Social knowledge is "the product of agreement or consent between individuals who live out particular social relations and who live in junctures in time." I feel that the key idea is that knowledge needs to be questioned, that "dominant discourses" can not become assumed truth just because the powers that be claim them to be such. These so called "great men" and "great event of our past are not all that the majority would like you to believe. These were men to be respected in some of their motives and actions but not seen as omnibenevolent. My belief on this is that it is hard to attack this cirriculum of the majority in other areas besides history. I suppose in teaching multiple languages is one area that you can do this but I feel history is the main source to teach students about prespective of what happened so that they questioning what is happening and who is saying it. My hope is to teach from a reformist point of view of history and show students not to accept our past as absolute truth but see event as something controlled by those who wrote it.
3 comments:
I give you credit for trying to teach from a reformist point of view as opposed to the 'great men' / 'great events' version of history. McLaren compared this conservative stance on history with the more liberal ideas of teaching history from the viewpoint of the opressed - those who weren't necessarily in power. Whenever I hear things like this I immediately think of Howard Zinn's 'A People's History of the United States' or other works that challenge the standard view of American History. I just hope you will have luck with your reform and wont be too weighed down by curriculum restraints.
I would agree with you 100% Hulkster. Social norms need to constantly be questioned when we do not agree with them. After all, just because many people believe in something does not always mean that they are right. Take a look back in history, and we see many instances where dominant social knowledge of then is considered to be absolutely ridiculous today. If you ask me, life is too short to act like you believe in something just because you want to avoid the harassment of society. As educators, I know that we can do our students a lot of good by questioning these norms, since this way they will also learn to be critical of the so-called “knowledge” that is accepted by many as fact.
I agree with you that history is an area where were are easily able to challenge dominant perspectives, but I also think that the way we look at literature can be challenged too. Specifically, I think we can have a better traditional cannon for our students. The majority of the books that our students read that are from the cannon are written by rich, white men and there isn't much representation of other groups of people in writing. I see this changing at least in higher education, but as a language arts teacher I want to take this further and expose my middle and high school students to different writers on a regular basis. In this way, students will be able to challenge dominant perspectives by hearing more view points and different experiences by a wide range of people.
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