Interpreting Across the Abyss: A Hermeneutic Exploration of Initial Literacy Development by High School English Language Learners with Limited Formal Schooling - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 81
About This Presentation
Title:

Interpreting Across the Abyss: A Hermeneutic Exploration of Initial Literacy Development by High School English Language Learners with Limited Formal Schooling

Description:

'A highly educated, extremely literate person engaging in scholarly ... education ... American education in its current manifestation as a product ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:103
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 82
Provided by: les1
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Interpreting Across the Abyss: A Hermeneutic Exploration of Initial Literacy Development by High School English Language Learners with Limited Formal Schooling


1
Interpreting Across the Abyss A Hermeneutic
Exploration of Initial Literacy Development by
High School English Language Learners with
Limited Formal Schooling
Presentation at 2009 LESLLA Conference Low
Educated Second Language and Literacy
Acquisition Banff, Alberta, Canada Sept. 28,
2009 Jill Watson Department of Curriculum
Instruction, Second Languages Cultures
Education University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
MN, USA wats0023_at_umn.edu
2
  • On Interpreting
  • A. Antecedents of modern hermeneutics
  • II. The Abyss
  • A. Four Dimensions
  • B. Interpreting Orality
  • C. The New World of Literacy, Hyperliteracy
    Digitacy
  • D. Political Epistemological Considerations
    The gift of orality
  • III. An existential portrait of oral L2 learners
    making the leap to literacy digitacy in US high
    schools

3
I. Interpreting A Brief History of Hermeneutics
  • Derives its name from Hermes, a god of the Greek
    pantheon, who was charged with delivering
    messages from the gods of Mt. Olympus for human
    beings. Associated with eternal youthfulness,
    volubility, creativity, trickery, duality,
    diplomacy, fertility, prophetic power.
  • Aristotles Peri hermenia a treatise on what we
    do when we are interpreting
  • Ancient Alexandria had a school of hermeneutics,
    1st century BCE

4
A. Antecedents of modern hermeneutics
  • Schleiermacher, early 1800s
  • Interpretation is a form of divination a
    feminine art.
  • The point is not to document and record, but to
    engage
  • the text (a book, an experience) in profoundly
    creative
  • ways that allow new meanings to emerge and permit
  • new understanding of the relationships between
    things
  • and between people.
  • Knowledge is never fixed, but is emergent and
    evolving it takes a diviner, not a scientist, to
    be able to read it.

5
  • Dilthey, late 1800s
  • First to make the distinction between
  • Geisteswissenschaften (Human Sciences) and
  • Naturwissenschaften (Natural Sciences), and to
    propose that study of each must be distinctly
    appropriate to each.
  • Diltheys argument because human lives are
    constructed historically, with unique and
    evolving human consciousness, we cannot
    understand the meaning of human experience using
    scientific methods.
  • Nature we can explain, but humans we must
    understand.
  • Understand verstehen. Contains the notion of
    standing for, standing in proximity, intimacy of
    experience as prerequisite for understanding
    human experience.

6
  • Husserl, early 1900s
  • Refuted the new positivist movements in human
    science research.
  • His doctrine of intentionality describes the
    way in which the world is always already present
    in our thinking, and we are always present in the
    world, so, given this intersubjectivity, we cant
    be objective about worldthere is no world as
    utterly separate from us.
  • Heidegger, mid 1900s
  • Since Aristotle, Being has been the focus of
    philosophy, but what is Being? Heidegger
    people can only talk about being in time, in the
    world as historical beings (Dasein). As such,
    knowledge about humans, like human being itself,
    is always finite and contingent, subject to
    disclosure and concealment.

7
  • Gadamer, pre-eminent scholar of hermeneutics of
    the 20th century
  • Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein
  • effective historical consciousness the
    essential openness of history and interpretation
  • On method It is impossible to decide on a
    method of inquiry in advance, since what is being
    investigated always holds part of the answer to
    how it needs to be investigated.

