Journal of Education & Social Policy

Dancing with Learning: Ghosts and Shadows
Dr. Ed Harrison

Abstract
The paper begins with the concept of community curriculum. The term, we realized, is an artefact of the western way of thinking about education and community learning. It is important in that it places learning in the center of a community but the critical question is, “how does a community learn?” We consider the subtleties of how First Peoples are recovering from the disruptions in their community life by exploring the importance of traditional values to their identity. The main concept is culture language, its role and how it helps to recover the past in order to reverse the effects of the residential school learnings. We explore the relationship between language and culture and conclude that the “and” is a disruptive conjunctive that allows western governments to effectively deny the relationship between language and culture. Secondly, we explore the concept of cultural pneumonics as a way of understanding what occurs as cultural knowledge is passed from one generation to another.

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