Contextual learning : education through inter-cultural dialogue of elite and indigenous-indigent

• Main Author: Ibhakewanlan, John-Okoria
• Published: University of Nottingham 2015
• Subjects: 371.9; LC Special aspects of education
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.680266

Universal access to education has been an urgent concern since the establishment of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals or MDG. While aiming at ‘Education for All’, the MDG did not specify what kind of education nor how that education would be delivered. Besides the emphasis on access, apparent in the various attempts to ensure provision of education for the world’s poor, there has been also focus on material resources - especially a reliance on foreign aid. This author argues that what is needed in the long-term is a localized or Culturally Responsive approach that includes a consideration of the question of justice – particularly the issue of socio-economic inequality. The study evaluates some historical attempts towards Cultural Responsiveness (CR) in education, highlighting the efforts to filter curriculum content and teaching strategies through students’ cultural frames of reference. It eventually questions this curriculum-centred approach. Should CR not rather address the problem of elitism inherited via colonial education? The elite and the indigent, the study suggests, have become of different cultures. Hence part of the task of CR in education needs to be conceptualised as an elite-indigent dialogue. The CR dialogue is indeed of culture but must be framed in the context of justice, presented in terms of the author’s religious worldview, which includes eco-justice. To gather data on an elite-indigent interaction, the study adopts a decolonized methodology, as well as a qualitative approach employing unstructured interviews and open-ended questionnaires. Based on an interpretive case study of the relationship between an elite school in Africa and its indigenous-indigent host community, the study explores an alternative CR approach through the philosophical lens of Constructivism and the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP). The result is a three-fold learning hypothesis termed Costheanthropic Learning.