The wind (of my soul) and other folk songs

Preamble to a Penanti Proclamation

Preamble to a Penanti proclamation

Azly Rahman | May 4, 09 12:48pm

Two scores and ten years ago, our forefathers and foremothers brought forth in this kampong the plan for a just republic that never materialised. We argued and waged peace for a republic of virtue but instead were given a warmongering State of Denial. MCPX We toiled to established a kingdom of peace and tolerance but saw instead the evolution of a dictatorship of plutocracy and totalitarianism. We have become ‘It’ in our journey towards the ‘Thou’. Two scores and ten years ago, we thought we had Independence - given on a silver platter by a dying imperial power. But what we got was a state that evolved out of ketuanan Melayu. We wanted Liberty but we got Plutocracy. Two scores and ten years later we are seeing a country divided, sub-divided, and further sub-divided into tribes and post-industrial tribes. The politics of race have strengthened and inspired the few to plunder and patronise the many. We are seeing chaos disguised in the name of consensus. We live in an imperfect world. We live in Maya, in the shadow of Plato's cave. We have allowed totalitarianism, corruption, repression, and hedonism to take root in our democratic institutions. We constantly need to make changes to our institutions, so that democracy will have its breathing space, will evolve, and will flourish in accordance to the laws of Nature. As the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau once said: "Everything in good in the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the Hands of Man…" In Malaysia, imperfection has made us slaves to the policies created out of our prejudices and arrogance, out of our greed and lust for power, and out of our ill-conceived idea of human liberation and economic development. But let us not despair for even religion has asked us to revolt against the corrupt few; and philosophy has given us the wisdom to tear apart totalitarianism. We must recast our vision and cast off our garments of illusion. Voices of change This imperfect world needs more than just incremental change and compromise. It needs radical changes and no compromises. We made that change, sudden yet peaceful and civil, on March 8 last year. It was our Velvet Revolution, inspired by our own sense of non-violence, aided by technologies of cybernetics. Those hard long years of battling injustices, the sacrifices of those imprisoned without trial, of those humiliated and stripped of their dignity, those brutally beaten, those hunted down on the streets of our cities, those silenced and stupefied in our universities, those sprayed with chemicals, and the voice of the little girl - a child of the Hindraf revolution who brought roses to ask for her father's release - all these violent images of oppression that we do not deserve have taught us to be stronger. A few days before the Malaysian tsunami that swept away the powerful machinery of the ruling regime, sweeping it to the backyard of our national history, we were battling with this feeling that the regime would still be holding power and will continue to use it to oppress, intimidate, and to rob the people - for another 50 years. We are now at an exciting historical juncture. No longer are we objects of history; we have become makers of history. History marches on, crafted by those oppressed by their own people.. Let Penanti not be a wait that abandoned us on this dangerous crossroad of history. This victory is already ours. We cannot underestimate our struggle - the struggle of Malaysians regardless of race, class, gender, creed and origin. This victory will be a gift for our children. This will be the best gift we can leave the next generation in a country where ‘justice’ is put in its proper place. This is the concept of adil and is what we base our struggle on. This is the concept of bersih, cekap, amanah in the truest sense of the word.

Dictators of the world unite!

The Dictators

An odor has remained among the sugarcane: a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating petal that brings nausea. Between the coconut palms the graves are full of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles. The delicate dictator is talking with top hats, gold braid, and collars. The tiny palace gleams like a watch and the rapid laughs with gloves on cross the corridors at times and join the dead voices and the blue mouths freshly buried. The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth, whose large blind leaves grow even without light. Hatred has grown scale on scale, blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp, with a snout full of ooze and silence Pablo Neruda

Yusuf Islam on Jay Leno -- May 13 2009

Perak Darul Absurd

Perak Darul Absurd

My moments of linguistic relief is to imagine what words look like and why names are as such. When I was a child growing up in Johor, I always wonder why there are names of places as refreshing as Segamat (‘segar amat), Yong Peng (which rhymes with yong tau foo), Pontian ( a haven for pontianaks), Mersing (a place where giants sneeze).

I still could not think of Hospital Kandang Kerbau in Singapore as a place where jaundiced baby buffaloes get placed in incubators. In short, Stamford raffles would not want to be born in a hospital full of water buffaloes, even.

A child’s imagination. Language and thought at play. Language shapes reality. Language is Reality. Or is it -- language limits reality. Speechless, formless "it" is -- as the Taoist would say. Be like Nature because we are Nature.