8
Gadamer, continued
  • Prejudice acknowledging our fore-structures of
    understanding
  • Fusion of horizons an essential openness to
    understanding the other with his/her own
    forestructures, and to seeing how my identity is
    in fact a function of relationships in history
    and culture that always pre-exist me.

9
  • As a hermeneutic project, this study aims to
  • 1. unpack some of the epistemological and
    teleological orientations inherent in an
    encounter between primarily oral students and the
    world of hyperliteracy, already itself in
    transition to a world of digitacy.

10
  • 2. Speak divinitively, intersubjectively, from a
    position of long and embedded proximal intimacy.
    As a teacher in a high school for language
    learners without literacy or prior schooling, I
    am a participant hermeneut.
  • 3. Inspire new ways of seeing and understanding
    the experience of older students with limited
    formal schooling, learning language and literacy
    at the same time, in a US high school context.

11
  • 4. Acknowledge the fore-structures of my
    understanding in attempting to interpret across
    the abyss
  • A highly educated, extremely literate person
    engaging in scholarly work, reading madly and
    referencing the work of other scholars,
    presenting the fruits of my scholarly work to
    other extremely literate, academically proficient
    people, in a conference context whose purpose and
    structure is completely foreign to oral culture,
    in order to understand and articulate what it is
    like to live orally, without print, without words
    that outlast their utterance, and to make the
    transition from orality, to academic literacy, to
    digitacy, all in one lifetime.

12
  • II. The Abyss How great is it?
  • Fully literate persons can only with great
    difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is
    like. Try to imagine a culture where no one has
    ever looked up anythingthis is an empty
    phrase, with no conceivable meaning. Without
    writing, words as such have no visual presence.
    They are sound. You might call them back,
    recall them. But there is nowhere to look for
    them. They are occurrences, events.
  • -Walter Ong (1982). Orality and Literacy The
    technologizing of the word, p. 31.

13
B. Interpreting orality
  • Ong, Walter. (1982). Orality and literacy The
    technologizing of the word. London New York
    Routledge.
  • Three stages of orality
  • 1. Primary the orality of cultures untouched
    by literacy
  • Residual traces and practices of orality that
    remain even as literacy becomes more meaningful
    and important
  • 3. Secondary the kind of orality that arises in
    highly literate, technologized cultures, for
    instance telephone, radio, television, recorded
    music. Orality that depends on writing and
    technology.

14
A long distance to travel While most areas of
the earth have by now had some exposure to
writing, still we must face the reality that in
industrialized societies many of our older L2
students come to us directly from cultures
characterized by a very high degree of residual
orality. Minneapolis, MN, USA Somali, Oromo,
Hmong, Karen, Liberian, Indigenous people of the
Americas
15
Ongs Characteristics of Oral Mind
  • Its all about memory The residual orality of
    a chirographic culture can be calculated to a
    degree from the mnemonic load it leaves on the
    mind, that is, from the amount of memorization
    the cultures educational procedures require.

16
Contrastive interpretation with examples
  • A look at Ongs 8 psychodynamic characteristics
    of oral mind
  • Contrasting tasks required of successful high
    school student in US.

17
1. Additive rather than subordinative
  • The oral mind strongly favors additive
    constructions (andand, rather than thus,
    while-- subordinating structures). Oral
    structures look to pragmatics (in the context of
    speaking), while written structures turn to
    syntactics, elaborate and fixed grammars which
    rely heavily on subordination. (p. 39)

18
US high school context
  • Standards of good writing required for academic
    success specifically reward subordinative writing
    and punish additive, run-on constructions.

19
2. Aggregative rather than Analytic
  • Clumps of fixed expressions, not so much simple
    integers as clusters of integers. The sturdy
    oak, the brave soldier, the beautiful princess,
    the glorious revolution of October.
  • Need to be kept in tact, it has taken a long time
    to establish them, and there is nowhere outside
    the mind to store them. Without a writing
    system, breaking up thoughtthat is, analysisis
    a high-risk procedure. (p. 38)

20
US High School contrast
  • Repeating expressions others have used may be
    plagiarism, at the very least it is not good,
    inventive writing
  • Coining phrases denotes a good writer.
  • Analytic thought is the hallmark of the
    successfully educated person.

