Re-membering my ways of knowing and learning while ‘learning otherwise’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the writer's internal conflict as an African woman who left the great continent in the hope of gaining knowledge at a large North-American university. The writer is faced with the dilemma of acquiring knowledge of Western origins as part of a doctoral programme in nursing, which rarely and scantly acknowledges that the writer, too, possesses unique knowledge. This dilemma has made the writer wonder about the ontological and epistemological stances regarding nursing practice in Africa, which forms the writer's professional identity, in the context of an African heritage. This is a deliberation on the development of nursing knowledge which has guided the writer's re-(membering) of African ways of knowing and learning, despite it being deemed ‘unscientific’. The presentation answers four questions:1. Can the writer reflect out loud (Cruz 2008) about African knowledge in the context of Western academia?2. Why do Africans keep audibly silent about the knowledge they have?3. Is the writer's African knowledge considered knowledge by the West?4. Is Western knowledge relevant to the writer, as an African, or is it relevant for her nursing practice? As an African scholar and researcher, the writer strongly believes we must not turn ourselves into the model researchers and scholars described and prescribed by the West. This will take us backward to the era where we were made pariahs in the land of our birth. We can succeed if we confront our fears and doubts that the polite methods which African scholars and researchers use have little effect. We can succeed if we do not adopt a policy of yielding to oppression in our research and scholarship. Therefore, no congregation other than this one will free our children, their children and their children's children from oppressed scholarship and educational practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".