Session Information
Contribution
By confronting and complementing the relative strengths of oral history and archival research, this study attempts to gain purchase on the everyday realities of elementary schooling as lived by monolingual indigenous boys and girls attending official Spanish-language only schools in the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico. Several authors (Julia 1995, Grosvenor, Lawn and Rousmaniere 1998, Lawn and Grosvenor 2005) have long noted that documents in educational archives alone shed little light upon past classroom practice and school experiences. Memories of childhood days in school are also problematic, as they are filtered and delivered as narratives within present-day situations (including that of oral history interviews) that influence their form and interpretation. Some authors in fact have expressed doubts as to whether researchers can ever come to understand the lived experience of schooling, past or present (Rousmaniere 2001, Nespor 1997). In this study I have attempted to combine both sources to understand the everyday dynamics of dominant-language elementary education in indigenous communities, a facet of schooling that was particularly well-hidden in the official documentation in the region. Interviews with twelve elderly men and women of Nahua communities of Tlaxcala, who were monolingual as schoolchildren, has opened windows upon their experience in classrooms, particularly in relation to language practices, modes of instruction, disciplinary measures, and students' survival strategies. These recollections take on additional meaning in the context of the fragmentary evidence gleaned from documents produced in the same localities and years, which provide a sketch of the material conditions of the schools and of the administrative measures that actually reached them. The narrated experiences of the former students sustain critical reinterpretations of teacher and supervisor reports and local complaints, which were rendered in terms of the discursive genres prevalent in the educational milieu at the time. The results of the study confirm the previous findings (Rockwell 2002, 2005a, 2005b) regarding the distance between actual schooling and the 'stories' that educational institutions tell of themselves, whether past or present (cf. Nespor 1997). The production of institutional documentation, a major source of information underlying educational research in all disciplines, tends to create a false sense of coherence and sistematicity, which is belied by the examination of the actual processes of schooling through micro-historical and ethnographic research. This distance in turn affects the relevance and quality not only of much of the institutional documentation that purports to control and transform schooling, but also of educational research that is based on such documentation. This problem transcends the discipline of historical research, as even the independent variables of experimental research are often defined and assessed in terms of official discursive categories contained in institutional documents. Thus, the underlying theoretical and methodological issue addressed in this study, and of others used as references, is valid for the more general discussion to be held at this ECER meeting. This specific study will further address theoretical issues surrounding the realities of elementary schooling in societies marked by a strong separation of the dominant language used in writing and schooling, and the experience of children born into homes where another language is spoken. While this theme has gained particular salience in our times through global migration process, it probably marked the experience of most school children in all societies in the past. Oral history and documentary research; in-depth interviews with former students and analysis of archival materials for the schools of the study. Complementary use of oral and written sources reveals the distance between the actual lived experience of schooling by minority children and the version of school performance contained in official reports and evaluations. This in turn poses significant methodological questions for the entire field of educational research, as well as theoretical questions regarding the nature of schooling in multilingual contexts. Julia, Dominique. 1995. La culture scolaire comme objet historique. In : The Colonial Experience in Education, A. Nóvoa, M. Depaepe, y Erwin V. Johanningmeier, eds. Paedagogica Historica, Supplementary Series Volume I, Gent, CSHP pp. 353-382. Grosvenor, Ian, Martin Lawn y Kate Rousmaniere, (eds.). 1999. Silences and Images. The Social History of the Classroom. Nueva York: Peter Lang.Lawn, Martin and Ian Grosvenor, eds. 2005. Materialities of Schooling. Oxford: Symposium Books.Nespor, Jan. 1997. Tangled up in School Politics, Space, bodies and Signs in the Educational Process. Mahwah, New Jersey. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Rockwell, E. 2002. Learning from life or learning from books: reading practices in Mexican rural schools. Paedagogica Historica 38 (1): 113-135.Rockwell, Elsie. 2005a. Walls, fences and keys: the enclosure of rural indigenous schools. En: Materialities of Schooling. Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, eds. Pp 19-45. Oxford: Symposium Books. Rockwell, Elsie. 2005b. Indigenous accounts of dealing with writing. En: Language, Literacy and Power in Schooling. T. McCarty, ed. Pp. 5-27. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum (ISBN 0-8058-4647-6). Rousmaniere, Kate. 2001. Questioning the Visual in the History of Education," History of Education (U.K.) Vol 30, No 2.
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