Western education severed knowledge from its narrative context, making disciplines domains of status.

Evidence

As Cajete goes on to point out, what we call the “disciplines” or content areas in modern education are forms of stories that explain and describe particular approaches to knowledge. “The difference,” he tells us, “between the transfer of knowledge in modern Western education and that of Indigenous education is that in Western education information has been separated from the stories and presented as data, description, theory, and formula.” Students in modern cultures have lost the sense of story that accompany these traditions and instead are taught to see the disciplines as separate domains of “expertise,” that include some and exclude others. These are domains of status and power because they have succeeded in taking the narratives that circulate and defined them as Knowledge. But Cajete argues that we should allow teachers to return to their roles as storytellers, and encourage students to become active listeners. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1603

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the disciplines-as-severed-stories concept, which teachers can use to reconnect curriculum to narrative.
• XREF: Pays off earlier ch10-11 threads on root metaphors and discourses as cultural meaning systems; aligns with the course’s storytelling/interpretation thread. — connects to: White teachers’ education subverted West Indian racial consciousness.; The Rest was constitutive of the West’s identity and knowledge — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 686; Boarding schools severed whole generations from their ceremonial language and songs — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 125
• SEED: An essay angle: what re-storied science curricula would look like across the disciplines.

Broader Connections

• White teachers’ education subverted West Indian racial consciousness. #exemplifies (0.80)
• The Rest was constitutive of the West’s identity and knowledge #expands (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 686