Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 9 - September 14, 2020
“For Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and their followers, oral consciousness is a sonic consciousness, and the difference between orality and literacy is based on the difference between the eye and the ear.”743 It is unfortunate that Ong and others chose to make the dichotomy eye versus ear, orality versus literacy, throwing us off the scent of the myriad of ways ALFE learn, of natural learning, social learning, learning through trusted relationships and connections. While the principles of orality have been helpful and indeed revolutionary, the name would seem to be a misnomer, an incomplete
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Killingsworth explained: As opposing pairs of terms—product versus process, literacy versus orality—they bear a special relationship to one another, one that resembles a ratio: Product is to literacy as process is to orality. Product and process are code words for a set of generalizations in the history of composition, while literacy and orality represent similar structures in the history of culture.745
Finnegan once asked the provocative question, “What is orality—if anything?”747 Wanting to avoid stereotypes, sweeping generalizations, and indefinite answers, her reply was, “Nothing.”748
Contrary to Finnegan, I believe there is something to orality, something literates encounter when they meet those with limited education, something that causes us literates to stumble, to fall short in appropriate teaching skills, something we need to label appropriately so that we can adjust to this type of learning we have forgotten.
What term would I choose instead? West rejected the term “oral preference learner,” as he believed people are not privileged to choose their first and foundational way of learning, to have a preference.750 I agree with him that orality is an identity, one that we all seem to have at the beginning of our lives. West chose another term, explaining: “As a more useful term, I offer French anthropologist Marcel Jousse’s verbomoteur to describe oralists as experiential, gestural, action and holistic in nature over those habitus-shaping effects that literacy-contingent models produce.”751
If we also examine literature in the field of neuroscience, we find that from infancy, we as humans are involved in observing and attaching to our caregivers, a type of learning that affects us at the neural level. We watch, we observe, we listen, we feel.
Merrifield and Bingman named what they observed in this kind of learning “other-oriented learning strategies.”752 Paradise and Rogoff called this “a panhuman phenomenon,” “an integrated learning tradition,” and “a cultural tradition of humanity.”753 Ventura et al. referred to “the ‘default’ processing style.”754 Knighton added: “Orality, far from being primitive and savage, is pervasive and cohesive.”755 Even Ong believed orality to be “the primary modeling system.”756 I actually think this latter term a better, more inclusive description.
Beginning to use the terminology I mention, we avoid the Great Divide and the dichotomies of the past because we all begin learning in the first (upper right) quadrant of the Learning Quadrants diagram. As someone has said, “we” are “them,” and “they” are “us.”
In researching non-formal education in Ethiopia, Abiy et al. discovered the process was “very much family-and community-based” and did “not depend very much on the presence of literacy skills.”758 Hardaker and Sabki, in exploring Islamic pedagogy and orality, noticed facilitating learning was “not a matter of simple methods and technique but as a holistic approach that deals with the capacity to form the human person.”759
Hiebert asserted, “Oral communication is highly relational.”761
she noticed Khmer pastors transplanted in the United States operated under traditional leadership styles, became patrons to their congregations, and thus some experienced moral shortcomings due to new temptations in their positions. She also found church members sometimes switched churches in pursuit of better patrons. However, Smith-Hefner related Christian conversion in the Khmer community with a loss of ethnicity and identity. She concluded her study by explaining, “One of the most important sociological features of Khmer conversion . . . may have less to do with belief, ritual, or morality
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Example of syncretism as failure to confront worldliness. Regardless of context, cultural deficiencies should be confronted.
I believe the reason for success lies more with the impact of social relationships than with education, the programs merely functioning as the means or conduit of providing the social glue integral to Khmer society, offering role models and a support system, connections that propelled these youth to more successful futures than the norm.
Allison and Broadus confided: “A belief in something or someone greater than oneself and a sense of connectedness are prominent definitive views of spirituality” and they found that faith or “an undeniable trust in things hope for and certainty of things yet to be seen” “brought clarity” to their purpose.799
study, “The cultural norms of Afrocentricity adhere to a worldview in which spirituality is the central core of life”800 and “contend that spirituality, purpose, and cultural identity are critically intertwined.”801
I agree, as did Battiste, in a statement encompassing much of this theory of connected learning: “Learning then, as Aboriginal people have come to know it, is holistic, lifelong, purposeful, experiential, communal, s...
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where they “equate sensitivity to shame with virtue,” shame-socialized versus non-shame-socialized cultures.812
even in a non-shame-socialized culture such as the United States, illiteracy and shame walk hand in hand. Shame has also entered the western social scene through technological avenues.813
If poverty is everywhere associated with shame, then shame, and its possible antonym dignity, might better facilitate a more comprehensive global discourse on poverty than one which is limited to relative and absolute measures of poverty.
Researchers may discuss the poverty-shame nexus, however, given this study, I would include lack of formal education as being crucial to the mix—a poverty-shame-limited education nexus or cycle of lack—with poverty or lack of resources resulting in lack of education, which ultimately feeds into lack of honor or dignity, a sense of shame.
This insight helps explain why so many poverty mitigation projects fail--their educational component isn't connected enough to the rest of life.
François and Olazabal continued with the following training tips all of which confirm the findings of this study: (1) Let learners make decisions, (2) apply what is learned, (3) promote learner-to-learner education, (4) reinforce as much as possible, and (5) train adult educators differently.844 Their summary of the “confessions of two adult educators” was, “We had to change ourselves as educators before we could help others to change their lives.”845
Educators believe that literacy is fundamental to competence and independence in modern society; it is difficult for us to conceptualize life without reading and writing as anything other than a limited, dull, dependent existence. As a result, adult basic educators continue to define their student populations in terms of incompetence, inability, and illiteracy, even though this kind of orientation has been labeled a “deficit” perspective and is under attack in a variety of social science disciplines.
