Transcript of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable: January 24, 2019
Topic: Decolonising Learning
Pictures by Sheila Yoshikawa
This Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable session takes a theme from the 2019 edition of *Innovating Pedagogy* (the annual publication from the Open University that identifies education trends)
Report is at https://iet.open.ac.uk/file/innovating-pedagogy-2019.pdf
(section on decolonising learning is pages 15-18)
We can discuss
– what does this mean generally in our teaching?
– have we undertaken any decolonisation activities? have we experienced education ourselves as colonised?
– how does it apply to virtual worlds education?
– have we experienced SL or other virtual worlds as colonised?
– do virtual worlds give particular possibilities for decolonisation? (see the examples about digital decolonisation in the report, extract below).
Decolonising the curriculum has been a topic for some time, and see e.g. this short item in the British Medical Journal https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/10/18/diversifying-and-decolonising-the-medical-curriculum/
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NOTECARD: Extracts from “Innovating pedagogy”
(from summary, pages 3-4
“Decolonising learning: A curriculum provides a way of identifying the knowledge we value. It structures the ways in which we are taught to think and talk about the world. As education has become increasingly global, communities have challenged the widespread assumption that the most valuable knowledge and the most valuable ways of teaching and learning come from a single European tradition. Decolonising learning prompts us to consider everything we study from new perspectives. It draws attention to how often the only world view presented to learners is male, white, and European.
This isn’t simply about removing some content from the curriculum and replacing it with new content – it’s about considering multiple perspectives and making space to think carefully about what we value. Decolonising learning helps us to recognise, understand, and challenge the ways in which our world is shaped by colonialism. It also prompts us to examine our professional practices. It is an approach that includes indigenous knowledge and ways of learning, enabling students to explore themselves and their values and to define success on their own terms.”
(from the section on “Decolonising learning”, which has a focus on *digital decolonisation*)
(p15)
“Digital colonialism occurs when indigenous populations use resources developed by the colonial population. This can happen with online learning, and is a danger when millions of learners from countries around the world join massive open online courses (MOOCs) run on platforms developed in just a small number of countries.
In contrast, digital decolonisation considers how to support colonised people with technology in order to:
- connect them with a shared history,
- support a critical perspective on their present,
- provide tools for them to shape their futures.
To enable the use of this critical perspective and these tools, it’s important that digital decolonisation transfers decisions about how to use technology to the people.”
(p.16)
“Critical pedagogies provide frameworks for the academic success of indigenous students. For example, culturally relevant pedagogy seeks to provide a way for students to maintain their cultural integrity (their needs) while succeeding academically (educational needs). Similarly, culturally sustaining pedagogies seek to support students in sustaining the cultural competence of their communities (their needs) while also offering access to the colonial cultural competence (educational needs).”
ALL ARE WELCOME TO VWER!
When and where: The VIRTUAL WORLDS EDUCATION ROUNDTABLE meetings start at 12 noon SLT (3pm ET – 8pm UK time) on Thursdays on VSTE in Second Life
We meet at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/VSTE%20Island/27/27/22
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Sheila Yoshikawa: today’s theme comes from the latest edition of an annual publication, that was just published, it is produced by the same unit at the Open University that Shailey belongs to. So that is the link to the pdf, It is called *Innovating Pedagogy* and the Report is at https://iet.open.ac.uk/file/innovating-pedagogy-2019.pdf
(section on decolonising learning is pages 15-18). I think this was launched because of the Horizon Report that identified education tech trends
Marly (marly.milena): Niela Miller M.S. Ed/Communications. See www.peoplesystemspotential.com for my voluminous background info. LOL
Sheila Yoshikawa: The Open University thought it would be a good idea to have something similar focusing on pedagogy, the link and some extracts are in the notecard in the box on the table, just to repeat myself.
Valibrarian Gregg: “Digital colonisation”- fascinating and I believe we all are already taking part in it- Don’t you think?
Sheila Yoshikawa: Well I thought it brought up some interesting questions and I am aiming to extract a few of the themes from this report and use them in future discussions, just to warn you! OK I put it in the notecard but I will just spam you with the text
Elli Pinion: I so do, Val. I believe that VWs open that up, as well.
