ABSTRACT
As a public school educator of Latino and African American children for the past fourteen years, I have struggled with the task of facilitating a curriculum for my students which is based upon the indigenous knowledge they bring to the classroom in an attempt to move beyond "formal thinking." The modernist conception of"formal" intelligence is an exclusionary system based on the premise that some people are intelligent and others are not (Case, 1985; Klahr and Wallace, 1976). Post-
fonnal knowledge, that which moves beyond the exclusionary aspect of fonnality, celebrates the knowledge that multiple races, classes, religions, and sexualities bring to schools, which is not represented in the curriculum.
