>> The course is called Aboriginal World Views in Education. So it's important to get clear about what I mean by world view and by education. So first of all, world view. This is a concept that originates from German philosophy of [foreign], and it, it describes basically the, the orientation or the set of beliefs that an individual or a group has on the world or reality. And in fact it encompasses a number of different a number of different things. First of all, what is the nature of reality? You know, what is real? It encompasses the nature of knowledge. So how can we know what is real? How can we know what is true? How can we know what is false? And it so, prescribes also how, ways that we might go about testing those things. So how do we find out what is true and what is not true? And also in ethics or a an axiology, of acting in that world. So how should we act in the world? And this is all part of the world view of a people or, or an individual. So they have a certain set of underlying assumptions that can be implicit or explicit. They might be conscious of, of acting on the, on these assumptions, or they might be unconscious of it, but they are in play and they, taken together, they form a set of givens or assumptions about the way nature is, the way reality is, and how we, we can know something about that nature how, about that reality and it also prescribes a set of values or ethics for how to relate to that reality. So in this course we're talking about cultural world views. So what are some of the givens and assumptions that characterize traditional indigenous ways of relating to the world or seeing the world? So the world view then is how do indigenous peoples understand what is real, what is the nature of reality, how can we know that reality, and how are we to act in that reality. An interesting article by Leroy Littlebear titled Jagged World Views Colliding problematizes the sense of a, of a, of a pure notion of an indigenous world view. Because we have been impacted so much by Western world views, he talks about these world views being in collision in each Aboriginal and individual, so that we kind of see the world in a bifurcated way. We, we view it in, in some ways if we have that strong cultural foundation that we see things from an indigenous point of view, but at the same time we are so inundated with a Western world view, a, you know, a scientific world view that that's, that's interrupted a lot of our understandings of the nature of reality, how to know that reality, and how to act in that reality. And sometimes working with both in our bodies at the same time causes some stress or, or confusion and leads to a lot of the identity struggles that indigenous people feel in going about their activities in the world. So it's, it's useful to look at that article by Leroy Littlebear when we talk about world views. And throughout the course there, there is some essentializing about this world view and what is an indigenous world view, and I get into that a little bit later in the course. And we try to complicate it as we go along, but just to, to understand how is world view being understood, those are the kinds of questions that are incorporated or, or meant when I say world view. Now that second term education is one that I like to look at as the ways in which a society reproduces itself. So it's education is usually a formal process in which the things that matter a lot to a society are transferred from one generation to the next. So in our schools we certainly see what's important to the dominant culture that has created that curriculum. The, the teachers who are part of that system. They may differ in some beliefs about it but ultimately there is a foundation that is reproduced in those institutions. George Day has a very clear and articulate way of discussing education, and I include a link to a video of George Day talking about what is education, and I encourage you to take a look.
