The public intellectual meets pop culture

Hi all, This may seem a bit tangential, but it resonates with me because much of what we're trying to do as we develop courses (or, at least, I'm trying to do as I develop my content) is teach our students how to recognize and navigate an oppressive society while we're trying to recognize and navigate the same thing ourselves. Kao Kalia Yang, Hmong author from St. Paul, wrote the following opinion piece for Monday's Star Tribune. Read the comments section, if you dare, to see a prime example of the challenge we all can face in articulating a critical perspective in a public domain: http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/119214304.html

Teaching and the Heart (Or the Love Part of All This)

"Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people...love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself...Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others."
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Recently, I've witnessed (or have been involved in) a number of conversations where the notion of "caring" about students came up. In particular, when I was discussing the fact that I was particularly worried about one student who had shown up to class only a few times, but who, whenever he came, always offered really wonderful comments, and for whom I had no idea what was going on, a colleague (who, I should say, I respect as a teacher) said to me: "Your job isn't to take care of your students: it's to teach them." This has led me to wonder, though: How do we define the verb "to teach"? And does "caring" have any role in this? (What does it mean, then, "to care"? It's more than just a feeling, of course, but...isn't there some role that "feeling" also plays in it?) I agree that it is not our job to "take care" of students--here at the university, they are adults, they are beings who take care of themselves, and/or have other people in their lives who care about them. Also, as we have discussed in our class: a teacher is not a savior, a saint, a liberator (although our work itself hopefully becomes liberatory).

And yet: the idea for me persists that part of my job as a teacher is to care about my students. (In fact, one 4th grade teacher I worked with as an instructional assistant in Vermont gave me a little memento which says on it "Teaching Is a Work of Heart," in response to the year that we had spent working together, and thus, she also seemed to think there was something to this). Anyway, to care about how the students are doing in life, the extent to which they feel able to participate in class; to care about what they say and think, and to relate to them in a mode of caring that also suggests compassion toward the world..this seems to me to have something to do with teaching. But teaching critically and lovingly...I think that these also involve a RADICAL acknowledgment and practice of the FREEDOM of others!!!

So, again: What does teaching mean? And where does caring...or really, I mean LOVE--that revolutionary, committed love that Freire discusses--fit in all of this? Even if I "succeed" at "teaching" lovingly and toward the freedom of others, have I taught my students anything? (And, I know this question of love probably walks a very fine and problematic line, but...I think we need to think about it, and try to define love in other terms, which I think someone like Freire helps us to do).

I ask all these questions in light of a class today that didn't seem to go very well. I mean, we did a number of different things: the first part of class involved one student giving a song presentation, then I handed back some old essays which students had done, and we discussed those. In light of the "read aloud" model that we heard about in seminar, I had one person read his essay to the class (because of time I didn't ask more students to do it (a moment of banking?)), but I did have everyone go around and share a little bit about his/her paper, so that all the students would get a sense of each other's work. We talked about the process of writing this essay and what had been challenging about it. (Perhaps I should've also asked if there was anything fun about it, but I didn't. I worry that "fun" seems to exist to a lesser extent in my class than in a lot of other folks' classes...Last semester in my class we had a lot of fun (or at least it felt that way), but this semester, I just don't think students are having fun...although, on a positive note, they are chatting with each other a lot.) Anyway, I actually thought it'd be really good for students to hear about each other's work, which I think it was, and folks liked it, but...the energy of the class still seemed really low.

Sometimes I feel that in my class we don't "DO" a whole lot of things other than dialogue. I do move around the room, I often have students meet in small groups (though we didn't do this today), we sometimes look at film clips or images, and we try to shift gears often through the course, but the particular mode remains one of dialogue...In the Freirian sense, this dialogue should always be a praxis, and thus a kind of doing, but...how does dialogue become "loving"? And what does it FEEL like for a class to be a space of love as opposed to fear, hurt, shame, distrust, and/or even indifference? Should I care if my students care? And, would it help if I showed more how I feel about the material...the extent to which I care about it and why? I don't feel like I did this very well in the second half of the class today, where we discussed the reading I had assigned.

Indeed, content-wise today, I kind of bombed; there wasn't a whole lot of "precision" in what we did...we kind of felt our way through things. We were talking about Tales from the 1001 Nights, and because I had spent all night trying to finish grading my students' prior essays, and trying to offer a lot of comments to them, I didn't come in with as well prepared a set of points as I would've liked. Or maybe, I didn't have any points, just some questions. The students had quite a number of interesting things to say, but...I feel like we didn't really get at some of the more critical points and questions that this reading addressed...and the stakes of such a mis-step is huge. I fear I may be hovering at the edge of Orientalism, even as I try to caution my students to resist it! (Maybe I can simply talk through this with them next time). Indeed, we'll be spending a lot of time next class talking about this concept specifically (which we haven't really discussed in particular terms yet), because I just wanted to give students the time and opportunity to wrap their own minds around the text and to have their own responses, before imposing "mine" on them. However, I do really think I need to be clearer about the STAKES of what we're doing, and why we're even reading such texts in the first place.

Clarity (especially in spoken words) is a big challenge for me, and...I wonder about how "being clear" might relate to this larger question of caring and/or "teaching well"/ i.e. loving in a liberatory way. I guess I'm just realizing how very much more practice I need in dialogue! How can I propose this as something I want my students to do, when I'm not very good at it myself? Or, is it something that we can teach each other? But aren't I failing my students if I don't offer them some bit of information and material and/or a practice that they can then work with? What if the part I play in the dialogue is itself a poor one? I sometimes worry that I'm remaining fearful as a teacher by operating in a pace comparable to the musical "andante"...or perhaps even more as an "adagio," rather than in a more seemingly active, vigorous pace. Is this pace suffocating to students rather than calm? Or, is my pace okay? How can I change my own pace?

I'm also feeling a bit confused, and/or my heart feels some dis-ease because of what one student came up to talk with me about today. It's that he is "looking for an A" in this class, and was really surprised that he got a B+ on his essay. Apparently, he needs to get an A to stay in his program, which I didn't realize before. We had a pretty good conversation about this, but he still seemed upset at the end of it. He wanted to know: What can I do to get an A? Will this essay "destroy" my A? The student was also concerned about the way I had graded the essay, noting how often when there is no grading rubric (which I didn't have for this one), teachers tend to grade by "comparing" the essays of students, and place them on a kind of scale with each other. While in a general sense I do read all the papers first to get a sense of what people have done, I always try to grade a paper on its own terms, in line with the requirements I've set out. I tried to talk with this student about how one "A" is very different from another A, but...this student still has concerns. I gave him the option of revising, and per his request I said that for the next essay, I'll prepare a rubric, but...yes, all this gave my mind--as well as my heart--pause. Yes, I am hurting mostly because I feel like I failed my students, because I didn't recognize the assumptions within my own grading practices, and the social, political, and racial stakes that they carry. How can I now respond in a vigorous and critical way to this mistake?

