Walking the walk with you

2-1-13


In the effort to walk the walk, I'm blogging along with my students. This week my blogging is mostly inspired by your writing (and my own foibles). The process of doing this (not to surprisingly) felt useful and not like a time-suck as I'd feared before I began. Hopefully you find yourself wrapped up in the opportunity to reflect as well.

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Reading over the blogs I am really enjoying the variety of interpretations of the genre.  I am really enjoying the titles and various formats people are using. Some people are really well versed in imbedding text or using images and other content to build on their ideas (for example the horse jumping over a fence). These things are beyond me in terms of making it happen, but as a reader the seamless inclusion of multimedia text increases both the pleasure and often the effectiveness of communication. Most of my favorite blogs use this juxtaposition of text with images to make points and to get a laugh.

Dan said in his blog that students in this program not treated as having knowledge. This is a very fair critique and one I hope to address in this class. This results in a class in which the majority of the use of time is on you – your language will fill the space, your ideas, your prior knowledge, your understanding of the texts. The fact is you are experts – experts at being a student, and scholars of what it mans to be a teacher. Pay attention to how it feels, as a student, to be considered knowledgeable. Does it feel like more or less work? More or less rewarding? Or am I in fact dominating after all, not making space for the development of new knowledges. A number of you made reference to walking the walk, and I took notice. Your discussions lead me to realize, for example, that I need to write my own blog. As this short term progressive, we will see how successful I am in walking the talk of my own pedagogies.

I was very interested in Katie’s idea of considering the possibilities for encouraging students to imagine the administration as an audience for their work. I am very excited about this idea – it is very radical! I’m wondering about the considerations teachers must make if they wish to be critical, to teach their students to be critics of power and to be activists themselves. What if the students all did really decide to rise up in some way – and you were the instigator? This is exciting and something to really ponder.

I found an article about this possibility, Developing an Activist Writing Program: Possibilities and Challenges

I also noticed that a lot of you liked and agreed with the more free-choice approach to choosing a topic. Yet a lot of you struggled with being given this choice yourself. Open ended assignments can produce anxiety (which can certainly be complicated by unclear instructions – but in a way open ended assignments are deliberately unclear). If you think about how this assignment felt to you, how can you use that feeling to improve your development of similar assignments? Another take on this question of choosing your own topic comes from my days of teaching at an Alternative School. Many of my students tole me they didn’t want to give me what they cared about. Why don’t you write about skateboarding I’d say. Because it’s not FOR you they’d say. They didn’t want what they loved to be colonized by the teacher, though they didn’t use this language. They would rather write about what I wanted to read. I saw this most vividly with a student who kept a notebook with him always and wrote poetry and fiction, for his own purposes but would never let me see it. It was gang-related writing – but not what one might think. It was about family, mentorship, support, safety, love etc. (He did let me see it once but not even hold it – not read whole pieces – certainly not grade it) It made me think of Elizabeth Ellsworth's Why doesn't this feel empowering? 

Along these lines, what are the risks of inviting out-of-school genre’s into the classroom (hip hop?). What does it mean to teach students through hip hop vs having them teach each other AND the teacher. I think of the times I’ve tried to teach using rap – always a HUGE flop. Even though I am a consumer of rap I am not truly “of” rap is an appropriation – if perhaps a less violent one. But while I can consume it I cannot truly teach it.