BERA main conference paper (YH WANG)
THE LIMITS OF ETHNIC RECOGNITION: A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF MULTICULTURAL COMPETENCE OF ABORIGINAL TEACHERS ON CURRICULUM PHILOSOPHY
YA-HSUAN WANG
FACULTY OF EDUCATION
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, UK
Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association, University of Exeter, England, 12-14 September 2002
INTRODUCTION
Owing to several waves of immigration, Taiwan has been a multi-ethnic society[1] in which diverse ethnic groups share the same education system. In this sense the education system could be said to be unified (Lin, 1987). School students were not provided with multi-ethnic textbooks until the 1990s. In reality, the multi-ethnicity in population was suppressed under Japanese colonial education[2] from 1895 to 1945 and KMT partisan education[3] from 1945 to 1970. According to Fong & Hsuei (1996), students lost their ethnic awareness and ethnic determination under the oppression of Japanese. In the period of the KMT, according to Lin (1987), school curricula and instruction were dominated by a political agenda that promoted a national spirit. Therefore, the histories of ethnic minorities were distorted under the 'authoritarian pedagogies' of such a 'unified education system' (ibid: 52, 112), which tended to conceal the multi-ethnic reality of Taiwanese society.
Historically, the state has played a dominant role in Taiwan's educational reforms. One reason that the state regime did not expose the multi-ethnic reality of Taiwanese society was probably because it might cause political separatism. Up to the 1990s, the impetus for educational reforms was transferred from the state to civil society in which there was increasing sense of localisation, and raising consciousness of ethnic specificity and awareness of the need for a form of multicultural education (Executive Yuan, 1995). Progressive educational voices over the last decade have called for the school curriculum to promote a multicultural education. However, the government has been reluctant to go further in developing multi-ethnic schooling since it might endanger a unified sense of national identity. The government's ambiguity about multi-ethnicity is therefore constrained by the dilemmas of national identity in the face of diversity..
State-centred policies in Taiwan have dominated educational development from 1945 to 1990s and as a result, the majority of current primary and secondary teachers are likely to be unfamiliar with ethnic issues except in term of their daily life---they having been educated in schools where such issues were never discussed. Nevertheless, with emergence to democracy, the government has begun to eliminate ethnic segregation and cultural intolerance and that has contributed to increasing higher education for the aboriginal peoples[4] of Taiwan since the 1970s. A series of curriculum reforms[5] in 2000 have brought significant changes to the curricula of primary and secondary schools. Teachers are now expected to teach about ethnic issues. This change is likely to challenge teachers in primary and secondary schools since such a 'hidden' multi-ethnicity has been unfamiliar to them.
Using this rather specific context of Taiwan, I shall attempt to trace the rationale of this study to ethnic recognition in education and its conceptions for teachers' professional practice. This task of this study is to understand teachers’ conception of multicultural competence on curriculum philosophy in terms of ethnicity. The definition of ethnicity in my study is not a primordial one but a social constructed one. Ethnic groups are 'social groupings that form, change their shape and the glue that holds them together, and sometimes falls apart' (Spickard & Burroughs, 2000:7). By developing a sociological account of ethnic recognition, I will look at both the ways in which ethnic ideologies have been framed within governmental educational policies and the ways in which ethnic hegemony operates in Taiwan's educational, economic and political systems in terms of the domination of cultural capital. The research question is to theorise the nature of ethnic recognition among different ethnic groups in Taiwan, to explore re-conceptualised ethnic identities into a wider social context and to theorise the nature of ethnic recognition among different ethnic groups of Taiwan. This paper reflects some fundamental issues along with exploring ethnic identity formation and its interaction with ethnic recognition as revealed through some extracts from the life history of aborigines and the researcher's reflections on dynamics of the research encounter.