Due to everything above, I'm wondering about the place of the heart in all of this. The heart is what seems to be calling out for another possible truth, another way of living, teaching, being. And yet, sometimes I feel that neither my heart or mind are "educated" enough to be doing this; sometimes, I feel that they know nothing! But then again, it is all a process...it is something that we have to be honest to ourselves about, something we have to recognize that we are always learning...But where and how does one find the COURAGE to inhabit that space of always learning??? What is the place of something like courage in the Freirian act of love? How does one let go of fear? Or, do we walk right into it?

There is so much more to be said and thought on this matter, but...I wanted to put this concept out there as a question. How do you define "to teach"? "To care"? "To love"? Do these things have any relation to each other, and if so, what does that relation look like?

Some Prompts I Use In Class

I thought I'd share some of my materials I use in my classes to place students into groups. I use very similar kinds of prompts almost every class, so while these won't show everything we do in class, they at least point to the kinds of things I'm asking students to take up with me.

Grading Day:

Based on your group’s article, please cover the following information in your poster:

· Name of Author and Article

· 3 main points they want us to think about regarding grading

· 2 critiques of their proposed grading strategy/ideology

Lastly, reserve the bottom 1/4^th or so of your poster to make this chart:

Thumbs Up	Thumbs down

Once all groups have completed their posters, we will move around the room and mark whether we give the article, in light of the main concepts and critiques, a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Tensions in Ladson-Billings’ Yes But How Do We Do It?

Teacher as Savior

Beliefs About Students

Socio-political consciousness

“I can’t tell you how to do this”

Thinking about your group’s tension, please do the following:

First, come up with an understanding of what the two sides of the debate are. What are the logical reasons behind either notion? Which of these things feels the best? The Hardest? The Easiest? Why?

Then, come up with a strategy to help others understand the tension, and how it is possible for it to be resolved. If we face these challenges in classrooms, what will we do with them?

Finally, discuss other reactions to Ladson-Billings that your group has. We will share out our work in these groups to kick off a larger conversation about “doing” versus “being.”

Anyon Discussion Questions

First: What should be the relationship between social class and schooling?

Then, based on school type (Working-Class, Middle-Class, Affluent Professional, and Executive Elite)…

1) How would you characterize the school setting? What kinds of things are in the school? In the classroom? What do students bring with them (in a material sense) to school?

2) What sorts of teaching practices sound like they fit with Anyon’s depiction of this school?

3) Can we think of local examples of this kind of school?

a. What are these schools like?

b. How do we talk/hear about them?

- These questions are always only a part of the conversations students have in groups, as I always encourage them to bring their own questions with them to class and to discuss those with their groups and with the large group as well - I also believe that teachers from different schools/districts/grade levels/disciplines rarely get the chance to talk seriously with one another, and so while the groups often finish their tasks at different times, I like to think of these times as solidarity building activities.

Framing our discussion around these kinds of questions also frames the direction the class will go in the larger discussion that we have at the end of every class. By posing questions (or problems) to students, and then centering everything on what students do with these questions, I'm able to shape the direction of the class without controlling it, thus enabling students to self-appropriate what is meaningful for them without running into me banking the answer to any of the above questions.

Short Assignments Can Be a Problem

Above are a pair of assignments that I assigned for our 'Reading Culture' class. I've not a whole lot to say about them, other than the fact that, as this was a one-day a week night class, the one page responses could best be described by a bell curve, a few great ones, a few weak ones, and a number of 'could-be-better' ones. The class being on Monday did not help the environment of 'coming prepared,' that I hoped this assignment would foster (about 1/3 of the way through the semester we switched to using texts read for the upcoming week). That being said, the final papers on the whole turned out quite well. I put most of the failure of the weekly prompt on my shoulders, as I only really pecked at it from week to week, and probably should have spent more time in class discussing it--My view at the time was that what we were doing in class was representative of how one could go about writing. I do have to say that I think the most useful part of asking them to pick their own cultural object did help to get some idea about what parts of culture they were most concerned about--Politics/Comedy (The Onion) and negative representations of women's bodies were the two biggest--though the latter could also be clumped into the framework of advertising. Were I to do this again, I think I would have them write to each other throughout the semester, rather than to an abstract audience.

On Taking Shortcuts, Banking to Save Time

Just a quick note, but I wanted to just get some thoughts down about my course from last night. We watched Waiting for Superman in class to go along with our reading of the second half of The White Architects of Black Education by William Watkins. As the movie took the first two thirds of class, we quickly transitioned into a group project where each student was with a group who elected to read the same chapter of the optional readings (Everyone read the first three chapters and chapter six, and then they could choose from chapters 4, 7, and 8). They made posters to help them explain their chapter to the rest of the class. Then, we turned to the connections between the film and our text. Our final discussion of about 100 pages of text and a two hour film only lasted 20 minutes (since I'm committed to always starting on time and always ending on time).

Our conversation was rich, and some folks pushed us to consider if there is any real difference between the Rockefellers using their wealth to dictate educational policy and Bill Gates doing the same through his foundation. As an aside, we will start our next class looking at some of the policy statements from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, as well as at the Phelps-Stokes Fund website that I brought up in our Critical Pedagogy course a few weeks ago.

Still, I left feeling like my students had a lot more to say about the film and the text, and that even though we decided collectively to watch the film in class, our time together wasn't as useful as I hoped it would be. Or, perhaps better phrased, we could have had a much richer discussion of the role of philanthropy and big business in public education had we not watched the film together.

In an attempt to continue the conversation, I created a discussion board on our course WebVista site and invited students to post their reactions to the film. To try and get the ball rolling, I wrote the first post on the discussion board. No one has yet responded, and while I know I made it optional and that they have a paper due next week, I'm now worrying that I put too much of my own opinions about the film into the post and thus silenced students (potentially). Below is what I posted on the discussion board:

I want to start by just stating that I don't understand this film completely. Or, perhaps better put, the logic of the film's main arguments doesn’t make sense to me. If I’m understanding them correctly, they boil down to this:

The problem with the United States, the cause of poverty and systemic inequity, is our unequal education system. The cause of these poor performing schools are “bad” teachers, who get to keep their jobs indefinitely because of the system of tenure. To fix all of this, we need to have every school in the country use the same explicitly test-prep oriented curriculum as KIPP and Harlem Children’s zone schools, so that every child will go to a 4-year college.

OK, let’s work backwards as I break down my confusion: Not everyone can go to a 4-year college because there are not enough colleges with enough space for everyone in the P-12 system to go. On top of that, many universities have admissions criteria along the lines of the “top x% of graduating seniors” – even if everyone is brilliant, they can’t all be in the upper tier of students on the national scale, because that’s the whole point of the national scale.

