Research Thinking 080110
Jan 10th, 2008 by nicol
I was having a conversation with my friend who was also a postgraduate student at HKU. And one of the topic we spent quite sometime developing was about a phenomenon we observed. My friend was at a postgraduate student gathering and she overheard some comments made by the group on a particular student in the faculty, Mr. M . He was a new comer in the PG circle and had already made his name quite famous among students and academic staff. It was mainly due to his ‘unusually’ outspoken manner, especially in classes where he would always sit in the front row of the lecture room, listening to the lecture, and also asking a lot of questions, sometime interrupting quite a bit of the lectuer’s lecture times. One of the PG students’ comments was on Mr. M’s attitude which they thought was problematic because he never brings a notebook and diligently jot down what the lecturer said like a ‘good’ student would do, and always looked so excited and enthusiastic to challenge the lecturer and argue with him. Now my friend had never sit in the same class with Mr. M, but she told me that from what she heard from the other’s comments, she couldn’t see why there was such a big fuss about Mr. M. Her question to me was, isn’t asking lots of questions, and challenge conventional views and established knowledge the real spirit of university education? She furthered argued that why would anybody come to a university, pursue a research degree if he or she wants to uncritically accept facts, and what is already known?
I think my friend’s questions are critically important and valid ones too. I had the fortune to sit in a class with the ‘infamous’ Mr. M in the last semester. I too had the same observation of Mr. M’s outspoken manner, but I never felt the annoyance and intimidation that quite a number of my classmates and the PG students of my friends were feeling. Yes, Mr. M always asks questions, and get in debate with the lecturer and often times not during the ‘official’ question times, for example towards the end of a long exposition of the course contents or most often towards the end of the class. Although the lecturer acknowledged that his questions were actually quite good and intellectually challenging, the questions he asked were sometimes quite philosophical, adhereing to first principals, which means the lecturer would not be so prepared both in terms of intellectual effort and lecture times to respond to them appropriately. And those philosophical questions often come from an Eastern, and Hindu origin and I can see people’s reactions are like, ‘ is he from outer space?’ And because Mr. M is an Indian, he speaks with a very heavy accent which can proved to be quite difficult for the audience to comprehend. Towards the end of the course, Mr. M’s voice has significantly silenced and he asked less questions. I was not surprised because he received unfriendly gestures, and a few sneers from quite a number of classmates. To be fair, all Mr. M did was making comments or asking questions a lot during the ‘lecture’, but his actions were not accepted by the norm or the dominant culture of the classroom. Clearly, people have entrenched ideas of what classrooms should be like, and how students and lecturers should behave in those spaces. And I should mention that the class was consisted of quite an international body of students, coming from various ethnic backgrounds, however, the discourse of the classroom was predominantly a western and white one. Many of the students taking the course were in-service teachers from local schools or people who have had a teaching background of some sort. I suspect that if this was a different course with different students, for example, a philosophy class or sociology course, or a class in a major Indian university, the situation might be quite different.
So at the end of our conversation, I was left with a number of questions in my mind:
1. Clearly, if students like Mr. M couldn’t find a voice comfortably in a ‘conventional’ classroom or lecture room, then what sort of spaces are needed or available for open and intellectual discussions and debate to take place? Can the Learning Commons provide such an alternative?
2. How can we build a learning environment that is truly multicultural where intellectual exchange and collaboration can reign freely and without prejudice?
3. Our university claimed itself to be a multicultural and international higher education institution situated in the Asian region, yet why does Eastern thinking and philosophy as old as the Indian culture not represented in the slightest amount within the curriculum content from a discipline as diverse as the education field? (Having some background in Eastern and Indian philosophy helped me to see what Mr. M was trying to get at, but the majority of the class had clearly no clue most of the time when he talked)
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Poor thing Mr. M…. I agree with you and also with your friend. Coming to uni is to be challenged and also to challenge others critically. Sadly, many of our classmates only come to get the qualification and refuse to think outside of the box.
If it is the collective persoanlity (culture) then I am not sure how creating Learning Commons could help that far. People do not like to speak or to debate with you anyway.
