Blogs

Education 311: Field Work Seminar

Spring 2013

Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College

Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program

Office: Bettws-Y-Coed 303 (BMC)

Meetings by appointment

Phone: 610-526-5214 (office), 215-206-6832 (cell)

jccohen@brynmawr.edu

Course Overview

This is the culminating seminar for students completing the Minor at Bryn Mawr or Haverford Colleges, and is open only to students completing the minor.  Drawing on the diverse contexts in which participants complete their fieldwork, this seminar will explore how images and issues of practice emerging from students’ fieldwork inform and are informed by cross-cutting issues in the field of education. 

This put me in mind of what Prof. Crawford told us about the
effect of the fault line on the building of cities:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/the-fall-lines-fault/

Ladies and Lying: Some Questions about Honor

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.  The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us.  We therefore have a primary obligation to each other; not to undermine each others’ sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.  Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience.  Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.”

--Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”, p. 190

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViZBwbzOcC8

What do you wish you/we could have talked about with the women at the jail?

I wish we could have talked about the tension of Bryn Mawr students being able to leave at the end of the day, or the broad topic of power dynamics between us.

I wish I could’ve known why the women wanted copies of Zehr’s book on the children of incarcerated people.  How could they actively choose to step face to face with such a poignant reminder of their failures and losses?

I wish we could have asked – and they could have told me – about the details of their lives.

Also, I wish we could have reflected together on what we learned by making art: What we learned about being creative/having agency within institutional structures; about finding our niches; about working collaboratively.

What did the virtual tour of BMC really make you feel?  I noticed you became very quiet and reserved. – to (a particular woman)

What did you expect from this class prior to starting it? – whole class

I wish I was able to ask about religion and its role in the women’s lives while incarcerated.  I also wish I was brave enough to share experiences I had in common and to admit some of my own faults to make the conversation more equal.  And why didn’t I just ask how they felt about us coming in and how they saw our class, outside of an escape from the monotony of the jail’s daily routine.

hey everyone- this is rather late posting but if anyone has been still lurking around serendip over winter break, here is a link to my soundcloud account, which I uploaded all the recordings I had taken over the semester. There are some you haven't heard, so if you had liked the sound recordings you should check them out!

https://soundcloud.com/saragladwin

Sat down by the cookstove
in a dirt-old house
on a bump on the lip
of a moraine.
Wind, winter, ocean cloistered sandbar.
Shut inside by cold fat sticky rain.

Pondering the knot upon 
               my jawbone.
Sorting stuff I think 
I own. 
Mapping out a fortnight on a train.

A loan, alone, a rolling stone.
Resolve, evolve, remove, escape........remain.
                   Plenilunar overdriven brain.

            “I cannot think of a more authentic form of representation of [something] than its beginnings”. I’m surprised at how abrasive I find my own words, barely written more than a couple months ago at the beginning of my first semester at Bryn Mawr. My old window of perspective, which I now find rather limiting, has expanded to allow me much more room to see the different nuances in my environment, and has therefore helped me reorient myself as a part of it. I used to be enamored with the past, convinced that it could foreground significantly more about an individual or place than the present could. However, after reading works such as Terry Tempest Williams’, An Unspoken Hunger, and J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, I’ve learned that while our history is a necessary reminder of how everything is connected, it sets a very narrow frame for the present. The past does not, and should not, define who we are. While our history is, in a sense, the foundation to the “architecture of the soul”, it does not determine the development of values that we acquire from life experiences.