Professor's Challenge

This past week in my Cognitive Development class, we talked about knowledge being classified as nomothethic, idiographic, and ethnographic; essentially, in the differences between the three we explored what makes an idea valued as a general/universal principle or considered an individual or cultural variation of a norm. We examined the Western tradition of establishing Eurocentric frames of thinking and ways of being as the baseline against which everything else is assessed and judged; inherent in this practice is an assumed sense of privilege and entitlement to defining the value of individuals, ideas, and phenomenon.

In academia, there is this underlying buy-in to the idea that "truth" and "reality" can be defined by those who have an assumed power to do so; in school, we are taught "theories" and "foundation" courses, where we are expected to learn and master the contributions of particular "scholars" whose perspectives have been respected and heralded for decades, if not centuries. As articulated by my classmate, we are then expected to always use one or more of these frames of thought as the basis upon which we can then build our own ideas and establish relevance, or not.

While exploring these ideas in class, the Professor made an explicit appeal to us to consider that part of our responsibility is to develop our own ways to tell our story, and the stories of others around us; to use scholarship to push the envelope and transform the Western habit of banishing the experiences of the marginalized and oppressed to the peripheral category of anomaly. Ironically, in a class of roughly twenty students, all pursuing doctoral degrees, there was an awkward silent resistance to this proposal; the reticence shortly translated to an outburst of discussion about the level of difficulty that it takes to make an impact of this proposed magnitude in a world that predominantly moves according to habit and norms, and resists legitimizing things, experiences, and people, that don't simply fall in line with this neat organization of human life and interaction. One student explained that a desire to create and live the comfortable, wealthy life makes him very clear that he will not be the one to take on the Professor's challenge; alternately, he will choose a career in his field of Psychology that does less rocking than boat, and more staying the course. Others in the class engaged in conversations about the importance of having standards and the immense difficulty of getting people to respect and buy in to approaching the human experience from a different, more inclusive perspective.

At this conversation, and its context, I again thought about who I am choosing to be in this process.

Earlier that day I attended a Social Work student's defense of the proposal to defend her dissertation. The doctoral candidate, interested in exploring the lives of "child soldiers" in Sierra Leone, shared her ideas in hope of receiving approval to commence her research. What stood out to me about her proposal was this desire to really present a vehicle for these youth protagonists to articulate and explain their own story of resilience; the student described creating a platform for human beings to construct the stories of their own survival as one of the goals of her research. In her approach, she reflected the importance of not simply dissecting these youth's experiences based on established theories of child development, and presuppositions about human response to "trauma", but she was intending to let the value of this experience, for the children who experienced and created meaning from it, breathe on its own merit. While the dissertation aspect of this work "requires" that she develop theoretical frameworks from existing knowledge as the "foundation" or backdrop of her work, I still felt like her research was a great example of the work that my Professor encouraged us to take on.

I reflected on these two very different experiences that I had in one class day. While I was inspired by the vision for the dissertation, I was saddened by the thought that as students, at this level of "formal education", there appears to be an epidemic fly in the jar syndrome lurking in our midst; invisible lids are suffocating and stifling the dreams of many students who can't even envision being in positions to make contributions to the world of learning and critical thinking. The idea that the "power to define" will remain inaccessible to us energizes this myth of being limited in our ability to transform our "reality" and fosters a cycle of complacency while ushering in more of the same. I'm convinced that the legacy of our people indicates otherwise. Under conditions far worse than we could presently imagine, our ancestors created space for our voice to be inserted and for our existence and experiences to be honored and respected, and not simply as some tangential phenomenon or deviation of the norm.

While I can imagine the challenges that will surely come with carrying the torch of these ancestors whose contributions I describe, I know that I didn't choose this path because it promised to be some frilly adventure. To my Professor, and my people, I can commit to being in the fleet of ships, among peers and colleagues of my generation, that will ruffle the feathers of Western tradition and practices of exclusion.