Fractal education inquiry

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on transnational education inquiry from Guatemala to Australia. Grounded in field research on Indigenous matters, this paper offers fractal education inquiry as a proposition to interrupt the straight and spatialized notions of time that produce developmental, salvific, and progress-centric aspirations from which educational problems are generated. Set as a manifestación, the paper begins with the case of the Don Dale youth detention center in Australia’s Northern Territory and moves on to define the terms of fractal inquiry to defy carceral logics. Fractal education inquiry is exemplified in the study of teacher education reforms in Guatemala. In the last section, the paper interrogates the logics of the gap, teacher competencies in diverse classrooms, and the disadvantaging of populations as reinscriptions of educational regimes attempting to tame multiple and Indigenous fractal ontologies that defy the linear temporalities ruling current schooling.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• indigenous
• temporality
• diversity
• gap
• disadvantage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The quotations here signal a recognition of the historical making primarily via colonizing administrations and imaginaries of what is called Africa today (Mudimbe, 1988).

2 Difference and diversity are codes with references to markers such as ‘African American’, ‘Pacific Islander’, ‘refugee’, ‘Latino’, ‘Latina’, ‘Latinx’, ‘women’, ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’, ‘homeless’, ‘disabled’, ‘poor’, ‘urban’, ‘unemployed’, ‘rural’, ‘at risk’, ‘refugee’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Mexican’, ‘African’, ‘Turkish’, ‘Black girls’, ‘Black boys’, ‘Native American’, ‘Aboriginal’, ‘remote dwelling’, ‘Maya’, ‘Afro-Colombian’, so on and so forth.

3 School subjects are those which make school, those which are studied in school, those which legislate school, those which attend school, and are schooling itself.

4 And in other places such as South Africa, India, the US South and the West Coast.

5 I say manifestación deliberately as journalists are prosecuted, incarcerated, and murdered for attempting to reveal the atrocities being committed by democratic States. My use of the term here and in the rest of the paper follows the language commonly used in Australia. The quotations around ‘Aboriginal’ and in other namable ontologies throughout the paper signal a suspension of their existence as natural givens (categories, names, etc.), and invite their interrogation as made-up kinds of people and ways of being (Hacking, 2001).

6 Jake Roper in an interview for the program stated that he was ‘being treated like an animal’ (‘Australia’s Shame’, 2016).

7 ‘I’ll pulverise. I’ll pulverise the little fucker’. These were the words of one of the prison guards when referring to one of the young people in prison (‘Australia’s Shame’, 2016).

8 The textual play in (s)object here suggest a sensitivity to the distinctions made (from the eighteenth but more so in the nineteenth century) between ‘object’ and ‘subject’ which are linked to the discussions in the history of science as elucidated by Daston and Galison (2010).

9 Castilianization and culturization efforts were in place before castilianization and culturization became the educational reform of progressives and revolutionaries of the democratic spring between 1944 and 1954.

10 From an article published in 1927 in the first year of the Journal Rural Education (La Educación Rural) whose primary readership was meant to be rural teachers:

A very true statement is that those cultures or peoples who don’t read are dead … Poor people, they are blind because they live in darkness … What would a teacher be? Teachers read, it is necessary to renew the spirit, in the same way that nature does it with matter. Teachers read, make an effort, as you do when you buy candy, a ticket to a show, or a beer, and buy good books if you want to go, as Marden said: ‘always ahead’, or if you want to live as the poet D’Anunzzio said: ‘always awake’. [‘Renovarse es vivir’]

11 The classification of academic journals into tiers, as the classification of people as a means of norming life, remains within the very logic that this paper critiques. By focusing on journals at this tier is focusing on interrogating the very space where academic normalcy and the regulation of others is bread in a self-similar production of coloniality. The article selection was driven by three dominant semantic fields in the regulation of difference/diversity in education: The gap, teacher diversity competence, and disadvantage.

12 On inclusion and diversity in institutional life see, for example, Ahmed (2012) and Dary (2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Theodora Herfurth Kubly Research Fellowship.