Education … with a capital ‘E’

Dr. Catherine Odora Hoppers, PhD, comes from a family of leaders. She grew up surrounded by “policy talk,” and when she talks about her understanding of the lack of equality in social structures around the world, she does it from a place of personal knowledge, experience, and example.

Hoppers, the Canada Research Chair in Pluralistic Societies: Transdisciplinarity, Cognitive Justice and Education in the Werklund School of Education, was born in Northern Uganda into an extended family of doctors, mathematicians, engineers, pilots, and politicians — many of whom led Uganda’s independence movement which liberated the country from Britain in 1962.

Her father was the chief/administrator of the Koc Clan; her eldest brother was prominent in the national government throughout the 1960s; her mother was a powerful leader in the women’s movement who constantly challenged the status quo. Her mother took it upon herself to lead a group of about 400 women to develop a growers’ co-operative, which for a decade and half was the only one of its kind in all of Uganda. And through the work of the co-operative, the women — and their communities — prospered. “This was my introduction as a child to feminist action for development,” she says.

The first disconnect

Hoppers’ mother also started a school, located under a fruit tree along a footpath the women of the village used on their way to collect water from the local well.

From those early days in the outdoor classroom in her community to a nearby primary school and through her continued education, Hoppers began to feel a disconnect in what she had learned through tradition and what was being taught. “I recall rigorous choir practices at that school, how the teachers spent weeks getting us to sing ‘I Sowed Barley in the Meadow,’ ‘London's Burning’ and ‘Land of the Silver Birch, Home of the Beavers.’ None of the teachers had ever seen barley, let alone meadows, birches or even London, either the one that was burning or the parts that survived the fire.”

“I also remember clearly one question in an exam that has never left my mind,” she continues. “The question asked about who discovered Murchison Falls (a waterfall situated not too far away from Hoppers’ father’s ancestral home).

“The first four options were European names and the last was ‘none of these.’ I chose the last one, but the teacher insisted that it was one of the Europeans who had discovered this waterfall. This waterfall, on the Nile, is part of the boundary between two major ethnic groups in Uganda and was a respected site for ancestral worship by the people who lived close to it. My great grandfather died while on one side of the river early in the 19th century, and he was brought across to the other side and buried as he had wished. A memorial tree had been planted on the grave way before any of those explorers saw that waterfall.

“But in the school, we were to say it was some European who had ‘discovered’ it.”

Dictatorship upends democracy

When Idi Amin took power of Uganda in 1972, hundreds of thousands of people were killed including seven of Hoppers’ brothers and cousins. In 1976, at 18 years, Hoppers fled Uganda as her last brother was killed by a public firing squad. She fled to Zambia and later to Sweden, where she began to think about education, and to ask questions about its purpose.

“Is the task of education social mobility, the transmission of the normative heritage of a people, or is it the training of people to work in factories far away from homes that nourish them?” Hoppers began to have reservations about education, about what was taught and how it was taught. 

Thinking back to her own experience, she reflects, “I wondered why the teachers felt so comfortable with educating us on what Rip van Winkle had done in the Catskills while ignoring the fantastic narratives of the kind my father told us regularly of famous events that had occurred on different mountains long ago.

“I felt that I needed to find the tools that would enable me to critically question an educational system that harboured and condoned such practices.”

Researcher as both subject and object

As she struggled with the concept of a different, “foreign” narrative of education, she felt lost. And when it came to research, the ideas were often more challenging.

“I am part of very history I seek to analyze and the future I'd like to create.”

Friends and colleagues suggested she consider critical sciences that focused on critical values. “With empowerment as its metaphor, this paradigm sees education as preparing individuals capable of producing and transforming a given form of social life. It stimulates human agents to take an active stand towards social development and urges self-reflection as a primal path by which one can recognize interconnectedness between a subject and an object.” And with that concept in mind, she found her niche.

Connecting Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, being

Hoppers’ work has taken her from Uganda to Sweden, from South Africa to India, and from Africa to Canada, as she works to emancipate subjugated knowledges. And she says Indigenous knowledge is being recognized officially in many parts of the world. “It is, indeed, but what we need now is to work out the conditions of their acceptance into the mainstream.

“We are now aware of new methods, of multiple track systems, of levels and approaches for dealing with conflicts, including cultural and even psychological research on forgiveness, as well as the tension that underlies the dual goals of revenge and redress,” she says. “We have a far better capacity to diagnose and thus develop more effective prognoses, including structural and cognitive dimensions of violence and obstacles to peace building. In calling for a more concerted action towards paradigm building, transparency and forthrightness, there needs to be a far greater attention paid, especially here in the ‘West’, and the ‘North’to unlearn, and to re-learn.”

As she assumes her role at UCalgary, Hoppers says the university’s foundational commitments and approach to the Indigenous community are both exciting and promising. “It calls for creativity, inclusivity, collaboration and resolve, and it calls for listening to one another in a respectful manner.”

The Chair, she continues, “will help to further an education that does not shy away from the fact that modern education does propagate western views. Therefore, there should be an institutional space for relearning, unlearning multiple wisdoms, skills, and values from other cultures.

“This enlarges Eurocentric education with a small “e” to education with a capital “e,” capable of embracing wisdoms from other cultures.”