Sheila Yoshikawa: or perhaps I won’t as you have started discussing!
Maggie Larimore: hey everybody brb (need tea….)
Sheila Yoshikawa: Basically just to say – there is the idea of decolonising the curriculum to get different world/cultural views, and them also they talk about digital decolonisation of learning as you say.
Elli Pinion: Hi Maggie
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Val @Elli
Sheila Yoshikawa: yes I agreed in that I thought that a virtual worlds platform, being what you make of it, offers possibilities.
Elli Pinion: I find both perspectives important and vital to opening up learning.
Valibrarian Gregg: I would think that virtual world communities could play a big role in digital colonisation (relating to curriculum).
Sheila Yoshikawa: has anyone here been in discussions about this (not just in VWs) or heard discussions about it for their area of teaching/learning?
Valibrarian Gregg: No! Not sure I have heard the term “digital colonisation”.
Elli Pinion: Yes, a real opportunity for us (VW Communities).
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Val I think the potential of bringing people “into the classroom” from other countries and cultures is valuable.
Beth Ghostraven: I’m just catching up, have you said what “decolonising education” is?
Elli Pinion: There is a lot of conversation in my RL community about anglo colonialism.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Beth, it starts with the idea that there has been a “colonial” bias, basing learning and the curriculum on voices and viewpoints from a particular country or culture, so it’s getting rid of that.
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): Education is colonized by educational practices of the previous century.
Sheila Yoshikawa: so @Selby colonised by practices of people from one’s own culture/country but from the past?
Dodge Threebeards: I think one of the purposes of public education was to instill a cultural narrative into students. still is.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Dodge I wondered about how this applied to STEM subjects.
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): right
Sheila Yoshikawa: It is really obvious in areas like history or literature.
Elli Pinion: and likely by the dominant “culture” of that age.
Dodge Threebeards: in STEM, we like to think that there is not a cultural bias.
Valibrarian Gregg: From p.15 “In contrast, digital decolonisation considers
how to support colonised people with technology in order to:
- connect them with a shared history,
- support a critical perspective on their present,
- provide tools for them to shape their futures. “
Sheila Yoshikawa: and in applied area which mine is more, focusing on western practice research.
Dodge Threebeards: but I am not sure that is true.
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): And they won’t decolonise us.
Dodge Threebeards: the Science Circle has members from around the world, which is interesting.
Marly (marly.milena): It is only recently that the contributions of black educators, scientists, historians et al are beginning to make their way into textbooks and curricula.
Elli Pinion: I agree that is not true, Dodge. But I also think that (almost) all areas of ed think they aren’t driven by one culture.
Sheila Yoshikawa: Hi Stranger, there is a notecard in the box.
Elli Pinion: True, Marly.
Dodge Threebeards: i was just doing some work on agricultural research in Africa, and it has a strong western cultural bias, often the research is not appropriate for the local farming systems in Africa.
Elli Pinion: A great example, Dodge.
Dodge Threebeards: 🙂
Beth Ghostraven: I agree, Elli, it seems impossible (and not really desirable) to completely detach education from the culture that it’s in.
Valibrarian Gregg: Global digital culture provides advantages (everyone can participate) but also disadvantages (way TOO many voices and TMI!).
Sheila Yoshikawa: yes @Dodge. I think one issue is also – pressure from students to be “relevant” to the majority-students’ culture/country.
Valibrarian Gregg: The disadvantage of a SEA of information bombarding us can be combatted through curating communities of interest….like we do here.
Marly (marly.milena): However @ Sheila, what the majority is, is shifting, at least in the U.S.
Sheila Yoshikawa: from my perspective the fact that most of the students in our department are from other countries, in fact a majority from China, makes you rethink the curriculum a bit!
Maggie Larimore: but in STEM just as anywhere else (reading back in the chat) there are built in prejudices about the scientific expertise/output of various countries, about publications in non-English languages, in my small specialty my husband has done a lot of work over thirty years to include Spanish speaking scientists and academics into the mix from editing their English publications, making their work known to Anglo-American communities and so on. He’s had an impact but there are still literatures in Portuguese, Italian, in Hindi, Chinese, Japanese that are ignored by Anglo-American psychologists and physicists, and/or dismissed out of hand unless the “foreign” language speaker manages to get a position at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard etc.
