I'm not sure that, after Kumashiro touches a topic, anything conceptual at all remains to be said. He so thoroughly analyzes issues, seemingly from all angles, even picking apart his own ideologies. I find that these qualities are both his strengths, and his [theoretical] weaknesses in Chapter 2 of Troubling Education (2010).
I most appreciate his idea that though we continue to be "taught" certain things to do and think about as we get prepared to go into the world and teach, there is an inconceivable amount left unknown. He argues, "teaching involves a great degree of unknowability" (Kumashiro, 2010). To me, this points out the degree to which a teacher candidate must display a creativity, and a readiness to take what gets thrown at her. Teaching involves risk, and a lot of adapting, confronting, and reconceptualizing on the fly. He brings in Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997), who discusses a "'space between' the teacher/teaching and learner/learning, between, for instance, who the teacher thinks the students are and who they actually are, or between what the teacher teaches and what the students learn" (p. 37). There is only so much we can glean from these theories; in the end, it has to actualize in our practice.
I work with a Bengali woman in her forties who has had over fifteen years of teaching experience in India. She is now working towards getting her license to teach in Minnesota. Though she is in a different program than ours, she is reading a lot of the same literature and theory that we are, and I can see her getting easily overwhelmed by the lofty language of educational theory. It seems a bit antithetical, or counterintuitive, actually, to theorize about something that at its very nature is so based in action. Of course, praxis cannot exist without theory to guide it. But it seems to my friend, and myself, that the reason we are here to become teachers is because we already know this. We are ready to put into action the principles of love, compassion, creativity, and knowledge that guide us. If anything, perhaps this is a way to affirm ourselves as teachers.
Again, Kumashiro seems to be good at naming nearly everything there is to name about challenging systems, even down to his own. For me, this constitutes a problem even with CRP or CSP as theories, or the extent to which they are possible. I find theory in many ways to be exhausting in that, to me, the only way possibly to access this kind of truth is through authentic personal and spiritual reflection and a tapping into a hope that is touched by something divine. Humans are innately and constantly imperfect, and I wonder if all this idealist projection is just words, or if it will only ever be a striving.
Kumashiro goes on to echo my very question.
He posits himself that even his own theory has its limits, saying even anti-oppressive approaches to education should not predetermine what students need to know or be able to do since they "are as partial and uncontrollable as any other theory and practice" (p. 68).
I myself have been wondering, having recently read "What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland" about why the educational theories we read are so limited to European and North/South Americans. Maybe I've got my history wrong, but aren't our primary methods of reading/writing/synthesizing/theorizing rooted in ancient European, and ancient Greek/Roman ways of thinking? What about the rest of the world, and specifically, Indigenous ways of thinking or knowing? To me, I think I resonate somehow with the typically Indigenous desire to keep themselves as other from mainstream capitalist societies, in the sense of remaining guided and principled by their roots and relation to the land and the spirits of nature and their ancestors. What about Buddhist ways of knowing? African animist ways of theorizing? Certainly, future research needs to examine more possibilities for anti-oppressive education that come from a more expansive set of histories and ideologies (p. 69). I wonder, though: could this even be done, and in what way, to be truly anti-oppressive, relevant, or sustaining? Is even the trying to synthesize these knowledges somehow wrong?
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