21
3. Redundant or copious
  • Repetitiveness aids in comprehension, allows
    audience to remember, allows speaker to collect
    next thought.
  • Rhetoricians called this copia fluency,
    fulsomeness, volubility. Sparsely linear thought
    as occasioned by writing is an artificial
    construction. Redundancy is much more natural to
    human thought. (p. 39)

22
US High School context
  • Repetitiveness is to be avoided in tight academic
    writing.
  • Focus of key academic standards being able to
    condense large amounts of information to the
    basic main idea
  • Emphasis on summaries, economy of expression.
  • Bullet-point mentality

23
4. Conservative, Traditionalist
  • In the absence of writing, knowledge must be
    repeated or it will be lost. Great energy is
    expended in oral cultures in saying over and over
    again what has been arduously learned over the
    centuries.
  • Hence, the figure of the wise elder has great
    importanceimparter of sayings which constitute
    the core knowledge of the culture.
  • Eg. It is often said that every time an elder
    dies in Oromo society, a library is lost
  • This mindset discourages intellectual
    experimentation. In typographic cultures,
    storing knowledge outside the mind downgrades the
    importance of the wise elder repeater of the
    past, in favor of a younger discoverers of
    something new.
  • Oromsis, iRep Oromia, Being Oromo in the States.
    Downloaded Sept. 20, 2009 from opride.com/oromsis.

24
US High School contrast
  • New discoveries scholarship, inquiry
  • New technologies elders are behind the times
  • The individual reader is said to be constructing
    meaning from the text
  • Thematic experimentation is encouraged and
    rewarded
  • Anecdote My best day as a teacher is when the
    students take over the class.

25
5. Close to human lifeworld
  • All knowledge is conceptualized and verbalized in
    reference to the lifeworld, even the objective,
    alien world is reinterpreted according to the
    known lifeworld.
  • Oral mind includes no statistics or abstract
    lists. Note genealogies (the begats) are lists
    but entirely concerned with lived history. No
    such thing as trade manuals or how-to books
    skills are transmitted by apprenticeship (even in
    textual cultures, this is common), relying on
    observation and practice and very little
    verbalization. (p. 42)

26
US high school contrast
  • Anecdote In a classifying exercise in science
    class, students are asked to sort pictures of
    sporting goods with a capital letter attached to
    each one according to whether it is done indoors,
    outdoors, or both.
  • The science teacher goes through the exercise,
    giving the correct answers.
  • Ice skating is classified as outdoors, despite
    the account of a newcomer student that he has ice
    skated indoors.
  • Tennis is classified as outdoors, despite an
    adult describing the work of her husband tennis
    pro indoors all winter.
  • The point Arbitrariness, unreality of
    definition. Teacher I know you can do that
    one outdoors, but well just call it indoors.
    Also note the teacher has and claims the
    authority to override the truth of experience,
    and newcomer LFS ELL students accept it.

27
6. Agonistically toned
  • Oral or residually oral cultures strike literates
    as highly agonistic in their verbal performance
    and their lifestyles.
  • Writing allows abstractions that disengage
    knowledge from the arena of human struggle,
    separating knower from known. In orality,
    knowledge is embedded in the lifeworld, keeping
    it within the context of struggle. Thus it is
    common to engage others in verbal debate, also
    bragging, parading ones exploits, flyting
    (reciprocal name calling), the dozens, joining,
    sounding (insulting anothers mother),
    celebrating physical behavior, descriptions of
    violence.
  • On the other side of the same coin fulsome
    praise, celebrating glory of a hero or community.
    What strikes the literate as insincere,
    flatulent, and comically pretentious is the
    natural product of highly polarized, agonistic,
    oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice,
    villains and heroes.