Teaching to the test makes sense if the test is measuring a students’ ability to be a worthy human being. I do not know what kind of a test this would be, but it certainly is not the Eurocentric “standards” based tests we use today to measure students and teachers. True, if we make our instruction grounded in the test, practice taking the test often, and continually require students to do “test like” exercises and activities, our scores will probably go up. But since everyone’s scores must go up every year, gains are rarely celebrated and often come with considerable loss to learning that does not connect directly to the test. No test could measure everything a teacher teaches or that students know, but in the logic of positivism we have to have numbers to understand things, and we have to leave some things out in order to make tests that give us numbers.

Bad teachers are very loosely defined in the film as “ineffective.” Note the e, in effective here, as opposed to affective teachers which in the literature in teacher education is what we are actually aiming for. The “effect” of a teacher is apparently measurable by scores, through sophisticated modeling and mathematics like there are in value-added assessment. The claim “we have to have a way to measure teacher effectiveness” sort of makes sense. The claim that we can isolate the impact of one teacher by looking at her students’ tests scores does not make sense, because there are just too many variables. So, why not look for other ways to measure effectiveness? What if we had students evaluate their teachers, like we do in the university setting? What if we mandated every teacher would have a monthly visit by their principal, another one by a mentor teacher or vice principal, and do their own peer-reviews of the colleagues and co-workers? We could even make a rubric with however many points we want and then compare them all. As silly and arbitrary as much of this would be, it would be exceptionally more sophisticated and accurate a measure of what is actually going on in the classroom than the results of a standardized test.

And then we come to the claim that I have the most difficulty with: that schools and teachers are the cause of structural inequity and white supremacy. As we’ve just finished reading a book that details the very intentional moves of those in power to use schools and education as tools to maintain or increase their power, it is just plain not factually accurate to say that schools caused inequity. Let me be clear, laws and governmental policy created and maintain inequity – schools were never consulted on the matter, and the public school came into its widespread existence almost 500 years after the first slaves were brought to North America.

The ongoing legacy of white supremacy has at every moment in its history sought to justify itself with the common sense of the time. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, we saw scientific racism emerge as a justification for Jim Crow and the continued exploitation of people of color after slavery was declared illegal. Today, we blame schools instead of banks for redlining, for predatory home loans, for racial restrictive housing (which wasn’t made illegal until 1968 and today continues in the form of “zoning”), for gerrymandering so that politicians get to decide who elects them instead of the people electing their politicians… These are issues far larger than the school, and yet the film blames schools for the very things that make teaching so exceptionally difficult, as if teaching and learning aren’t difficult enough on their own.

Hoping we can get a good conversation to have another life on the internet… What did you think of the film? Or of my reaction, for that matter? Or the connection to Watkins? What should the role of philanthropy be in public education? What say should businesses have in public schools? Anything else is on the table… So, what do you have to say (or type, as the case may be).

On Writing and Writing Instruction

After Geoff Sirc's lecture last week, I left the building feeling a certain sense of wonder, a certain sense of awe. As we walked away, I voiced aloud my revelation that writing is nothing more than an expression of the human experience. Robin corrected me: it can also be a creation of human experience.

Two things have happened since then:

1) I followed up with Geoff. He agrees, though I changed my definition ever so slightly to say that writing is an act of expressing or creating the human experience. Obviously, we have our agreed-upon understanding of genre--this one "looks" like an essay, that one "looks" like a cover letter--but, at the core, all we are doing is acting out our ideas using symbols that represent those ideas. Self reflection followed. I realized that I have been writing words first, with the infusion of my ideas coming only second. I have been writing according to the rules I thought I knew--the grammatical, syntactic, and stylistic expectations I thought my professors had of me--with the infusion of my own ideas coming only after, if really ever.

2) I followed up with Mitch Ogden in the Writing Center. I asked Mitch about my "revelation" and he filled me with confidence by replying that I am not alone and that I am well on my way to articulating this idea. We talked about writing. We talked about the history of writing, its development of genres and place in academic, professional, and philosophical writing. Inspired by Geoff's justification for using lists and Courtney's use of Montaigne, I began to demystify writing in my own mind.

I talked with Mitch about my writing, and was relieved to learn that my mistakes are the very same he sees in academic writing more often than not: students understand that they are taught to begin with a thesis statement, they work out the problem as they write, and they arrive at a sound--sometimes revelatory--conclusion at the end. The problem is: that very conclusion should be the thesis statement. The problem compounded: who in the hell wants to rewrite an entire paper based on their conclusion after days or weeks of research and writing or after pulling an all-nighter just to get the damn thing done before the 9:00 am deadline?!

Mitch then talked about a paradigm shift in writing instruction. Still marginal, the idea is that we ask students to begin with a topic--not a thesis--and then spend time (days? weeks?) working with them to develop and explore research questions based on that topic. Take time in class to read over research questions. Make it an assignment to submit three or five of them with a paragraph or two of explanation or proto-research for each research question. Work with the students to help them see their thesis (formerly conclusion) develop before their eyes, before they even begin writing their "essay." Show them how to incorporate the research they've already done in constructing their argument. Actively guide the students' process and understanding where before all we had was a last-ditch effort to critique the final product leaving comments that may or may not ever be read, understood, or investigated (in order of descending probability). Do the work with them that they are often left to do on their own.

There's more, and we can talk about it, but two things happened on the way to class today: I fell in love with idea of my ideas and I found a way to help inspire my students to do the same.

p.s. I still have many fears about sharing my writing: did I spell the big words correctly? Did I use them properly? Are my descriptors over the top or lame? Still, I see now how I have begun to express my idea. That's kind of a big deal. I'll get the rest of it in the second draft.

On the "essay"

In the section of the course I teach, "Reading Literature: Theory and Practice," we do a fair amount of what might be called "traditional" essay-writing. Although I think there are many other very helpful and important writing projects, I do have an investment in the "essay as form" to use Adorno's term, because I think that, depending on how you teach it, it can actually open up thought and the world tremendously. It's true that the practice of essay-writing has become almost synonymous with a formulaic and tamed way of writing and thinking; it is something that might feel absolutely suffocating to students. However...I try to unsettle the concept of the "essay" itself, by going back to the genesis of the essay, at least in terms of the modern world. Yes, Montaigne! Who would think that a Renaissance, humanist philosopher and bourgeois gentleman could have penned a form that is so--well, earth-shaking? Or, at least I think it is. Let me try to flesh this out:

So, you probably know that the notion of the essay is linked to the French verb "essayer," which is most commonly defined as "to try" or "to attempt." However, in different historical moments--and in some cases still today--this term has also referred to the following: to try on (like clothing), to try out (like a new tool), to experiment, to test, and....my favorite: to taste! (In my own writing, I've framed the essay as a "path"...or rather "a walking"...an attempt to "go in quest of what is". These are all other images that emerge from Montaigne's writing as well.) With my students, we try to think through these multiple valences, and to see what "problems" or "questions" these meanings might pose to our own work.

