Learners’ cultures as ‘knowledge’? Sudanese teachers’ perceptions of cultures and languages in adult education

摘要

This article considers the status of indigenous knowledges as forms of knowledge in the multicultural context of Sudan, through exploration of Sudanese adult education teachers’ perceptions of culture, language and knowledge in education. Drawing on critical and poststructural theoretical concepts, cultural discourses in education are shown to derive from the operations of power that legitimise and marginalise forms of knowledge. This is particularly visible in adult education in Khartoum, in which the Arab-Islamic ideology of the curriculum is juxtaposed with the cultural and experiential knowledge of the learners, who are from diverse marginalised ethnic groups. The teachers’ conceptions of culture and knowledge are set against the political background to the development of discourses that interweave Arabic and Islam into the national identity. The role of discourses in the school experience are shown in the teachers’ perceptions of representation of Sudanese cultures in the curriculum, revealing the dominance of the Arabic-Islamic cultural model, the reproduction of essentialised and compartmentalised cultural identities and concerns of deficits in cultural capital. Critical analysis of epistemology through exploration of tuition of Arabic language to the learners who speak diverse ‘local dialects’, which are, in fact, indigenous minority languages, reveals differing discursive constructions of legitimate and marginalised languages, cultures and knowledges in education. The concluding reflections on the theoretical analysis of the teachers’ positions emphasise that the authentic inclusion of marginalised indigenous knowledges in education requires more than increasing the multicultural content, suggesting instead the need to address the imbalanced power relationship between the representation of forms of cultures and knowledges.View full textDownload full textKeywordsIndigenous knowledges, culture, Sudan, Freire, FoucaultRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2012.706451