28
US high school contrast
  • Classrooms and hallways in newcomer high school
    settings often drive teachers crazy because of
    the verbal noise, volume, volubility, many people
    speaking at once, even when the teacher is
    speaking
  • Even the level of volubility in the British
    parliament is considered inappropriate in US
    political and school settings
  • Increasing medication of students, especially
    boys, whose behavior needs to be modulated in
    order for them to fit into school culture
  • Goal is to maintain an atmosphere of quiet work
    and purpose, without passion or disruption

29
7. Empathetic participatory rather than
objectively distanced
  • Learning or knowing means achieving close,
    communal identification with the known.
  • Writing sets up the condition for objectivity in
    the sense of personal disengagement or
    distancing. Communal soul in oral culture as
    opposed to individual soul in literate culture.
    (p. 45)
  • Einstein What does a fish know about the water
    in which he spends his life? (literate scientist
    perspective.) Who knows more about water than a
    fish? (oral perspective)

30
US High School contrast
  • Rugged Individualism vs. communal soul In
    literature classes, strong emphasis on individual
    reflection, making your own meaning
  • Scientific Stance vs. participatory
    understanding Objectivity is required in
    science and math

31
8. Homeostatic
  • Oral societies live in a present whose
    equilibrium is maintained by sloughing off
    memories no longer relevant to the present
    conditions.
  • Eg. Oral historians and W. African griots leave
    out parts of genealogies and histories that dont
    support the communal order of today (as opposed
    to written records which show the situation of
    the past). British vs. oral records in Ghana, of
    land ownership.
  • Oral cultures uninterested in definitions such as
    provided by dictionaries, elucidating layers of
    old meanings. What matters is the functionality
    of expressions and meanings todaydo they enhance
    the social order we are living in now, which is
    preferred to a factual account which might damage
    or stir things up.
  • This principle strongly favors the winner, oral
    culture encourages triumphalism.

32
US high school contrast
  • Fantastically heavy emphasis on defining words
    and concepts, the act of definition
  • Examples and non-examples, True and False
  • Distilling essential characteristics
  • Copying vocabulary and definitions of terms
  • Dictionary entriesmultiple and confusing
  • History claims of legitimate grievance model
  • The coin story why save money? To learn
    history.

33
9. Situational rather than abstract
  • Ong on Luria Oral noesis does not think in
    purely artificial abstractions
  • Syllogisms (self-referential logic)
  • Purely abstract categories, such as grouping
    according to type rather than function (eg.
    hammer, saw, log, hatchetall are alike say oral
    folk).
  • If asked to identify shapes such as a circle or
    square, oral people say the name of an objects,
    eg. plate, those with some schooling say circle.
    Categorical thinking is uninteresting,
    trivializing. (p. 49)

34
US High School Contrast
  • Largely consists in categorizing information, in
    preparation for
  • Standardized education / assessments
  • Move to standardize all knowledge National Core
    Standards
  • Ability to learn and produce evidence of learning
    without reference to experience is rewarded

35
(No Transcript)
36
(No Transcript)
37
(No Transcript)
38
Summary Interpreting Oral Noesis
  • The mind (heart, spirit) develops distinctly in
    an oral environment versus a high literate, or
    digital environment. (Wolf, McCluhan, Ong,
    Luria)
  • What it means to be intelligent in orality is
    different than what it means to be intelligent in
    literacy, which is different than intelligence in
    digitacy.

39
C. The New World of Literacy, Hyperliteracy,
Digitacy More is going on with literacy than
just acquiring a skill
40
  • You have to die (lose orality) to attain new
    life (literacy).
  • There is hardly an oral culture or
    predominantly oral culture left in the world
    today that is not somehow aware of the vast
    complex of powers that is forever inaccessible
    without literacy. This awareness is agony for
    persons rooted in primary orality, who want
    literacy passionately but who also know very well
    that moving into the exciting world of literacy
    means leaving behind much that is exciting and
    deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have
    to die to continue living (Ong, p. 15).

41
Concerns over the costs of literacy are not
unknown in western tradition
  • In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the inferiority
    of writing as opposed to speaking, as writing is
    helpless, cannot defend itself, always gives the
    same answer when asked a question.
  • A truly intelligent person possesses the nimble
    wit required for excellent oral discourse.

