compulsory schooling itself.

  • 2021-09-30 2:51 PM

  • We cannot incorporate land-based learning in school because

  • 1. The emphasis on productivity and career development
  • 2. Anti-Indigenous practices in the school system?

Learning

• Learning and self-discovery ^2d5ifg
  • Ingold (2013, p. 13) explains this basic insight, and how it informed his own approach to teaching and practicing anthropology:
  • we learn by doing, in the course of carrying out the tasks of life. In this the contribution of our teachers is not literally to pass on their knowledge, in the form of a ready-made system of concepts and categories with which to give form to the supposedly inchoate material of sensory experience, but rather to establish the contexts or situations in which we can discover for ourselves much of what they already know, and also perhaps much that they do not. In a word, we grow into knowledge rather than having it handed down to us.
  • 2021-09-30 5:04 PM
  • Learning should not be made with the intention to absorb information without personal connections, but to spark self-discovery through our environment

Primary Learning

• Teachers don’t impose learning

  • Ultimately, this changes how we describe the educative process: through engaging in practices, teachers do not so much force or manipulate student’s attention toward pre-defined and desirable outcomes, but rather, simply provide opportunities for students to form their attention and to grow into knowing.

  • 2021-09-30 3:04 PM

  • Land-based is tied to primary learning, which is tied to application of learning. It is ultimately up to the student to make the decision to learn, so the emphasis should be on them rather than the cirriculum and processes

• Learning is primary ^jgoe5s
  • It is in this sense that I have maintained in previous work with anthropologist Michael Ling (cited in Campbell, 2018, p. 550) that “Learning precedes teaching, insofar as it goes on without formal teaching, often enough, and, that effective teaching has to be shaped by an understanding of learning, first and foremost”.
  • However, asserting that learning is primary and precedes teaching also requires that we recognize that learning is fragile, messy, and risky
  • 2021-09-30 4:56 PM
  • Support for the idea of primary learning
  • I think the quote is implying that we try to mask the riskiness of learning by downplaying it as students not being fit for the job, but in reality, it’s just the nature of learning and we need to put this in mind as the number one thing to adress in a successful learning environment

Land-based learning

• Taking action
  • If there is a central message from this study, it’s simply in reminding and reasserting that the prospect of decolonized place-based education is not in any way ensured just because it has been minimally acknowledged in recent years. At best, we are in stage of pre-conversation – just beginning to put our thinking to the test of reality.
  • 2021-10-01 2:38 PM
  • The current actions are only a stepping stone, and much more is deserved and possible
• Land-based education
  • Land education, these editors observe, calls us to more explicitly recognize Indigenous connections to land as central to environmental education, to recognize “both the role of Indigenous cosmologies in practices of land education, as well as the necessity of centering historical and current contexts of colonization in education on and in relation to land.” (p. 1)
Calderon (2014), in his contribution to this special issue, accentuates the problem clearly, stating “land education takes up what place-based education fails to consider: the ways in which place is foundational to settler colonialism” (p. 33).
  • 2021-09-30 5:09 PM
• Criticizing lack of effort

  • it is not enough to simply include references to the importance of Indigenous perspectives and knowledge in official government curriculum documents, while providing very little in terms of meaningful resources or avenues for learning and teaching about these perspectives in formal schooling contexts

  • 2021-09-30 2:46 PM

  • Relevant to orange shirt week, what actual support is there to make up for these actions?

• Criticizing methods of incorporation

  • “Talking about unceded territory does nothing to achieve justice or form restitution with the Indigenous people’s who are dispossessed from their land. Instead – actively live it. How are you, through your actions, lifestyle, and attitudes, enacting a life that lives on unceded territory? What systems that perpetuate uncededness and dispossession do you speak out against or subvert?”

  • 2021-09-30 2:49 PM

  • Could be used to question the effectiveness of the brief reminders of treaty territory prior to events.

  • Sure it’s a step up from nothing, but is it really that effective? Shouldn’t we be continuing to advance in our call to action?