My crazy thought is…..if there is a Learning Common, there should be some facilitators “on-duty” whom should be talkative, sociable, full of knowledge, and ready to be challenged. I am talking about real people, not ppl behind the computer/internet.
Another crazy thought is, every students should spend like 3 hours per month at the Learning commons. They can do whatever they like there, not neccessarily studying/talking about formal lecture materials. In otherwords, they would not have an excuse that, they are not free to discuss…etc… I found ppl are simply just rushing for other stuffs all the time. Like people have multiple roles like part-time job, full-time studies, dating (thats the most time-consuming hahaha) etc… to handle those roles need a lot of time. And sometimes these roles clashes and you would feel you really want to make use of every minute. In that case ppl does not cherish classmates delaying lecture time. So yea, making the collaboration time compulsory might help them schedule a place for collaboration in their timetable perhaps?!
Hey, I try to put my question here cause it is related to the course and Mr. M. Like we discussed before, I had some problem with the notion of universal value although I couldn’t identify what kind of problems indeed they are. I just had some feeling that it is against my belief about multiculture and value. As the instructor contends, there must be some value that can be widely accepted by people all over the world. For instance, the notion that “everybody need to be treated equaly”. However, I think the notion is ambiguous for the term ‘equal’ is not well defined. And different people from the view of different political, social and economic status, differing knowledge background will have various interpretation of equality. So how can it be possible that we establish a universal value without ignoring or surpressing some groud of people’s voice? For example, when the white middle class women promoted ’sisterhood’ and called for a collaboration of women in the whole world, they encountered criticism from feminist in the third world and in different color. So isn’t it so idealistic or even hegemonic to advocate a value to overtop others?
Thanks for your ‘very important’ question. I think it’s very easy for people to take certain seemingly basic human values, like equality, love, justice for granted. By that I mean, people often assume that everyone has exactly the same understanding and interpretation for these values.
The problem like you said, is that everyone, every culture has their own understanding and interpretation of what constitutes ‘equality’. Some cultures don’t even have that concept of ‘equality’ which is a very much Western philosophical ideal. One example I can think of is the Confucian ideal which speaks more about creating harmony in embracing differences. Are these two ideals the same or are they different?
But to me, I try to avoid generalize such kinds of value laden statements and ideals because it is useless. I think it’s futile to argue for a universal ideal such as ‘equality’ precisely because this sort of argument is a kind of ‘violence’ that would eliminate and reduce the fullness, and wonderful complexity of life into something rather ‘dead’. If there is equality, it needs to be lived, experienced, and contested by the praxis of life, in human relationships. I recommend the article title “Why doesn’t this feel empowering’ by Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) and I quote from her:
‘each affinity group possessed only partial narratives of its oppressions – partial in that they were self-interested and predicated on the exclusion of the voices of others and…the meaning of an individual’s or group’s experience is never self-evident or complete. No one affinity group could ever “know” the experiences and knowledge of other affinity groups or the social positions that were not their own. Nor can social subject…ever fully ‘know’ their own experiences…But this situation was not a failure; it was not something to overcome. Realizing that there are partial narratives that some social groups or cultures have and other can never know, but that are necessary to human survival, is a condition to embrace and use as an opportunity to build a kind of social and educational interdependency that recognizes differences as ‘different strengths’ and as ‘forces for change’ (316, 318)’
As a buddhist practitioner, I try to see concepts and ideas as just concepts and ideas, not larger than life. It’s like, when you see a poor and hungry child being denied of a decent meal, what you do in that situation will determine whether there’s equality and love within you. It is through human relationship that equality and love manifest, you cannot seek it from outside of that. I don’t mean that you cannot spread that around but it always start from within, and not some ‘ideal’ that exist ‘out there’. For example, the Buddha himself never put much emphasis or preach about the great ‘values’, instead he always talks about suffering, and how to end suffering for oneself and others. The minute you start to conceptualize that as something as grand as ‘equality for all’ then, you start to fall prey to the illusion of a simplified world that the ego constructed.