I suppose my childhood self-play with language further intrigued me and forced me to think of meaningless names of places such as Cyberjaya and Putrajaya along with those such as NusaJaya or whatever “jayas" that means and shouts victory to cut-throat capitalism. From inscriptions come installation comes institutionalization to ideology and the cycle continues – the cycle of absurdity that robs humanity out of its existence.

My life, Fate decreed and like a vagabond by Intelligent Design, brought me to places in Malaysia. First to Pahang, then to Shah Alam, and next to Perlis and Kedah. In all these places names intrigued me. They forced my imagination to the Bakhtinian carnivalesque dance in a Hegelian fashion. These names forced me to think of contradiction and what form of historicizing created such names of which many are absurd to the max.

Growing up I was often told that Perak is the most populated place on earth where people live everywhere; in Parit ( monsoon drain), Lumut (mosses), Dinding (wooden wall), Ipoh (in the Ipoh tree), and Mambang di Awan (a bigfoot-like creature that resides in the clouds). The last one sounds like Socrates as depicted in the Greek master dramatist’s Aristophanes’s play The Clouds.

Perak Darul Absurd replace Perak Darul Ridzwan. The land of the warring faction between Ghee Hin and Hai Sans, and the land of Larut-Matang in which the more history progresses (sejarah berlarutan) the less mature politics has become (semakin tidak matang). Semakin sejarah berlarutan, semakin kurang kematangan.

My obsession with the word absurd came from a period in my life where I was engrossed with the Literature of the Absurd; of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Nikolai Gogol, Samuel Beckett, and Eugene Ionesco. It was a strange period not just for me but especially for the genre. It was a time of cynicism; of Catch-22, No Exit, The Plague, Oriflamme, and Waiting for Godot. Even Indonesian writers most notably Putu Wijaya and to some extent Sutardji Calzoum Bachri were influenced by the genre.

Perak is in an absurd state. Perak Negeri Absurdus. See, I cannot even find a nice Malay translation for it; it has no precedence in Malay history. Take any state in Malaysia and think of its contradiction.

Or is it Perak Darul Ridiculous?

Perak's Hall of Shame! ( and related brawls globally)

A tribute to my teacher

ON THINKING LIKE MAXINE
by Azly Rahman
written circa Summer 2000

“… since a Maxine Greene has existed, more should be created” were the words which were crafted in my mind as I was walking home after listening to the existential phenomenologist’s narrative of the Self, curriculum, schooling, and what the possibilities in education should be. Maxine Greene’s idea of the mind as “verb” rather than a “noun” captured my imagination in analyzing what mass deception can potentially do to creative young minds schooled in a capitalist, totalitarian, or a mixture-of-both state.

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste” would be an appropriate juxtapository statement to Professor Greene’s maxim. It frames the question of the role of schooling as a mass babysitting state-sponsored enterprise which pegs thinking and human beings, mould them, and invent their realities into believing that the modern state is a moralistic and democratic institution to be abidingly served in the name of “national interest”. I think much of what is said by Professor Greene has given me the added fuel to go more miles ahead in exploring the terrain of the more radical humanistic philosophies such as radical humanism and creative anarchism; the latter a much misunderstood perspective of the Self in the relation to the State.

Several points made by Professor Greene have helped me link existentialism with the meaning of teaching. First, the idea that the “self doesn’t exist but created in the course of action” and second, “individuals become persons because of other persons and culture”. These two can be interpreted by the notion of the evolving creative self in dialogue with others and with experience to create a community of learners closer to humanity than to forms of ideological domination and mental constructs which limit the meaning of freedom. I find these transcendentalizingly refreshing notions which are Deweyian, Vygotskian, and Freirian in essence. The notion of dialogue in Greene’s narrative is similar to Dewey’s idea of “democracy to be lived for”, to Vygotsky’s “learning as a social cognitive enterprise based upon collaboration culturally meaningful”, and Freire’s “conscientization and the subjectivizing of the objective so that the power of the word can be realized”.

Greene talked about life as the activity of “naming things and after doing so change them”. “To name the world and to change it”, as she puts it. I would extend Greene’s notion of existential phenomenology with the idea that the Self is in “trialogue”, i.e. in constant dialogue with the Surreal, and the Supreme Spirit; that the “I” in us powers Technology in the presence of the Inner Conscience so that what the I creates (technological tools, ideology, institutions, and ideas for social change) is imbued with a deep sense of moral conviction and reflectivity which constitute ethical behavior. The Creative Self is hence existing within Creativity in the Moral domain. What is the use of one being schooled if in the long run is agenda is to be engineered as beings who would create and propagate structures of oppression such as militarism, structural violence, state-sponsored terrorism, engines of mass destruction, and instruments of the perpetuation of Space Age imperialism?