I also attempt to talk with my students about the conditions in which Montaigne himself wrote the famous--and enormous Essays. I think this is important, because...he is usually cast as someone who epitomizes a way of writing that celebrates and affirms the "single, individual" (and white, and male) subject. However, I tend to read his Essays as a call for friendship, for society, for relationships. He wrote this work after he lost his father and his best friend, Etienne de La Boetie, who was his most cherished interlocutor, and who had an enormous impact on his thought on society. Anyway...in face of these great losses, and, I think, as a result of his grief, he essentially settled into a solitary condition, pretty much locking himself in his library...only to find that "the world" did not leave him alone...and that, as much as he was able to "build a little workshop" for himself that would enable him to live again, he realized that he could never achieve a singular self. And...the presence of so many different figures in his own work--from Greek and Latin thinkers, to the words of the workers in his town, to those of contemporary kings, and...yes, even his cat--goes to prove that thought and life are never individual enterprises. They constantly cast us back into the world...and they are never finished, either.

Anyway, there's much more that I could say about this subject, but...suffice for now to say that I think there is actually power in the essay form that could be used to critically re-invent how we write and think. That said, I do have problems with Montaigne. One of the biggest ones: as much as he does "try out" and "test" himself as much as other ideas, as much as he does invite a mode of experimentation, I worry about the status of RESPONSIBILITY in this form. To what extent does this text suggest that how we think and what we think, how we act on our knowledge, matters...and not only in terms of some individual ethics, but in terms of SOCIETY? (There are ways in which Montaigne can tend toward a bit of a solipsistic and semi-irresponsible mode of being). That's where I think he's a bit shaky, and...also where I think I have to ask some serious questions about my own investment in his work.

Also, one problem in teaching him: As much as I encourage students to "experiment" with their own mode of essay-writing, in light of reading Montaigne, I then also ask that they conform to certain parameters: font, MLA guidelines, smooth-flowing transitions, etc. So...perhaps I am giving them mixed messages, which I think is potentially dangerous. I leave my comments on this subject with a question: What can I do about this? Would it be better to try a new form rather than the "essay" for writing, or does some immanent critique of the form seem in order? If so, how can I more fully embody the essay process, by not reverting back to the standardized forms? Or, does it do a disservice to students if I don't teach them those standardizations?

Below, I give you one example of the "essay-writing" assignment that I have given students in light of Montaigne, that perhaps best illustrates the tensions I have tried to express:

CSCL 1401, Section 3

Essay No. 2

DUE: Friday, April 23^rd

Assignment (General Requirements):

Please write a 3-5 page essay in response to one of the prompts below. You may choose to write this essay in the more “standard” contemporary fashion. Having read Montaigne, you may also write your paper in a way that reflects the notion of “essay” as he conceived it, or in light of the broader definitions of the verb “essayer” that we have encountered: to attempt, to experiment, to experience, to try out, to try on, to taste. If you do choose to write this way, I would ask that you provide a short statement before your essay, telling us why you’ve decided to write this way, and what you hope to accomplish by doing so. Consider this statement your own “To the Reader”.

Either way, I would ask that your essay still follow standard MLA citation procedures (today, making sure to reference the work of another is essential). In part, this means including a “Works Cited” page. Also, I would ask that your essay be typewritten, double-spaced, and in 12 pt Times New Roman font, with standard 1-inch margins. Finally, do be sure to include a title.

* As always, please feel free to contact me or stop by my office hours if you wish to discuss this assignment! *

Prompts:

1. Revisiting “On the art of conversation”

Montaigne (whom fellow countryman and philosopher Blaise Pascal called “the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation”), considers conversation the most enjoyable and fruitful exercise of human life. In addition to seeing it as a pleasurable activity, Montaigne also tells us that conversation is both something in which we participate on a daily basis, but also something that we should understand and cultivate as an “art”. What is this “art of conversation” for Montaigne? How does he understand it? Why, for him, is it an “art”? How does his “art of conversation” relate to (resemble, differ from, challenge…) other forms of “dialogue” or other forms of language more broadly (writing, singing, etc) with which you are familiar, or which we have encountered in class? Could you, for example, engage Montaigne’s “art of conversation” with Cixous’ “écriture féminine” (feminine writing) and/or with Christine de Pisan’s “book of the city of ladies,” or perhaps imagine how someone like Frantz Fanon might respond to Montaigne’s “art of conversation”? You may also write of Montaigne by himself, responding in your own voice to different aspects of his “art of conversation,” or positing an alternative “art” or theory of conversation.

2. Writing a “Voice” of Poverty

We spoke in class about how The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes is, to some extent, an on-going meditation on hunger; the figure of hunger is a central one in this celebrated “Golden Age” novel. Not only that: it seems that the author of this text finds a particular way to “write” not just hunger, but something of which hunger plays a key part—poverty—in and through his text. I would argue, though, that poverty exists in this novel not as an exact “reflection” of society at large (consider all the churches and artwork that were being created at this time in Spain, as well as its overseas endeavors), but emerges largely through some other mechanism.

With that said: How is poverty crafted in this novel? What does it sound (or taste or feel) like? What are the figures, themes, and techniques that create a “voice” (or maybe voices) of poverty in this text? Why focus so directly on poverty here? Or, are there other voices besides that of poverty and dearth that you think emerge loudly from this novel? What are they, and how do they operate here?

For this question, you could also compare the figure of poverty in Lazarillo de Tormes with that of something else we have read or are reading. César Vallejo’s poetry (which we did not get to analyze together), the film “Before Night Falls,” or the short story “Dhowli” are potential sites you might look at to engage in a comparative project.

3. Your Choice

You may develop a paper on any other topic of your choosing that relates to any of the texts we have read since School Days. I would only ask that you discuss and confirm your topic with me before writing.

Getting Personal

This is the assignment that my students are currently working on -- they had rough drafts due last Thursday, which I just checked off, and we peer- and group-edited in class, and they have final drafts due tomorrow.  So I can't say, with any conclusiveness, to what extent it "worked".  But Robin said I should post about it anyway.  So here we are.

In many ways it follows my normal protocol for first assignments:  it is short, relatively simple, directly linked to the stuff we've been reading and talking about (requiring no outside research), and private -- in Michael Warner's sense of not written to strangers (as in "public" (or "published") writing).  My logic behind this is, we can tell our students "write for your audience!" till we're blue in the face, but if they don't have a clear idea who their audience is, they will often fall back into the vague idea of their audience as half-my-teacher-half-a-poorly-defined-general-reading-public-that-will-never-actually-read-this-but-I'm-supposed-to-pretend-they-will.  So I ask them to write to someone specific -- and then, to actually send it to this person or people.

In this case, it's their m/others.  I took this mostly from Robin, with his recurring heuristic, "Can you explain this to your mother?"  But from there it grew.  I decided -- rightly or wrongly -- that they shouldn't just EXPLAIN it to their m/others; they should also work to CONVINCE their m/others that it matters, that it's relevant. 

