Thinking back to my time learning mathematics in school, I can’t think of a specific time where I felt oppressed. The only thing I can remember is feeling overwhelmed by certain subjects like fractions and percentages in elementary school and calculus in high school. It was a helpless feeling, because I felt that these subjects were impossible to learn, but I also felt like I had to learn them in order to succeed. There was often one way these lessons were taught and it was something difficult and stressful to grasp the concept.

In Gale’s lecture and Poirier’s article my own eurocentric views of mathematics were challenged. I always believed the phrase, that mathematics was a universal language throughout the world. However in Poirier’s article, they challenged that notion. For example, Inuit people use a base of 20 when they are counting. They also have an amazing sense of space that is translated into how they travel and interact with the land. Another way that Inuit math challenges our Eurocentric way of thinking is through their calendar. Instead of using a solar or lunar calendar, they use one based on natural events. Their year is divided into months, but the days in the months change based on the natural events.

Growing up in Regina, I adopted a eurocentric view of the world. In elementary school, my class was comprised of mainly white Canadians. I grew up in a home where we didn’t have to worry about money and a lot of things came easily to me. My family is also very close and my parents are still together, so I think that also shapes the way I see the world. I don’t remember learning a lot about Indigenous culture, and I also felt like I didn’t come into contact with many Indigenous people. I definitely saw the single story of white Canadians in my school. Kumashiro states in Against Common Sense that, “when students read literature by only certain groups of people, they learn about only certain experiences and perspectives, especially those of groups that have traditionally been privileged in society”. I only remember reading books that told stories about white people, which happened to reflect my ethnicity, but not that of everyone’s in the class. It is important to give students literature that can connect to each student in diverse ways.

Kumashiro, Kevin K.. Against Common Sense : Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice, Routledge, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uregina/detail.action?docID=446587.

The Personally Responsible citizen- Thinking back to my time in school, I can remember a lot of example of this type of citizenship. I recall going out to pick up garbage, being taught to be honest and kind and responsible. I also remember that in my Christian Ethics class in high school, part of our grade was to go out and do a certain amount of hours of community service.

The Participatory Student- One example of this type of citizenship would be when I was a part of SRC in elementary and high school. I remember organizing a blood drive in my school, encouraging students to sign up and taking them to Canadian Blood Services. I also remember raising money- I actually can’t remember what it was for. But me and a group of students brought awareness to this issue and encouraged people to donate.

The Justice Oriented Student. There could of been moments that this was taught in school, but I honestly can’t remember anything specific.

I think my experience in education really focused on being a personally responsible student. However, I think I also had a strong focus on the Participatory student, because I can remember always being encouraged to be a leader and take action. I don’t remember the third type as much in my own experience.

Treaties are a relationship, an ongoing conversation that needs to happen in this country. Cynthia tells of her settler ancestors, coming to Canada with a fantasy of living this new modern life in Canada. They didn’t know the stories of the people from this land and they did not care to listen and learn. Additionally Dwayne mentioned, colonialism is an extended process of denying relationship. There has been a huge gap in the relationship between First Nations people and settlers. This makes room for racism, misconception and oppression. This is why Treaty Education is so important. Or as Claire calls it, “Settler Education”. We need to understand our history and know the treaties that have been formed throughout our land, in order to bring reconciliation to Canada. Schools that do not have any First Nations students, especially need to be taught about treaties, as they are the foundation of Canada. We need to learn about this in order to create a better future. This is the teacher’s responsibility to educate their students and also the parents of the students.

In the article Learning From Place, youth and elders are brought together to share stories and explore their land. I see reinhabitation and decolonization happening as they explored the river. The elders used a map to teach the students parts of the river in the Inninowuk language. The students learned that there were Indigenous names given to the river before colonization and they were reclaiming them. A quote that stood out to me in the article was when I elder shared,

“I want my kids and grandchildren to know the rivers, so they know who they are and are proud of who they are, and where they come from”

By spending time and learning from the river, the elders and committee members desire is for the youth to know who they are and remember their culture.

This make me think about my own lessons and how I can incorporate place into them. As a music teacher, I would love to bring my students to different locations in nature to inspire their creativity.

According to common sense, a good student is someone who sits quietly when the teacher is talking, who speaks when told to speak and sits still and does their homework. A good student will do all the homework raked of them and won’t challenge what is being taught. This idea is very problematic because not every student functions this way. This way of thinking privileges the children who are able to learn in the same way that the teacher teaches. Because they conform to their teaches methods, they are seen as ‘good students’. This disadvantages students who learn differently, you have been brought up with different ideas and beliefs and they are made to believe they are ‘bad’. It broke my heart reading the story Kumashiro wrote about his student M. This student didn’t learn in the same way as the other students and because of that he thought he was being bad. As hard as he tried to be ‘good’ he just couldn’t get there. Some students thrive in structure and some students are suffocated by it. As teachers we need to be aware of how all students learn and be careful to not teach in an oppressive way just to fit them into the mold.