Marly (marly.milena): We living in interesting times!
Sheila Yoshikawa: and a perspective on other countries’ research and practice driven by what is published in english language journals.
Maggie Larimore: not to mention the dismissal of the histories of science in other countries, I saw that changing when I was at Duke in the 1990s, but realized recently that I was replicating that in revisions I helped on a history of psych course at NCU by not including philosophers who touched on psychology in other cultures. One of my students called me out on that and I let him profile Ibn Sina, an Islamic scholar of the middle ages and it was fascinating, now we’ve got it on the revision list to start searching for and including those voices
Elli Pinion: That’s an effective approach, to make research more available (translations)
Sheila Yoshikawa: great Maggie
Valibrarian Gregg: Welcome Josain
Sheila Yoshikawa: also making things available open access
Elli Pinion: Yes!
Maggie Larimore: Beth, or to disengage science and scholarship from its cultural/language context either
Sheila Yoshikawa: one problem which is not helping decolonisation is the “author pays” model, that is being seen as “good for open access, but which causes disparity because those who can’t pay will probably be read and cited less, as they are behind a paywall.
Sheila Yoshikawa: I mean in journals by the big publishers.
Elli Pinion: I also believe that one practical approach is to have your curriculum open enough that a student can bring in their culture/experience/research. Similar to Maggie’s experience.
Stranger Nightfire: sorry i got here late, very interesting subject.
Sheila Yoshikawa: who are still targeted by many academics, driven by managers etc in their universities
Elli Pinion: Good point, Sheila.
Maggie Larimore: Sheila that’s a very important point
Marly (marly.milena): Antioch College (my alma mater) was probably the first college that, in the 50;s, set up exchange programs with students in Africa and Asia. We were expected to learn about their ways of learning and cultural forms as part of our education.
Stranger Nightfire: well even within just say the US itself many may voices, many points of view get silenced.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Elli yes, I think that you can create opportunities – e.g. when i was teaching on a health information module here, I had students each talk about what the health service was in their country, I didn’t need to prepare the information, the students came already with expert information from around 10 different countries.
Maggie Larimore: I mean the one about pay per publish model in modern journals, it not only restricts those who personally can’t pay or whose university can’t pay but also those at the entry levels of academe or are adjuncts and their universities won’t pay to help them publish.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Stranger yes, and also the issues and voices different in different countries
Elli Pinion: So true, Stranger.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Maggie yes indeed
Valibrarian Gregg: Providing open access is important but also teaching people to evaluate the online nonsense they encounter.
Beth Ghostraven: oh, by open access I thought you meant self-publishing, like on Amazon.
Marly (marly.milena): The other thing Antioch has done is to hire educators from many races, ethnicities and walks of life!
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): The language used in teaching creates a cultural bias: Language in Thought and Action is a 1949 book on semantics by Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, based on his previous work Language in Action published in 1939. Early editions were written in consultation with different people. The current 5th edition was published in 1991. It was updated by Hayakawa’s son, Alan R. Hayakawa and has an introduction by Robert MacNeil. The book has sold over one million copies and has been translated into eight languages.
“ Insight into human symbolic behavior and into human interaction through symbolic mechanisms comes from all sorts of disciplines: not only from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and cultural anthropology, but from attitude research and public opinion study, from new techniques in psychotherapy, from physiology and neurology, from mathematical biology and cybernetics. How are all these separate insights to be brought together? …I have examined the problem long enough to believe that it cannot be done without some set of broad and informing principles such as is to be found in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski.
Valibrarian Gregg: excellent, Marly
Sheila Yoshikawa: no @Beth, because now there are top class open access journals or repositories – and actually the “Innovating Pedagogy” report is an example of an excellent publication, self-published.
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_in_Thought_and_Action
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Thinkerer yes also very true
Valibrarian Gregg: good point Thinkerer (cultural bias) and also confirmation bias- which is rampant.
Sheila Yoshikawa: again from my experience I now know not to make cultural references in class that on British students would understand.
Elli Pinion: Our University is very diverse – students and faculty. I believe it really helps, but agree with Stranger that doesn’t insure voices are heard.
