Course Outline for Challenging White Supremacy Workshop: Education in and of the Community

An Introduction to Grassroots Anti-Racist Organizing

This is an anti-racist training workshop for grassroots social justice activists who want to work for racial justice and challenge white privilege in all their social justice work. It is a project of the Challenging White Supremacy Workshops of San Francisco.

GOALS: The workshop will introduce participants to:

* An historical analysis of the U.S. white supremacy system and the legacies of resistance to white supremacy in communities of color;
* An historical, institutional analysis of white privilege, its intersections with other systems of oppression, and its effects on social justice movements;
* Analyses, strategies and practices of some Bay Area grassroots racial justice work;
* Examples of some Bay Area anti-racist organizing in predominantly white social justice movements; and
* Practicing and modeling respectful and accountable behavior in all our anti-racist work.

WHEN AND WHERE: The workshop will meet on Sundays from 4pm to 7:30pm in San Francisco. The location is near BART and bus stops, and is accessible by bike. Car parking is challenging. The workshop is on the third floor of a building without elevators.

DRAFT AGENDA (subject to change): . . . [topic for each week listed]

RACIAL JUSTICE PLACEMENTS:

Every participant will be expected to volunteer 6-8 hours per week in a racial justice organization. cws will arrange placements for all participants, unless you are already volunteering or working with a racial justice organization. A partial listing (as of December 2004) of cws racial justice placements for Spring 2005 include . . .

'WORKSHOP AS A LABORATORY' PROGRAM:

The workshop program is based on the concept that anti-racist analysis and practice go hand in hand to create 'reflective action.' As a workshop participant, you will have the opportunity to:

* Practice and Model Respectful Behavior' to challenge white privilege;
* Practice small group anti-racist facilitation skills;
* Practice 'Each One Teach One' anti-racist organizing;
* Practice grassroots anti-racist fundraising;
* Strengthen your practice of accountability and solidarity in your racial justice work; and
* Strengthen your capacities to analyze and discuss different strategies of grassroots organizing in Bay Area communities of color and in predominantly white social justice movements.

COSTS: $10 with application, $125 registration; = $135 total.

The above excerpt (I took out the agenda and sample orgs so the post wouldn't be so long, but the title links to the whole thing) is on the Website of the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop in the Bay Area. I picked it as an example of how and why pedagogy is enacted in non-school spaces. I have had my most significant learning experiences outside of school settings, although they, like this workshop, frequently aren't labeled (by self or others) as education or pedagogy. Like much of my learning about race and white supremacy, the above workshop was in alternative education and community settings, although the classroom space was definitely influenced by (at the least) popular notions of critical pedagogy and critical theory.

A few of the teaching practices, assumptions about learning, etc. that are evident from this outline:

• learning, and more important, change in the direction of justice, require both practice (action) and analysis (e.g., Freire's definition of praxis--reflection and action in order to change the world)
  
• emphasis is on "practicing": what you will get out of the "workshop laboratory" are hands-on, community-based skills
  
• practicing involves both being in the community (i.e., placement in a community social justice organization for more hours than usually spent on coursework in more traditional settings) and efforts in the classroom (e.g., facilitating)
• learning and change require a commitment of time; if we want to learn, we have to put in the time--and changing entrenched, structural cultures is even more time-intensive.
• knowledge is historical, structural, local, contextual, and intersectional. This is true of the course content, practices, and set-up (e.g., notations about public transit and the building not having an elevator).
• belief in the hope of transformation (coexistent with discussion of 500+ years of injustice)
  
• commitment and desire to challenge oppression are present in the community (given how long these workshops ran)

Compared with most syllabi, this one is more explicit upfront about for whom the class has been shaped. I don't know that this makes the space or this work any easier, but I have been to any number of race/gender/sexuality classes or workshops that have not been that specific upfront and the conversation has had to be much more basic. I guess it could potentially be a problem and exclusionary, but given the few numbers of such programs, I'm okay with it. Also, the cost is $135 for a 15-week course, compared with thousands at schools (although, having done a lot of these types of trainings myself, I know it is partly a function of low or no pay, lack of infrastructure, no technology, etc.) Finally, I also want to point out that this is a public Website and that many of the materials used in the course are available online (for free).

