Tensions in Deconstructing and (Re)Constructing Institutional Knowledge

• In Event: Roundtable Session 66
  In Roundtable Session: Tensions Between What We Know and What We Do: Research Praxis in Higher Education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to address tensions between the presence and imposition of institutional knowledge, and the relatively large absence and subjugation of both community and cultural knowledge in research studies. Working from multiple theoretical frameworks (emphasizing Ta-Va theory of reality) and utilizing ethnographic methodologies (interviews and focus groups), this paper draws from a larger project documenting the complex roadblocks preventing Tongan students from extending schooled experiences beyond high school and into college. A large part of this complexity concerns socio-educational erasure of Tongan epistemologies in much research at the expense of community and cultural knowledges. Additionally, earlier research studies tended to generalize findings to all Pacific Islanders and to “blame the victim” for unequal academic outcomes (Hingano, 1983) when there are other fundamental players and structures to consider.

Although many researchers are aware of the partiality of truth in research (Sanger, 2005) – like those distinct voices and multiple realities that are missing, incomplete, or at-risk of being appropriated if compatible lens aren’t used to critique the context – many more continue to marginalize community knowledges and perpetuate deficit-based perspectives. In many research studies associated with Pacific Islanders in general, and Tongan students in particular, for example, diverse claims have not moved beyond metanarratives of Tongan school success and failure. As a contributing result, many researchers conducting research in their own communities (see Anae et. al, 2001, 2002; Thaman, 2003; Helu, 1999; Fua, 2006; Taufe’ulungaki, 2003; Vaioleti, 2006) are required to dismantle and deconstruct “legitimized” knowledges before (re)constructing community and cultural knowledges that are complex, contradictory, and sometimes messy.

In my study, Tongan students’ educational experiences in formal institutions of learning are fraught with tension. They enter into schools with worldviews and values that differ from dominant perspectives and are often not celebrated in Western culture: collectivism (not individualism), cooperation (as opposed to competition), and interdependence (not necessarily independence). Student’s perspectives are based on the view that relationship building matters and yet, this perspective is almost always emerging (rather than centered) in part because this knowledge from the community is seldom heard or privileged in academia by “outside” researchers.

The role and power researchers have in integrating the voices of research participants into the final analysis and representation of proposed studies must be problematized. As Patti Lather (1991) suggests, “it is much easier to share power in conducting fieldwork and collecting data than it is to share analytic and representational power” (p. 58). Bloom (1998) affirms this crisis and stresses that researchers must “grapple with concerns about ethics, reflexivity, emotions, positionality, polyvocality, collaboration, identification with participants, intersubjectivity, and our own authority as interpreters” (p. 2). Rather than simply being aware of the authority researchers hold over interpretations of the data and final representations of participants’ utterances, this paper examines whether and how researchers might participate in ongoing (re)constructions of community knowledge that can then enter more productively into educational institutions.

Author

• Belinda Otukolo Saltiban, University of Utah