As it is, “the diploma disease developed and nurtured by the credential society has intensified the diminishing interest in the knowledge structures of non-credential societies.”852 How can we as a global learning community validate the needs of those who do not place value on formal education due to their beliefs, vocations, and life struggles?
As Mazamisa affirmed, “Textuality is a form of resocialisation.”853 No one should be forced to change lifeworlds or become literate in order to learn.
A number of scholars view literacy efforts as paternalistic and oppressive.
In summary, given the findings of this study and the theory of connected learning that emerged, wisdom would conclude orality is an area of study in need of renaming, ALFE prefer learning by means of persons and not texts, no failure learning is necessary for promoting lifelong learning of ALFE, faith and spirituality can provide redemption for hopeless ALFE caught in shame, people can learn without being literate first, and accessible technologies can provide connection for Cambodian AFLE.
contra theological education by extension.
According to Heschel, “What we need more than anything else is not textbooks but textpeople. It is the personality of the teacher which is the text that the pupil reads; the text that they will never forget.”868
Merging anthropology and education in order to understand and adapt
As Quillen wrote long ago, “Education is a cultural process.”872
addition, as most educators know, every classroom houses people with very different ways of learning and knowing.
Diamond described the present schooling system as an “assembly line,” a “factory system,” which was “in startling contrast to the personal learning context in traditional and primitive societies.”
“Humans are adapted to be highly social, but the organizations through which we live our lives are not adapted to us. We are square (social) pegs being forced into round (nonsocial) holes,” according to Lieberman.887
893 Caring is not optional if learners are to become engaged and successful. Studies show positive affect and a sense of belonging improve test results.894 What does this mean practically? It means effective facilitation of learning includes the affective—culturally appropriate intentional listening, relationship building, exhibiting care and concern, for example.
To promote this kind of person-connected learning, we as educators need a number of practices in our repertoire: respecting connected learning and connected learners; demonstrating relational connectedness;899 learning to deal with shame, emotions, lack of self-efficacy and self-concept; promoting connected, cooperative, relational, or PIER learning—“People as Informal, Extended Resources for Learning”;900 distilling lessons to the most meaningful essentials; promoting more showing and less telling or experientially-based approaches;901 respecting all professions, whether they require brain or
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In his ancient text on teaching the Christian faith, Saint Augustine reminded the readers that when the Ethiopian eunuch read the Old Testament prophet Isaiah and did not understand what he was reading, God sent the apostle Philip in person (Acts 8:26–39), someone who “sat with him, and in human words and human language opened up to him what was hidden in that passage.”907 Moreover, the Creator God Himself came as a man to communicate with us. He personally connected with us on many levels. As Soukup elucidated, “Truth is not a statement at all, but is nothing less than a person.”908
How can faith communities have non-reader friendly meetings? Study of sacred scriptures cannot subsist only in the bottom left quadrant of the Learning Quadrants in Figure 11. There needs to be a place for spiritual learning in all four quadrants.
The length of time it takes for a person to gain the highly literate skills for abstract Bible study is beyond nine grades of study.
Too often religious education, theological education, and leader development concentrates on the cognitive knowledge a person might need without a connected learning outlook. An emphasis solely on the cognitive can repel and discourage connected learners.
An estimated 90 percent of the world’s Christian workers present the gospel and do discipleship using highly literate communication styles. 90 percent. Throw that up against the 67 percent who are oral learners and what do you have? A strategic problem. . . . The fact that we, as literate, print oriented, missionaries from the west, have missed this oral storying method for so long may be one of the single most serious tactical mistakes we have made in the last 200 years.921
According to one biblical scholar,924 Paul was also involved in “traditioning.” Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 (NASB): “For I delivered [paradidomi] to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” The Greek word paradidomi meant to “hand down, pass on instruction from teacher to pupil.”925
West gave an extensive list of remedies, stating, “Jesus is unlike other rabbis in that He does not emphasize memory drills, but a changed disposition in life, in all its habits.”930 Similarly, Childs and Greenfield found the women they studied learned weaving in groups and that “the learning and the working were found to be ‘a social event.’”
He witnessed how the preacher embodies the Word and “connects people with God in the sermon event.”933 Preaching in that situation did not necessarily involve study and analysis but creating an event, an experience, and an encounter with God. Anderson found, These rural Ethiopians thus generally approach life through participation in direct experience, and this reinforces an entirely different set of values than those found in the West. Most important, people share experiences together in community, rather than as individuals who learn through the solitude of reading a book.934
Saint Augustine, undoubtedly having much experience with ALFE in the early Christian church, reportedly told his congregants who could not read, “We are your books.”935
The “uneducated” still engage in biblical exegesis, but not that of a lone grammarian sitting before a text in the study. The value of “exegesis” extends beyond the specialized work of a literary professional to the activity of one who intentionally participates in the prayer, worship, and reflection of the whole community and is challenged to live out one’s life within that “school.”
academia. I concur with Egan’s insight: “We need to see orality as an energetic and distinct set of ways of learning and communicating, not simply as an incomplete and imperfect use of the mind awaiting the invention of literacy.”1002
Gee maintained, “What is at issue . . . is different ways of knowing, different ways of making sense of the world of human experience, that is different social epistemologies.”1003
As Ong noted, “Oral communication unites people in groups.”1007
Too often we hand people a book when they want a story, a model, honor, and a relationship.