For my critical summary assignment, I will be focusing on the scholar Maxine Greene and specifically on the topic of aesthetic education. Maxine Greene was an amazing educator, pioneer for women in the workplace and advocate for the arts in education. Maxine often spoke about ‘wideawakeness’ in the classroom. She argues that classroom are stuck in their habits and rituals and do not encourage students to be fully conscious emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. She is basically saying that is many ways a lot of people in education are asleep. She believes that we must actively engage students in class, and the arts is a great way to do that.

Maxine was also very critical of standardization, especially in arts education. In her article The Turning of the Leaves: Expanding our Vision for the Arts in Education, she writes that “we must give up the kind of standardization that wipes clean the diversity, richness, and humanness that infuses the arts as well as human beings’ individual – and sometimes collective – responses to the arts”. Standardization in a lot of way tries to make people all the same. This really opposes the core of arts education, which is to celebrate and inspire individual creativity in each student. When you try and standardize the arts, you take away the beauty and magic of people’s responses to art and turns them into cookie cutter answers.

As a future art educator, I am super passionate about the topic and I’m very inspired by Maxine Greene. She was truly ahead of her time in the way she thought about education and she had a very successful career in a time when women were not valued in the workplace. My next steps for this assignment is to continue writing. I have collected other articles that I will compare to Maxine’s article. Basically I’ve done the research and now I have to write out my thoughts.

It has been super interesting to learn about the history of curriculum and how it has changed over the years. Thinking back to my years in school, I can see the Tyler rationale happening in my art classes. The teacher would give instructions on how to create a piece of art. As students, we would have to carefully follow to rules and all produce the exact same product in the end. If we strayed from the instructions and added our own self expression, we would not be graded highly. I remember an assignment where I coloured in some objects in a way I thought looked really cool and I was pleased with my work. My teacher however, was not and told me that I did not follow the rules of the assignment.

The Tyler rationale creates major limitations in the classroom. This theory is basically saying that classrooms are flat 2 dimensional spaces that are easily predicted and never change. If you have ever been in a classroom you know this is not true at all. Classrooms are diverse and changing and the curriculum must reflect that. Tyler’s rationale will benefit the few students that fall in that category of learning. However, those that learn differently or do not fit in “the mold” will greatly suffer. In the article Smith states,

The problem here is that such programmes inevitably exist prior to and outside the learning experiences. This takes much away from learners. They can end up
with little or no voice.

Each student is unique and brings different experiences and perspectives with them into the classroom. Some students may come from affluent families, some in poverty. Some students are learning English, some students may struggle with ADHD. There are so many different elements to learning that the Tyler rationale does not address.

I think the Tyler rationale benefits the teachers and those students that fit in with that certain way of learning. The teacher only has to worry about one curriculum and outcome even if it does not suit all the students. This may be simpler and more ‘efficient’ but does not serve the classroom as a whole. I honestly can’t think of any other benefits to the rationale as it is outdated, ineffective and does not give all students the same opportunity to succeed.

In the article, Kumashiro defines common sense as something that makes us feels comfortable. It is a way of being that is so engrained in a culture or society that it almost goes unnoticed because it is so normal. She explains that she encountered cultural common sense in Nepal. They had a specific way of teaching that required the teachers to just follow a government issued textbook in order to prepare the students for the end of year exams. They also had specific functions for the local watering hole as certain times. Kumashiro was out of her element in this new culture. What seemed like common sense to the Nepali people, seemed different and uncomfortable for her. She also explains that the USA has it’s own common sense practices. In American schools there are the same core subjects areas that students must learn, school starts in the morning and ends mid afternoon, and teachers are expected to know more than the students. Common sense does not tell us what schools could be doing, but what they should be doing.

We must pay attention to common sense because oppression often hides in the normative, comfortable ways of a society. People are led to believe that this is the way it is suppose to be, and it should not be questioned. This is dangerous because this leads to certain groups of people being marginalized and oppressed. It is often easier to follow society and go with the flow, not questioning practices that may be unethical even though they are normal. However, many oppressive structures in our school systems have been dismantled because people were willing to stand up and disrupt the common sense. We must think critically as teachers and open our eyes to see what may be hidden in the everyday common sense practices that happen in our own lives, our schools and our world. I like what Kumashiro said at the end of her article, that there is a lot of work ahead of us, but there is hope that anti-oppvesive changes are possible.