• Land-based learning complements spontaneous nature of learning
  • Learning and teaching don’t always go as planned. This, however, is not a problem to be solved, but simply the situation all teachers face daily, if we accept the emergent and enacted nature of learning and teaching – the fact that meaning-making can’t easily or simply be determined or ensured by schools, teachers, parents, or society.
  • 2021-09-30 4:42 PM
  • Learning is spontaneous and can commonly occur through unforseen and unplanned experiences.
  • Goes well with land-based learning, as nature’s unpredictability forces us to adapt, going against the rigidity of a school system
• Realizing disconnect with indigenous land history
  • If this is your land than where are your stories? (Chamberlin, 2003). At a basic level, I think this has always been upsetting to me, born and raised in the Pacific North West— how we are often completely dim to the land we inhabit and living next to mountains, rivers, and places, with their names and stories removed, unaware of their broader spiritual, ecological and historical significance.
  • 2021-09-30 5:14 PM
  • A realization as to how little intimacy we have with the land we’ve grown up in from an indigenous standpoint.
  • The only things we are mostly taught are things like colonial events, confederation, and residential schools; were we ever taught about the old histories of the land experienced by the Indigenous?
• Cary’s resolve
  • Finding pathways (both conceptual and practical) from which we can embrace, celebrate, and understand this continuity is, I will argue, an important task and opportunity for educational theorists, like myself, to contribute meaningfully to decolonization efforts
  • 2021-09-30 2:55 PM
  • supports the idea of how a key idea in the seminar should be to promote and acknowledge the surpression of land-based learning, sharing his solutions

Colonial Style Learning

• Strict assessment, competition, life-long learning

  • By committing to narrow productivity models, features that can be easily measured and quantified, schools have continually, both unwittingly and deliberately, enforced structures that atomize students from their peers, teachers, and community. By individualizing learning and imposing highly competitive evaluative structures, coupled with a gradual corporatization of many areas of education (primary, secondary, and tertiary), educational institutions, policy, and society itself have adopted an essentially neo-liberal conception of education. The modern reduction and re-presentation of the school as a learning environment and the identification of all citizens as lifelong learners is no doubt symptomatic of this turn (see Safestrom, 2011).5 In the learning environment, learner-consumers seek and extract positive learning outcomes in the interest of individual advancement. Put somewhat hyperbolically: they mine for learning-capital. Learning, thus construed, becomes little more than a means to constantly keep up one’s employability in rapidly changing market conditions (Biesta, 2016[2013], p. 67). Notably, these “learning outcomes” are created outside of internal pedagogical events, imposed from the outside, and very easily education (and learning more broadly) becomes something that everyone is expected to undergo. Everyone can and should learn, and therefore, they must continue to learn through their entire life; for this is the way they preserve and keep up their societal worth. Learning here, is naturalized, presented as something everyone implicitly does, without explaining why or how (Biesta, 2016[2013]).
  • 2021-09-30 5:01 PM

• Swtiches from learning to competition

  • Clearly, when learning equals the achievement of “good outcomes”, learning is reduced. It refers not to an experiential undergoing, but a simple means-ends mechanism. Such a reduction reifies learning from its experiential basis and feeds into a persistent performativity problem in terms of how education (and public services generally) are evaluated (cf. Stables 2019, p. 29).
  • 2021-09-30 5:00 PM
  • Good way to word emphasis on productivity, could be used as a jumping pad for potential solutions

• Modern assimilation

  • Mead emphasizes that this conversion from pedagogy to assimilation, occurs not inside pedagogical process itself (teaching a child to learn) but in the external functionality (conversion, colonization, standardization) ascribed from outside and generally channeled in/through buildings called schools. Mead explains this function of colonial education as inherently violent: “Changing people’s habits, people’s ideas, people’s language, people’s beliefs, people’s emotional allegiances, involves a sort of deliberate violence to other people’s developed personalities –a violence not to be found in the whole teacher-child relationship” (p. 637, emphasis added).