Marly (marly.milena): Yay Selby <The map is not the territory!>
Beth Ghostraven: what is confirmation bias, Val?
Maggie Larimore: Antioch has always been in the forefront, since the 19th century.
Elli Pinion: I also agree with Val, that teaching how to sift through information is critical
Maggie Larimore: wonderful reference Selby
Valibrarian Gregg: Confirmation bias- only following those who have the “same” ideas as yourself (social media promotes it)— We learn by being able to argue well not by deleting names who don’t agree with us.
Marly (marly.milena): @Maggie et al, I feel very fortunate to have not only gone to a culturally enlightened college, but also to a high school and a camp both of which were fully diverse in the forties!
Maggie Larimore: our is too Elli, and working all the time to become more diverse
Marly (marly.milena): I think that is why I have a global field perspective and it enters into all my teaching.
Elli Pinion: Ah Confirmation Bias….wow. Very real.
Stranger Nightfire: i am disturbed by the degree that it seems the intelligence agencies and the military industrialists have taken control of no only our media but our universities.
Maggie Larimore: confirmation bias happens in science and scholarship too, and boy howdy is it hard to recognize in our own thought processes, like the water fish don’t notice until they’re propelled out of it.
Elli Pinion: It takes work, doesn’t it, Maggie.
Maggie Larimore: Marly and in the 19th century, I think they were one of the first schools in the US to admit women back in the 19th century.
Maggie Larimore: it does, Elli, OMG!
Dodge Threebeards: my experience is our foreign born faculty come with their own cultural bias, which is interesting to see.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Val a very thoughtful colleague of mine was talking about responding to a student with opposing views to hers, the student made an excellent case, and the colleague was talking about being able/willing to engage with that and still be willing to challenge and provide your own argument, but really engage with the other person, not be patronising and say “oh very nice”.
Maggie Larimore: I thought about Antioch when I was looking forward colleges, but money and fear lead me down a more conservative/closer to home path, I’m so happy I got to be at Edinburgh in Scotland for the PhD.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Dodge yes
Elli Pinion: I agree, Dodge.
Sheila Yoshikawa: I will throw in another question – have we experienced education ourselves as colonised? In SL for example. I was thinking of how we have US Pacific time, which annoys me.
Valibrarian Gregg: yes- confirmation bias divides people…. I just finished Jaron Lanier’s latest book “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Now”- It was disheartening to realize that social media is mandatory for most of us in education. We cannot escape it but must learn best practices.
Sheila Yoshikawa: well it’s the change in hours that really annoys me twice a year lol, and I have colonised this space with my own ideas of what is nice to have around.
Marly (marly.milena): So….question….in a virtual environment where one can paint oneself with any identity and even in this group we have minimal info about each other’s ethnicity/racial heritage/cultural biases, how is this affecting the whole ed experience compared to Out There?
Maggie Larimore: I love bumping into non-US faculty members and students, Dodge; it’s a good window in on our students from other countries.
Sheila Yoshikawa: although we DID have a conversation about some basics before we set up the new island. @Marly that has been one of the things I like about SL
Valibrarian Gregg: Excellent Marly! Our virtual identities open up questions about authenticity and transparency for sure.
Elli Pinion: Social Media has changed us. I think there must be colonization in SL.
Dodge Threebeards: yes Maggie, i also like this, and I try to use examples from other cultures and other countries in my teaching.
Maggie Larimore: I gave up some years ago and live on Pacific time even though I’m in Eastern, NCU (where I work) moved their offices from Arizona to San Diego so now my whole life is Pacific LOL.
Dodge Threebeards: but you need experience outside the USA to appreciate that.
Maggie Larimore: that’s the thing
Sheila Yoshikawa: that I am prevented from making assumptions by hearing a particular accent, or appearance, or finding out as the first thing that this person is from that country, or that gender.
Valibrarian Gregg: I believe most educators come into SL with an open transparent purpose…..We are who we are- in all worlds. But not so, I suppose, with some people.
Marly (marly.milena): We are conscious of gender identity shifting but how many people (besides my program manager) actually have chosen to walk in a different skin from their own or immerse themselves in non-fantasy ethnic groups?
Elli Pinion: I believe that, too, Val. (open transparent purpose).
