Whose knowledge counts?

[W]hat counts as knowledge is closely related to the interests and power of social groups. What counts as knowledge in differing groups is different, but what counts as knowledge in schools and formal education systems is determined largely by the interests of the powerful.

Bates, 1980, page 9

Bishop and Glynn (1999) argue that culture is central to learning, and so they warn that we need to be aware of the range of socially constituted traditions for sense-making that each individual brings to their community of practice. It is not acceptable to structure mainstream educational contexts based on the majority culture, as has often happened in the New Zealand context.

The traditions of discourse include the full range of language and behaviours of meaning-making, of agreeing, of arguing, of thinking and conversing. Further, in mastering these traditions, students learn how to operate within them and how to change them. The processes described make culture visible; indeed, a vital ingredient of education. Nevertheless, many educational practitioners continue to ignore culture as a central ingredient in educational interactions. Further, many educators remain ignorant of the fact that they bring to educational interactions their own traditions of meaning-making that are themselves culturally generated. This invisibility of culture perpetuates the domination of the "invisible" majority culture. However, it is not sufficient to simply raise awareness of other cultural backgrounds; it is also important for educators to critically evaluate how one set of cultural traditions (their own) can impinge on another (their “students”).

page 78

Bishop and Glynn’s model means that it is essential that communities acknowledge their own diversity as they reflect on and develop their knowledge-of-practice. It also means that educators’ understandings of learners and of different learning contexts must include understanding the ways different people learn and value knowledge. This requires self-knowledge – knowledge of the cultural backgrounds and ways of making meaning that we bring to a learning situation and of how this affects the learning of others. In addition, it requires the ability to make tacit knowledge explicit, to articulate that knowledge, and to interact with each other in such a way that new knowledge can be co-created.

Bishop and Glynn (1999) cite a study by Thornley (1997) at Otago University into the consequences of professional development experiences that denied the teacher participants the opportunity to bring their own sense-making faculties and prior experiences to bear on the new knowledge. These courses followed a “set content”, “set approach”, and “set follow-up” chosen by their deliverers. The teachers reported an overwhelming sense of frustration with an approach in which their only means of engagement was to accept or reject the new ideas.

They reported that they would have preferred to have been involved in a more “discursive” conversational approach; by this they meant one where they could be active collaborators and decision-makers. They wanted to engage with the new materials on their own terms, theorise about implications of the new approaches, discuss how the new curriculum would impact on the particular children and schools they worked with, and wanted to test their ideas out in real-life situations.

Bishop and Glynn, 1999, page 148

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