Kassahun

Hi everyone. I am Kasshun Tekalign Hiticha, an Ethiopian-Oromo refugee living in Ifo Refugee camp, one of the three refugee camps that make up the Dadaab refugee complex. I also work with Windle International Kenya as a secondary school teacher.

Production 1

I strongly agree with the student-teacher in Bradboy & Maughan's (2009) article that Indigenous Knowledge systems value contextualized knowledge that is local and particular to the setting. (p.10). She further mentions that “all knowledge cannot necessarily be universal in its application because of the importance of place, space, and context.” (p.10). this was what was missing during my primary school days back in the 1990s in Ethiopia. Even though all of the children including myself came from a pastoralist background, teachers didn’t talk much about pastoralist life in any of our lessons. That was way back in the days, my community refers to western education as the government education alien to them. With that, they say “just because a child does not sit in a classroom doesn’t mean there are wasted. Nor does it mean they aren’t learning.” This is mainly because education according to my people is something that cannot be learned from a book or taught in school but obtained only through lived experiences as Burkhar (2004) also laments “Knowledge can never be divorced from human actions and experience.” while other scholars also confirms “Indigenous Knowledge are rooted in the lived experiences of peoples” (Barnhardt, Kawagley, 2005; Battiste, 2002, 2008; Battiste & Henderson, 2000). Leona Okakok (1989) also writes, “To me, educating a child means equipping him or her with the capacity to succeed in the world he or she lives in”(p.253). she continues making a powerful statement that goes, “Education is more than book learning, it is also value learning”. My past school experience was the most traumatic one. I was forced to transform my identity from the native (Oromo) identity to the Amhara identity. If my own lived experiences were anything to go by, when I first joined school, I had to drop my Oromo name, Edossa, to get admission to the school and therefore given the name Kassahun, the Amharic name alien to my Oromo background. Back in the days, the only language spoken in all the schools in the country was Amharic, and any child found speaking his first language had to be expelled from school. Remember, I was born and raised in rural Ethiopia, where Oromo is the only language used for communication. Before my admission to the school, I never met with anyone speaking Amharic. Therefore, to me, the school was like a prison because I could not understand Amharic and being canned five to ten times a day for only speaking the only language closer to my heart. On the other hand, concerning Complexity Pedagogy and e-Learning, I am strongly supporting the end of the teacher-centered method but equally worried as it is not easy to fully implement complexity pedagogy and e-learning though it would help learners lead their learning process at ease. This is because there are limited resources about e-learning methodologies with complexity learning. Besides, the article helps me to broaden my thinking in a way that Complexity Pedagogy is the best Pedagogy that will enable us to make connections and interconnections with learners and educators alike irrespective of the distance. It also as outlined in Table 1 page on 208, “Facilitating students to engage in thinking and learning with differences and emergent insights and patterned and collective learning” The authors further describes that “We created an e-learning platform informed by complexity thinking as an alternative to the traditional LMS (Moodle) and social platforms (Wiki, Facebook, Twitter) to enhance our complexity pedagogy. From this conclusion, I have realized that no one authority figure would influence learners learning and thinking apart from their motivation for learning. I strongly agree with Richardson & Postman (2013) who suggested that “technology has the potential to transform education through creativity, as opposed to seeing technology as merely a way to dispense information and manage students.” (p. 210). I equally impressed by the idea that goes, “technology is a beautiful thing when it connects people, engages imaginations, and sparks creativity” (p.210).