Maggie Larimore: I’ve been in Brazil three times for more than 5 weeks, in Scotland on and off for most of a 5 year period in the 90s followed by 5 years living in Puerto Rico, a couple of weeks each in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Spain, and a week in Ireland, mainly conferences for teaching trips.
Marly (marly.milena): Suppose all whites adopted a different race here?
Maggie Larimore: even brief times like that changed my views of countries.
Valibrarian Gregg: For some of us it only takes a quick search to find out who the avatar is. But I have a colleague here in SL that is completely anonymous- and for ten years nobody has ever figured it out!
Elli Pinion: I have an alt so that I can be a different gender/ethnicity.
Maggie Larimore: that and close friends who came to the US from Pakistan and India, all that
Marly (marly.milena): How would that change our focus, our interactions, our work as educators, etc?
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Marly for me, some things would seem like cultural tourism and I would feel unethical.
Maggie Larimore: Val wow!
Dodge Threebeards: i find professors who have experience in different cultures, adapt to SL better, it is a different culture.
Valibrarian Gregg: yes- Several colleagues I know have alts of different race/gender
Maggie Larimore: truly, Dodge, I think that’s true
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): What really annoys me about time references is that people say the time without a time zone. “We meet at 1 pm” tells me nothing without a time zone when I live on the Internet.
Sheila Yoshikawa whispers: So – hauling back to this week’s theme – is this fluidity/ opaqueness a factor that helps decolonisation??
Marly (marly.milena): Yes, it’s tricky, isn’t it> Would people of other races consider it insulting or a breakthrough for whites to do this kind of experimenting?
Elli Pinion: It’s a good experience, for us personally. But I think not being able to make assumptions is one strength of SL.
Stranger Nightfire: one of my favorite alter egos here.
Sheila Yoshikawa: well, Marly, in the physical world it would be seen as offensive e.g. “blacking up”
Elli Pinion: I think both, Marly.
Sheila Yoshikawa: I think the fact that it would be so taboo in the physical world makes me feel the same about it in virtual worlds.
Marly (marly.milena): Right, but would the culture here regard this differently? I wonder….
Elli Pinion: Good point, Sheila.
Maggie Larimore: but it also helps with dealing with folks in the US (for me) that are significantly different than me, some of my students are fundamentalist/evangelical Christians and bring in the Bible to their academic writing, and I don’t struggle as much honoring their cultural background that is a total 180 from mine as I used to, I sort of think of those interests as cultural understandings but I have pushed them to academic church history sources instead of just sticking with the Bible.
Sheila Yoshikawa: I feel it is ok to have blue skin (like I did at Christmas/new year) but not really brown skin.
Valibrarian Gregg: Perhaps there will always be a “balancing act of tension” between cultural heritage and decolonisation……We are all one and the same yet we are all unique and different
Maggie Larimore: you can tell the history of psych course has a bit of latitude in some of the assignments ….
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Maggie yes that is the sort of “confirmation bias” I find challenging, when it is a matter of faith and bound up with deep identity.
Maggie Larimore: having lived outside the countries in other countries/cultures even briefly I think made me find a way to work with those students, I mean.
Elli Pinion: Perhaps that is the answer, Sheila! Blue!
Maggie Larimore: for me, the solution is to take it on as sincerely meant but then see if I can’t get them to include academic Church history.
Josain Zsun: As an Air Force brat, we grew up all around the Pacific rim. I’ve hitchhiked Mex. & Cent. Am. Western Europe & Scandinavia. I guess that affected my cultural attitudes. I never understood cultural/racial bias & prejudice. It has always been difficult for me to debate that with someone that is.
Dodge Threebeards: one interesting thing is that many educators have had problems adapting to the SL environment and try to maintain a brick and mortar campus because it “feels right”. Even when such a campus is hard for students to navigate in.
Maggie Larimore: the other cultural experience that helps with that is that I used to work as an editor at a Christian history publisher run by two close friends, one a Calvinist/Methodist theologian and the other a Jesuit. They argued all the time and never stopped respecting and enjoying time spent together, but one of the reasons why I didn’t get a lot of work done when they were together in the office …\
Elli Pinion: I think the more you are able to travel/live around the world, the more open you are.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Josain yes, just being exposed to and interacting with people from other cultures.
