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.
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.
