Experience Is A Key For Knowledge
At the beginning of Chapter 3 of “We Make The Road By Walking,” Freire and Horton talk about knowledge deriving from experience. If you don’t have any experience, then you can’t relate to or understand what it is you are being taught. Freire states, “ It has to do with a very important moment in theory of knowledge, which is knowing man’s moment of information …” (99) Learning information that you learn through your own experiences, you obtain that knowledge from that specific situation you just went through and not from outdated information which can happen in many cases in classes when learning from textbooks. This relationship is significant to me in terms of my education because I have realized after reading this passage, I learn the most when I experience situations myself or when hands-on learning is involved. In the Cultural Humility video, Patricia Castañeda, who is a Pediatrician working at Kaiser Permanente, mentions that it took her a long time to make peace with herself for not knowing and lack of intelligence in certain areas until a friend of hers told her that it’s not that she isn’t intelligent, it’s that she didn’t have her fund of knowledge in this particular area, therefore, it doesn’t take away from her intelligence, she just didn't know because no one had told or taught her about it. She says “There’s no way for you to know something unless you learn about it,” and this spoke out to me because I have been one like her who struggled accepting not knowing certain things and not because she was dumb, but because she had never been exposed to it or gone through anything that would have taught her to accept that sometimes we just don’t know.
The specific event that prompted the founders to create and implement the Principles of Cultural Humility was when they discovered that the work they had done with the communities had been something they wouldn’t have learned if they weren’t willing to step foot in the water and learn what the specific community valued the most. It’s not just about individual activity/behavior but about knowing what the community wants and needs. Cultural Humility relates to the larger context of “Close Encounter of The Human Kind”(Hurricane Katrina) and Verghese’s realizations about his job as a human being, not just a clinician by actually placing his emotion in his patients’ states of being having just came from being rescued from a hurricane. He began to apologize to a patient which came troubled about the fact that they hadn’t been rescued early enough and the patient began to compare it to when the country goes and helps out another country, they save the people even better than how he was rescued and that brought him anger. He began to vent with Verghese’s as he helped him out and after he had apologized to him about being rescued late, he replied by saying that it’s what everybody says but can’t relate to him. This relates to the Principles of Humility when we’re encouraged to enter into a relationship with another person to honor their beliefs, customs, and values.
Horton expresses his way of teaching and how he approaches to always teach, “ To me, it’s essential that you start where people are … I can start where I am, but they’ve got to start where they are ..”(99 and100) This is very crucial for him when it comes to education and making sure his teaching is efficient. He goes about explaining that if a student is being taught at the level his teacher knows the material, it won’t help them learn if they aren’t at the same level of knowledge so, it’s best to begin at the level you know the student is at. When introduced about Neutrality Horton says, “ Neutrality is just following the crowd … Neutrality is just being what the system asks us to be … It was to me, a refusal to oppose injustice or to take sides that are unpopular.. “(102) He believes that Neutrality is just a way of going along with societal norms/customs and not doing anything about changing it or making a difference. In the Cultural Humility film, we see a drastic movement happening when Melanie Tervalon begins to speak about cultural humility vs. cultural competence and what role it plays in medical providers who are trained in academia that you are then “all-knowing and all-powerful” which for her felt like it was something wrong while learning from the community she served and understanding how families were coming to the hospital and feeling as if they weren’t being heard from their heritage. She goes about expressing that the humility piece for her as a provider was getting to understand that life is like this and that sometimes you’ve got to cooperate and make a difference for what those people were going through which relates to Horton’s statement about “not following the crowd”.
As time has passed, I never pictured myself giving back to kids who have gone through very similar experiences I have. I saw myself giving back to adults just like my parents because I know everything my parents went through coming to this country, living in the canal and wanting to facilitate their lives. I want to be able to guide and help these young lives to be even better than what I am. As I continue in this class doing my service learning at Canal Alliance helping out the kids of these adults just like my parents, I hope to bring them some light into their path and remind them of the endless opportunities there are in this country and that with the education available here, anything is possible. I am proof and hope to continue being proof of that. As I share my experiences with these students, I hope that like Horton states, they will relate to and understand what it is I am trying to teach them because I have experienced what they possibly have also.