Marly (marly.milena): I have found that one of the richest parts of my experience here has been seeing how communication is affected when interacting with people from different countries. Kinda mind blowing!
Sheila Yoshikawa: @maggie lol
Maggie Larimore: Josain, that’s a great set of experiences, and Sheila’s so right about exposure
Elli Pinion: The power education (and in SL) has is to allow a student who can’t in RL to be able to in VW.
Valibrarian Gregg: I do think virtual worlds provide possibilities for decolonisation because we are all “equal” here and our voices cut to the chase…..no preconceived ideas about our physical stature.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Dodge would you see tha clinging to a bricks campus in virtual worlds is sticking to a colonial idea of the university – like the old American/European tradition of a “place of learning”
Maggie Larimore: good point Elli
Josain Zsun: Initially, traditional ed. environments were a comfortable introduction to me and my students. But they quickly became inconvenient for our simulations & experiments.
Dodge Threebeards: yes, it is so much better for students once you free yourself from that, we hold on to what is familiar,
Sheila Yoshikawa: I touched on this point before – but I think that it is not just up to the teacher to be decolonising, the students have to also be willing to participate in decolonised learning
Stranger Nightfire: one thing i discovered as the creator of a big Halloween event every year in SL was that people from other countries sometimes think Halloween is something kind of sick and demented.
Elli Pinion: It sometimes is more comfortable for them, and you have to help them let that go.
Sheila Yoshikawa: and if they are from the “coloniser” (e.g. UK students in a multicultural class) it may be challenging.
Sheila Yoshikawa: or they may feel their time is being wasted….
Stranger Nightfire: well i guess for some people in SL it is.
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): The older buildings on major universities are colonized by ancient Greece and Rome.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Stranger – though I must say that halloween events and items are HUGE in SL!
Elli Pinion: Good point, students need to understand why, Good point, Selby
Sheila Yoshikawa: lol@Selby
Maggie Larimore: we found that out in Scotland, and then promptly inspired our landlady to rebel, but we kept it less ghoulish.
Dodge Threebeards: smiles at Maggie
Marly (marly.milena): HAHA, Sheila, the students are a colony in their age groups. What cultural differences present themselves between young ones and old ones now. Almost entirely different <languages> with the advent of galloping technology.
Stranger Nightfire: I tell people from other cultures that Halloween is the day we set aside to laugh at the things that scare us the most.
Sheila Yoshikawa: I know some Brits who object to Halloween because it is colonising (ie colonised by the USA) rather than because of the spookiness.
Maggie Larimore: Stranger that’s a great explanation.
Marly (marly.milena): Even the bastardization of language which drives me nuts ie Bad means Good, etc.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Marly yes also you hear of complaints about older people colonising some types of social media!
Elli Pinion: Interesting Sheila.
Sheila Yoshikawa: which I see as healthy appropriation lol
Josain Zsun: Living in the SW…it is part of the Latin Dia del Muerto.
Elli Pinion: lol
Maggie Larimore: we had fundamental Christians in the neighborhood in Edinburgh and they objected on the grounds that we were honoring Satan.
Maggie Larimore: I love the Dia Del Muerto more, honoring your own dead and lots of sugar skulls … yum …
Marly (marly.milena): Satan?
Sheila Yoshikawa: as someone English, sometimes I feel like the language is colonised …. for example when I have to use American English spelling and punctuation in a journal article ….
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): Teens have theirs, now seniors have their own texting codes. I thought the following listing was appropriate … After all the kids have all their little codes…like BFF, LOL, etc….so here are some codes for seniors:
ATD – At the Doctor’s
BFF – Best Friends Funeral
BTW – Bring the Wheelchair
BYOT – Bring Your Own Teeth
CBM – Covered by Medicare
Maggie Larimore: Satan?
Maggie Larimore: LOL
Maggie Larimore: Sorry…\
Josain Zsun: To me Halloween is a candy holiday like Valentine’s is a Hallmark holiday.
Sheila Yoshikawa: lol Selby
Maggie Larimore: LOL Selby!