I believe Greene’s idea of teaching for understanding, much popularized by Howard Gardner these days, points to such a notion of developing the trialogical self through a curriculum which brings meaning and creates authenticity in learning and promotes inclusionary practice. Her idea of freedom as also mentioned in her Dialectic of Freedom must begin with the developing of the holistic self through the arts, for, human beings themselves are a metaphor of the humanism governing life and living which is in constant threat of technologism we too, ironically, has created. We live perhaps in an Orwellian society wherein realities are invented and packaged out of an industrialized culture and schooling has become a powerful instrument of social reproduction rationalized in the language of utilitarianism, technological determinism and liberalism.

With apologies to Albert Camus, “one must imagine our human race happy, as we roll the rock up the hill of mass deception” after having been condemned by the God of Economic Productivity or the Goddess of Surplus and Plenty! In the words of Roger Waters of the British rock group Pink Floyd, “… all and all we’re just another brick in the wall”. But however captivating Greene’s idea of human freedom within the context of existentialism is, she left me with some perplexing questions: Is freedom merely a means to and end? If it is a process, from what should one be free from? Is death the end of freedom or the beginning of one? We live in a world of wants and needs and of constructs – race, ethnicity, ideology, biological, political etc. – and what is the condition like to be free whilst at the same time still “be in this world”? We are biologically constructed and by virtue of such a construction, can our mind be a “verb” without being conscious of the desires of the flesh we are encapsulated in? i.e. the “noun” we live in? and by claiming one to be an existential phenomenologist, can one also claim to be ideologically free from domination?

I reflect upon a “goodbye phrase” written be my advisor at Ohio, George Wood who cautioned me of becoming an ideologue (Marxist humanist presumably) when he wrote: (to the effect) “be closer to the people and to the self rather that to ideals for Marxism, existentialism, and anarchism are themselves constructs; they condition one to become an ideologue” For ten years hence, I have reflected upon these words and attempt to capture the essence of what education and teaching means within world wherein the only permanent thing is change! To recap this reflective notes, I would say that Maxine Greene has provided us with an example of an intellectual commitment for dialogue within the world we call education, within the context of contending paradigms of the what schooling should mean and how curriculum should become.

This dialogue must be continued so that we may then, as teachers become closer to becoming a “verb” than continue to exist as “nouns” unaware of what “adjectives” are used to describe us or how we use them to describe ourselves.





ABOUT MAXINE GREENE: http://www.maxinegreene.org/about_maxine_greene.html

Malaysia's politics of color

We have red trucks heading north, men in black heading to jail, yellow wave heading in all direction, and blue ocean strategy heading nowhere ...

Semiotics of color, political-economy of class, psychology of control we all are seeing..

God Bless our country -- right or wrong. Wage peace -- not war.

Hitler and history

Voices of Peace

Paulo Freire speaks

MY REVIEW OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY:

Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium Peter McLaren, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997. pp. 306
Review by Azly Rahman, published in Educational Researcher June-July 1999

Reading Peter McLaren’s passionate and insightful analysis of the current state of educational praxis one cannot escape from images of postmodernity as a backdrop of anomalies in the world we are in as the new millenium approaches. The domino-like collapses of the financial markets of the world beginning in Thailand in July 1997, nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, the revolution which brought Indonesian President Suharto down after 32 years of rule, hunger and starvation in North Korea, and the continuing intensified debates on race matters in America--- all these represent the chaos in the global economic order McLaren’s critical pedagogy can be relevant to those wishing to contextualize their understanding of political economy of education. McLaren’s Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millineum, albeit with its analytical flaws, is a passionate piece of work highly-charged with honesty in the manner McLaren positions his ideological standpoint throughout.

For a relatively slender volume of work on educational theorizing, Revolutionary Multiculturalism contains the essential ingredients of educational and social analysis which dissect capitalism from its transnational operating table right through the ideology of consumerism which pervades the hip hop culture and the issue of whiteness in American race relations. Including its introductory and epilogue sections, the book is divided into 10 chapters with several of them written in cooperation with critical theorist such as Henry Giroux , Zeus Leornado, and Kris Gutierrez.

