Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro, Amy Stambach by Patricia Wallace

Study's Contribution to Research

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"There has been no extended look at the ways in which what goes on inside schools is related to what goes on in the greater outside. Education is glaringly absent from anthropological works on culture; and ‘culture’, as a theoretical framework for linking education institutions to marriage, kinship, and inheritance, is strikingly absent from works on education" (Stambach, Ch 1, 2000)

To further the classical anthropological tradition here of understanding 'schooling' in historical and cultural context. (Stambach, Ch 1, 2000)

The above quotes from the author, Amy Stambach, express her desire to link culture with education. Stambach takes a negative view of modernization theory, calling it “school-to-the-rescue model” theory. Stambach explains modernization theory views “maintain that schooling is a culturally homogenizing process…. That with the right combination of raw materials and human capital, poverty can be eradicated and countries may thrive” (Stambach, 2000). This ethnographic study was an exploration on how decades of Western influenced schooling could not overcome the native culture, its social structures, or belief systems. Additionally, the study highlights that the schools established within these settings emulate the setting’s culture, not Western culture, making it that much harder to homogenize.

Map - Village of Machame

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Major Research Question

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How do collective ideas about what is modern and traditional emerge in connection with people’s understandings of schooling?

Sub-Questions
1. What do people hope to get out of education? What is secondary schooling all about?
2. Is school the Great Leveler of Social Difference?
3. How are age and gender expressed through teachers' lessons?
4. Were students young adults temporarily removed from their development outside of school? Or, were they older children who needed more time to mature mentally and physically and needed to be conditioned by school rules?

Methodology

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Amy Stambach used a series of methods in conducting her ethnographic research in Tanzania. Over the course of two visits to Tanzania, Stambach employed observations, surveys, conversations, interviews, in addition, to teaching and living in the village of Machame with the Chagga community. James Spradley wrote, “Ethnographic interviewing involves two distinct but complementary processes: developing rapport and eliciting information” (Pogrebin, 2003). Stambach was able to establish rapport with the local Chagga community due to the church’s patronage and introduction, along with her teaching position, a position that demands respect in the Chagga community. We see the rapport develop as Stambach, who started by observing classes and then teaching, is allowed more freedom to observe private rituals (initiation) and people confide in her their dreams (female independence). The fear with ethnographic studies is that bias will infiltrate their work. Just as in embedded journalists in a war zone or a developmental professional working in the field with an NGO, there will be trust and loyalty established which may color their findings, work, and reporting. The rapport that Spradley wrote about is established through trust and likeability. Bias in ethnographic research can be avoided by including data, replicating findings, explicating mechanisms that can have wide-raning application and bringing new ways of seeing and understanding into plain view (Wedeen, 2010). Stambach negates any suggestion of bias by including recorded interviews and structured surveys which add the empirical evidence to balance out observational conclusions. Her work is conscientiously and, at times, painfully aware that there could be bias in her interpretations and addresses the issues as they unfold.

Methods
- Two visits to Tanzania.

- three days a week spent observing and teaching English at Mkufi

- lived and worked in Machame

- two days a week conducting informal interviews and household surveys in the surrounding community and visiting other secondary schools

- Surveys pertaining to people’s educational backgrounds, occupations, household resources

- Conversations and interviews about everyday activities – conducted in Kiswahili or English and provided the greatest insight into local views about social life and schooling.

- Observations in over 100 classes at 27 different secondary schools

Summary and Analysis

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Conclusion

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“The kind of gendered and generational transformations associated with schools emerge through a dialectical interrelation of school practices with local culture. Thus, the kind of ‘gendered knowing’ schools produce in not culturally universal; school-educated women who are thought by elders to be becoming more and more like Chagga men are neither women anticipated in the official policies nor those that hold in most versions of Western feminist ideals. Instead, they are a product of the interactions and mutual effects of the structures and principles of formal schooling and of social life on Mt. Kiliminjaro.”

In 2014, Merriam Webster awarded its “Word of the Year” award to: culture. It is an overused and multiply defined word that can cause confusion. For the purposes of Lessons of Kilimajro, the definition of culture found in Merriam Webster under 5.a. and 5.b. applies:

a. the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.

b. the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time

The conclusion that Ms. Stambach arrives at is that the cultural influences of the Chagga community infiltrated the westernized school system so thoroughly that there was no way that the official policies of the Tanzanian government could have predicted the outcome. This line of thought refers back to Stambach’s understanding of modernization theory. Stambach says modernization theory “maintains that schooling is a culturally homogenizing process…. That with the right combination of raw materials and human capital, poverty can be eradicated and countries may thrive” (Stambach, 2000). What she observed, lived, and substantiated with empirical evidence is that there was no amount of standardization of curriculum could produce an homogenized society. This line of thinking leaves out generational customs, social forms, beliefs, behaviors and patterns of the local people. Standardization of tests does not create a standardization of humans as if they were products on a factory assembly line. This thinking does not take into account environmental influences or the peculiarities that are human beings. Western curriculum and ideals can be successful in a western environment, in a western capitalistic market, in a western frame of mind. Lessons from Kilimanjaro shows that transplanted ideas cannot be boxed up and shipped out. There should not be and, as proved by this book, cannot be a McDonaldization of education (Ritzer, 2014).

Mount Kiliminjaro, Tanzania, Africa

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References

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Pogrebin, M. (2003). Qualitative approaches to criminal justice: Perspectives from the field. Chapter 4, Asking Descriptive Questions, James Spradley Thousand Oaks, CA, CA: Sage Publications.

Ritzer, G. (2014, August 9). McDonaldization – George Ritzer. Retrieved February 17, 2016, from https://georgeritzer.wordpress.com/category/mcdonaldization/

Stambach, A. (2000). Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Schooling, community, and gender in East Africa. London, UK: Routledge.

Wedeen, L. (2010). Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science. Annual Review of Political Science, 13, 255-272. Retrieved February 17, 16, from http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.052706.123951

Welcome!

pmwallace123 — 2016-02-19 23:51:24 UTC

Introduction from Patricia Wallace - Drexel University - EDGI 532 - International Organization in International Education