  • 2021-09-30 5:20 PM

  • Colonial mindset implies the superiority and conversion of a seemingly inferior group of people. The violent dominance of assimilation has heavily favored the canadian cirriculum to more productive studies, and as experienced first-hand, rarely taught through traditional means. Canada has been converted.

  • Like mentioned earlier, it’s not enough and is almost ironic to teach such indigenous origins in a european-inspired manner.

Connections

• Schole (free time)
  • school is not conceptualized principally as an institution or institutionalizing force, but more generally the enacting of a kind of space-time-matter arrangement; scholé, or time free from the demands of productivity
  • 2021-09-30 2:44 PM
  • Cary - what we talked about on the first day about the definition of scholar
• World-centered education

  • Biesta (2017, p. 88, emphasis added) proposes that “[t]he work of the school, and of educational places and spaces more generally, is precisely to offer time, space and forms that allow children and students to practice grown-up ways of being in and with the world”. For Biesta, grownupness means to be in the world without being the center of the world. Thus, the question and proposal of grownupness is not the question of development, but the question of existing “in and with the world”, which Biesta (2021, p. 3) observes is decidedly not the same as individualized emancipation, or “just doing what one wants to do” but rather, existing within limits: “acknowledging that the world, both natural and social, puts limits and limitations on what we can desire from it and can do with it […]”. Analogously, thinking about the school through the purview of study requires that we continually endeavour to reconcile ourselves to reality; that we exist “in and with the world” not only with and for ourselves.

  • 2021-09-30 5:05 PM

  • Biesta world-centered education, positioning ourselves

Continuity

the consistent meaning of education throughout human societies is to create forms of continuity 2021-09-30 2:39 PM

Unsorted

The crux of the matter: through recognizing, with Mead, the pragmatic continuity of learning, teaching, and schooling, Indigenous pedagogical practices and orientations appear as vital to educational research and practice, not peripheral or marginal. 2021-09-30 2:56 PM

Land-based learning is vital in all aspects of education

the second obstacle concerns the interior or existential manifestations of colonization that impact upon our general ability to see/feel/think places and land as educationally significant in the first place 2021-09-30 2:58 PM

second obstacle to continuity

The belief that learning must be ensured, Mead suggests, is a consequent of the colonial/settler mindset. If there are already exterior aims for education – settling, converting, dominating, selling, trading – then learning cannot be honored for its essential fragility and indeterminacy 2021-09-30 4:47 PM

Helped me understand the colonial mindset

 But, what exactly constitutes a pedagogical perspective?

By recognizing that the telos and aims of education are ultimately enacted within shared rituals and practices (forms of gathering), we recognize a different way of thinking about the role of education and schooling in society. 2021-09-30 4:51 PM

Ideas

To Discuss

• Land-based
  • Cary wants to acknowledge the lack of land-based learning, so I think a good starter would be to prime everyone in that mindset
    • First talk about land-based learning, then ask about the examples of it’s presence
    • Mention cary’s point on how land-based learning isn’t really present, ask about why that’s the case
      • School’s focus on productivity and colonization
• Self-discovery through land-based learning
  • Ingold (2013)
    • Learning should not be made witht he intention to absorb information, but to spark self-discovery through our environment

Mead’s

• Continuous
• Acknowledges the current situation of schooling structures focusing on productivity
  • the consistent meaning of education throughout human societies is to create forms of continuity
• Learning comes first
  • We take the plunge into learning and it’s applications, it should not be handed to us

Cary’s

• recognize the essential continuity of learning, teaching, and schooling

TOC

2 - Learning is Primary

• I need to take notes on the key ideas in the book to properly steer the seminar
  • Take note of any important quotes that support the idea and can spark discsussion
• Think of some of my personal experiences/connections as a gateway for others to share

Reading this is kind of difficult, so I need to try my best to understand the main ideas to help everyone else learn in their own way

• Brute forcing the ideas might not work, so maybe it’s best if I find an idea that’s kind of easier to grasp

Review

Connections

Seminar Recap

Backlinks

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Created:: 2021-09-30 14:09