Culturally Responsive Methodology: On the Branches of the Family Tree

• In Event: Roundtable Session 99
  In Roundtable Session: Which River Metaphor Is Yours: Culturally Responsive and Socially Responsible Methodologies

Abstract

A river begins at its source. The source may be a lake, a pond, or other body of water. From this source the river flows, meandering into its tributaries, confluence, watershed, flood plain, and drainage basin until reaching the end of its course at the mouth. The mouth of the river is where it joins with a large body of water such as an ocean or a gulf.

My position is in the source water, the place of beginnings. I am embarking upon a journey not knowing where the river of my research will take me. I imagine places in this source water to be shallow enough that I can see the rocky bottom below. A place where I can see each step as I take it and where I may be intentional about each step that I take. As I am moved along, I know I will reach places where the water becomes deeper and eventually I will get swept up in the flow. But here in this place of beginnings, I can be still and quiet and embark.

I have never considered my family culture one to be studied. I have taken most of its characteristics for granted, as I have taken most aspects of my white privilege for granted. In excavating my own performance of white privilege I have found it necessary to examine its context in the larger framework of my immediate and extended family.

In order to do this, I needed to develop a methodology specific to my family culture. Reflecting, researching, and remembering have all contributed to my application of cultural intuition in developing this methodology. It is this methodology that will carry me through the river and deeper on into my research.

I want to showcase the members of my extended family regarding ancestry, heritage, culture, whiteness, and diversity. I am a critical white educator and staunch advocate for multicultural education. I bring a history of being friended and forever changed by relationships with people from other cultures and communities or "transracial relationships" (Riable, p. ). I am interested in outing whiteness and deconstructing its performance in order to enhance the dynamic between white teachers and diverse student populations. As I studied the underlying theories regarding white teachers, I realized that whiteness studies helped to excavate white privilege. I now understand that the study of whiteness does and does not re-inscribe white supremacy. Who are my elders? Where or what is my land? Who are the people that make up my "community?" My answer to these questions will never be like Smith's (1999) account. But I know there was a time- before the West was Westernized, when my Irish, English, and Scottish ancestors were indigenous to a place, and had spiritual and ritualized connections to the earth. And I wondered, even now, do the people of those faraway places (my ancestral homelands) keep alive and pass on any traditional knowledges that might be considered indigenous?

Author

• Veronica E. Bloomfield, Chapman University