SparkNotes world--the educational industrial complex

I'm guessing everybody knows (and may have used) SparkNotes.  I fell last night, needing a fast plot summary for Brave new world (coming up in 'Science and Culture') and forgetting that the online version I put on my Moodle already has great context / summary material on it.  I ended up sort of horrifies and entranced.  It's morphed into a social network, with blog prompts on subjects like 'hating hipsters' and 'never been kissed in Michigan,' to which people are responding like mad.  These are, of course, data-mining devices, and the 'labor' being unwittingly sold becomes marketing capital. When one changes fields (to 'main characters' for example), a forced Flash commercial for the new Microsoft phone operating system is mandatory for 8 seconds.  I watched the two dudes skydive about six times, frantically clicking the 'X.'  An ad (Flash animated) for Metro State appears at the head of every new text column.  Facebook-like sponsored ads are bannered down the sides (including Phoenix University).  Big Barnes and Noble presence. Pull-down for 'No fear Shakespeare' (side-by-side translation into the English 'real people speak').  Pull-down for 'College,' where you'll find help on admissions and finding scholarship.  Pull-down for SparkLife where you can network about books, entertainment, music, the internet--and Prom. 

Want to take a look?  Here's Brave new world according to SparkNotes  http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/bravenew/.

Observations:

• it's pure and valuable 'ethnographic' data on real life in highschool.  Hidden curricula?  can probably get to it here.  How do we study?  This will show us a lot.

• similarly useful on the core / basic curricula: what's IN it; what they are asked to DO; how they receive it.  Like the cheater sites, SparkNotes has a great sense of what English and History classes are demanding; where and how it's hard and what students do to workaround.  It has a scary 'wholesome' quality: playful, 'good-student-ly,' want to do well—but why the hell would you READ the novel?  Using them, you'd easily pass any usual test in an underfunded, stressed, fractured normal high school.  With a small measure of BS ability, you'd ace it.

• they get it wrong, but not TOO wrong.  The interpretations, character sketches, plot structures are often crashingly 'off.'  So are the pieces of historical context.  It's 50's era New Criticism and symbol-chasing. But a student using it would look totally ordinary.  I don't think I could tell if they 'really read it.'

• it's brilliant marketing--and web marketing-driven.  The 'free' material generates a marketing and data goldmine.  Perfect market segment defined and motivated.

• that Metro and 'get into college' (and Phoenix) are present makes separating the marketing aspect and the educational virtually impossible.  School, simply, is a market.

A Different Take on Critical Pedagogy - From a Friend at another university: his critical pedagogy course in Graduate School

I realized I don't have the full syllabus, but I do have this blurb taken from the syllabus of this course:

EDLPS 5XX: Critical Pedagogy: A History of an Idea, 1970- Present
Instructor: XXXXXXXXXXXX
Monday: 4:30-6:50


The Library of Congress lists 342 books under the subject heading “critical pedagogy.”

A JSTOR search reveals 1,278 articles using the term “critical pedagogy.’

Critical pedagogy is ubiquitous.

But what is it?

Critical pedagogy has emerged as one of the field’s most frequently used and most contested terms. Is it a social theory or is it a teaching method? Is it a project specific to a particular intellectual and political tradition or is the term more elastic, useful in describing a range of progressive approaches to thinking about and ‘doing’ education?

This course is intended to offer some historical perspective on critical pedagogy. We will read, write about, and discuss some of the formative texts and arguments about critical pedagogy over the past 40 years, from the publication of Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970 up through feminist and critical race critiques that are resounding today.

Course conversations should deepen our understanding of the relationship between school and society and our thinking about teaching and learning. The course should also help orient us to major social theory debates in the field and improve our ability to read and unpack theoretical texts that continue to shape educational research and practice.

Readings will include three books and several essays: Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Henry Giroux’s Theory and Resistance in Education: An Education for the Opposition (1983), Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools (2008), and essays from scholars such as Kathleen Weiler, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jennifer Gore, Carmen Luke, Patti Lather, C. Alejandra Elenes, Gloria Ladson-Billings, William Tate, Zeus Leonardo, Ricky Lee Allen, Peter McLaren and others.