Some people are getting very, very personal.  One student (admittedly an advanced Comp Lit major) who chose to share her work in class last week wrote a beautiful letter to her mother, linking her discovery of letters between her mother and her father from their divorce to Leopold von Ranke's conception of source-based scientific history.  Others, whose work I have seen, remain more superficial and predictably "school-like" in tone and focus -- but their writing is still more direct and personal than in comparable "paper"-writing I've seen.

But I want, as a final thought, to discuss the work of one particular student, a first-year whom I knew from the class Robin and I taught last semester, and who came into office hours last week to discuss her writing.  It was a good but basic explanation of Hegel and how it might relate to the current situation in Egypt.  Good, but unremarkable -- and impersonal.  I called her on it.  I asked her more about her older sister, whom she was writing about, and how she could communicate these ideas more specifically and relevantly to her.  She started telling me about her, including about the death of her mother, and her sister's ensuing attempts to take over the role of mother, and her pain at the rupturing of sisterly bonds.  She started to cry, and didn't stop for several minutes.  I asked her if she was all right, and wanted to keep talking; she was, and she did.

By the end of the conversation, we had established two things:  one, a foundation for her to start over and rethink her writing on much more personal grounds; two, the decision that she would NOT send this letter to her sister.  I explained to her my reasons for wanting students to actually send out their writings (she had been absent when we discussed them in class), and that in her case, it seemed like the opposite prescription would be most effective:  she could write more personally and more honestly if she knew that she would NOT have to send this letter to her sister, that she and I would be the only people to ever read it.  She agreed.  Yet another reminder, I told myself, that no method is inherently good (or bad) in and of itself; context is so very important. 

A postscript:  we met again yesterday to flesh out some of the details of her writing.  By the end of the conversation, I was encouraging her -- but very clearly not requiring her -- to send this to her sister.  I may have encouraged her too eagerly.  I am hoping we have built a trusting relationship strong enough to handle that.  I think so.

#lessonfail

The image above has been snapped from a word doc that appeared on a transparency (overheads: my technology of choice) for a writing exercise I led last year in tutorial. The course was English 104: Introduction to Prose Genres and we were working, broadly, on life writing studied through Lacanian theory (I know, right). The required reading for this session was Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

I chose this lesson for our current discussion because of two features: first, I've never created a formal writing assignment, ie. one that was submitted as part of the students' final grade, and second, I think that we should pay some attention to "informal" or "low stakes" or whatever euphemism is cool, in-class writing activities. In my experience as a high school and undergraduate student, I thought these were a total bore. In some of my earliest English classes in university, we were still dwelling on "what happened in the summer"!! And they thought they could make it more literary by getting us to talk about "the last book we read"!!! When I started TAing, I quickly learned that the buzz on these chores is that they are "diagnostic", and thus have reevaluated their import.

In this case, the students were asked to write The Autobiography of Clint Burnham, who was the course's professor. Here's the catch ...actually not really a catch, I'm just using that for effect. Everybody knew about it. The course outline vehemently stated that "students [were] required to follow me [Clint] on twitter". This was intended to emphasize the role of social media in identity construction and to valorize Facebook and Twitter as new forms of life writing.

Stein's Autobiography, summarized really reductively ..I love that book... is written from the point of view of her partner Alice, but oscillates back and forth between the two women's stories. I wanted the students to think about voice, tone and narration and thought there was surely no better way to complicate these than by putting them to work. At the same time, I realized there was no better fodder than "Dr. Burnham" (which they called him in spite of his online Prof_Clinty monicker) and his voice, tone, narration, and life.

We reviewed four pages of his most recent tweets on the projector, because I was unconvinced that student's were following him regularly, listened to the Beach House album he references, and then wrote for about ten minutes. I thought it was really hilarious that most of my aims for the review (again, voice, tone, narration) were derailed as I was forced to give a virtual "Author's Tour" in the style of Hemingway's favourite bars in Havana of Clint's East Vancouver neighbourhood. I assume he thought that his young students would know about the coffee houses, used bookstores, and hipster nightclub (I wish there was a more precise word to describe Vancouver's Biltmore, but really, it's just a hipster nightclub) that he tweeted n' hashtagged. Even in a class where half the students were from within the city limits, as opposed to the suburbs, these hotspots for cultural capital were totally lost by them. One girl was able to locate the Biltmore on the basis of its location "across the street from a Honda dealership".

So the success of the assignment was that it was really funny, producing some hilarious associations between a prof and his students...and his TA, also his student. It was mid-semester, so I wasn't worried so much about diagnostics, but the subtle goals I had in mind about really enacting Stein's methods, etc. were largely lost. But it was really damn funny.

The above represents one of those moments of being knocked off the horse. I was confident that our discussions about semiotics had been fruitful. We had done, as a class, two exhaustive examples of how to 'perform' this assignment (writing is, of course, another language). They seemed engaged, and I heard from more students during this exercise than any other class period during the semester. Looking back at it now, with all of its spelling mistakes and awkward phrasings, I'm still not sure how it went wrong. Let me explain.

Certain papers turned out beyond my imagination. Simply stunning stuff. A few turned in papers that looked nothing like the structure I attempted to articulate. The question that still lingers is, I can extend office hours, urge them to come, and go over a number of examples, but I'm still uncertain as to when/what they are uncertain about--and from experience, understanding the assignment comes in two stages: getting what the teacher says about the assignment, and figuring out what the prompt is asking when one sits down to finally write it.

I'm coming to understand that drafts are a way of sidestepping this problem, but I'm constantly focused on getting to the material at hand. I realize that this is, no bones about it, part of the course material insofar as I've made a traditional writing assignment. Nonetheless, as a student who has, more or less, understood how to write a "A" paper (not to say a good paper) for any course I took, I'm unclear as to how the intensive focus on such a process goes over with students who struggle with writing. If I can't explain how to write an essay to a class (although I do feel quite comfortable instructing on writing one on one), then matching what they write to what we've been doing in class is a much more useful way of getting at this question of instruction.

In the end, I'm wondering what the pedagogical implications are when the goal of assignments like this one (unlike traditional compare/contrast/explicate material we've read), where I'm more concerned with them simply doing this practice, as an example of a worthwhile skill to be taken out of the otherwise foreign material, are in the doing rather than the writing? Another example of how, we academics find essays useful since we tend to think in/through them in an effective way.

Rather than rewriting this, let me simply point. That is, by the end of this, I realize that I have been more concerned, at the level of the letter, with how I fit into this puzzle than than thinking the obvious: why do I feel like students need to write essays (part of me thinks it useful, and part of me can't object to creating "alternative" writing exercises that are more attune to life-after-college) when I know there's more ideology behind this feeling than critical thought?.

Moreover, a distinction that I have found useful is that the sessions in class where we went over examples might be phrased thusly: I was practicing the exercise for them, rather than letting them practice.

