181 research outputs found
Schooling, Knowledge and Power: Social Transformation in the Solomon Islands
This paper compares traditional education with national schooling in the Solomon Islands, concentrating on the nature, meaning, and transmission of knowledge, and the impact of an imposed Western model of schooling on social change. We examine: micro-level structuring of teaching-learning interactions which embody knowledge as content, and teach important social values and ways of thinking; and macro-level processes in formal education as it developed in the Solomons, together with societal changes contributed to by schooling as a social institution.
Our primary focus is rural West Kwara'ae, where for the past ten years we have conducted research on culture and children's language socialization. Our discussion of schooling is based on historical sources, government publications, observations at a rural primary school, interviews with headmasters, teachers, and parents, and data we collected on children's socialization
Whose Knowledge? Epistemological Collisions in Solomon Islands Community Development
We show in this article how modernization, disguised as “community development,”
continues to fail rural villages in Solomon Islands despite the supposed
movement toward a more people-centered, bottom-up philosophy in development
education and practice. We focus on the case study of a Kwara‘ae (Malaita island)
rural, locally owned and operated project aimed at giving unemployed male youth
a stake in the community and preventing their off-island migration. Successful for
a decade, the project was destroyed by the intervention of a retired government
official who, because of his education, training, and work with outside development
agencies, imposed a modernization framework, including centralization of
leadership and the valuing of Anglo-European knowledge over indigenous knowledge.
While agreeing with the theoretical argument for indigenous knowledge in
development, we argue that it is equally important that development be guided by
people’s indigenous epistemology/ies and indigenous critical praxis for (re)constructing and applying knowledge
Ethnographic Inquiry into Second Language Acquisition and Instruction
IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, we in ESL have become increasingly aware of the important role culture and cultural differences play in communication, learning, and thinking. Yet research methods traditionally used in our field have been less than successful in clarifying this role, or in helping us to take account of it in teaching. Ethnography is potentially a very important tool for basic research because it gives us a way to focus on the intersection of language, social context, and society.
The purpose of this paper is to clarify what is involved in good ethnographic research both descriptively and analytically, and to illustrate the value of an ethnographic approach to research in ESL and second language acquisition. First, we will offer a basic definition of "ethnography." Next, we will briefly describe key principles of ethnographic research (further discussed in Watson-Gegeo, 1988). Then we will illustrate our points through two examples of research in which we are individually involved
The Role of Metalanguage in Supporting Academic Language Development
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96715/1/j.1467-9922.2012.00742.x.pd
Academic language socialisation in high school writing conferences
This study examines multilingual high school writers’ individual talk with their teachers in two advanced English language development classes to observe how such talk shapes linguistically diverse adolescents’ writing. Addressing adolescent writers’ language socialization through microethnographic discourse analysis, the author argues that teachers’ oral responses during writing conferences can either scaffold or deter students’ socialization into valued ways of using academic language for school writing. She suggests what forms of oral response provide scaffolding and what forms might limit multilingual adolescent learners’ academic literacy. Constructive interactions engaged students in dialogue about their writing, and students included content or phrasing from the interaction in their texts. Unhelpful interactions failed to foster students’ language development in observable ways. Although teachers attempted to scaffold ideas and language, they often did not guide students’ discovery of appropriate forms or points. These interactions represent restrictive academic language socialization: while some students did create academic texts, they learned little about academic language use
Looking ahead: Future directions in, and future research into, second language acquisition
Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142949/1/flan12314_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142949/2/flan12314.pd
"How We Know": Kwara'ae Rural Villagers Doing Indigenous Epistemology
We examine Kwara‘ae (Solomon Islands) indigenous epistemology and indigenous
critical praxis, including sources of knowledge and strategies for validating
and critiquing evidence and knowledge construction. To illustrate indigenous
epistemology in action, we focus on the Kwara‘ae Genealogy Project, a research
effort by rural villagers aimed at creating an indigenous written account of Kwara‘
ae culture. In recording, (re)constructing, and writing Kwara‘ae culture, project
members are not only doing indigenous epistemology, but also reflecting on
and critiquing their own indigenous strategies for knowledge creation. We hope
that the work illustrated here will inspire other Native Pacific Islander scholars
to carry out research on their native or indigenous epistemologies
Patterns of Suicide in West Kwara‘ae, Malaita, Solomon Islands
Conference paper for an East-West Center Conference on Suicide in the Pacific, 198
- …