Making sense of knowing through the gaze of different cultures.
Reverend Je Kan Adler-Collins
Ohmi Yukiko
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Institute of Education, University of London, 5-8 September 2007
Abstract
As educators we are in the arena of generating knowing and knowledge in our students set against a criterion of standards that our social and cultural content place on us. This paper looks at the process taken by two educators in nursing, One English ,male and one Japanese female, as they sought to make sense of knowing and the knowledge generated by the introduction of a new curriculum in nursing with its student centered forms of teaching strategies using heuristic(1990) living action research (McNiff 1992, McNiff et al. 1996, Whitehead 1989, Whitehead 1993, Law 2006) as an educational methodology.
This paper’s contribution to education and knowledge is the clarification of emerging values and ideas that arise in practice from inter-cultural dialogues and the identification of culturally sensitive forms of knowing as standards of judgments. Adler-Collins’s (2006) PhD research highlighted the problems of complying to what Freire (1970) and Freire and Macedo (1987) called banking education and the colonization of the Japanese faculty by yet another western paradigm.
This paper offers insights to the use of portfolios and web session questionnaires as data sources and the different way of interpretation that can be used in generating new understandings by the researchers from the different cultural ways of seeing.
The research context of this paper is a cohort of Japanese freshman students under taking nurse training in a Japanese university. The data sets on which this paper focus is that of students’ group portfolio and web session evaluations generated in response to completing a mandatory curriculum element of healing theory their session evaluations of our teaching and identifying what proof of learning could evidenced.
This paper offers a conclusion that multi cultural communications while prone to difficulties and miss understanding will; with inclusional co operation and a willingness to share produce new forms of knowing that enrich both cultures while still maintaining the integrity of each individuals cultural roots.
Findings:
· 1 Proof of learning was difficult to assess outside of the reproduction of formal cognitive learning outcomes. This proved recall and memory skills , it does not prove understanding. It could be argued that cognitive knowledge is banking education as it was given knowledge.
· 2 Proof of behavioral objective learning and task orientation as in processes was evidenced by the students’ compliance with the leaning objectives.
· 3 Proof of reflective and critical thinking was found in students’ reflective journals.
Introduction.
This paper, gives insights into the growth of our educational knowledge as we research the unique position we hold of being a mixed race and gender teaching team. Such thinking is crucial to our desire to make sense of what often is incomprehensible. Incomprehensible in the sense that the authors did not know the culture or the context of each others praxis and we came to realise the boundaries of our knowing is our ignorance of the other. Embracing this ignorance is a constant conscious process in our live as we seek to extend the boundaries of our knowing. At the same time we wanted the story to retain its spontaneity and authenticity in its telling as it evolved along side internal and external events shaping the story in the crucible of its praxis. We realised we needed to suspend our judgements in order to allow the space for an idea or a thought to come to fruition. Often it was the case we did not like or agree with the thoughts we was having, the “chatter box of judgement” in our minds was vociferous and tenacious in its demands to be heard, listened to and acted on. We needed to suspend judgement on them, and recognise what was required of me us by our separate academies. Such suspension is known as bracketing, described by Berger and Kellner (1981) when they said:
If such bracketing (of values) is not done, the scientific enterprise collapses, and what the [researcher] then believes to perceive is nothing but a mirror of his own hopes and fears, wishes, resentments or other psychic needs; what he will then not perceive is anything that can reasonably be called social reality. (p. 34)
In other words we see the world as a projection of our own unconscious, and until we can become aware of the unconscious content we will not see the social construction of our reality.(Vogotsky, 1978) While agreeing with Berger and Kellner’s understanding in part, we am more comfortable with Husserl’s use of the term ‘bracketing’ in (Cohen et al. 2000) , which is a mathematical expression to explain the suspension of belief which is not linked to science or social reality; rather Cohen et al suggested that bracketing was the conscious process of suspending beliefs and prior assumptions about a phenomenon.
To assist the reader of this paper to understand our values and thinking, combined with our requirements to write academically, we will use bracketing within the written text because we see this as one way to temporarily suspend our beliefs so that we and the reader can gain a clearer understanding of a phenomenon. We will use bracketing as demonstrated by Cunningham (1999, p55.) doctoral paper. Cunningham utilised Van Manen’s (1990) ideas on bracketing of preconceptions, prejudgements, beliefs and biases within textual accounts and explained:
…that doesn't mean what I bracket is unimportant. No, it only means that I work on what is outside the brackets separately first. I distance ourselves from what is inside the brackets, temporarily, until I am satisfied that I have understood everything represented outside the brackets to the best of our ability. What is inside the brackets is based on our values. (p. 55)
We extend Cunningham’s understanding by suggesting that inclusional bracketing allows more than one process to occur at the same time. Therefore in our text the reader will find text with in brackets that comes from a. our engagement with our reflective journal and or b. our engagement with a discourse with ourselves as we discuss an issue or clarify a point. By ‘inclusional’ we am suggesting that to suspend values is problematic as it causes separation of identity, knowing and understanding. It would set up, in the Rayner (2003) sense of inclusionality theory, a dynamic boundary that is in fact not dynamic, because some of the creating elements of the dynamic [Self] are being suppressed through their suspension and therefore excluded. An inclusional dynamic would suspend in conscious tension both the expressed values and the held values, dynamically in the same space at the same time, allowing engagement through critical examination balanced with the understanding of bias that exists in the researcher.
