Knowledge Construction

Knowledge construction is the process by which beliefs are incorporated into a curriculum, canon, or society. Study of the knowledge construction process is the second element of James A. Banks's five dimensions of multicultural education, a frequently cited metapedagogical taxonomy. The other four dimensions are content integration, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and empowerment of school culture.

Multicultural education in general, and the knowledge construction process in particular, challenges the common, but generally unspoken, belief that the content of a curriculum or scholarly tradition is intrinsically bias-neutral, objective, meritocratic, and fair. Instead, study of knowledge construction encourages students to take a revisionist view toward history—examining the role that an author's or tradition's social and cultural context may have played in the development of ideas, and viewing that author or tradition through narrative and hermeneutic lenses that are not necessarily complementary to the author's or tradition's implicit biases.

A conventional U.S. history of World War II, for example, would look at the war primarily from the perspective of American politicians, soldiers (largely white, male, and implicitly heterosexual), [Page 1298]journalists, and war historians. Implementing study of knowledge construction into the curriculum would encourage students to examine World War II from the perspectives of those who are often treated as bystanders, such as civilians in nations that were affected by fighting but were not directly involved in the war, and those who were treated as beneficiaries of Western intervention, but not necessarily as heroes in their own right, such as leaders of the Jewish underground in Germany.

Study of the knowledge construction process also calls attention to the ways in which marginalized voices are often misused to support a dominant narrative. When the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewed formerly enslaved African Americans during the late 1930s, for example, oral historians were surprised to learn that many of the elderly interviewees expressed nostalgia for their enslaved lives.

This is frequently interpreted as a sign that slavery was not necessarily unpleasant, a narrative that favors the conventional idea of a dignified but misguided white Confederacy. However, through a different narrative lens, a closer examination of the interview transcripts reveals that former slaves usually discussed slavery as pleasant only relative to their contemporary conditions—as a means of expressing how unpleasant their contemporary conditions were. That reflects more on the prejudice and grinding poverty of the Great Depression than it does on slavery.

A study of the knowledge construction process is generally revisionist, as the authors operating within the Western canon have historically been taught to downplay any personal biases they may have, and present themselves as objective representatives of their respective disciplines. Recontextualizing bodies of knowledge as the products of flawed and biased human beings, rather than as pure data discovered by objective analysis, recenters the discussion in a way that many conventional scholars may find challenging, or even solipsistic.

This is one of the primary reasons why the very idea of multicultural education remains controversial and has inspired a backlash among educators, theorists, and political leaders. In 2010, legislators in Arizona and Texas began targeting ethnic studies curricula that use the study of knowledge construction to critique traditional white historical narratives, and they were successful in removing much of this material from public ethnic studies curricula.

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