Sunday July 8th - Haas

One of the primary goals of education in my opinion is the fostering of cultural literacy in students. I appreciated this article because it described ways in which technology could be implemented in classrooms in order to uproot stereotypes and ingrained notions about different people and provide students with a more realistic understanding of them.

Something this article made me wonder about was the ethics of museums/displays of different cultures. I’ve wondered about this before because museums essentially objectify cultures and present them as an “other.” On the one hand a museum (say that displays art and artifacts from the Navajo) preserves aspects of that culture which may otherwise be largely forgotten and unknown to the dominant culture as it grows. On the other hand, the literal objectification of a culture in a museum seems unethical to me because it distinguishes other cultures from the dominant one. It also implicitly suggests that while we should respect and appreciate these cultures, they really exist for their value as entertainment and objects of inquiry rather than an integrated part of our world. In addition, a museum perpetuates the kind of notions about the primitive nature of other cultures and portrays them as outside the modern world. For me this raises the question about how museums could more fairly portray other cultures without playing into the common stereotypes that Haas critiques in her article.

I also connected personally with this article in a small way because my high school’s mascot was the Indian which was represented by a generic drawing of a Native American chief with a feather headdress. There has been continual pushback against that mascot for the exact reasons that were mentioned in the article. It is unfortunate that the dominant culture in the United States has appropriated Native American imagery and used them as symbols for various organizations/institutions.

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I think the decolonial project that Haas describes in this article could be extended to other cultures and peoples, and not exclusively those that are considered indigenous. Many students I have taught don’t realize that other places are developed in the same way that the United States is. I vaguely recall some middle school students comment that they can’t imagine things like skyscrapers and infrastructure in places like Spain or China. To return to what I said at the beginning of this post, one of my goals as an educator is to foster cultural literacy in students, and part of my teaching with technology philosophy is to use technologies to achieve this goal. I have done this using Google Earth tours to show parts of the world that students haven’t been to. This article has provided more of a framework and a clear articulation of how this could be possible and the importance of decolonial pedagogies as a priority in our teaching.