In chapter 7, an interview with McLaren provides the reader with a valuable understanding of the ideological standpoint the author bases his work on; one in which McLaren narrates his development as a critical pedagogue and differentiates his commitment for struggle with those from the camp of postmodernism. If his passionate language ala’ Allen Ginsburg’s in the classic Sixties Beat-generation poems of “Howl” and “The Velocity of Money” and his unwavering rhetoric in the Freirian tradition throughout are not enough in demonstrating his honest alignment with Latin American Marxist discourse, McLaren laced his book with, among others a picture of him delivering a speech in honor of Che Guevara against a huge poster of the Cuban revolutionary leader as backdrop (p. 107).

McLaren’s Revolutionary Multiculturalism is a continuing legacy of the work of educators trained and committed to the cause of liberatory struggle against the dehumanizing tendencies of transcultural capitalism with its ideological state apparatuses such as the schooling system, the media and the politics of multiculturalism. McLaren’s is essentially a continuation of the dialogue of Paulo Freire, thrusted in its analytical context into the world of global capitalism and its interlocking web of domination the world over and within the United States. The critical educator’s ideological standpoint is made evident at the beginning part of the book in which McLaren situates his work within the larger framework of socialism and aligning it with theorists within that paradigm:

Critical pedagogy, in this sense, remains committed to the practical realization of self-determination and creativity on a collective social scale. When I think of critical pedagogy as a practice of liberation, I think not only of Paulo Freire, Augustus Boal, Rosa Luxemburg, Judi Borri, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X, for example, but also of Emilio Zapata… Like Zapata, critical educators need to wage nothing less than war in the interest of the sacredness of human life, collective dignity for the wretched of the earth, and the right to live in peace and harmony (p. 13).

It is within those standpoint and the honesty of linking his work with leaders and theorists of the Freirian tradition that McLaren’s work is worthy of attention. What is impressive about McLaren’s Revolutionary Multiculturalism is its fresh call for educators to redefine the term “multiculturalism.” It questions the fundamental pedagogical belief by educators, particularly those from North America, in looking at America as a “melting pot” unto which schooling and the curriculum must address and celebrate of its cultural differences without being aware of the political economic nature of schooling in America. McLaren believes that such multiculturalist thinking is not only reductionistic and avoids the issue of class struggle but also dangerous to the critical pedagogist’s struggle to dismantle political, economic, and social structures which are anathema to the true meaning of human liberation.

Only through the engaging in dialogue which demystify power and language of the power elite, deconstructing our understanding of race relations into one which includes class, race and gender, and reconstructing our hope and struggles for a transformation of the transnational and local capitalist order, can we realize the true meaning of praxis in the revolutionary sense of the word. McLaren attacks neo-liberalism of American democracy as “a hidden service of capital accumulation, often [reconfirming] the racist stereotypes already prescribed by Euro-American nationalist myths of supremacy … (p.8). Thus, chapter after chapter, McLaren provides the context of objectivity, which needed to be subjectivized and a newer understanding to emerge. Some highlights from McLaren’s work need to be mentioned.

In Chapter 1 entitled “Writing from the Margins: Geographies of Identity, Pedagogy, and Power,” written with critical theorist Henry Giroux, the authors draw attention to the kind of language needed for educator-activists to analyze power and domination in order that existing realities be understood and transformed. They claimed that “most educational theorists have been so caught up in describing the reality of existing schools that they have failed to take up the question of what it is that schools should be.” (p.19). Not only educators, they write, need to be equipped with the language of critical pedagogy which contains moral, ethical, and visioning frame of reference in their struggle for liberation but students need also be provided with such linguistic tools to “assume a critical distance from their more familiar subject distance.” (p.37). Only through the grasping of such analytical skills can both educators and students in the Freirian tradition, understand what oppression means and how they can work collectively across cultures towards a just and equitable educational, political, economic, and cultural transformation.

In Chapter 2, “Liberatory Politics and Higher Education: A Freirian Perspective,” which read like an essay in honor of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, McLaren provides a postmodern analysis of capitalism as it relates to the need for educators in higher education to pay attention to the Freirian perspective of critical pedagogy. McLaren notes that in the Freirian sense, “the university is invited to become truly plural and dialogical, a place where students are not only taught not only to read texts but to understand contexts.” (p.69). It is through the Freirian approach, McLaren asserts that the meaning of individuals as makers of history can be realized to counter the dehumanizing effect of capitalism in its attempt to relegate individuals as objects of history, particularly in “U.S. culture in which history has been effectively expelled from the formation of meaning and hope.” (p.73)

In Chapter 3, “The Ethnographer as Postmodern Flaneur: Critical Reflexivity and Posthybridity as Narrative Engagement,” McLaren described the difficulty of the urban ethnographer’s situating of his/her existence; as one attempting to critically analyze society in a postmodern setting he/she is also inescapably in. The postmodern flaneur as one whom has to mediate the tension between being a detached observer and one drowned in the sea of images, signs, and symbols within what is to be observed, must become a critical theorist in order to effectively do reflective sociology. Drawing heavily upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of reflective sociology and illustrating the chapter with excerpts from his flaneuriel notes, McLaren called upon the need for the urban ethnographer to recognize the importance of emancipatory possibilities in one’s nature of work. “Ethnography as postmodern flanerie need to be conjugated with the contingency of historical struggle in terms of establishing a posthybrid dialogism.” (p.94).