Elli Pinion: Sometimes it just takes “listening and understanding” the culture to be ok with it
Valibrarian Gregg: lol thinkerer awesome
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): Speaking for my age group
Elli Pinion: hahahahaha, Selby
Sheila Yoshikawa: OK just a few minutes to go, any last thoughts on colonising learning?
Josain Zsun: I’m biased by the backpacks literally full of candy for the next week and sugared up kids.
Stranger Nightfire: i am one US citizen who if you tell me that this or that foreign leader is an enemy of the US i say more power to them
Sheila Yoshikawa: lol
Maggie Larimore: 🙂 Stranger
Valibrarian Gregg: This topic is great- really gets critical thinking going
Elli Pinion: I liked the, “indigenous knowledge and ways of learning, enabling students to explore themselves and their values and to define success on their own terms.”
Maggie Larimore: we’re not an innocent actor in the world by any stretch of the imagination, and especially now.
Sheila Yoshikawa: oops I meant decolonising, though my husband who likes an argument said – is there a movement for COLONISING learning?
Elli Pinion: agree, Val!
Sheila Yoshikawa: I was telling him what the topic was today.
ThinkererSelby Evans (thinkerer.melville): If learning is preparation for life, it needs to be preparation for life in a specific culture.. There is no human life without culture.
Elli Pinion: love that!
Elli Pinion: Yes, culture is not the enemy.
Dodge Threebeards: in general , that is the reason for education Thinker
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Selby good point, it’s not about saying people have to abandon a feeling for thei own culture
Marly (marly.milena): I wish we could talk more personally sometime about our own enculturation processes!
Maggie Larimore: I gave writing my PhD thesis a try using British English, I had two reactions, two of my committee thought it was a wonderful attempt to honor them and Edinburgh, and one thought it was cultural appropriate and gave me a lot of crap about it, circling every word in British English and saying “WTF is this?|”
Sheila Yoshikawa whispers: @Marly enculturation in life? or just SL?
Maggie Larimore: a cultural appropriation I meant
Elli Pinion: interesting, Maggie.
Sheila Yoshikawa: @Maggie, what an idiot
Marly (marly.milena): @Maggie, you can’t win. You can assume you will always insult someone! OL
Sheila Yoshikawa: I had thought of some other impolite words
Dodge Threebeards: 🙂
Josain Zsun: I really got into word & phrase etymology while in high school on OZ. They loved to tease me for “Yank English” yet they were pretty removed from “the King’s English”
Elli Pinion: That is what dissertation committees are for, right?
Maggie Larimore: Sheila luckily for me my advisor and the two main members of the committee who also were the ones who did the Viva with me also thought he was an idiot
Marly (marly.milena): I just loved Sylvia Ashton Warner’s book TEACHER about how she developed a way to work with Maori children that made sense to them. Wonderful book
Sheila Yoshikawa: I think the Aussies just like to pull everyone down a peg lol, they tolerate us limeys
Sheila Yoshikawa: just about
Marly (marly.milena): Has anyone else here read that book?
Maggie Larimore: he expected me to fail my Viva, and I came out crying because I was so relieved all I have were a few revisions, and he looked delighted, and I’m perverse enough I treasured the way his face fell when I said I passed with few revisions, then the other two made him join us for our pub meal and one of them spent a lot of time telling him what a good job I did
Maggie Larimore: great day …
Valibrarian Gregg thinks that book TEACHER sounds great
Valibrarian Gregg: https://www.amazon.com/Teacher-Sylvia-Ashton-Warner/dp/0671617680
Stranger Nightfire: sounds like a fascinating book Marly
Sheila Yoshikawa: worse than an idiot then @Maggie
Elli Pinion: lol Maggie!
Marly (marly.milena): Thanks for finding the link, Val
Sheila Yoshikawa: OK, thanks everyone for a great discussion!
Maggie Larimore: oh thanks on the book title Marly
Valibrarian Gregg: thank you all!
Josain Zsun: I’ll search for “Teacher”.
Valibrarian Gregg: Have a great day and see you soon 🙂
Beth Ghostraven: Thank you for moderating, Sheila! Great topic!
Sheila Yoshikawa: lots of interesting thoughts and good links!
Elli Pinion: Great conversation! TY all!
Marly (marly.milena): And it was written probably fifty or sixty years ago!
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