The new media environment provides new
opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our
students seeking important and meaningful questions. Questions of the
very best kind abound, and we become students again, pursuing
questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along
with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave
the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more
importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from
their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to
inspire. This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,”
in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but
on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the
types of questions that ask students to
challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own
underlying biases.
The beauty of the current moment is that new media
has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of
question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment.
There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the
questions that drive us on.
Peter Horsfield on 19 Feb 14What we take for granted, the women in Kakenya Ntaiya's village are denied of. A member of the Maasai community, Kakenya and her fellow women were looked down by men in their society. In a way, cultural customs discouraged a woman's success. Before they even get to high school, they are married off and get relegated to a life of service to their husband and children. But Kakenya fought her way to college, eventually becoming the first Maasai woman to achieve such feat. And because women do not forget, she founded The Kakenya Center for Excellence to give back. To read more about Kakenya Ntaiya visit www.thextraordinary.org.
