Reading Erasures and Making the Familiar Strange: Defamiliarizing Methods for Research in Formerly Colonized and Historically Oppressed Communities

Abstract

In this article the author uses an example from a Hawaiian education program in postcolonial Hawai‘i to argue that educational investigations into the colonialist and oppressive tendencies of schooling, in Hawai‘i and elsewhere, should employ defamiliarizing analytic tools borrowed from literary and critical theory to peel back familiar, dominant appearances and expose previously silenced and potentially disturbing accounts of the oppressive conditions in our schools. With the use of these defamiliarizing tools we see that within the context of historically oppressed and traditionally marginalized communities, seemingly benign or progressive instructional efforts can have unanticipated, counterproductive effects. Moreover, we find that even the most well-intentioned teachers and administrators can unwittingly be complicit in the operation and perpetuation of oppressive hegemonic dynamics.