42
  • Platos concerns that a new technology will make
    people less intelligent are echoed in our time..

43
The Atlantic, July/August, 2008
44
The Atlantic, Nov. 2008
45
From Orality to Literacy and Hyperliteracy
The journey our students must make from
46
School in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya
47
  • To the palaces of literacy we are accustomed to
    in the Western academic tradition

48
The George Peabody Library, Baltimore, MD
49
Gibert Jeune bookstore, Paris
Barnes Noble bookstore, US
50
  • So even as, in the U.S., hardly a day goes by
    without renewed calls to address literacy
    problems now understood to reach to secondary
    school levels

51
Education Week, Sept. 25, 2009
52
  • Still, in a high school with at least 25 of
    students unable to read at a second grade
    level, we find a graveyard in the basement

53
Obsolete books Roosevelt High
School Minneapolis, MN Sept. 2009
54
  • Yet our enormous faith in literacy provides us
    with the comforting assertion that even if we
    destroy our environment and none of our digital
    technology works anymore, we will still have
    books, and happy reading time, in a
    post-apocalyptic world

55
(No Transcript)
56
The Myth of Literacy
  • Social Literacy is able to solve all manner of
    societal problems
  • Actualization Literacy (leading to literature)
    represents a unique actualization of full human
    potentiality
  • Critical Empowerment Literacy allows us to name
    the world and become empowered
  • Medical Illiteracy is a disease that must be
    eradicated.

57
  • What all of this points to
  • The crisis of literacy in our hyperliterate
    world is not really a crisis of literacy but a
    crisis of relationship.
  • Between humans and nature
  • Between nations
  • Between worldviews
  • Between people
  • Smith, D.G. (1999). Modernism, hyperliteracy and
    the colonization of the word. In Pedagon Human
    sciences, pedagogy and culture. Pp. 61-72. New
    York Peter Lang.

58
D. Political Epistemological Considerations
  1. Epistemological crises
  2. Logic of Empire

59
1. Epistemological Crises in the West
  • Postmodern, Feminist, Systems Studies Tracing
    the legacies of Literacy Scientism
  • (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Bourdieu,
    Polkinghorne)
  • Phonetic alphabet pre-requisite to scientific
    method
  • Reading, writing, isolation (you talk together,
    you read and write alone)
  • S/O split literacy and scientism as
    prerequisite for ontological schism of
    enlightenment age
  • Facts are determinable if you use the correct
    method to ascertain them
  • Facts truth

60
The Spirit of the Enlightenment
  • Flower in a crannied wall
  • Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out
    of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all,
    in my hand, Little flowerbut if I could
    understand What you are, root and all, and all
    in all, I should know what God and man is.
  • -Alfred Lord Tennyson

61
Psychic Profile of Western CulturesAlthough
surrounded by libraries, bookstores, cell phones,
Blackberries, I-Pods, we are plagued by
  • Exhaustion bitterness
  • Growing sense of futility (depression, suicide,
    civic violence)
  • Loss of meaning and sense of purpose
  • Anomie, alienation from others, traditional bonds
  • An awareness of our own psychoses must temper
    our eagerness to export this developed way of
    life, underwritten, literally, by a magical
    belief in the power of literacy, science, free
    markets, and academic degrees attained by
    achievement on standardized tests.

62
2. The Logic of Empire
  • Post-colonial post-modern studies provide an
    account of the effect of epistemological and
    political empire on subjugated peoples
  • Said, Bhabha, Nandy, Mazrui, Spivak, Zizek

63
Literacy, Hyperliteracy, Neocolonialism,
Globalization The Best of All Possible Worlds
  • Kants logic of Emancipative Reason Those who
    do not choose freedom are living in perpetual
    immaturity
  • Hegel European civilization has transcended
    culture, has created a Universal Culture of
    Freedom through Reason. Others have quaint,
    charming, or violent cultures, but they are
    primitive, not yet developed, as the West is.
  • Fukayama proclaims the End of History U.S.
    democracy buttressed by free-market economy
    represents the culmination of History, a
    transcending of the vicissitudes of developmental
    history.

