Session Information
07 SES 02 A, Different Perspectives on Social Justice
Paper Session
Contribution
Research Question
In this paper we paint a picture of the histories that have influenced the development of education in the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA) in Georgia, United States. Using oral history research—informed by critical race, feminist, and queer theories—we examine an extensive history of controversies, diversity, oppression, injustice, and struggles for equality and justice in the conservative American south. Controversial issues because of dogma, ideology, religion and race have tormented and troubled this area, and continue to do so—mirroring challenges we face on the global stage.
Objectives
Our specific objective in the paper is to present a mosaic of important grassroots, unheard, undocumented stories from people—particularly from marginalized groups (e.g., ethnic minorities, women and gay people) who lived through events such as the civil rights movement and desegregation, in order to illuminate the events from the lives of people experiencing them.
Theoretical Framework
The historical South is central in the American and global imagination respecting the struggle for civil rights of all peoples, particularly with regards to racial equality and justice (Cashin, 1985). It is not enough to draw upon this history writ large and through its grand figures to seek to understand the human struggle for and achievement of freedom. To continue such efforts, to address present oppressions, injustices, we must listen to and learn from the stories and situations of everyday folk. Oral history enables us to do so. Such an approach also implicitly challenges the neoliberal forces of standardization, homogenization, neo-colonization, in education and beyond that seek to regulate and circumscribe human existence and agency. In such, the CSRA, while presently far from central in present considerations of such issues, historically was the site of immense struggle and victory—Georgia, the home of Martin Luther King, Jr., President Jimmy Carter—Nobel Peace Prize Winners, champions of civil rights, influential worldwide.
Oral history is used to record lived experiences; it is a form in narrative research practice that consists of gathering personal reflections of events and their causes and effects from one individual or several individuals (Creswell, 2012; Plummer, 1983). Oral history stands alongside other forms of narrative study, namely biographical study, autobiography (Ellis, 2004), life history (Denzin, 1989), all of which are about writing and recording individuals’ lived experiences (Creswell, 2012) in the form of testimonios (Beverly, 2005), personal stories, one’s voice or many people’s voices and the like. Testimonies are first-person narrations of socially significant experiences in which the narrative voice is that of a typical or extraordinary witness or protagonist who metonymically represents others who have lived through similar situations and who have rarely given written expression to them (Zimmerman, 2004).
The design of this project is drawn upon theoretical underpinnings associated with the role of narrative in people’s lives and essentially in knowledge construction. Bruner (1986) differentiated between two distinct ways that humans order experience. He called the first one paradigmatic, which refers to organising thought that is logico-scientific, based on reasons. The second way that humans order experience, according to Bruner, is narrative and deals with the creation of stories. As he described, narrative is used to refer to a way of sculpting and structuring information through expressions of different media into readily understood forms that guide learners’ comprehension; and to a cognitive mode that learners use to make sense out of information or experience. Narrative then becomes part of how people understand the world they live in and they serve as a way of communicating that understanding to others.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
References Beverly, J. (2005). Testimonio, subalternity, and narrative authority. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.) (pp. 547-557). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cashin, E. (1985). The quest: A history of public education in Richmond County, Georgia. Columbia, SC: The R. L. Bryan Co. Creswell, J. W. (2012). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Czarniawska, B. (2004). Narratives in Social Science Research. Introducing Qualitative Methods. London: Sage Publications. Denzin, N. K. (1989). Interpretive biography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Edgerton, S. H. (1995). Re-membering the mother tongue(s): Toni Morrison, Julie Dash and the language of pedagogy. Cultural Studies, 9(2), 338-363. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Felman, S. & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge. Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 105-117). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Morris, M. (2001). Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing sites of memory and representation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Morris, M., & Weaver, J. A. (Eds.). (2002). Difficult memories: Talk in a post-Holocaust era. New York: Peter Lang. Plummer, K. (1983). Documents of life: An introduction to the problems and literature of a humanistic method. London: George Allen & Unwin. Schubert, W. (1986). Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, possibility. New York: Macmillan. Schubert, W. H. (1997). Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, and possibility. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Zimmerman, M. (2004). Testimonio. In M. S. Lewis-Beck, A. Bryman, & T. F. Liao (Eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. (pp. 1119-1120). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412950589.n1006
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