To me, beginning a course with questions seems like a very worthwhile ideal - we should have a purpose and intention about what it is we would like to be doing in pedagogical spaces. Here, however, we don't see the same kinds of questions being posed that have arisen in every course on critical pedagogy (this is now my fourth) that I've been in. That is, very few of us come to critical pedagogy with questions about the links between school and society or even the relationship between teaching and learning. Perhaps better put, these are such broad categories, someone who says they are interested in school and society is either referencing Dewey or is saying something akin to "I'm pro-education." Critical pedagogy attracts those who already see themselves as engaged in political work, who see schools as sites of reproduction for an oppressive society, and who retain their hope that education as the practice of freedom is possible if not in schools, but in classrooms (hooks, 1994).

So then, I'm wondering about this blurb on the course and who it was intended to attract. The course ran in the college of education, and was taught in the educational leadership and policy department of that college. Those who do not come to this course with a background in schools of education would be aided here by knowing that Curriculum and Instruction is often seen as more teaching-focused, than the more policy oriented Educational leadership departments. While there is great overlap, there is also often a very different kind of focus in terms of the purposes for a course and the kinds of scholarship the two departments seek to produce. My hunch here is that this course was not actually about "how to do" critical pedagogy, but more about what critical pedagogy means and has meant in the research and writing on critical teaching over the past 40 years.

But here I have to pause, and think of one of my favorite educational writers Gloria Ladson-Billings. She has a wonderful chapter titled "Yes, But How Do We Do It?" where she writes about her experience with pre-service teachers learning about culturally relevant pedagogy. She tells her students plainly that she cannot tell them "how" to do it, because then they'd just go do it, without thinking about who was in the space, what needs were present in that unique pedagogical space, and what they as the instructor brought with them (as we all do, teachers and students alike) into the classroom. Conversations about whether or not one is doing critical pedagogy seem far less important to me now than they did just three years ago when I was constantly asking myself if what I was doing in my classroom was properly Frierean.

Ladson-Billings ends her chapter by distinguishing between doing and being in classrooms. I believe her advise to her undergraduate pre-service teachers is well worth taking here as we continue our work to make sense of critical pedagogy and define for ourselves what our commitments to such a pedagogy and politics mean for our work in classrooms. She tells them that she is far less concerned with what they do in their classrooms, but rather she's worried about who it is they will be. So, when I use this article in my classroom, I always ask my students to try something - instead of asking "what will I do in class" ask "who will I be?" It is this move that brings the concept of praxis to its most profound application in thinking about pedagogy. We must stop asking if we are doing critical pedagogy, and ask instead if we are being critical pedagogues.

Love and Literature in Borges' Essay "Blindness"

Jorge Luis Borges' essay/lecture "Blindness" is an atypical piece of pedagogical material, but it nonetheless feels to me like the standard by which I mean to measure my own attempts at teaching literature. This is the essay that contains the famous, overused quote "I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library," sometimes misquoted as "I have always imagined paradise as a kind of library." The misquotation is significant, because the change the change in tense vastly changes the sense of chagrin which Borges engineered into it. This is a wistful text, a meditation on love, loss and cosmic irony. In the course of the piece, Borges teaches the reader/listener about an array of topics, but, like much of his work, the gentle kind of pedagogy catches the reader unawares - we learn an incredible amount both about a life and about literature while he charms and amuses us.

Borges creates a smooth and seamless reading/listening experience from multiple, unexpected sources, weaving together poetry from all over the world, historical anecdotes and examples from his own work as a teacher. Not only does he develop with the reader a coming to terms with tragedy and a reflection on the nature of disability, but this text accomplishes a metaphysical and epistemological intervention - it reveals in literature something very different from the nature that is typically ascribed to it in the academic setting. Borges shows us the literary as an expression of the human that is beyond a single sensory experience. He complicates the relationship of the written word to sight and calls into question the primacy of the written text, as well as the fetishism for "appearances": the tangible shape that the ideas of literature take as text on a page. This overture is reinforced by his relationship to this text and others that he produced after the onset of his blindness (Are these examples of writing, after all? Does the fact that they were dictated change their status as the written word? Or what about the idea that they were, or that they are meant to be, read aloud as a lecture?). All of these ideas are explored in an entertaining and emotional way that stirs a deeper, almost spiritual sensibility, just as much as it informs the intellect. Thus, it is not so strange that we often find Borges talking about literature, and the teaching of literature, in terms of love.

