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Hands-on Assignment #5

Rachel Horst
ETEC 565G
December 13, 2015

My Professional Context and Interests

As a secondary school teacher I have always gravitated towards the margins of the educational landscape,
where those students who do not fit in with the main stream tend to proliferate, whether of their own volition
or because they have been swept there by the multiple institutional systems that dominate public schooling. I
am interested in putting my efforts and creativity into helping students who have not yet found much
satisfaction in their education. I currently teach at an alternative program for students who are one step away
from dropping out of school entirely. They did not find success in the main stream and have been funneled
into my program due to extraordinary behavioural and learning needs. Before this position, I was a teacher in
a small Aboriginal community on the coast of BC, where the students, for the most part, had a complicated
and somewhat ambivalent relationship with school-based learning. Providing opportunities for academic
success and satisfaction to students who are resistant to learning in mainstream, institutionalized
environments (such as face-to-face, teacher led, standards-based learning) is a profound and meaningful
challenge that has been at the heart of my teaching practice. Growing out of this, is my interest in alternative
education in all forms, especially virtual learning environments, which provide a whole world of possible
alternatives to traditional ways of ‘doing school.’ I have yet, however, to witness a virtual learning
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environment that adequately meets the needs of marginalized learners. This course has helped me
conceptualize reasons for this lack and to contemplate possible avenues for realizing what I see as a CMC’s
profound potential to engage marginalized learners.

Culture and Virtual Ethnicity

When I say, that virtual reality poses a whole ‘world’ of possible alternatives to mainstream education, I am
not being poetic or metaphorical. This course has opened up for me a deeper understanding that the Internet
really is a place, a world, a “social context” (Cheong, Martin & MacFayden, 2012, pg 2) for human
interaction, not entirely dissimilar to the ‘actual’ world (Macfayden, 2006) but also very unique and in need
of its own purposeful, ethical mediation (Ess, 2002) – a mediation designed with an awareness of the value-
laden cultural complexities that arise from both the design process itself (Cheong, Martin & MacFayden,
2012) and the unique “third culture[s]” that are born when multicultural populations meet, connect, create
and communicate together online (Hewling, 2006). I have always had a sense of the virtual world as an
alternative space, but had never spent serious time considering how people of different cultures experience
this space differently. Many of the ideas brought up in MacFayden’s “Virtual Ethnicity: The new digitization
of place, body, language, and memory,” were especially intriguing to me. I hope to explore them further in
my studies and thinking:
 Textual language as a new kind of speech
 The construction of ethnicity online through ‘text acts’ that are themselves a kind of ‘attestation’
of self
 Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of selfhood

Culture and The Other

As an educator, especially of marginalized students, I believe it is essential to contemplate and celebrate

“The Other as the Other.” Failure to do so “has been institutionalized… in racism and colonialism” – both of
which are embedded in our mainstream education that has traditionally placed one set of cultural values
above all others, thereby silencing or devaluing diverse ways of knowing and being (Cheong, Martin &
MacFayden, 2012, pg xvii). I agree with Charles Ess that there is “a moral imperative in education” (Ess,
2009, pg 18) and that a large part of this imperative is “a foundational sense of responsibility for the Other”
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(Cheong, Martin & MacFayden, 2012, pg xvii). Culture is a useful framework, though certainly not the only
framework, for respectfully exploring Otherness and thereby fulfilling this ‘sense of responsibility’. All the
readings of this course, as well as the ensuing discussions, have provided an avenue for me to contemplate
the Other through the lens of culture. I think this contemplation is essential. Even “essentialist” (Hewling,
2006) conceptions of culture can be useful in the abstract. There is a danger, however, when exploring
culture, to take one’s observations and apply them to individuals. Regardless of how nuanced or benign the
observations are I believe it is extremely dangerous to pre-judge an individual based upon any criteria,
including culture. “Individuals represent a constantly shifting intersection of multiple cultures and
subcultures…. a near-infinite continuum of possibilities….” (Ess, 2009, pg 25). The important work is the
activity of analysis, contemplation and theorizing, which I believe serves to enhance one’s perceptual tools
for noticing and appreciating difference in each unique individual. As an educator (and human being) I enjoy
the creative and intellectual challenge of defining human beings in the abstract, but in any actual or virtual
human encounter each individual must define him or herself. It is my responsibility as an educator to
facilitate self and cultural exploration, and to make myself perceptually ready to heed each attestation self.

Culture and Technology as an Academic Discipline

As we moved deeper into the readings of this course, my appreciation for the “wildly interdisciplinary and
highly collaborative” nature of this field of study increased (Cheong, Martin & MacFayden, 2012, pg xviii).
We touched briefly upon some enormous ideas and philosophical constructs that I would love to revisit in
greater detail. I found myself particularly enthralled with Ess’s writings, which were full of gemlike wisdom
and insight, such as the notion of ‘epistemological humility’ (something I aspire towards as a teacher and a
human).
“Philosophy and experience in other cultures thus leads to an epistemological humility –
one that recognizes that every view is at best partial, but that a more complete
understanding of both ourselves and others may be reached by becoming familiar with a
variety of cultures and philosophies, rather than remaining dogmatically content with just
one” (Ess, 2009, pg 19).

(I am still inclined to feel that the above quote would be improved somewhat if we switched out the word
‘culture’ for ‘Other’.) In the end, for me, it is the philosophy that reveals the experience. A major benefit of
this course has been my introduction to this area of study and thought, and an ignition of my interest to
explore this discipline further.
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Readings of special significance:

Chen, G.-M. & Dai, X. (2012). New Media and Asymmetry in Cultural Identity Negotiation. In P. H.
Cheong, J. N. Martin & L. P. Macfadyen (Eds.), New Media and Intercultural Communication. Identity,
Community and Politics (pp. 109-122). New York: Peter Lang.

Ess, C. (2002). Computer-mediated colonization, the renaissance, and educational imperatives for an
intercultural global village.
Ethics and Information Technology; 2002; 4, 1 (11-22).

Ess, C. (2009). When the Solution Becomes the Problem: Cultures and Individuals as Obstacles to Online
Learning.
 In M. N. Lamy & R. Goodfellow (Eds.), Learning Cultures in Online Education (pp. 15-29).
UK: Continuum Press.

Ess, C. & Sudweeks, F. (2012). Foreword. In P. H. Cheong, J. N. Martin & L. P. Macfadyen (Eds.), New
Media and Intercultural Communication. Identity, Community and Politics, (pp. xi –xx). New York: Peter
Lang.

Hewling, A. (2005). Culture in the online class: Using message analysis to look beyond nationality-based
frames of reference. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article 16.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/hewling.html

Hewling, A. (2009). Technology as 'Cultural Player' in Online Learning Environments.
 In M. N. Lamy &
R. Goodfellow (Eds.), Learning Cultures in Online Education (pp. 113-130). UK: Continuum Press.

Macfadyen, L. P. (2006).
Virtual Ethnicity: The new digitization of place, body, language, and memory.

Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, 8 (1).
http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2006spring/macfayden.html

Plum, E. (2007). Cultural Intelligence - A concept for bridging and benefiting from cultural differences.
Download the article as a pdf

Rachel, J. (1986). "The challenges of cultural relativism" in The Elements of Moral Philosophy. Random
House. http://www.nd.edu/~bgoehrin/literature/Rachels.html