Grace

Hello, my name is Grace Muvunyi. I am a student of the BHER Daadab Program. I am a First-Year Postgraduate student at York University, currently pursuing my Master of Education in Culture, Language and Teaching. I work for InZone University of Geneva as a social and emotional learning coordinator. Along with my job, I facilitate an Applied Arts workshop to the community by basically simplifying the complex content from the course materials offers in our program into the simplest mean which everyone can digest with the help of simple Arts, as well as covering various topics of concern to the community through Arts. I have a passion for Digital Literacy and therefore, I sometimes train young people in basic digital skills. I look forward to learning skills that will help tell the world stories of what it means to be a student in a refugee camp.

Thank you!

PRODUCTION 1

The story of the Daagu people of Ethiopia confirmed so much on what many people believe to be the Canon of Knowledge. From a traditional perspective of schools, teachers have been believed to be the producer of all knowledge while students are the consumers of this Knowledge (Mitchell et al, 2016, p. 206). This is not an exception to the e-learning pedagogy that is currently being implemented in emergencies. Learners are believed to understand everything on the computer screen without any support from the facilitators be it online or onsite. It is assumed that learners will make meaning of what they learn and that it will have a difference in their lives. Knowing that this is not true, Bryan takes us back to the understanding of what we mean by the indigenous way of knowledge. What is the difference between this pedagogy in relation to our traditional education pedagogies (Western way of learning) that we use today? Looking at Mitchell (2016) on his Complexity pedagogy and Bryan’s (2009) argument of the Indigenous Knowledge, the difference here is on how knowledge is defined. While the traditional pedagogy looks at it as a noun, the indigenous looks at it as an action. That is why for example in the Kenyan curriculum, One is viewed as intelligent and successful by the level of how best he can master the teacher’s content and transferee it to the exam paper and not how best you understood and applied it in your daily life. In fact, this kind of pedagogy to be cannot be doomed as a successful one. As a matter of fact, many learners who have completed form four in Kenya have performed so very poorly not because they are not capable but because it is one thing to master and a different thing to apply. I have witnessed so many people who have completed their university but are not working. Not because they do not have jobs but because they were suspected from their workplace for perfuming very poor at work and so they are seen as useless. Such cases are witnessed in schools and hospitals. On the other hand, I have seen so many people who have not performed so nicely academically but when given a job they prove to be the best. Thus, it is important to understand the indigenous knowledge, especially as we work towards the innovative pedagogy of learning in the emergency and crisis contexts where e-learning is used as a pedagogy. Like the Daagu people, we would love to see our students learn how to learn, collaborate, find creative pathways for learning and can make a difference in their lives. In fact, Fullan one of the authors in Mitchelle (2016), challenges us by asking us to think of a possibility of enacting new pedagogies with technology that benefits innovative ways that are more engaged, active, distributed, equitable, mindful/Meaningful and creative, one which enables the community conversation, student choice, Localized and of course contextualized.

REFERENCE

Brayboy & Maughan (2009). Indigenous Knowledge and the Story of the Bean, Harvard Educational Review, 79(1) Mitchell, G., et al (2016). DAAGU: Complexity Pedagogy and e-Learning: Emergence in Relational Networks, International Research in Higher Education Vol. 1, No. 1; 2016.

PRODUCTION 2

Reading through the two articles, I could tell that there is a difference between Paradigms and technology. While the two almost mean the same thing, Technology is the organization of the knowledge for a practical purpose. On the other hand, Paradigms is a pattern, a way of doing things, or a system of beliefs. Starting from the first article models of literacy in North American schools: social and historical conditions and consequences, the authors define literacy as a set of context, neutral, value-free skills that can be imported to children with near- scientist precision. Convention research defines literacy as a psychological process whereby children acquire and use the skills of reading & writing. In the same article, the author divides the paradigms of literacy in 3 ways. 1. The classical, aim of literacy of high culture subserved the goals of an aristocratic social structure 2. The Progressive shift of focus to the pragmatics of interpersonal communication and 3. The technocratic approach to literacy developed in concert with increasing centralization of schooling which led to an emphasis on more standardized and universally verifiable forms of literate behavior. (De Castell & Luke, 1986, p. 87). In the article, a focus was put on the kind of curriculum used in American Pragmatism. Each of these curriculum is aimed at creating a model literacy that is socially oriented as well. On the other article of the multiliteracies, my focus was on the question of the what, why and the how of the multiliteracies pedagogy design. On the question of the of multiliteracies, meaning-making is key in this pedagogy. In a pedagogy of multiliteracies, all forms of representation, including language, should be regarded as dynamic processes of transformation rather than processes of reproduction. That is, meaning makers are not simply replicators of representational conventions (Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M, 2009, P. 175). The author argues that meaning makers do not simply use what they have been given: they are full makers and remakes of signs and transformers of meaning. On the question of the how? There is deadening institutional inertia in schools and their disciplines, in the heritage physical architecture of school buildings and the institutional architecture of educational bureaucracy (Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M, 2009, P. 182). Another kind of answer has been to go back to the basics. This is a move in which conservative activists have, in many places, succeeded in reversing the slow march of progressivism curriculum reform over the course of the twentieth century that started with the influence of educationists such as Dewey and Montessori from that century’s beginning(Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M, 2009, P. 182). The third kind of answer is to move forward and to redesign pedagogy for our changing times. The experimental practices of a pedagogy of multiliteracies have been one such attempt to move forward. This is an option that all educators would love to go for. However, the back-to-basics movement has had considerable success in taking education back over the past decade to what appears, in the retrospective view of its advocates, to be the halcyon days of traditional schooling (Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M, 2009, P. 182). This movement has been working on the ``skill and drill’’ curriculum that transforms knowledge into practice.

REFERENCE De Castell, S., & Luke, A. (1986). Defining literacy in North American schools: Social and historical conditions and consequences. In S.C. de Castell, A. Luke, & K. Egan (Eds.), Literacy, society, and schooling (pp. 87-109). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.* Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (2009). ‘Multiliteracies’: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164-195.