This review has been accessed  times since November 20, 2001
Willinsky, John. (1998). Learning to Divide the World: Education at
Empire's
End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
304 pp.
$22.95 (Cloth) ISBN# 0816630771
Reviewed by Tom Barone*
Arizona State University
November 20, 2001
Blurbs on the back covers of books tend to be a tad gratuitous, and what I
want to say
first about John Willinsky's book may indeed resemble a back-cover blurb.
But I mean every
word of it.
Learning to Divide the World is a book of enormous importance. It
is a
work of
impeccable scholarship, astonishing in its breadth, enlightening in its
often harsh but telling
detail, and addressing a topic of great significance. The book is written
at a level of abstraction
that invites not just university scholars, but also teachers and lay
people to partake of the wisdom
it contains, an important consideration if the social divisions that are
its subject are to be healed.
Willinsky's work offers new understandings about our colonialist past and
new hopes for
beginning to repair the personal and social damage that continues as part
of our imperialist
legacy. And Willinsky locates a significant part of his own hopefulness in
the public schools.
Specifically, he writes of potential progress though proposed alterations
in the school curriculum,
and these provide the ultimate focus of my review.
What makes Willinsky's critique so appealing is the fact that it is at
once radical and
ameliorative. Radical, of course, in the sense of rooting out basic
misconceptions that are part of
the colonialist mentality and embedded within (among other places) the
school curriculum. But
wise in its understanding that we have no choice but to work from within
that heritage—and
that curriculum—in order to change it. The following passage
addresses this point:
The specific differences that we learn to attend to with acuity—such
as those
grouped under the heading "race"—and the extremely consequential
burden of meaning that
we learn to assign to those differences are the result of a historical
process that each of us is
educated within. To change the significance of those differences will take
an educational effort at
least equal to the one required to put those meanings in place to begin
with. My modest proposal
is to supplement our education with a consideration of imperialism's
influence on the teaching of
history, geography, science, language, and literature in the hope that it
will change the way this
legacy works on us. (p. 247)
The second half of Willinsky's book is itself divided into six chapters,
five of which are
dedicated to descriptions and analysis of the educational mischief of the
colonialists within each
of those disciplines he mentions, as well as some suggestions for
redressing that mischief (p.
158). But the last chapter addresses curricular issues most directly, and
seems aimed squarely at
teachers. The chapter expresses the author's hopes that the book will
serve to inspire teachers to
reflect upon its contents and to collaborate on the production of
materials supplementary to
offensive existing curriculum materials. The chapter also includes what
Willinsky calls a
"postcolonial supplementary project grid," designed as a kind of
heuristic, or as he puts it, "a
starting point in helping educators imagine, in a crudely schematic sense
what in the world might
be taught to the young as a result of this book" (p. 255).
The grid is used by stringing together three components of classroom
activities —
first, the disciplines; second, identity concepts such as race, gender,
nation, culture, and empire;
and finally domains of inquiry such as students, families, schoolbooks,
and popular culture. One
example
provided by Willinsky is this: In the discipline of geography, "students
interview
members of the community (domain of inquiry) about their understanding of
the changing
meaning of culture." Another, in history, suggests that "students look as
how the concept of
nationality is
presented in an informal education setting such as a museum exhibition on
the American
Revolution." And so on.
I should quickly add that there are significant exceptions to the
pigeonholing of school
subjects, especially in Chapter 7, as Willinsky struggles against the
stale notion of science as an
ahistorical enterprise. Specifically, he states that "My aim is to give
students an account of how
science has worked in consort with other social forces in bringing us to
our present inadequate
understandings about race." Science teachers, to this end,
should share history with students by "visiting the school's book room
where old biology
textbooks can reveal science's changing regard for race" (p.187).
Overall, however, discrete school subjects serve as curricular starting
points, and I admit
to a degree of ambivalence about this approach. On the one hand, there is
something refreshingly
pragmatic in an implicit recognition of the limits of teacher control over
the curriculum.
Willinsky seems to recognize the various frame factors in which teachers
operate that serve to
reduce their professional autonomy. He is aware that teachers are often
required to use textbooks and other curriculum materials that retain
elements of a
colonialist mindset, and so he wonders less about how those textbooks
might be discarded and
replaced than how they might be critiqued and supplemented.