Throughout other chapters in Revolutionary Multiculturalism, the reader can expect McLaren and his co-authors’ analysis of language, power, and pedagogy in issues such as media control over the postmodern mind, hip-hop music and global politics. In each, the ideology to be scrutinized is described in language of postmodernity, as though McLaren is illustrating that the illusionary world of postmodernism must be demystified via explanations of its inner linguistic logic, using its own language---all these done in order for the claim for the superiority of Freirian critical pedagogy be made loud and clear. Thus, when talking about gangsta pedagogy in “Gangsta Pedagogy and Ghettocentricity: The Hip Hop Nation as Counter Public Sphere,” for example, McLaren writes like an insider well-versed in the development of this brand of popular culture, only in the end, to demystify its creativeness as another attempt by capitalism to capitalize on the expression of oppression among the African-American and Latino community.

Illustrative of McLaren’s consistency in providing a final analysis, he writes of the emerging and proliferating genre of music:

Gangsta rap’s relation to the corporate marketplace, its potential for expropriation, and its reproduction of ideologies historically necessary to commodity exchange – such as patriarchal ones – is an important issue that needs to be addressed. In other words, gangsta rap needs to be viewed not only as an ideological formation, cultural signifier, or performative spectacle, but also as a product of historical and social relations. (p.179)

Within such a framework of critical analysis, the author skillfully uses language of sophistication characteristic of many writing in the postmodern genre only to eventually return to a call far action insistently based upon the neo-Marxist framework. The power and the vigor of his oftentimes-long sentences are interspersed with first person narratives of his experiences, which he relates to the subject matter analyzed. It is within this stream of consciousness point of view and the chanting effect of his expose that Peter McLaren’s perspective is made constantly fresh in the reader’s mind and his arguments difficult to counter. One can almost see Freire alive in these powerful chapters and given doses of vitality by this popular Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based professor of Education and Information Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. But it is an irony that one needs to read McLaren back to back, dialogue with him in-between the pages, and let the images of dissent and call to a revolution be skillfully made alive through the written word, in order to locate counter-arguments to his claims.

To the critical reader, McLaren’s Revolutionary Multiculturalism’s strength can also be its weakness. Particularly significant is his overstated ideological standpoint, which sees the sorry state of society and education purely within his neo-Marxist bird’s-eye view. He attempts to mesmerize readers into believing that there are no significant effort made by grassroot movements, social activist groups, educators for social consciousness or even the struggling day to day teachers who are making significant changes, albeit incremental perhaps, to make the lives of citizens and school children alike happier, more creative, and critical. McLaren’s analysis is purely sociological hovering within the realm of theory attempting to grab the attention of policy makers in the social, educational and political spheres. He locates himself from the beginning, strategically from a new-Marxist paradigm, analyzes society and policies within this narrow perspectives and offer solutions which are ideologically apt to the framework he uses. McLaren, towards the end of the book, advocates “for the development of the ethical self as a way of living within and challenging the historical capitalism” (p. 284)

From what spiritual-metaphysical or ethical platform which can unite multiculturalists is not exactly clear in McLaren’s advocacy. McLaren repeatedly made the call as such in calling upon us to “unthink whiteness.” His call is even louder when his advocacy is laced with language of postmodernism epitomized perhaps in a passage as such:

What I am advocating, dear sisters and brothers in struggle, is a postcolonial multiculturalism that moves beyond the ludic, metrocentric focus on identities as hybrid and hypernated assemblages of subjectivity that exist alongside or outside of the larger social totality (p. 287)

What these terms mean, seemingly circular in their usage, and how one can comprehend a situation wherein society can levitate beyond such a condition are not entirely clear. Perhaps this can be possible in a scenario wherein society can be freeze-framed and the ethical segment of it extracted out of the ludic-metrocentric identitied habitat. Clear to McLaren’s understanding as a sociologist presumably, this is not entirely probable given the fact that society is a complex, intriguing and ever-changing amalgam of peoples with values shifting, pragmatism and relativism reigning, and feeling and emotions dictating. As such, the only permanent thing is change and the most applicable theory thusfar to analyze society is perhaps via Complexity or Chaos theory!

