The Four Concepts

These are the four concepts we'll be working on in my Aboriginal knowledge class. I didn't write these, the lecturer did.

Engagement:
This is about expressing and sharing the emotional dimension of learning. Are you part of the Dialogic process the class is generating, are you involved in the context, or are you opting out? Engagement is about asking "what does this mean to me? How do I feel?" It is also about responding from this place, not always seeking to say the 'right' thing, the 'intelligent' thing, but instead saying what you feel, reflecting on how the topic, the discussion, or the process is affecting you. It is about AUTHENTICALLY sharing your self and respecting others as they share themselves. Engagement is about developing and maintaining human contact rather than keeping issues, events and others at 'arm's length'.

Tracking/Mobility:
This concerns the ability to see movement in knowledge across contexts and time. It is about tracking ideas, where did this idea come from? Why was that idea given this significance? Where are the relationships between ideas? It is also about the recognition that history is not a single linear or static series of 'facts' but a critical literature itself: created, imagined, manipulated and contested. It is about the ability to see and appreciate where knowledge comes from, whose knowledge is being spoken about, what is understood as 'knowledge', and where that knowledge is taking us. Mobility also seeks to instigate movement where understandings are seen to be static. Mobility challenges imposed, unconsidered, and concealed understandings.

Fit/Deep Listening:
Having engaged and moved with the topics, the next question concerns positioning: where do I fit in relation to all this? It is about the recognition of your personal importance in the process, and about whether you accept a role in the continuum: whether you see yourself as no longer separate from the context. It is also about how ideas, assumptions, and preconceptions fit with various contexts; and how the same things re-emerge in other contexts, so that history can be recognised as a record of the shifting patterns and social reconstructions of understandings. Fit is about a deeper understanding of how all these things, and the self, are located; how sometimes things just seem to 'fit' and why some things are excluded from a social understanding.

Respect:
Throughout the whole process there needs to be a demonstration of cross-cultural respect. This means allowing there to be other ways of seeing, knowing and expressing. Respect is about showing care and awareness in the way you identify, explore and assess meaning across cultural contexts, including your own. To be aware of your own cultural contexts and develop the ability to suspend the judgements based on them to allow other understandings to be brought to mind. It is a kind of openness that allows conceptions to come to mind through suspending cultural filters. It is also about relationships and responsibility and the responsibility to maintain good relations. It means to be human in the proper way for humans, a moral and ethical understanding of being in the world.