Ethnographic data:
Teacher: left brain/linguistic, on her 50’s, M.Sc., adult education course teacher, wife, mother, grandmother, friend of a mature girlfriend group
Two female adults: one on her 40’s, almost half/half left brain/musical, PhD, immigrant, sister, daughter; and another on 30’s, a mom/left brain/logical-mathematical, widow, in between-jobs, receiving well faire, friend of a group of young adults (related to the school and to her daugther&son).
Four female young adults: 2 moms (one right brain/kinaesthetic, divorcing, and another almost half/half left brain, mom/working in the family cleaning business); 1 left brain, adopted mother of her sister, who had a health issues and was separating from her boyfriend and so losing her support family; and 1 right brain, sister, becoming aunt, friend of many young adult friends, receiving well-faire.
Four male young adults workers: one male convenience store worker, planning to move to Vancouver with his girlfriend, friend of adult friends; one right brain male fast food kitchen worker, son and grandson, apart from friends with whom he grew up, one right brain kinaesthetic male cooker auxiliary, planning to move to British Columbia or apply for Social Work College; one right brain with a steady job as stock auxiliary.
Who we were :
1) Who we were as learners (Learning skills data)
1.a) Hemispheric dominance. From the 11 people we had responses
3 left brains (the teacher and the student who had medical condition that make her be late on schooling, one mom going to college with first intelligence on body and medium to less than medium on linguist and logical )
1 almost half/half left brained (the adult immigrant with first intelligence on musical and linguistic intelligence on medium level)
7 right brains (only one with linguistic intelligence over the medium level (level 9)).
1.b) Sensory learning style: From the 9 people we had responses
Kinaesthetic (3)
Visual (3)
Auditory (2)
Number of people who have auditory as last sensory learning style: From the 7 people we had responses in the KAV classification
1.c) Intelligence: From the 9 people we had responses
Number of people whose first intelligence is (sometimes more than one intelligence is their first intelligence):
Body: 6 (right brains)
Musical: 2
Logical-Mathematical: 2 (the 30’s mom student and the student whose medical condition made her late on schooling)
Linguistical
Spatial
Intra
Inter: 3
Number of people whose second intelligence is:
Spatial: 5
Musical: 4
Intra:4
Body: 2
Logical-Mathematical: 2
Linguistical: 1
Inter: 2
Number of people whose last intelligence is:
Body: 3 (the left brains)
Logical-Mathematical: 3 (one half/half left brain and two right brains)
Linguistical: 2 (the full left brain student and one right brain))
Musical: 1
Spatial 1
Intra
Inter
1.d) Locus of control: From the 9 people we had responses, only 1 was external locus of control (the left brain young female adult)
1.e) Work preferences:
From the 6 responses, 2 prefers to work independently
1.f) Procrastination level:
From the nine responses, only one was considered only one was procrastinator by the test, despite some didn’t keep on their homework
2) Who we were as teachers
We felt empowered to be teachers of each other by the teacher’s critical education practices. Critical educators perceive their primary function as emancipatory and their primary purpose as commitment to creating the conditions for students to learn skills, knowledge and modes of inquiry that allow them to examine critically the role that society has played in their self-formation. (Darder, xvii)
Empowered we taught each other all kind of subject from learning strategies, computer gigs, slang words to the relevance of some of our songs, our visited blogs and websites as well the relevance of our unique body expressions and life stories.
The research initiators, the teacher and a graduated immigrant student, were expecting to have the students as peers to investigate their own experience facing the mainstream power and its exclusion forces. With four years apart, the two initiators had shared the same learning environment about how to teach, the OISE/UT. They have been accepting similar challenges, critiquing authoritarian uncovered forces. Both worked on their academic development on the emancipation possibilities, one from the ethnocentric settings, calling attention to the bicultural students oppression at schools and the other one calling attention to how the scientific main stream way of thinking have been oppressive in industrial and society settings, both initiators calling attention to how the main streamed way of thinking has been oppressive.
3) Who we were when blaming about what happens to our life
All the students except two were evaluated as more than 75% internal locus of control, they believe strongly that they are responsible for what happens to them. The two people who consider that they sometimes do not have control of what happen to them were a left brain (63% left) student who had two life events (family and healthy issues) were classified as highly external locus of control, and the immigrant student which were classified as half left (10 scores), half right (9 scores) was tested being 54% internal locus of control.
4) Who we were as outsiders
In the beginning everybody was considered by the research initiators “outsiders”; we were out of that wealthy world promised by the mainstream schooling pace; our class experience revealed our values and behaviours as not a match to the schooling system ones. The feeling of strangeness when facing the text book lessons enriched the understanding of the taken for grant values and behaviours in the school culture. As a research outcome, we redefined the concept of outsiders to distinguish the graduated peers who had strong embedment in the academic culture.
