Nespor and Sarangapani

While I was reading Nespor’s “Tangled Up in School” and the Sarangapani article, I kept thinking about my elementary school in Japan. Especially, the part where Nespor talked about how teachers control students’ body spaces and where Sarangapani talked about how teachers ignored students’ opinions/corrections reminded me how strict teachers in Japan were. These also made me think about pedagogical differences among various cultures. When I was in elementary and middle school, teachers’ authority was absolute and we students could not say anything against such imposed power. I clearly remember that my middle school math teacher hit my head with his fist when I corrected his mistake. It was common to see male teachers carried wooden swords all the time (this type of sword is used to practice Japanese Jujustu…I know it sounds scary…and it looks scary, too!) and were ready to smack students who did something against their rules.

This sounds terrible, but Japanese students and parents at that time understood and accepted the teachers’ absolute authority as part of our education. Then, I started thinking about our subjectivity and objectivity issues as ethnographers. Some behaviors, traditions, or practices may look strange to us, but they are culturally accepted by certain ethnic groups. In other words, we should not judge things by our subjective views. The positionality of ethnographers or researchers in general has been my question and my dilemma at the same time because we cannot get rid of our lenses (identities, cultural affiliations, etc) when we look at phenomena that we are interested in. Or, should we bring Harding’s “strong objectivity” to our research? In my opinion, I really like Harding’s idea, but I do not know how to use the theory in actual data collection and analysis. I guess I need to read more about ethnography…