Essential Question: How is everything connected from the perspectives of indigenous peoples and Western scientists? What are the advantages to knowing both ways?
3 Questions
The point was well made that the ways of native knowing and western sciences are different and similar. The comparison chart was very useful in framing my thinking about the overlap and direct comparisons of the two ways of knowing that we are exploring.
I realize that the native way of knowing comes from living out a base of knowledge that has been taught by the past and making it your own through the needs of daily living. Western science has people who do the same thing but to a different end. They live inside their world framed by the boundaries of their scientific inquiry. All of their time and thinking is focused on the tools and words of their field and they do not interact with other worlds.
We call these people nerds or workaholics. They immerse themselves in their field and the better they get in that area, the less connected they are to other areas. They are going much deeper into a field than others and therefore sacrifice their connections to other worlds, be that relationships, the outside world, or their own health.
Making connections between different areas of thought has different implications in the two ways of knowing. Connections between things can be fun or revelatory in western science when they happen and they can be incredibly inconvenient when they don’t. In native ways of knowing, connecting things about your situation and environment leads to success and missing those connections leads to hunger or danger thus the process becomes invaluable to you and worth the effort. Realizing the value of connections is also quite valuable in the classroom.
In a classroom, if you only see the teaching as a sum of the parts, you can miss some very important ways to help kids and much of the joy in teaching. As with native knowing, relationship in teaching is so very important. With knowledge of your subject and your age group, you have a foundation on which to stand. With knowledge of how students learn and people work, you have a way to reach out. When these come together you have a classroom that works.
On how this will change my classroom:
Teaching provides many opportunities to color or flavor the material being presented. The ideas learned from the native way of knowing seem so natural a tone to have in a classroom. Keeping whatever we are studying connected to how we interact with our world makes enough sense to make it a part of my teaching.
3 Colleagues
I visited Alicia Weaver and enjoyed the perspective of someone living in such a remote place. It brings back the wonderful experience of getting to know this unique place and the people who seem to never tire of welcoming newcomers to the land.
Janet Reed’s blog brought to me a reminder to go look at Teacher Domain again. When I first looked at it and searched for what we are presently working on in science, I wasn’t blown away at the number of videos. I will continue to explore this resource as I am sure that it will serve my students well in other components of my curriculum.
I enjoyed Sandi Pahlke’s thoughts on the need to meet the needs of all of our students. We struggle to bring the relevance of school along when we bring the work of school daily. We can do a better job of making western thought more useful both to ourselves and our students.
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