64
The persistent violence of standardization
  • Theweleit (Male Fantasies) The holocaust is not
    an aberration but rather the logical result of
    the Enlightenment
  • Dussel The Myth of sacrificethe flipside of
    the Myth of Emancipative Reason. Those who do
    not accept Western rationalism remain in a
    primitive state and may be (must be) sacrificed
    in service of global progress.
  • Deloria Although American society in a way
    accepts the relativity of things as a leveling
    device between comparative values, white society
    has, on the whole, acted as if all things should
    be related to its values only (p. 25).
  • Habermas (1984), a child of Frankfurt School
    critical theory, persists in contrasting the
    unreflective mode of mythical thought, as
    exemplified by his essentialized portrait of the
    Azande people of Africa, with occidental
    rationalism that is a prerequisite to his theory
    of communicative action. The putative message
    every one can play, if they play our game by our
    rules.
  • Smith (2006) Since the advent of The 1492
    World System (Amin, 2001), the sacrificing of
    people, by way of the murder and embalming of
    their essential values as expressed in forms of
    community and communication, takes place as a
    largely unquestioned matter of course in Western
    education (The specific challenges of
    globalization for teaching and vice-versa. )

65
Summary Legacies of Empire
  • Literacy Scientism Objectivity
  • European Culture is Universal, transcends Culture
  • New Global Economic order requires uniformly
    educated students to meet requirements of global
    markets

66
  • The tacit message of neo-imperialism
  • Those who do not or can not comply with the
    noble gifts of enlightened academic scientism
    employed in service of global market concerns
    must be sacrificed, and its ok to do so.

67
Whats missing in all of this a true
conversation
  • You cannot have a conversation if one partner
    has no desire for it or if his/her worldview does
    not value it necessarily
  • What are the implications for a globalizing world
    of traditions that are exclusive in their
    self-interpretation, wherein being in
    conversation with Others does not imply the
    possibility of change within ones own
    worldview?
  • (Smith, 1999, p. 108, italics added)

68
The one-sided conversation that American
education is having with LFS oral L2 learners is
an expression of schools as agents of
neo-Hegelian empire
  • Academic English is like medieval Learned Latin
    the mother tongue of no one, unrelated to
    anyones life
  • Standardized Tests embalmed knowledge
  • Primary mode of instruction
  • Definitional
  • Abstract
  • Factitious
  • Determinate, sealed gt like the fate of oral
    culture trying to acquire these norms

69
III. Existential Portrait of students from
strongly oral cultures in their encounter with
academic hyperliteracy in US high schools
70
Survival studentingPlaceholders
  • Filled with ug, the younghede Tenderis groped his
    way along the downsteepy path toward the cosh
    wherein dwelled the feared spirit-person.
    Squit-a-pipes that he was, Tenderis found
    negotiating his way through the eileber and
    venerated dway-berries very teenful in the nyle.
    He tripped over zuches spiss with maily malshaves
    that made him quetch at their touch.
  • (S.K. Sperling, Poplollies and Bellibones A
    Celebration of Lost Words, pp.33, 35.)
  • 1. What was Tenderis emotion as approached the
    cosh?
  • 2. Why was it difficult to go through the eileber
    and dway-berries?
  • Define these terms younghede, teenful, maily

71
  • The Point LFS preliterate L2 learners develop
    incredible skills at figuring out what might go
    in what place, without actually understanding the
    content.
  • The Metapoint Teachers and systems must not
    allow the appearance of proficiency to outweigh
    real proficiency. It is our lack of appropriate
    preparation and pedagogy that allows, indeed
    requires this type of studenting.

72
Survival Studenting FakingIn the absence of
true meaning, students adapt by appearing to
understand and participate in order to satisfy
the teacher and get a grade
  • Faking accomplishments
  • Eg Teacher who got only one or two wrong?
    Student who didnt complete any at all raises his
    hand proudly.
  • Faking understanding what is going on
  • Eg Responding to intonation raised voice
    with right? Or dont you? Students just say
    yes or no to comply.
  • Copy whatever looks like the activity we are
    doing.
  • Eg Copying is perhaps the most pervasive form
    of instruction used by underprepared teachers
    in sheltered classes, both in lessons, and by
    having students copy portions of answers in notes
    to use in tests.

