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Though I feel this chapter from Delpit was extremely impactful as far as what a “warm demander” looks like and acts like, the beginning of this chapter really captivated me. Delpit talks about how important teachers are for students, but makes a distinction between teachers who teach at students from “more privileged backgrounds” vs students “who are not a part of the mainstream” (72).  This distinction is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot as a first generation college student.

For me, one of the hardest things about coming to college was the level of academic rigor that was demanded of me. Mostly it was difficult to see myself struggling in these classes (that I had never experienced in the poorly funded high school that I came from) and see students who had been in private schools all their life not struggle. There was a difference and I think Delpit point it out. Both in her story about her daughter’s experience playing softball and her reframing of Gloria Ladson-Bilings words, Delpit says that in comparison to these privileged kids who can “manage to perform well in school in spite of poor teachers”, low income and culturally diverse students “depend upon schools to teach them whatever they need to know to be successful.

Throughout most of my educational experience, going outside has been seen as a luxury, a reward or fun place to hold class but one that is rarely used, because it's thought of as distracting.  On the few occasions that I have had class outside, we were supposed to act exactly as we did inside, not engaging with the environment around us and forced to ignore all "distractions" from that environment.  We never truly engaged with the place in which we were learning, because learning was seen as only the content of the class itself, not the place in which we were having it.

--"what are some ways we might think about outdoor spaces as sites of learning/education?"--here are a few images from an "outdoor classroom" that David just told me about; I've been @ BMC for over thirty years, and had never seen this space. What-and-how might we learn here?

By 5 p.m. on Sunday, post as a comment here your reflections on one of the central questions raised by our reading of Coetzee's novella, The Lives of Animals: what does it tell us about the possibility that vegetarians and meat-eaters (or anyone w/ decidedly opposed views) can actually enter into productive dialogue?  Might some divisions be so deep that common academic training, common culture, or even familial ties can not bridge the gap? (Think of this as a warming-up for your next paper, due next weekend: “how much latitude can we allow”? At what point are we "allowed" to "call the question," and refuse further conversation?)

in our lit classroom, during the past two sessions--it left me breathless today (and I loved it!). Wanting, like Jessica, to use this spillover place that is Serendip, which gives us room for what we don't have "in-class" time for, I want to follow-up on some of the distinctions Simona's been making about 'real facts' and 'subjective stories,'
starting with some short readings: a piece in Geology, 2014 about The science of subjectivity; and three talks, delivered in a faculty discussion group 10 years ago--one by Arlo Weil, another by David, another by me...
and then there's this March 31st NYTimes piece about how College Classes Use Arts to Brace for Climate Change...

To be continued (I hope!)

We didn't have quite enough time for me to bring this up in class, but I'm really interested to know what you guys think of the following situation...

Most schools if not all tell teach their students to stand and walk in perfect lines, to sit straight in their desks, to put their hands behind their backs, to not speak unless given permission. Authoritive and controlling we apppear to children when shouldn't we be embracing their innocense and let their energy flow not strain?

Teachers complain to parents about their kids having too much energy, but why do schools make it seem like such a bad thing? 

Has anyone else thought about this?

To discuss:  "full deployment of 160 'eye-in-the-sky' cameras, and other
high-tech equipment that remotely monitors whole swaths of the city...
'It's like Big Brother, but I just don't care.... If they don't get jobs, things will stay the same'"....
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/new_jersey/Crime_plummets_in_Camden_could_a_city_recovery_be_underway.html

This looks like remarkable work-- http://prisonphotography.org/2014/03/05/prisoners-39-panel-allegorical-mural-made-from-bedsheets-hair-gel-and-stacks-of-newspapers/ --and it was on display @ The Church Studios, in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia.

I just came across a very powerful illustration of the central idea of our course: that all representations are limited. This article in today's edition of The Guardian, on Why Google Maps gets Africa wrong, tells the interesting story of the limitations of maps. There are strong eco- and econ-threads in all of this, from the early mapmakers who would "fill their gaps" with "elephants for want of towns," through the Berlin Conference, where "Europe's colonial powers coloured in their territories with their imperial hue-of-choice" (we saw this represented in Shonibare's "Scramble for Africa")--

--through today's Google maps, "driven by commercial multinational profitability" and "the prospects of advertising revenue." Google maps are "produced on the west coast of America," which "necessarily affects how they are made." Imagine, instead, that "all of Google's data and programming ability was suddenly in the hands of a Namibian agriculturalist, a Sahelian nomad or a Senegalese fisherwoman – the maps they would conjure up would be completely different. They might well prioritise soil types over Starbucks, wells over Walmarts and the state of land degradation over panoramic street views of American towns."

Imagine.

I don’t feel I can write about my praxis in this forum. Even without naming students or sharing identifying information, the dialogue we have in our focus groups is so personal and vulnerable making that I don’t want to either expose people by reflecting on moments in the groups or make them personally uncomfortable when seeing the way I’ve reflected specifically on a moment in the work (by telling a vignette).

In spite of avoiding or rejecting the idea of writing a vignette on this Praxis, I will reflect on an important moment of connection I had with theory and experience within the Praxis. In our group on Sunday, I used educational theory to help reflect with our participants on the meta-processes happening in the sharing they were doing. After a moment of tension, we reflected together on Ellsworth’s idea that true dialogue is impossible and acknowledged that we were all coming into the room with different assumptions about each other’s identities. We also acknowledged the immense listening and openness required to understand – even partially – the many layers of identity we all came with. At the tea for the Identity Matters 360º yesterday, one of the professors mentioned that she doesn’t see a person as a single identity or whole being, but instead as many layers and intersections. I definitely see this play out in all of the focus groups we’ve held, and I appreciate the way it complexifies our understandings of topics, events, and each other.