Assigning writing (and reading assignments)

This one haunts me.  I KNOW that what I 'tell' them to do is going to produce 'unintended consequences,' and I won't like them. Over, and over, and over, and over.  Ouch.

I think we're getting close to understanding why, and we'll get even closer.

I offer what I think might be the best attempt of my teaching life at writing an explicit, orderly, open, interesting (even funny) engaging essay assignment.  Following my usual principles (which still look good) I did these kinds of things:

• preparing for the larger essay with two, preliminary part-of-the-whole smaller essays
• explicitly looking back at readings and class work, using the class terminology, even using examples from class, in students' words.
• structuring the hell out of the process (so they don't need to worry about that) and leaving the content open so they can be creative.
• providing a method--and linking it to work we did.
• sharing the criteria by which it would be scored ('marked,' Emily!).
• providing a model.
• formatting to ease reading, bolding active verbs that say what to do.
• paying attention to document-design and formatting to set an example of high production values and professionalism.

Nothing wrong here, in my view.  The grading rubric / response sheet that I and my team of four TA's used follows.

We all know what resulted: MISTER BELL CURVE, with an ugly bottom half.  The 'good students' doing well and liking it, but the majority reverting to old behaviors as if they had not read a word (maybe not reading a word), and even ignoring explicit imperatives (like: 'give it an appealing title'  —  No title). Probably many did not read beyond the word count and due date.  Scarier: they did 'read' it and took very different meanings from what was said.

In short: the usual.

I've pasted the four PNG files (Blogger won't accept PDF's) of the pages here, and ---  uh --- a two page, single-spaced writing assignment just MIGHT be too long.  But I've also mounted the original and easier-to-read file to our Moodle Archive, FYI.

School choice

Top 10 Reasons for Being in an Immersion Program


• To acquire a second language

• To have a greater capacity for listening

• To think more creatively and analytically

• To develop better communication skills

• To express enthusiasm and have an aptitude for problem solving

• To have a greater awareness of self and others

• To gain insights into other cultures

• To unify staff and students in creating a shared linguistic community

• To provide access to a greater part of the world

• To take advantage of the optimal time to learn a language and develop an appreciation and understanding of diverse cultures, peoples, and perspectives in the world


********
It’s school choice time in Minneapolis! This presents a terrifying scenario for the critical educator who wants to neither alienate nor compromise… too much. So my husband and I embarked on the search for our sons’ academic home in a manner similar to how I remember approaching the college search: intense background research, a long lull, punctuated by an eleventh-hour freak-out and snap decision. Now that the “choice card” has been submitted (a process that I, a former public school teacher halfway to a Ph.D, found confounding), I feel I can take a deep breath and reflect on the experience of navigating “school choice.”

When Robin introduced this task last week, I wrote down “microinteraction,” and thus was thinking more about verbal exchanges between people that could be considered pedagogical. With that in mind, I’m considering the conversation I had this (Tuesday) morning at a school tour along with the text below, copied from the school website. The tour took place at a dual immersion elementary school, and I found the Top 10 list on the school’s website after my visit to the school. I want to problematize two elements of my interactions with the text and the tour guide: first, the “de-fanging” of the real power of language immersion in favor of a softer, “celebrate diversity” discourse. Along with that comes, of course, a lack of acknowledgement of the role of power itself in choosing a curricular framework for a public school. Again, thinking about binaries: by choosing immersion, the school leaders were not choosing lots of other things, particularly a testing-focused, reading and math-heavy academic schedule. Second, the individualism inherent in the language of the top ten list: the message I read here is that being bilingual will benefit your child and his or her interactions in a “global society.” My top 10 list would refer to subverting English dominance, building social cultural capital among both native English and native Spanish speakers, growing a generation of children who look at language, culture, power, and the purpose of public schooling in critical ways (Ladson-Billings’ sociopolitical consciousness), redefining academic “success” while acknowledging the need to succeed in the present testing climate, etc. These include benefits to individuals but don’t leave out how the individual shapes and is shaped by society.

I hope that the school we’ve chosen for our kids does the real work of immersion education, but I don’t see that in the top-ten list below. This problem of publicly representing a deeply researched and considered perspective brings me back to my key question on the first day of class: how do we communicate about critical work in a way that is both comprehensible and true to the work itself? What is lost when we go too far in either direction?

As a discipline, Comparative Literature takes the whole of global literary history as its object, and does not limit itself to a single period or language, as do other types of literary studies. As a result, Comparative Literature has the unique task of investigating the underlying structures of literature and their ability to express similar ideas in otherwise dissimilar places. In short, Comparative Literature asks how literature works and why it seems to work everywhere.


This is a snippet from a syllabus of a class currently taught in our department. I think that this is an eloquent argument for Comparative Literature as a certain style and methodology of literary studies. It is obviously very carefully balanced and well-defined according to current debates in the field (eg. David Damrosch's What is World Literature, et al.). Yet, I do think that there are several ways that this otherwise deft statement could be improved, pedagogically speaking.

Using Friere's problem-posing model of education as a point of reference, this statement could do more to point out the way that Comparative Literature itself is a shifting, ideologically constructed discipline, particularly if such a point could be made with the potential identity of the student in mind. Questions that might arise in doing this:

Will my idea of what literature is be addressed by this class? Or, Will my idea of what the world is be addressed by this class? If not, why not?

What are the ways that in which this academic discipline or even the idea of "literature" has been constructed to assert a position of cultural superiority, either historically or within this institution?

On a similar note, what if the texts that have been described "literature" don't "work" for me? What does that make me? Do I still have a voice in this class? How can we make that voice vital and productive?

What are ways that this class can collectively create an open dialogue about these earlier questions in order to open this discipline to the particular conditions of our (the students') lives?
(I feel like this last question is particularly crucial to the future of Comparative Literature, if it does indeed have one)

Although it is easy enough to create a syllabus with these concerns in mind, creating a classroom that actively addresses all of these questions everyday may be impossible. Nonetheless, ths exercise was quite helpful for me in thinking about the context in which I would like to teach literature. Perhaps this kind of reflection should be routine before finalizing the wording of a syllabus and handing it out to the class?

Introductions

I have been struck by the ways instructors begin their courses, in other words, by what happens the first day of the graduate-level course. I'm pretty certain that in all of my courses, two things have happened in that first session:

1.) a form of "getting to know who is in the room" and
2.) getting to know the content of what the class will engage.

I am curious about the ways in which this first day shapes subsequent interactions and relationships in the classroom and outside. Below are three different ways I've seen this happen, all with instructors who are versed in critical pedagogy. The courses had between six and twenty students, and in all of them, everyone sat at tables in a square, with the instructor at the "head" of the table.

What teaching is occurring in how this takes place? How conscious are these choices? How do they help to shape what happens for the rest of the semester?