Thus, McLaren’s writing, as well as those who he collaborated with is somewhat weakened by the very framework he hoped to strengthen his sweeping analysis with; a framework weaved out of the fragile, ideologically-laden, and textualized semantic glitters of postmodern language. Though the author’s critical analysis is brilliant throughout, his is short of providing a scenario wherein a society of revolutionary multiculturalist has triumphed in destroying the old republic and what emerged out of the despotic is, one ethical and moral and constantly aware of another wave of transnational capitalistic world order. What would a society of the next millenium look like? The providing of such a scenario is what makes Revolutionary Multiculturalism yet another well-trumpeted rhetoric of post-Marxism attempting to subvert post-modernism.

Another fundamental anti-climax of McLaren’s grandiose staging up of such a frame of social analysis is perhaps, the absence of political dimension in his writing. Though his calls for action are indeed political as it relates to the subverting of grand narrative such as neo-liberal whiteness in social psyche and the use of multiculturalists-of-the-world-unite-and-revolt slogan, he failed to link his advocacy to political or non-governmental organizations progressive enough to carry the banner of revolution to its final victory in Washington. One may ask of the value of such revolutionary trumpeting without a concerted effort to harness the voices of the revolutionary multiculturalists into political grandiose carries forth by political parties. Virtually non-existent is this aspect of McLaren’s campaign.

To rally against an elusive oppressor such as transnational capitalism and to create a new order in America is virtually problematic, unlike perhaps in the case of revolutionary multiculturalist rallying against the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somozo in the late 1970s. In the former, the enemy is invisible yet pervasive, whereas in the latter, it is visible and exclusive! Perhaps McLaren conveniently applied the scenario of Latin American politics to that in North America, paradigmed his revolutionary analysis as such, and ended up making an overglossing of solutions to the problems he found. Herein Complexity theory can be of value in framing the issue of multiculturalism in the manner McLaren sees it. Aside from the contradictions in the analytical framework presented in McLaren’s work, Revolutionary Multiculturalism must still be read in its entirety and the powerful strands of the author’s argument to be put to use. Although the idea of multiculturalism’s revolutionary streaks is not revolutionary at all as they are inherent in each culture and need not necessarily be yanked out of the masses, the freshness of the Freirian tradition McLaren attempt to maintain must be applauded. What is novel and of commendable sociological analytical value is the postmodernist aspect of McLaren’s neo-Marxism.

Like many philosophical, metaphysical, and ethical systems in every culture which has responded to changes brought about by maturing of the capitalist ethos, the neo-Marxism according to Peter McLaren and his band of critical pedagogues has also responded brilliantly to such maturity. It is a jazz ensemble in a orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein, an Indonesian gamelan troupe playing in a Viennese concert hall, and a hip hop group performing at the steps of the Lincoln Performing Arts Center in New York. And in these, the voices of the subaltern growing louder, with spectators and onlookers beginning to appreciate the beauty of the message conveyed. In corporate transnational America, the tune played by Freire and his band continue to become more refined, sophisticated and gradually permeated into the system of thoughts of multiculturalists; and Peter McLaren’s Revolutionary Multiculturalism, in the next millenium, may become a magnum opus for critical pedagogists all the more ready to sing tunes of dissent.

As the author writes in the epilogue:

… there is a spirit in the making that refuses to succumb to the lure of nationalism, a spirit that is rising up like a serpent of fire. It is a spirit that refuses to die. The world has seen this spirit before. And capitalism’s pinstripe gangsters would do well to tremble before its humble grander… (p. 301)

And it is that spirit Peter McLaren believes the next millenium will dwell in!

Posted by DR. AZLY RAHMAN at 8:10 PM

Labels: education

My first 10 messages on twitter

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1. azly rahmanazlyrahman

Twitter will bring us to nowhere --that's the final destination (half a minute ago) from web

2. azly rahmanazlyrahman

They say if you keep digging a hole at the site of Twin Towers New York, you reach Penanti, Penang (3 minutes ago from web)

3. azly rahmanazlyrahman

Again, journeying to the epicenter of the Earth ...(6 minutes ago from web)

4. azly rahmanazlyrahman

Came home from Princeton University, New Jersey, to watch a Percussions ensemble play. Thinking of Mozart's childhood. (about 1 hour ago from web)

5. azly rahmanazlyrahman

I am watching the game between Barcelona and Chelsea and thinking of swine flu in America. (4:19 PM Apr 28th from web)

6. azly rahmanazlyrahman

where is Malaysia heading? (12:42 PM Apr 21st from web)

7. azly rahmanazlyrahman

The modern State is a necessary evil (12:30 PM Apr 20th from web)

8. azly rahmanazlyrahman

Just updated my column: http://mt.m2day.org/2008/co...(3:25 PM Apr 18th from web)

9. azly rahmanazlyrahman

Just updated my blog: http://tinyurl.com/56fzdd (3:23 PM Apr 18th from web)

10. azly rahmanazlyrahman

azly rahman is on twitter (2:51 PM Apr 18th from web)

Great speech!

