Thinking about thinking in Guyana..
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The discussion reflected on the national culture of limited inquiry and lack of desire or demand for knowledge creation.
This is not a Guyana situation alone - the researchers referred to a study in Nigeria and to one done for the University of the West Indies.
I am no academic and I am no philosopher or intellectual. I believe scepticism is inherent in the human culture. Six years ago, I had written about ways in which people might gather to talk and think , but things still seem very much the same in terms of our thinking culture.
The work against child abuse and domestic violence made me realise that even as the services were offered, the violence was intensifying. The work for LGBT equality while showing how homophobia exists in Guyana, also showed interesting levels of acceptance , or tolerance. I realised as the work kept going on, the problems were intensifying and the opportunities for learning were limited. Being active and doing.. also meant limited energy for thinking.
We need to be creative in the ways in which we could live together . I believe that we need to develop this "thinking culture" - phrase borrowed from educators who apply this to classroom settings in the North.
I realise that I am doing with this idea like what we do with Bollywood or Soldanza Plaintain Chips, importing and making my own, rather than creating . However, I still want to 'try a ting'.
I borrow from Ron Ritchhart's Cultures of Thinking work. In this work, he identified some cultural forces which work in classrooms in the USA.
I wonder if we can think of Guyana as a classroom - in which we are our own or each other's teachers.
The Cultural Forces are :-
- Time for Thinking
- Opportunities for Thinking
- Routines & Structures for Thinking
- Language
- Modeling
- Interactions & Relationships
- Physical Environment
- Expectations
In our classroom of Guyana, I am thinking of how some of these forces would apply.
Time for Thinking
We are busy, preoccupied with making a living or managing livelihoods. There is no immediate financial reward for thinking. When we work in donor funded projects, we tend to rush through activities, completed deadlines, finish reports and ensure the money is spent properly. My experience has shown that the learning time is not available since there is no tangible evidence to show for the time we spend learning. So.. like time for exercise, we would have to make the time for thinking - reading, researching, asking, engaging with others. One of my friends did tell me that this kind of time is a luxury for the rich. It probably is, I do not know.. but I keep thinking of the women I see around the place - security guards, vendors and others who are reading Bibles and other books. They are not supposed to apparently. I would suggest that we would not have to wait on the Government to decide when it is time to think, but it would be up to us to find that time. (The toilet is good for reading )
Opportunities for Thinking
We are not encouraged too much to think. We have a culture of the Government will think for us and we often unfortunately have created a governance mechanism. which does not allow us to create local solutions to our problems.
Those of us who are not academics, have to be creative about finding spaces where we could think . In 2006, we had an attempt at the Vigyani Sangh - an attempt to get Hindus to examine some real life issues through a Vedic lens. It was a one off event. This year I celebrate the IDEAS Forum - an initiative of The Consultancy Group Guyana; and the Guyana Secular Association which is promoting scepticism.
Language of thinking
This one is complex . Malcolm Williams made about about how we think in Creolese and express ourselves in English. Does this duality mean that thinking and its activities are limited ? Should we learn to speak/write proper English, before we think?
There is a vocabulary around philosophical and academic inquiry which is scary. I do not think there are creolese translations for words like "epistemology" or "ontological". We might have to create our own language for thinking.
Routines & Structures for thinking
I just used the word "epistemology" .. it means 'how we know what we know' ( I say smugly). Malcolm Williams in a passing comment said we would have to consider a Guyanese epistemology.
In Guyana, that would be fascinating. First we have God's Truth. There are different religions and truths . These are sometimes co-opted in the national politics (Mr Juan Edghill's Jesus would have voted for PPP is a classic).
Other truths are complex. Last year Minister Manickchand, in her co-opting of the alcohol industry in support of female empowerment , referred to research which concluded that there was no correlation between liquor and domestic violence. Statistically, probably true.. but the lived hell of many of the women and families where the violence intensifies after alcohol consumption does not reflect the statistical truth. So, is the scientific method enough?
And of course now we have this ongoing debate about the Corruption Perceptions Index; and the Hope Canal Project and the tools used for determining the results of the decisions in both cases.
Would tools like rum and ganja make a difference to our routines for thinking?
Modelling thinking behaviour
A few people do ask questions, and are allowed wonder if they can do things differently from what they have been doing to find solutions to problems, or to imagine different things.
The People's Parliament this year showed that it was possible for people to get together and petition. It also depressingly showed the failure of our governance mechanism since the issues raised by their petition have not yet been dealt with in the National Assembly.
What are the assumptions we would have to make about those whose behaviour and attitudes we are trying to change? If some people are interested in preserving the status quo , is it worth thinking, or should that time be invested in fighting?
Interactions & Relationships
Yep.. in Guyana, most times usually good. How to be nice to people you disagree with? Do we have a culture of understanding "collaborative inquiry "? In the discussion about the corruptions perception index, the words like "clueless", "self-serving", "unprofessional" etc are bandied about. A woman was accused of treason for daring to question the status quo.
Does our culture, small society, many of us interconnected, provide us with some kind of space to allow engagement which is not based on competition for political gain? Are we open to being questioned without feeling threatened? Are we open to questioning others without being contemptuous of them?
Physical Environment
Ron Pritchart said the physical classroom should include the artefacts of the thinking process - in some workshop settings we post the outputs of the stages of the work. Where in Guyana can we find the artefacts of our thinking? The big concrete structures which reinforce our problems rather than provide solutions?
Georgetown with its rubbish piled up all over, Guyana with the rubbish piling up all over, is that rubbish the artefact of our thinking ability? How do we rise above the rubbish - which just regenerates in the same places as fast as different people try to clean it? Does the answer lie in locking ourselves away from the environment? Running away to the savannahs in the dry season?
Does this landscape encourage thinking ? How can we engage with our landscape and be radical and creative ?
Expectations
Each citizen would have to decide on their own value of learning - not only in the formal education sense but also in terms of what they learn from the University of Life in Guyana. The UG discussion talked about the difficulties in moving from research to knowledge products with economic value.
In our thinking culture agenda - what are the outcomes we want? What do we do if our thinking and reasoning do not create any of the changes we want? Can we celebrate, that in the thinking of some of the problems (apart from the rubbish), that we are thinking and that is enough?
Vidya…I really appreciate this post. Got me thinking that we need to use thinking as a guiding design in the reconstruction of the curriculum in our schools. Recently, I’ve been thinking about Guyana, race and development. Thinking about how the majority of academic work I’ve had to digest this past year have been perspectives from the north and how local research, local thinking is absent from the current stream of materials we are asked to read and digest about our own countries. Where are the perspectives from Guyana, where are our thinkers, our researchers and writers? Why must we continue to rely on outside analysis of how things are inside? When are going to start entering the debates that are dominated by outside perspectives. These are the things I’ve been thinking about. I’ll use my Christmas break to think more, write, challenge some mainstream ideas out there and see where it leads. Maybe there is a Phd to pursue in 2013.
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