THE POLITICS OF ETHNIC RECOGNITION
A harmonious multicultural society, theoretically, would be one in which individuals can recognise all the different languages, religions and cultural activities (Verma, 1990: 54). As a cultural study of multicultural education, this research will explore the concept of ethnic recognition[6] in the context of educational inequality. The concept of ethnic recognition in my study will be elucidated by referring to the argument of Stuart Hall (1992), Axel Honneth (1995), Jessica Benjamin (1988), and Charles Taylor[7] (1992). Based on their argument, ethnic minorities can empower themselves as well as being empowered by ethnic majorities. As Hall (1992) states,
There is a recognition that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular experience, and a particular culture… this is also a recognition that there is not an ethnicity which is doomed to survive, as Englishness was, only by marginalising, dispossessing, displacing and forgetting other ethnicities (Hall, 1992: 258).
Stuart Hall (1992) proposes that such forms of recognition do not regard any ethnic group as inferior but remains for individuals to be, in Axel Honneth's (1995) sense, 'socially esteemed and this is accompanied by a felt confidence that one's achievements or abilities will be recognised as "valuable" by other members of society' (p.128). To esteem oneself, one has to speak of a state of societal solidarity where the social relations inspire not just passive tolerance but also a felt concern for an individual and particular 'other' (ibid: 129).
My theoretical framework is an integration of macro-and micro-dynamics of ethnic recognition. The concept of ethnic recognition is based on Charles Taylor's "The Politics of Recognition".
…our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being (Taylor, 1994: 25)
‘Ethnic recognition’ is a new concept in the area of ethnic research. My research is a sociological project which has to link with the social context so that economic, cultural, political and historical accounts are significant, as McCarthy(1990) states:
The reproduction of hegemonic racial meanings, the persistence of racial inequality and the mobilisation of minority resistance to dominate educational institutions have not proceeded in a linear, coherent or predictable way. A systematic exploration of the history of race relations in education does, however, lead us to a recognition of the agency of oppressed minorities, the fluidity and complexity of social dynamics and the many-sided character of minority/majority relations in education (McCarthy, 1990: 78).
In addition, my research is an ethnic research but ethnicity in many cases is intertwined with class and gender issues.
By virtue of the operation of these four types of relations---of competition, exploitation, domination, and cultural selection---and their complex interaction with dynamics of race, class, and gender, schooling is a nonsynchronous situation or context. In this nonsychronous context, racial dynamics constantly shape and are in turn shaped by the other forms of structuration, namely, gender and class (McCarthy, 1997: 549).
The meaning of ethnic identity and ethnic recognition has to be returned back to its social structure and thus the interaction of Micro-politics and macro-politics is a circle. ‘To interpret the meaning of race is to frame it social structurally…to recognise the racial dimension in social structure is to interpret the meaning of race’ (Omi & Winant, 1994: 56-57).
METHODOLOGY AND METHODS
The purpose of the study is to explore the complexity of ethnicity by using a critical qualitative social research with wide and deep perspectives on historical, political, and cultural contexts. It is now commonly accepted, within social sciences, that ethnic identity is socially constructed and historically specific rather than being fixed essences (Fortier, 1998; Barth, 1969). In researching ethnicity as well as cultural phenomena, we must situate them into social relations that give them meaning (Carspecken & Apple, 1992). The research purpose of this study is to build a comprehensive understanding of the diversity, ambivalences and complexities that currently characterise the changing nature of ethnic identities. A hermeneutic perspective would explore this topic by interviews with an emphasise of interpretation centring the issues of discourse, context and meaning that is more appropriate to understanding the meaning of particular actions (Mishler, 1986: 140). However, in a critical sense as well as from an ethno-cultural perspective, hermeneutic approach fails to explore the essence of ethnic identity by just linking in-depth interviews and group discussions to the micro-politics of a complex question. Therefore, my examination of ethnic identity in powerful symbolic aspects of self-concepts and collective identity is not by returning back to the "natural," deep-rooted, affective ties of family, community, and ethnic group. Such a natural primordialist[8] position on ethnicity is vulnerable for 'it generally stops asserting the fundamental nature of ethnic sentiment without suggesting any explanation of why that should be the case' (Thompson, 1989: 52-3). My broadly sketched context in this study is not only perfectly bounded in individual sentiments but also refers to macro-sociological aspects in order to fill the gap beyond the personal account with a full contextualisation of this sensitive topic.