Great speech for a great city!

NOTES: Research strategies

I. On particularizing and generalizing strategies of research.

Strengths and weaknesses of each strategy

Implications of each strategy for the design of studies

Particularizing strategy in research is concerned with an event or phenomena in a particular time and space and for its own sake. This time-space context of analyzing, hypothesizing, and drawing specific meaning of the phenomena or event is an attempt to primarily develop historical knowledge in hope that consumers would find meaning and significance in the historicity of the findings.

The idea of developing historical knowledge itself, as a forte of the particularizing approach then assumes that the event and phenomena investigated cannot be duplicated or cumulative research findings are structured as a goal of research.

Some of the examples of most-often quoted research which utilizes this strategy can be gathered by the so-called qualitative tradition in research; from phenomenological, historical, case-study, ethnography, or critical theory.

Among these studies such as Claude Moustakis's A Study of Loneliness, Paul Willis's Learning to Labor, William Labov's study of speech of New York kids in genre of "student's right to their own language movement', Lynds' study of Muncie, Indiana called Middletown in Transition, Freud's psychoanalytic work, Marx's notion of history through his inversion of Hegel's logic, Darwin's Origin of Species, Bernstein's and Woodword's journalistic case study called "All the President's Men", Benjamin Bloom's The Development of Talent Research Project, Howard Gardner's original study on seven different individuals and their 'intelligences, Robert Bellah et. al's study of individualism and commitment in American life, as well as ethnographic studies of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz---- all these are prominent ones which provide rich, thick, and in-depth narrative description of a phenomena or event. They are retrospective in knowledge construction.

Generalizing strategy in research, on the other hand is concerned with developing generalizable statements, which are independent of historicity. i.e. independent of the context of time and space. This strategy attempts to discern patterns, in chains of events and conjure laws, which explain the causality of these events or so that the statements of truths the strategy generates can be used to ultimately develop scientific knowledge.

Because the nature of science is to falsify and to prove and disprove and so that immutable laws can be suggested, and because science as a framework (and 'a culture in itself too') lives and breathes on the refining of strategies and instrumentation to arrive to such generalizable knowledge claim, quantity in studies are the key orientation of the generalizing strategy.

The hope for the strategy is to provide explanatory power to particular knowledge claims through a series of inquiries, investigations, experimentation, and empirical investigations through as rigorous mode of scientific process itself (a process of framing the issue, testing hypothesis, data collection, conclusion, and generalization) so that theories generated can hope to stand the test of particularity and time.

Thus studies such as those characterized by frameworks, which does not deviate from the logical-positivistic mode of inquiry and those, which assign corresponding value of variable, and relationships to the elements of the inquiry themes are attempts to arrive at scientific knowledge.

Primary illustrations in these studies include most obviously those in the scientific and mathematical fields or in any which can be (albeit inappropriately, as in the term 'qualitative') are those such as Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of giftedness (though there is also a narrative component to it), most United Nations' studies which deals with 'indicators ' such as the ascertaining of "physical quality of life index', World Bank and OECD studies on indicators of development via computing of per capita income, Gross National Product, and the like, Project Follow Through (a 30-year study to 'debunk' child-centered learning and Constructivist principles of teaching) and of course the one called Third International Maths and Science Study (which shook the American business and corporate elite into backlashing American education standards and hence brought about Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the same manner the Japanese-economic-superiority-scare brought the National Commission for Educational Excellence's report A Nation At Risk into existence and the same manner The Sputnik brought the revamping of the Maths and Science curriculum of the 60s.)

In essence thus, the generalizing strategy is about finding patterns and law of cause and effect and consequences in the order of things, so that the knowledge generated can be claimed to be one, which is scientific.