Methodology.
A Western approach of combining two different qualitative methodological approaches, living action research (Whitehead 1989) and heuristics (Moustakas 1990), is used in this paper as a methodological framework. Living action research as a method requires transparency on behalf of the authors; two very different ontological positions are shared in this process as each seeks to find understanding of the other. We do not see that this tension in any way negates the scholarship of this enquiry even when at times we may appear confused. Such confusion arises from our desire to navigate our consciousness to a conclusion that supports our ontological position. As we reach each new moment of illumination in the heuristic sense of knowing such new understandings cause the whole kaleidoscope of ourselves to reshuffle. Such reshuffling brings about temporary confusion as new insights are integrated into our ontological praxis. (Moustakas, 1990). We suggest that such a process is critical to multi-cultural understandings where space is needed to listen and engage with the ideas of the other with out a domination or colonization of the other.
The cultural context.
In Japan, this difference between the Eastern and Western concepts of what constitutes a professional nurse, and where the responsibilities lie, is quite confusing. we believe that this is a conflict of cultures of caring, the Western academic model clashing with the Eastern family unit model of what constitutes a nurse/nursing as mentioned by Kawabuchi (1998).
The difficult issues of race, gender and culture are not avoided or sanitised in this account. The tensions Adler-Collins experienced arose from meeting significantly different cultural mindsets or world views in Japan which conflicted with the English-speaking whiteness of our Euro-centric heritage. Ohmi had tensions of her own in understanding a western male attitude balancing that with having to be the mediator between Adler-Collins and faculty while not having the educational status to address the power issues in play.
Ohmi personal journal entry May 2003:
“I received education and grew up in Japan. I believed that a foreign male teacher was completely correct. This is what I had been taught and as male dominance is normal in my culture, I had no reason to question; I thought foreigner was more excellent than Japanese people…. The other teachers of faculty of nursing were negative about Je Kan who suffering completely. Other teachers said to me that teaching and educational method of Je Kan was wrong. I got very confused and I could not believe anybody. I felt in a dark tunnel. However, I found a light in the dark tunnel. I studied healing ahead of the students and I experienced the confused situation in the process, then I got licence of healing nurse. I understood that Je Kan offered new ideas and ways to think. At first I was excited but when I saw students’ reaction I was scared. I could not understand why Je Kan was not scared, he said that confusion is natural when new things are learned, strange words for me, I worried about senior faculty.”
In the reality of praxis, events are seldom clear-cut and stances can be held that are irrational, culturally important or inappropriate. Cultural misunderstandings were frequent on the part both of Japanese colleagues and us, for a number of reasons. Some misunderstandings could be attributed to the possibility that we might just have been having a bad day or had poor personal skills that had nothing to do with culture. Some faculty were problematic to Adler-Collins in their interactions due to personality attributes, or that they were not prepared to engage in constructive discourse, or acted in a destructive manner towards him as I was the only foreigner in the Faculty where he also experienced for the first time in his life reverse racial and gender discrimination, being in the minority. This type of prejudice was disempowering for him, but a great learning experience, as our bias and racial naivety were made apparent to each other. For example, when Adler-Collins arrived in Japan he was fully conditioned by his culture. He would assess handshakes and look at body language, eye contact, dress and jewellery with his Euro-centric gaze. In Japanese culture, handshakes are not the normal custom on introduction. The art of the bow is still the main forum for establishing status. Body language is very formal in public and status ranking dictates spacing, length and depth of the bow. Eye contact is different from that of the West. Direct eye contact can be a status drive, with a sexual bias of women averting their eyes from men. Clothing and modes of dress are indicators of profession and status. Japan is a culture of uniforms that show and confirm identity to a company or the status of a person’s job in that company. Dress codes are therefore very important and there is an expectation and social requirement to conform (Rohlen and LeTendre 1998).
Adler-Collins suggested that he often made mistakes as he used his Western filters and knowing to assess a situation, and he misunderstood unconscious cues or biases resulting in the misjudgements of others. (Argyle 1969) Language was a significant barrier for all parties, but was reduced as our proficiency in spoken Japanese/English and our cultural sensitivity increased.
In order to test the authenticity of our knowledge claims we needed to interrogate our claims for internal validity. However, we openly acknowledge that we could never get inside the total understanding of the cultural context of this research, for we do not have the skills, insights or conditioning of a native person. We do not see this as an exclusional position rather; we see it as the richness and diversity of our humanness. We also acknowledge that these views express our current understandings and are based on our present assimilation of knowing. We are certain that they will be modified as new understandings emerge over time.
[Adler-Collins: As I am writing I am mindful of the tension I hold concerning our deep fears of our violation of other by our being a colonising agent. I need to make clear how I see colonisation working within the frame work of this paper. In Biology a species colonises and competes for space and natural resources in order to expand and grow at the expense of other life forms unless it is in a symbiotic relationship. Our introduction of new forms of thinking and methodological outcomes are presented in a mindful manner, on that is aware of social context and is offered as another way to do some thing or a different way of looking. They are not presented as ways of replacing existing forms of knowing. In the learning outcomes of our course students are required to experience these new methodologies as possible tools for future use in their practice. Being exposed to new forms of knowing is part of the human experience as knowledge develops in the living context of culture and praxis.