Nation Building and the Dynamics of Diversity

Loading...

En provenance du cours de University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Negotiating Learner Differences: Towards Productive Diversity in Learning

notes

Explore Related Videos

At Coursera, you will find the best lectures in the world. Here are some of our personalized recommendations for you

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Negotiating Learner Differences: Towards Productive Diversity in Learning

notes

An investigation of the dimensions of learner diversity: material (class, locale), corporeal (age, race, sex and sexuality, and physical and mental characteristics) and symbolic (culture, language, gender, family, affinity and persona). Examines social-cultural theories of difference, as well as considering alternative responses to these differences in educational settings - ranging from broad, institutional responses to specific pedagogical responses within classes of students. The course also focuses on the application of learning technologies and new media to meet the needs of diverse populations of learners. Its main practical question is, how do we use educational technologies to create learning environments in which learning experiences can be customized and calibrated to meet the precise needs of particular learners? Topics include: universal design for learning, differentiated instruction systems, and adaptive and personalized learning environments.

À partir de la leçon

COURSE ORIENTATION + Learner Differences

This opening module gets participants started in the course, and introduces some key ideas about the social context of learner differences.

Learner Identities10:03

Human Movement9:02

Nation Building and the Dynamics of Diversity7:13

Productive Diversity5:05

Meeting the Challenge of the New Xenophobia1:47

Rencontrer les enseignants

Dr William Cope
Professor
Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, College of Education
Dr Mary Kalantzis
Professor
College of Education

That takes me to nation building.

Nation building, the idea of nations, is a very, very recent phenomenon.

If you look at the whole of human history,

the invention of a nation is very relatively new.

And in the creation of nation there have been some major dynamics about how you

deal with the difference that has come as a consequence of

human ability and human creativity.

One response has been to say,

well societies don't work unless we're the same.

And we need to make sure, if we're going to be a good, strong,

healthy society, that those perhaps who were there before us,

that don't fit in, that might never fit in, need to be removed.

And we need to construct a community of our own people.

In fact, if you look at the example of Australia when the first settlers came

there from Great Britain, they looked at the peoples who where there and

barely saw them as human.

In fact,

what they declared was that the land was empty, terra nullius it was declared.

And then on becoming a nation, they declared themselves white and British.

And their job they thought was to smooth the dying pillow of the indigenous people.

Because in their minds, with the ideology of racism, they

believed that the indigenous Australians, the Aboriginal people of Australia,

could never become part of the Western Civilization that they brought

with them from England and Great Britain to Australia.

But this kind of exclusion and separation was not unique to Australia.

Other nations, when they created themselves, created themselves

with a singular sense and drew borders and tried to remove people,

or had wars to kill people who they thought were not like them.

Because they believed that you couldn't live together fairly, and

because they believed in race having superior and inferior members to it.

So that's one dynamic that exists in the world and has existed, and

is still in the memory of people who are part of our planet today.

A second dynamic is something that we call recognition or integration.

And many parts of the world have finally had to realize that you

cannot do ethnic cleansing,

you cannot remove people who are not like you, even if you are dominant.

Even if you have the tools to be able to make it impossible for

people that you don't like to survive comfortably,

you do need to create the conditions of recognizing diversity and

respecting people in their differences.

Sometimes it's been called multiculturalism,

sometimes it's been called assimilation, but that has been a trend as well.

And the third one, perhaps the more recent one that we'd like to talk about,

is civic pluralism, how does any geographic space

recognize the dignity of the people who are in that space?

And how does it create institutions that are inclusive and

can deliver on people's needs, whether they're emotional, material or symbolic.

So if we just take exclusion and separation,

it is one of the most difficult and

horrendous periods in human history in nation building.

And many places in the world have chosen that as a model for community building,

in order to ensure that the resources that were available

to the land were to their people, and enabled their people to prosper and grow.

Examples have existed, as I've already mentioned,

in Australia or in the United States, Apartheit in South America,

the fascism of Germany that wanted to get rid of Jews and

Gypsies and people that weren't Aryan, the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

We have seen many periods in history where people have resorted

to that kind of dynamic for addressing diversity.

The other approach, which I mentioned earlier,

is the one about creating a nation around a single identity, and

anyone who's allowed in must assimilate.

So if you're going to be Italian, you have to be Italian in a particular kind of way.

You have to be of the same religion or of the same habits,

or the idea of, if you are to come into the community and

want to be part of the Italian State, for example, you need to assimilate

to what that country has determined are the features of its society.

Assimilation was also a model in the American context.

The idea was that people would come from all over the world, as we've seen, but

once they came into America, they'd leave their identity behind.

And they would go into a big melting pot, and

come out with new habits, new language, new ways of behaving.

And then they would have the opportunity to share in the bounty of the land.

The assimilation policy was, when there is an assimilation policy,

the schools are part of that process.

And there's great attempts to ensure that the heritage that somebody

had when they came to the country, or in the case of Native Americans or

aboriginal people, that somehow that is put aside

in order to become part of the society that's going to succeed.

Part of the idea around assimilation was that if you wanted to get ahead in life,

you needed to be like the dominant group.

So on one side, there was an ideology that it would benefit

people to leave behind the ways that were deemed inferior or

not suitable, but it was a horrendous process for

people to have to give up so much in order to become.

And as we've seen, it's not necessary to give up everything

to become part of a decent society and to make a contribution to it.

Explorer notre catalogue

Rejoignez-nous gratuitement et obtenez des recommendations, des mises à jour et des offres personnalisées.

Coursera propose un accès universel à la meilleure formation au monde, en partenariat avec des universités et des organisations du plus haut niveau, pour proposer des cours en ligne.

© 2019 Coursera Inc. Tous droits réservés.

Télécharger dans l'App Store

Disponible sur Google Play