Example One: The instructor asks students to each fill out a paper with various questions about themselves, including past experiences with the topics, what they are studying, why they are taking the class, etc. After collecting these papers, she introduces the course. Students then pair up and "interview" each other, asking questions about life in school and out of school. They introduce each other, with the instructor going last. Then everyone goes over the syllabus together.

Example Two: Students introduce themselves, giving their program, research interests, and why they signed up to take the class. The instructor goes last, also introducing the course, its content, and goals, and then handing out the syllabus.

Example Three: The instructor outlines his view of what he hopes will happen in the space of the classroom, in terms of environment and interactions, in the process debunking some standard tropes about grad school (e.g., it is a competition to see who can prove their knowledge). He then introduces the course, including the texts, syllabus, etc. After a break, students introduce themselves and talk about one thing they hope to get out of the class or one thing to which they look forward.

While the syllabi for all of the courses were set, asking students what they are interested in opens space for both student investment in the course and each other and gives the instructor a sense of what students are hoping to get out of being there. Being introduced to each other also personalizes the space, making the class about who is in the room, not just the texts or the syllabus. Introducing the syllabus helps demystify what the course will cover. This is also a lot of information to take in, so I like the idea of example one, where the instructor had students record this info (privately) and could take it with her.

On the other hand, example two made me quite uncomfortable. Because not all students really knew what the course was about before having to say why they were interested in it, two things occurred: 1.) there was a little "one-up-personship" in which people could demonstrate (or not) their already-existing relationship to the presumed course content and 2.) when students weren't clear on what the course was, they either talked about things that the course wouldn't cover or about their understandings that were then "corrected" by the instructor's course introduction later. Rather than being positioned as knowers and learners, it created a weird hierarchy (or at least felt this way to me). In contrast, in example three, by going over the course content (including texts and assignments first), students could say something in which they were interested, even if they didn't know when they walked in the room, and were thus positioned differently.

I'm also curious about the differences created by having students introduce themselves versus having someone else do it. In the first, you talk once and spend the rest of the time listening (or trying to). In the second, you begin with more of a conversation, or at least an interaction. You also, however, have to try to present someone else fairly and accurately from a short interview--and this almost always means interpretation and differing emphases.

Finally, another curiosity is that I can generally remember what happened (in vague terms) in each of the first days of all my classes--and perhaps the last as well. In itself, this probably says something about the importance of these interactions. And, being a student now, I think it is important to think about so I can figure out my own philosophy before being too far removed from the experience of being the student.

Teaching What They Know

I thought for this post, I would express both the highs and lows that I experienced teaching media clips for our CSCL 1301W (Reading Culture) in a brief manner. For the course, in which we were investigating 'criticism culture,' i.e., the predominance of discourse that is critical of everything (What Not to Wear, Political Theater ala Fox News, etc.), I asked them to bring in any internet videos, news paper articles, etc. so that we could discuss them together as a way of beginning class. This was, when they actually brought in materials (about 50% of the time) a great way to start each class. As it was a one-day a week night class, this allowed us to discuss the clip in relation to what we had previously discussed, and it gave me the ability to foreshadow upcoming readings/concepts.

1) Complete failure - Juliet's Sassy Gay Friend. A somewhat quiet, but altogether brilliant older student, took serious exception to this clip--in the process of which he was 'forced' to express his own sexual position to the rest of the class in the midst of his criticism of the clip as being representative of hurtful stereotypes that he was invested in critiquing. I tried to follow the critique by situating the 'sassy gay' trope in relation to Hollywood under the Hays Code, and historicize the harmfulness of said trope, but really I felt like all the air had been sucked out of me. I screened the clip before class during my lecture prep, and I had intended to discuss it in relation to the question of authority, history, and 'great works,' that we had been working on in previous weeks. Yet, as Adorno critiques Benjamin's optimism of Chaplin, the laughs of the class were more directed at the the 'funny gay guy,' than the critique (as I saw it coming at the expense of the the canonical status of the text as 'the greatest love story ever'). Yet, I simply did not see this coming. That's what makes it all the worse for me in thinking that I might have implicitly been creating an environment that felt unsafe for the LGBT community.

2) Great success -- Dave Chappelle on Gender and Dress. I also used other clips, from his other stand-up special, and received more positive comments about including this in my course than any other material. I decided to use this as a way of opening up a chapter from John Berger's Ways of Seeing -- namely his discussion of the construction of gender roles as they developed through the genre of painting 'nudes'. The basic thesis of the chapter is "Men act. Women are looked at." Chappelle, as you have seen, illustrates this is a very direct way--women at the club, "telling" men how they want them to act toward them (we, of course, complicate this as a culturally produced 'way of seeing' rather than a psychological/anthropological fact), and the police uniform which suggests his power to act. What I took from this is, as a colleague suggested, if I can teach them this through Dave Chappelle, why include Berger at all?

As an aside, in relation to this type of activity of discussing material in general, what are people's thoughts on foreshadowing. I often find myself using this technique in two ways. Firstly, I use it to table certain avenues of discussion -- e.g., a student talks about boredom and I say, "Yes. Good Point. We're actually going to be discussing the concept of boredom later alongside Adam Phillips," or something like that. Secondly, I attempt to use it to by means of demonstrating the cohesiveness of the constellation that we're attempting to develop throughout the course. I can't say that I have much experience as a student with this teacherly-act. As an act of critical pedagogy, should we put student responses on the table--while pointing to how these students are, in fact and so to speak, anticipating/understanding the trajectory of the course--or do we have a responsibility to engage these thoughts as they emerge? Any thoughts?

Difficultation #1

For a long time I've had an issue with the term "facilitation" / "facilitate" / "facilitator", and I didn't quite know why.  As in many other such situations, Augusto Boal helped.  The trouble with this term, he said (and I paraphrase), is that it encourages the teacherly tendency to make things easy and simple (fácil), often at the expense of exploring their real textual, political, and conceptual complexity and difficulty -- and hence, he proposed the alternative word "difficultator" as a better description of his own practice.  (Harvey Sarles, in our department, made a similar point in his book Teaching as Dialogue, where he suggests that the title "facilitator" implies an abdication of responsibility and bodily presence.)  Of course, this can be debated.  The point is, a lot of the examples of "facilitation" I've seen in critical settings involve oversimplifying and sloganizing -- and in the interest of true critical work, I wanted to resist that.

Similarly, with the issue of collaborative instruction.  From last week's post, you'll know I am suspicious of it, especially as it often implies a similar abdication of responsibility on the part of the teacher.  At the same time, I think it's essential.  If critical pedagogy is actually to make student-teachers out of students and teacher-students out of teachers, the teacher cannot remain at the helm, at the center, at all times. 

Here's my attempt to work through these contradictions.

For my Hitler (or history) class this semester, I have required each student to participate in a group (2-3 people) that will perform a "difficultation" on one of the materials we study.  It must:  be about 15 minutes long, include some interactive and physical activity, and make an argument (implicit or explicit) about the thing we're studying.  And they have to meet with me in advance to discuss it, so I can give them advice (and make sure it'll be a worthwhile experience for everyone...from my perspective at least) and incorporate what they're doing into my overall plan for the day.

