Whose knowledge counts? Culture, curriculum, and the boundaries of educational inclusion

Abstract

I want to start with something that happened in a museum. In 1992, artist Fred Wilson was invited to work inside the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. Rather than create new objects, he went into the museum’s storage and pulled out what had been kept there for decades: shackles alongside ornate silver pieces, tools, and garments connected to the lives of enslaved and working-class Black Marylanders, objects the institution owned but had never considered worth displaying. Wilson called the installation “Mining the Museum.” When it opened, students who had grown up in Baltimore and never seen themselves in a museum stood in front of those cases for a long time. That story is cited in one of the articles in this issue, and it has stayed with me. The objects existed. They had always existed. They simply had not been considered worth showing. Every educational system makes the same kind of choice, continuously and mostly without announcement: what knowledge is worth transmitting, whose history is worth telling, whose ways of making meaning are granted legitimacy. The costs of these choices are borne unevenly. Students look for themselves in the curriculum and find mostly absence. The articles assembled here approach that problem from very different angles and very different parts of the world. Taken together, I think they make a serious case that the question of whose knowledge counts is not peripheral to educational research. It may be close to the center of it.

References

1. Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. F. (1949). Knowing and the known. Beacon Press.
2. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder.
3. Selwyn, N. (2011). Education and technology: Key issues and debates. Continuum.
4. Wilson, F. (1992). Mining the museum [Installation]. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD, United States.

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