So the reader/listener (or at least this reader/listener) leaves the text having absorbed two valuable teachings:
1) An idea of love as a critical concept of the lifelong process of learning. Love that is not simple, adoring or adulatory, but committed, tumultuous and complex, like love in all honest relationships.

2) Literature not as high art or a record of elite culture, but as a living body of voices calling out with this kind of love. As Borges describes it:
"I too, if I may mention myself; have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny- that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that in the long run, all of it would be converted to words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."

I wish I could have provided a .pdf of the entire text, but partial rendering of the text is available here through google books.

'Acts of love,' revolution and what I'm going to do on Tuesday morning

Is Freire's work 'coherent'?  Yes, it is.

Is his project focused on critique of, and overthrow of Capitalism?  Yes, it is.

Can one remain a 'bourgeois subject' and practice Pedagogy of the Oppressed?  uh...probably not—though Freire never uses the familiar Marxist terms, preferring oppressor and oppressed. Here the issues clustered around 'acts of love,' true solidarity, ' 'being and having,' necrophilia, egoism, 'humanist generosity' and the quest for human completion come into play.  I really like my Beethoven, and don't intend to change (that). Liberation is a painful childbirth.

Cool.  Now what do we do on Tuesday morning--assuming we will not be out building the revolution (doing, maybe, what's going on in Cairo)?  In short: can some essence of the Freirean project be saved / extracted to use as a way to 'humanize' instruction in settings where the institutional or disciplinary constraints define what we do as anything but land reform, or overthrow of Capitalism? Where's the Hope? (part is in Pedagogy of hope) I'm liking 'co-intentional pedagogy' (69)

 'Teachers and students co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coning to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge.'

But I'm trying (thanks bell hooks) to be self aware enough to know that his scary construction of the basic goal of all pedagogy is going to make me really, really anxious to find a way to rationalize what I'm doing as 'liberation.'

Blog Post #1: Getting really, really concrete: pieces of pedagogy

FIND a 'piece of pedagogy' (your call as to what, but perhaps things like a syllabus (or part of one), an assignment, a department's website presentation of itself, a textbook (part), or something that shapes pedagogy—like institutional rules-and-regulations).  We're wearing our critical anthropologist's hats (pith helmets).  In Freire's terms, we're doing 'ethno-science': trying to gather and explain the stuff out of which a 'culture' builds its teaching practices—and from that, to understand something of the culture.

Good stuff.  Bad stuff.  Ordinary stuff.  But something from which we can all see how we can better position our own practices.

Put it up and 'read' it.

Welcome!

Welcome to 'Critical Pedagogy and the New Humanities.'   This blog was created for us, by me, Robin Brown, as part of the graduate seminar Cl-CSDS 8910 at the University of Minnesota this spring, as a space to collaborate and create knowledge together.

Each week, we'll determine exactly when required posts and comments are due, and what topics we're engaging. You are also welcome and encouraged -- both you in the class, and you who may have stumbled upon this blog from elsewhere -- to post or comment at any time. We simply ask that everyone, students and non-students alike, follow the four rules for cooperative conversation set down by the linguist H. Paul Grice...

1) QUALITY. You are free to express any viewpoint on any issue, but you must back any statement you make with sufficient evidence. This will often mean citing material: articles, websites, books, or other relevant sources.

2) QUANTITY. Express your viewpoints thoroughly, with good argument and evidence; at the same time, avoid writing unnecessarily long or repetitive posts.

3) RELATION. Keep your posts and comments relevant. Read other people's posts -- including our posting assignments -- before you write posts or comments, and we'll keep a much more coherent conversation going.

4) MANNER. Write as clearly as possible. The point is to make yourself clear to the rest of us, and to convince of the truth of your arguments.

...as well as one fifth rule of our own:

5) RESPECT. Please respect all participants in the discussion at all times -- even (or perhaps especially) when you must respectfully disagree. The issues around what and how we teach are highly charged on many levels, but no flame wars, please!

And as always, if you have any trouble posting, or understanding posting assignments, or in any other way, feel free to contact me.