Critical qualitative research could be one way to reach this agenda in researching ethnic identity into its both micro and macro politics. Using interviews in a mode of inquiry called 'critical research', Mishler (1986) argues that the "dialectics of in-depth interviews"[9] 'involves critical reflection on the assumptions underlying one's methods and research practice within a commitment to human values' and that it can achieve the aim of 'recovering and strengthening the voice of the lifeworld, that is, individuals' contextual understandings of their problems in their own terms' (p.142-3). In short, since people are embodied as classed, raced, and gendered subjects themselves and acting within differential relations of power, critical qualitative research requires a recognition of these embodiments and these relations so as to provide an understanding of the meanings they construct in the institutions in which they live (Carspecken & Apple, 1992:510). These prior understandings about the nature of ethnic identity and power relations serve as my orienting framework---a conceptual and normative orientation that organises the questions critical researchers ask.
In order to account multiple forms of oppression out of ethnic minority's own experiences, historical change, complexity and interconnection of social divisions, Clifford (1994) argues that 'the ability of oral history techniques to illuminate the lives of people who belong to the dominated groups within our society has much to offer an anti-oppressive approach to social research' (p.105). Life story has been justified as a means for researching identity because 'life stories and their readings are as multi-layered and complex as human identity, so that conflicts and contradictions consist as part and parcel of narrative inquires' (Lieblich et al., 1998: 167-8), through which the researcher's interest in understanding the inner world, or the world of meanings, of ethnic minority in their culture is possibly satisfied. The essence of ethnic identity is deeply linked to collective memory shaped by historical and political ideology. Thus, oral history or biography may offer a thick description of ethnical memory, as Wieder stated,
Oral history provides a place for educational researchers and biographers both to hear about the importance of honouring the uniqueness of the human spirit and to experience the trust a subject places in the researcher, to transcend both the personal and collective blocks that alter memory (Wieder, 1998: 119).
This construction of ethnic meanings is based on the interview process of "critical dialogue" (ibid.: 118) and connects ethnic formation directly to memory and human interaction. "Critical life history" approach, as Clifford (1994) argues, can also contribute to 'the dialogical understanding and self-awareness of people from dominated social divisions as well as to the structural issues of social power' (p.105) that constitutes my methodological framework.
Oral history interview is employed in this project in order to investigate subjective awareness of ethnicity and ethnic images held by secondary school teachers in Taiwan. As I have argued previously, the research questions in this study explore several aspects of respondents' social worlds. Miller and Glassner (1997) argue that information about social worlds is achievable through in-depth interviewing.
It is only in the context of non-positivist interviews, which recognise and build on their interactive components (rather than trying to control and reduce them), that 'intersubjective depth' and 'deep-mutual understanding' can be achieved (and, with these, the achievement of knowledge of social worlds) (Miller and Glassner, 1997:100).
My main concern is to link teachers' interpretation of ethnicity to their life histories which could be useful in 'explaining shared behavioural and belief patterns both within and across cultures' (Morse & Field, 1996: 96-7). Oral history interview could be an appropriate way to collect data of ethnic issue within wider social context because, as Morse and Field (1996) remains, 'life history is used when a research wants to explore the history of an individual (micro-history) within a framework of time (macro-history)' (p.95). Particularly life history can be competently linked to macro-structure through an individual perspective, as Goodson states:
Through the life history, we gain insights into individuals' coming to terms with imperatives in the social structure…. From the collection of life histories, we discern what is general within a range of individual studies; links are thereby made with macro theories but from a base that is clearly grounded within personal biography (Goodson, 1980: 74).
Since life histories of immigrants would provide a better understanding of the problems of migration and culture shock, the use of oral history interview in my project is to explore the submerged ideology and to construct a conceptual framework as the way of doing ethnicity, the way of thinking ethnicity, the way of feeling ethnicity, and the way of being ethnicity.