Education and the possibility of outsider understanding

Abstract

In education issues to do with insider and outsider understanding arise in debates about religious education and about certain areas of research, and in argument about education for international understanding. Here I challenge the dichotomy between insider and outsider, arguing that a more collectivist view of human identity combined with elements of ‘the self which we share with our fellows’ means that we always stand in part as an insider and in part as an outsider in relation to others. I argue further that ‘understanding’ needs always to be thought of in the plural, as a matter of ‘understandings’, since members of any community, and even any one individual, have different understandings at different times. Against what may seem the strong case in favour of the superiority or exclusivity of insider understanding, I note the force of claims in a variety of theoretical traditions (expressed notably in the Marxist tradition in the notion of ‘false consciousness’ and in psychoanalytic attention to the unconscious) concerning the limitations of the exclusively insider perspective and in contrast the particular authority of the outsider perspective. Finally, I acknowledge the discomfort with which people respond to outsiders’ claims to understand them, especially where such understanding fails to support their own self-understanding, and identify ethical considerations, which might shape sensitive negotiation between insider and outsider perspectives.

Keywords:

• outsider
• insider
• understanding
• identity
• experience
• practice
• religious understanding
• understanding other societies
• ethics of outsider understanding

Notes

Notes

This paper was presented as the Terry McLaughlin Memorial Lecture at the 2008 INPE Conference in Kyoto, Japan.

1. I have lost the original cartoon, but this was the tenor of the text.

2. To affirm ‘I do not believe in God’ implies that one has some kind of understanding (including in this possible misunderstanding) of what the proposition ‘I believe in God’ might mean. The alternative is to respond on the lines ‘I do not understand what it might mean to believe in God – so I can neither affirm nor deny the belief’.

3. When Griaule died he was buried with the full funeral rites of the Dogon people.

4. I am grateful to Denis Phillips for drawing this source to my attention.

5. Smith tends to use ‘indigenous’ to refer to pre-colonial ethnic populations in countries later swamped by colonial occupation, though, as Munz (1999) points out, there is a sense in which all populations are ‘indigenous’.

6. I did at one stage maintain a log of the process of writing a philosophical paper for a research conference and wrote about the experience in a piece entitled ‘From philosophising about research to researching philosophy: reflections on a reflective log’ in Bridges (2003).