People’s Knowledge
Freire and Horton believe that to truly understand people you need to understand their practice but Paulo claims that, “without practice there’s no knowledge”(98). He then backs that up with stating, “But practice in itself is not its theory. It creates knowledge, but it is not its own theory”(98). For me and coming across an educator, I’d like to believe that they want to teach me what they know plus more. That everyday they’re educating themselves, learning new things, coming across new material and sharing it with the class. Creating a classroom environment where social life is added into the teachings can be very beneficial for students. I would personally find that more enjoyable because then I don’t feel the teacher is just being robotic and only teaching what they get payed to teach which is the case in a lot of settings. The Cultural Humility video does a lot of focusing on self reflection. Cultural Humility is larger than ourselves and when comparing an educator to this, you want to think they’re putting their students education, future, and knowledge before their typical criteria teachings and beliefs. We all have space to grow and sometimes something we learn may not always just be from a textbook…
The death of Rodney King is what really provoked some of the ctions taken place in the cultural humility video. The Multicultural Leadership program at the Children’s hospital in Oakland that Melani and Jann were apart of was used as an outlet to really embrace cultural humility. This video wasn’t just created to express cultural humility. That does play a part in it but it shares so much more. It shows the stories being told within each individual and how this path helped pave them and where they are today. The principles of cultural humility also ties into the article, “Close Encounter of the Human Kind.” Abraham Verghese was faced with his own challenges. Coming across many Katrina refugees he made the decision to volunteer to help serve them. He stayed open minded and allowed himself to be vulnerable during this situation and to relly hear and feel what these people were expressing to him. This was all so much bigger than himself. This allowed him to not just serve as a physician that day, but also as a human being with empathy.
Going into the community partner experience, I feel being open minded would be a big step in the right direction when practicing cultural humility. Placing subjected lives and voices at the moral center can be applied when working with my community partner. Stivers shares, “The goal is not to denigrate information that experts and professionals can provide but, rather , to gain knowledge that only those who have these embodied experiences can impart”(10). My hope is to be able to learn from the people I’m around since it’ll be a new experience and I’ll be alongside new individuals. Really getting to know these people and their stories creates bonds and makes working with one another more comfortable. I know some of the people I’ll come across could possibly have stories and personal experiences that I wouldn’t find in a school lecture so I’m interested in finding some of those out and how these things might’ve shaped them.
