Topic: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity
Order Description
1) At the end of his article, Aoki speaks of “learn[ing] to see life within the fullness of a double or even a multiple vision” (p. 334). In “being and becoming the
tensions” (p. 335), Aoki describes his experiences as a Japanese Canadian and a Japanese Canadian teacher (whether negative or positive) as moments of growth. In terms
of your own history and cultural background, how have you experienced the terms of this “multiple vision” that Aoki writes of? In your professional experiences as
educators, have you been able to work with others in the development of such a vision? How have you experienced ethnicity as a factor in your relation to schooling, or
those who you teach?
2) What do make of Aoki’s claim that probing the depths of our relationship to ethnicity does not “come easily to a person flowing within the mainstream” (p. 325), and
that such probing comes easier to those who live “at the margin … in a tension situation.”
3) Thinking about what Elbaz-Luwisch means when she asks “How is education possible when there’s a body in the middle of the room?” when have your pedagogies, or your
experiences as a student, been interrupted by the presence or movements of bodies? How would you describe the “bodily understanding” or “embodied knowledge” prompted
by such interruptions?
4) Following Gaztambide-Fernández and Murad’s description of “the ways in which colonial heteropatriarchal White supremacy continues to pervade curriculum studies” (p.
15), and thinking back to your experiences and readings in this class and in 503, where have you encountered evidence for such attitudes? Thinking back to Aoki’s
example of “social division by ethnicity,” which he titles “an example of a hidden curriculum at work” (p. 324), where have you seen such attitudes inscribed in your
personal experiences of curriculum?
5) Following her claim that, “Acceptance [of White privilege and complicity] is not the other side of action” (p. 150), and that “to accept White complicity is to
abandon an ideology of hope” (p. 145), what do you make of Maudlin’s critique of hope and humanism in education?