Hi Scott. Making hamfisted threats is really a great faculty development strategy. I’m sure that works wonders. This task is highly unpredictable, even without pathologically compromised administrators overseeing it. Ostensibly, it is a veritable mine field and problems arise less because of personality, skill, or personal roles than because of the way the task is structured and because of the environment in which it unfolds. So, I think you’re right. A neutral space must emerge where people can collaborate unimpeded by ego, status, or tortured expectations of the other.

First Nations is a whole nuther thing. I would say that being rejected by the “majority culture” – one has the option of opting out and waiting for history to take its course. This ties in again with Derrida’s hospitality theme. First Nations do not need the white curriculum, especially since that society has no use of them anyway and will not accept them until they forget who they are. This requirement to self-annihilate before being accepted is, frankly, unacceptable.

Online education makes no sense if the tech infrastructure is not there, or is not robust enough to support it. Illich speaks of tools for conviviality, which means we use what is at hand and what gets the job done as well as possible. Tech is just a means of connecting people. The wires and silicon are meaningless. It is the connections that are important and those connections are human. Traditional education lives in the collective memory of the people and should be recalled, nurtured and cherished. People are the stories they share and the millennia of oral tradition can vanish in one generation.

Have you heard of Moses Asch? This man armed himself with an audio recording machine and went out to record American folk music before it vanished beneath a buldozer of commercial recording. This is how much of our culture was rescued. Why would this not be a curriculum? Why would it not have value?

I will need to be convinced that good teaching exists. The best teaching makes itself quickly unnecesary. Learning is the point and when learning and teaching become one in the same, this is when we can start to think that what we are doing is really worth doing.