His pragmatic tendencies are also obvious in his assumptions that a
re-education in
schools about the intellectual legacy of imperialism—the ways in
which it has divided the
world—is best tackled within a curriculum that is itself divided into
discrete disciplines and
subject matter areas. This pragmatism does indeed seem to understand the
power nexus within
which the school curriculum is played out.
Proponents of a more integrated approach to curriculum have identified
various
constituencies invested in a subject matter curriculum (Beane, 1995). They
include many
academicians and teacher educators in universities, test publishers and
text publishers, subject
area associations,
state and district level subject supervisors, supervisors of teachers and
teachers
themselves whose professional identities are built along subject matter
lines, and parents and
other adults who wistfully recall the subject-based organizational
patterns in their old schools.
The subject
centered approach is so strongly rooted in the deep structures and
folklore of schooling
that reforming it may represent an even more herculean task than
redressing the legacies of
colonialism embedded within each individual subject of the school
curriculum (Beane, 1995).
And
therefore a project that may be best left to another occasion.
Willinsky's approach, which prudently avoids large-scale curricular
miscegenation, may
indeed represent the wisest course of action. But another part of me wants
to attend to the
common historical roots of the divisions of the world according to race
and culture, and the
divisions of all human knowledge into subject matter areas. Historians of
curriculum such as
David Hamilton (1990) and Ivor Goodson (1984) have located the origins of
discrete school
subjects in the age of Enlightenment, as a result of intellectuals' (for
example, Linnaeus)
fondness for
taxonomies. As knowledge
soon became fragmented, systematic and bureaucratized school subjects were
born.
I also wonder whether failing to attend to these divisions simultaneously
might not
ultimately cut against any postcolonial educational project. Let me
explain. Sensible curricular
holists, taking their cues from the likes of John Dewey and
progressivists, do not recommend
ignoring the disciplines. Instead they see them, as does John Willinsky,
as potentially important
educational tools for prying open secrets of our cultural/intellectual
heritage, so that we may
build upon it and move beyond it. Or to paraphrase Willinsky: "the human
perception of
difference (here, the differences between the subject areas) is natural
enough. We cannot
live but by making distinctions. But the significance invested in any
given difference forms an
order of work, history, and discourse, that then passes as 'only
natural.'"
The discrete school subjects, having been reified, essentialized,
institutionalized, are
themselves currently seen as "only natural." They now easily serve the
interests of a network of
professional elites who have built their identities around them, rather
than the interests of
youngsters who have yet to be initiated into them (Beane, 1995). It can be
argued that by taking
these subject areas as a set of discrete starting points for school
activities our colonialist legacy
may never be surmounted.
The rationale for an integrated, holistic curriculum assumes that, for an
educational
activity to be considered successful, knowledge must be internalized by
students. For this to
occur students must be able to view that content within the context of
personally and socially
significant
concerns. This can provide a kind of intrinsic motivation for students to
become seriously
engaged in the project. Most of these concerns arise out of real-life
issues that transcend artificial
divisions of knowledge.
The deconstruction of certain elements of the colonialist curriculum
within a discrete
subject area may therefore be perceived as simply another kind of official
knowledge to be
acquired and banked away for future withdrawal (to mix metaphors from
Michael Apple and
Paulo Freire). The knowledge may remain remote, at a distance from the
space where real
identity formation occurs, failing to prompt a personal re-description of
who the learner is in
relation to others in the world.
So within this line of thinking a post-colonialist curriculum would arise
not out of subject
matter areas, but within projects and activities that are the result of
collaborations between
teachers and students. Or we may see all real learning as arising out of
one central project, a
project that is related to the kind of quest about which Maxine Greene
(1995) writes so
eloquently. This is a search for personal meaning that provides sustenance
to ones' life, a sense
of identity, of one's position in relation to others in the
world—precisely the kind of search
that includes what Willinsky locates in the words of many of the students
interviewed for the
book:
The reader can hear how students seek a place within the reality of
categories, in
expressions of bewilderment over how one is to be identified
and where one feels one belongs, in a variation of that question "Where is
Here"?
