Lost in Certification: Indigeneity, Erasure, and Teacher Education

• In Event: How to Live Teacher Education: Reparative Perspectives From the Pacific

Abstract

The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) recently enacted a teacher certification program aimed at ensuring that all teachers in the country had at the minimum an associate of arts degree, and that fully licensed teachers had at least a bachelors degree. This initiative emerged both from the attempt to import the mandates of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act—which has no legal jurisdiction in the RMI—and the realization that a previous Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant from the US Department of Education (itself a product of NCLB) had failed to meet its goal of graduating every teacher from at least a 2-year teacher education program, as almost half of the RMI’s teachers at the end of the grant had yet to earn an AA. Simultaneously, the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI), the primary provider of teacher education in the country, found itself trying to develop a Marshallese Studies program with instructors who did not meet the minimum graduate-degree credentials for college teaching as mandated by its accrediting body, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). This chapter aims to uncover what is displaced, erased, and foreclosed on in the current push to certify teachers in the RMI at a variety of levels, specifically in terms of local knowledges and who is constructed as a legitimate “teacher.”

Employing a Foucaultian frame of governmentality (Foucault, 1991), I consider the ways in which the apparatuses of the state—in this case, both the RMI government, reacting to US Department of Education initiatives such as NCLB, as well as WASC, and the need for the college to remain accredited so that it can retain access to Pell grants for almost its entire student body—are operationalized through certification and licensing schemes that only take into account what is a decidedly non-indigenous definition of “the teacher.” Additionally, I attempt to extend the effects of governmentality, so that what is traced is not only the way in which those effects function, but also the way they erase difference, what Deleuze (1994) suggests “is understood only in terms of the comparative play of two similitudes” (p. 127), and in so doing produce one “true” subjectivity which can be called the universal, neutral, and non-contingent “teacher.” By listening to the life histories of both teacher education students at CMI as well as Marshallese Studies instructors at the college, this paper offers insights into how individuals construct themselves and how they respond to others’ constructions of them as “teachers”; the ways in which difference is sublimated through processes of colonial schooling requirements in the country, both from the US and from within the RMI; and what alternatives, if any, can be found in indigenous and customary considerations of what constitutes legitimate knowledge and teaching in a local, effectively uncertifiable, context.

Author

• David W. Kupferman, University of Hawaii West Oahu