The strength of the particularizing strategy is (according to its proponents and those trained to see the 'superiority' of it over other number-crunching method,) is in its ability to generate rich, thick and in-depth for that particular event or phenomena. This is indeed an appealing claim as one might be attuned to the idea that narrative, participant observations, interview transcripts, data from phenomenological research, data from the methodology of grounded theory, narratives of the researcher as action researcher, or notes from the 'researcher as postmodern flaneur' (as a critical ethnographer would put it), or even a James Joycean type of field notes--- all these are interesting reading which attempt to capture the moment-in-time of that particular event or phenomena.

And indeed many a historical account of phenomena (except ones attempting to describe the paranormal or extra-terrestrial!) are well regarded particularly in the field of history and political science which points to the idea that we can learn a lot from history and historical analyses so that history becomes therapy and certain histories would not repeat themselves.

And in the case of strategies such as case study methods, ethnography, phenomenology which utilize a triangulation method entailing structured, semi-structured, or unstructured postmodern stream-of-consciousness type of in-depth interviews---in these, the strategy entails the highly valued contact with human beings as respondents so that the ultimate aim of research is to "not bury the human being under data".

The weakness of this strategy is that because it is seduced by the richness, depthness, thickness, narrativeness, human-interestness, and interestingness of that particular event and phenomena, it gets seduced by the "goodness" of the data gathered. Statements and knowledge claims it makes becomes end sin themselves.

Thus we hear those claiming that the beauty of case studies and phenomenology for examples, is in their uniqueness of not being able to be generalized! It becomes then a strategy, which cannot provide explanatory power to a range of events and phenomena to come; those which require patterns to be discerned and predictions to be made and generalizables to be drawn from.

In short, the particularizing strategy cannot be an optimal strategy to serve such an end for theoretical construction because of its limited ability to generate theoretical knowledge by the very nature of historicism it is pillared upon.

The strength of the generalizing strategy lies in that its ability to explain and predict events and phenomena even not only when they recur at another moment in space and time but also, as in the case of studies involving 'forecasting' or 'futuring' a sense of what is to come can be conjured based on the knowledge generated of prior events which have also been analyzed using the hypo-thetical model of developing knowledge claims.

And because, true to its nature of predicting and controlling and explaining cause and effects and to framework these within a paradigm of systems thinking, the use of generalizing strategy can be of great value in "keeping the tradition of scientific inquiry alive'. One then cannot involve values and/or as Habermas would say "human-constituted interest" in the design of one's study so that ideology, power, and other non-measurable dimensions of intervening forces in research --- all these can be kept at bay. Science, and strictly scientific mode of thinking I applied as means and end.

The weakness of this strategy however is its tendency to gloss-over events and phenomena, which would not fit into the scheme of things. Because the nature and tendency of this strategy is to universalize, the idea is to gather as much data as possible, as much little empirical 'truths' as possible so that there will been enough power for the theory to explain and predict events and phenomena.

Thus, the more the kind of research to help prove or disprove, to build or destroy theories the better, as one ought to live with the idea of tentativity of knowledge as closely as possible in a world of scientific rationality. At this juncture then, the slip into the extreme forms of predicting and controlling can set in and manifested in the notions of prophesizing, forecasting, and other forms of abuse of the scientific method when the strategy is over-employed.

Science is about generating conditional knowledge in which events and phenomena can be explained not as universal but as conditional truths. The notion of gathering more data and doing more research to validate a particular claim in order to lend legitimacy to a particular theoretical construct can have its consequences. It is that more facts and data do not necessarily contribute to the strength of the claim, but another way to spread thin knowledge needed to give the theory more explanatory power.

This can be exemplified by the idea that two researchers using the same design can have two different and contradictory findings if factors such as scope conditions are not taken into consideration.

What are the implications of the strategies in the design of studies?

As have been alluded in the discussions above, the strategies chosen will determine the kind of knowledge generated. If particularizing strategy is used by using methods that lean towards what is called qualitative approaches in research, then the knowledge produced will be those limited to historical knowledge.

On the other hand, if the generalizing strategy is used, in the tradition of logical-empirical method of hypothesis testing and theory building, then scientific knowledge will be produced. The accumulation of facts and data and the fine-tuning of instruments used for the purpose are means to achieve the end of research in this tradition.

But of course there is also a whole genre of writing which attempt to bridge this so-called controversies between the historical and scientific orientation to research which these exam notes will not attempt to go into. Suffice it is however, to say that there are scholars who do not see the distinction between the scientificness of the two orientation. Just like John Dewey's crusade against Either/Or philosophy in education, that there is neither Essentialism nor Progressivism but a synthesis of both in a child-centered philosophy, many are beginning to assert that the issue in this qualitative/quantitative problematique lies essentially at the theoretical construction level.