Holists would agree that the disciplines are central to this sort of
quest. Indeed the
disciplines must serve at its behest, as students are enticed into them by
teachers who are
sensitive to their need for locating themselves in the world. But what
kind of activities might
serve as vehicles for the central project in which fragments of
educational content may come
together in a powerful and meaningful whole, while helping students to
move beyond colonialist-
tainted identities? There are, no doubt, many possible answers to that
question. But I will locate
one possibility, one with a potential for integrating several of the
disciplines emphasized by
Willinsky—science, history, literature, language, and geography. This
is the possibility that
lives in students' ongoing compositions of critical autoethographies.
Autoethnography is writing that defines one's "subjective ethnicity as
mediated through
language, history, and ethnographical analysis" (Lionnet, 1989, p. 99).
Autoethnography is
composed from within a simultaneously personal and social space, a
blending of autobiography
and ethnography (Ellis, 1999). It involves a hermeneutical dialectical
process in which the
disciplines are employed to enhance understanding of one's identity. The
process arises out of a students' reflections upon personal experiences,
and then, writes
Ellis (1999),
moves to an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and
cultural
aspects of those experiences, and then looks inward again, exposing a
vulnerable self that is
moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural
interpretations.
Moreover, the process of writing an autoethnography never really ends, as
long as life
continues, and we wonder about how we have been defined by the world, and
about how to
redefine ourselves and our relationships to others who seem alien to us.
And writing
autoethnography is indeed also
about learning to understand the other.
Enticing students into the researching and writing of their
autoethnographies may
therefore be their introduction to a lifelong quest that is never
satisfied. It may also serve as a
kind of wedge into the many of the educational activities suggested by
Willinsky, a center
around which the
insights gained within his subject-specific curriculum might coalesce and
adhere to a core
of personal meaning.
I believe that autoethnographic writing for students can provide for them
something close
to what Willinsky has imagined in the final, typically insightful,
paragraph of Learning to Divide
the World. I end with an excerpt from that paragraph:
We are not anything so much as what we have learned to call ourselves.
Learning to read
ourselves within and against how we have been written, too, seems part of
the educational
project ahead. But learning to read oneself is also about learning to read
the other, as we consider
how to rewrite the learned and learn-ed perceptions of difference. But how
are we to overcome
the foreignness that we have so often made of the other, if not by first
finding it within ourselves. ... "The foreigner is within me," Kristeva
insists, "hence we
are all
foreigners." We can better
understand the shaping of that shared foreignness by studying the
cultivation and manufacture,
the cataloguing and display of the categories that have done so much for
nation and empire. In
this way we see how we are pierced by the persistent past. Lessons on this
legacy will bring us
back, it is true, to an
educational project that was originally intended to profit and delight
some at the expense
of others, but it needn't continue that way. (p.264)
References
Beane, J. (1995). Curriculum integration and the disciplines of knowledge.
Phi Delta
Kappan 76, 612-622.
Ellis, C. (1999). Heartfelt autoethnography. Qualitative Health
Research, 9(5),
15p.
Goodson, I. (1988). The making of curriculum: Collected essays.
Philadelphia,
PA: Falmer.
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the
arts, and
social change. New York: Jossey-Bass.
Hamilton, D. (1990). Curriculum history. Geelong, Victoria,
Australia: Deakin
University press.
Lionnet, E. (1989). Autobiographical voices: race, gender, and
self-portraiture.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
About the Reviewer
Tom Barone received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1978
and is
currently Professor of Education in the College of Education at Arizona
State University. He
teaches courses in curriculum studies and qualitative research methods.
His writing explores,
conceptually and through examples, the possibilities of a variety of
narrative and arts-based
approaches to contextualizing and theorizing about significant educational
issues. He is the
author of Aesthetics, Politics, and Educational Inquiry (Peter Lang
2000) and
Touching Eternity: Life Narratives and the Enduring
Consequences of
Teaching (Teachers College Press 2000).
Address all correspondences to Thomas E. Barone, Division of Curriculum
and
Instruction, College of Education, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
85287-480.727.7991.
Dr. Barone can be reached via e-mail at barone@asu.edu.
*Reprinted with the kind permission of the
reviewer and the editors of
Current Issues in Education from:
Barone, T. E. (2000, May 16). Healing the world, healing the curriculum
— A
review of John Willinsky's learning to divide the world: Education at
empire's end. Current
Issues in Education [On-line], 3(5). Available:
http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume3/number5/
|