73
  • Pretending is the fate of the sacrificial
    student, ghettoized to receive surface level,
    tokenistic standards-based content instruction
    that looks good only in curriculum guides and to
    outside evaluators of the content area, but is
    not meaningfully taught to students whose
    deficits in language proficiency (L1 and L2), and
    in cognitive academic preparation present an
    incredible abyss between their actual state and
    the subject matter we pretend to teach them and
    they pretend to learn.
  • Basic telos underwriting all this It is the
    authority of western education underwritten by
    epistemological supremacy assumptions and the
    weight of empire that compels teachers and
    students to participate in the faking.

74
Consequences of Literate Academic Culture in US
High Schools for those of Primary Oral Culture
  • Mnemonic Plague Only written knowledge counts
    (eg. citations) leads to devaluing of elders,
    traditional knowledge
  • Forced choice between a better life encrypted
    in academic literacy, and a life embedded in
    authentic relationships
  • Forced to copy or fail, pretend or admit
    ignorance
  • Forced to abandon the relationship between
    language and meaning
  • Forced to see others as means to my ends (Western
    globalization model).

75
Hyperliteracy, Academic Language Embalming the
Living
  • Words and concepts, and the discourse and
    pedagogy that surround them, are treated like
    Tennysons flower in the crannied wall, like
    specimens in formaldehyde.
  • American education in its current manifestation
    as a product of eurocentric scientism requires
    that ideas and words be immobilized in this way.
    Standardized tests are the penultimate expression
    of preserved, embalmed knowledge the text
    booklets are their caskets, the vaults where they
    are locked for security are their vaults, the
    results are the students and schools academic
    epitaphs, published in papers for the public to
    decry and to mourn.
  • Hermeneutically understoond, people who journey
    from orality to literacy have to undergo the
    process of embalming while they are living.

76
Academic Rigor (mortis)where the right
questions and answers are predetermined by a
state or national boardversusAcademic
Vigorwhere learning is embedded in lived life,
and life is always considered interpretable
77
The gift of oralityConsidered against the
psychoses of the occidental world, the noesis of
orality brings the possibility of a healing gift
much of what we in the academic cultures lack is
precisely what oral cultures possess. This
thought leads to a recognition of the pragmatic
and ethical imperative of deep reciprocity
The command to love your enemy (the other) is
not only about doing the right thing but also,
perhaps mostly, a statement of our own need the
oral other has noetic knowledge that the West is
suffering from a lack of, and requires to survive.
78
The hermeneutic path the middle way
  • Gadamer reconciling tradition and the presence
    of the new
  • There is no responsible choice other than to
    teach literacy and academic knowledge to all who
    come to live in this society. Literacy does make
    a big difference. Groups like LESSLA are devoted
    to this goal.
  • But we must do it in a way that makes sense.
  • We learn more about what makes sense for the
    newcomers by reflecting on the existential nature
    of oral cultural experience in its encounter with
    literacy. That is, we learn about the weaknesses
    and fallacies of our own instructional designs by
    noticing how they are received by those who are
    previously untouched by a cynical, distanciated
    relation with knowledge and experience.

79
A Two-Way Conversation
  • We are not just teaching our older, limited
    formal schooling, preliterate students-- They are
    teaching us.

80
An intersubjective, valence-structured
educational orientation suggests itself
  • On the one hand, we have a responsibility to
    teach in the most effective, humane way, so that
    HS newcomers have a fair chance at practical
    survival in a world of hyperliteracy.
  • On the other hand, we have the opportunity to
    cultivate our ability to be open and attuned,
    that we may learn about spontaneous, embedded,
    orally-toned ways of being, to give our
    hyperliterate selves a fair chance at our own
    ontic survival.

81
(No Transcript)
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com