So we did the first one last Thursday.  And overall I'd say it was quite good.  The text was by Waziyatawin, a local Dakota activist with a PhD in American history, about the history of Fort Snelling as a concentration camp (including comparative analyses of the Nazis and White Americans...right down to the architecture of the camps) and the contemporary politics of memory surrounding the fort.  Her message:  take it down.  The two difficultators, working partly off their initiative and partly off my advice, moved the class deftly from writing their own reactions to the text, to sharing those reactions speed dating-style, to a brief plenary discussion including an analysis of the Ft. Snelling website, to a small- and then big-group writing exercise in which we drafted notes for a letter that the difficultators (promised they) would send to a relevant authority, containing our recommendations for changes to how the Fort presents itself.

Generally, I thought it was quite successful.  The discussion was spirited, and people clearly cared, and were being pushed in new and productively uncomfortable directions.  Of course, we didn't get into the text nearly as much as I wanted to.  Of course, the "intervention" exercise felt a little bit quixotic.  Of course, they didn't plumb the depths of the implications of being complicit in genocide as much as I waned them to.  Of course, the connections to Hegel were left for me to make, hastily, at the end (though I did so while referencing their own blog discussion). 

So, some depth and polish and clarity were lost.  But I think these losses were offset.  Or did I let them off too easy?  Don't think so.  (And we can, as I often say and rarely do, always come back to it later.)

Micro Pedagogy? Or: so HOW does this WORK?

Find a real 'piece of pedagogy' (an assignment, one sentence from a 'teacher's guide,' a chunk of your 'lesson plan' for a class (see below--way too big), a page of a textbook—whatever.  Just small and interesting), and explain how it works.  Or doesn't.  Or why we can't tell.  Or, or, or.

Our guide here is our focus on the ways all texts, actions, interactions, relationships, spaces, material features (of classroom and materials, but also of teacher and students—clothes, shapes, colors, say) set relationships among each other, and thus—inevitably—'teach.'

Sometimes they teach what we want and intend.  But in many interesting, scary situations they teach exactly what we didn't want: the 'hidden curriculum.'

In brief: this project asks us to bring concrete examples to what we theorized and discussed so elegantly, if abstractly.

___________

Robin Takes a Shot 

Background: 3331 Science Studies course.  Working on, roughly: 'bio-politics': exploring how science / technology are both informed by, and create possible 'new forms of life' (good and bad).  We started out with an article by Minnesota's Carl Elliot called 'A new way to be mad,' in which he explores to rise in incidences of apotemnophilia, a fascinating condition in which people declare that they have 'always seen themselves as amputees,' and go to gruesome lengths to make it so.  Intrigued?  Here's the link to the Atlantic source.  Is it a paraphilia?  Is it a brain disorder?  Is the web making it worse? Who's going to pay for the handicapped ramps?  Is it like trans-identity?  Is it like gay? Can you fix it with Prozac or RET? 'Oh isssh!'  Good material for teaching; always works.

At Issue:  The 'Tim Lensmire' phenomenon—how to sequence activities so that the change-ups do good pedagogical work—on the content, but on the relationships and what they teach as well—relationships to the material, of students to each other, of teacher to student.  An 'archeology of knowledge' (and power) enacted.

Activities:  

1.  Thursday was a 'Formal Debate'  (a Ben Fink invention—guidelines handout available on the 3331 course Moodle) in which I set a 'Proposition' with as much ambiguity in the terms as possible, and let them have at it in teams of 2 (with a week's prep time).  The proposition:  Resolved: apotemnophilia is best described as a disorder.

Power issues / hidden curricula / articulation:

1. They get to make meaning out of the many, contradictory readings. I don't direct the order-making / structure defining. What emerges is theirs, and they 'own' it.
2. They're the 'experts' (Gina used her psych terms).
3. They control the interaction: call on people, mediate, refute, expand. I'm minimally active (debate instructions operate without intervention).
4. 'Theory' (or content, or terminology, etc.) comes ahead of time--from preceding discussion and activities, readings, from the class list of 'keywords' in play).
5. Looks back to material covered; looks forward to next topic / problem

2.  After the debate, including a lot of  discussion (student led; teacher moderated), we moved into 'brainstorming a list of "conditions" that allow / require technological intervention, and which might plausibly construct a "new form of life,"'  EG: 

• bariatric surgery / obesity
• Ritalin / ADHD
• cochlear implants / deafness
• SSRI's / depression
• all cosmetic surgery / uh----not-cute-ness

Power issues / hidden curricula / articulation: 

1. 'Tests' comprehension of themes emerging from debate, etc.  Feedback / boardwork provides feedback, reinforces (and often modifies) our growing collective list of concepts
2. Prefigures next topic (Bio-ethics--what can we / should we / shouldn't we do to and with our bodies?  And what happens?
3. I'm NOT 'lecturing'; conducted right, the ideas emerge in dialogue.
4. Try to stick to requests and questions ('can you explain...?')

3. 'Good or Bad?'  Group-based discussion with goal of (1) selecting a condition / treatment (2) defining 1-3 reasons why it might have good or bad bio-ethical consequences (with attention to the political and economic).  After 8 minutes in groups, representatives slap their summary sheets on the document camera and present their collective thinking.  They take questions.

The primary teaching objective in all this:  Robin keeps his mouth shut and lets the structure teach.

Teach for America and the status quo

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Full salary and health insurance. Federal student loans deferred.

All majors and professional experiences.

Learn more: www.teachforamerica.org/compensation

For more information contact the Minnesota Recruitment Team:

The above announcement came through the College of Education and Human Development listserv earlier this week. While I won’t dwell on the odd placement of a message like this in a venue occupied by the students we target to become teacher education candidates, it’s worth a mention. Strangely enough, among the many implicit messages in the announcement is one directly from the College itself that TFA is a viable and endorsed (not to mention cheaper! And higher-status!) option for graduates of our undergraduate programs.

Messages about teaching, teachers, and the role of teachers in society:

• Teaching is a commitment… BUT, all you have to be is “outstanding” to earn a place in a classroom. The rest will be worked out in practice. (Practice first, reflection later.)
• A 2-year commitment is adequate to fashion oneself a leader “in expanding educational opportunity.” Freire, of course, would remind us that the commitment goes beyond “depositing” the benefits I reaped from my high-class education onto the underserved children under my tutelage.
• The elite college-educated can benefit even more from their work with marginalized students; teach the poor, get your loans forgiven and a job at Goldman Sachs! Win-win! This instrumentalist view of the process of educating does nothing to address the system that initially allows opportunity gaps to persist. A long-range view of TFA depends upon the status quo; we need the struggling schools and the fancy degrees in equal measure, and there’s no space for either to budge is a meaningful or systemic way.