As many of you know, I missed class this past Thursday and Friday to go to the annual Peace and Justice Studies Association meeting, which was being held at Tufts.  The whole conference was really great and picked up on so many themes that we’ve been discussing in all three classes.  In particular, a session called “Living Our Way Into the Answers: A Workshop on Transformative Pedagogy” really tied in to what we’ve been doing in class.  The workshop was really interesting because out of the 30 or so participants, it ended up being split relatively evenly between students and professors.  So, while much of the conversation about what transformative pedagogy means for students echoes the things we’ve been talking about amongst ourselves, hearing the teacher-perspective was really fascinating.  Beyond the obvious conversation about how to introduce radical pedagogy in a system obsessed with learning objectives and outcomes was the emotional drainage many professors felt – like they just didn’t have the energy to be “transformative” anymore.  This is something I haven’t really thought of in terms of my own professors or my friends who aspire to be transformative teachers one day.  I also talked about our 360, and got a lot of questions from interested professors about what it’s been like.

BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

Department of Sociology

Announces the Upcoming Public Lecture by

 WENDY GRISWOLD

Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities

Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University

The Hand and the Garden: Reading, Connection, and the Five Dimensions of Media Practice

"Have you ever wondered about the impact of the internet on the reading habits of young people?"

Educators and parents worry that reading is faltering among youth, losing the competition with social media, texting, and online entertainment. Past research suggested a “glamour versus honor” thesis. Now research on a new generation (in media terms) finds that although the spatial and temporal organization of connectivity has changed radically, the cultural separation of reading from being online persists. Understanding media practices requires a five-dimensional conception that incorporates space, time, materiality, social honor, and the imagined future.

 Thursday, October 25 @ 7:30 p.m., Dalton 300

Open to the Public

For two days now, I have been thinking about the term, "eduactional gap" mentioned in Girl Time. I think it is a more accurate term than the acheivement gap. I have always disliked this term because it implies that this gap, which never seems to closes, is the fault of the students who are "low-acheiving." It implies, much like in Haney with the female offenders, that it is the responsibility of the student to make up the difference. I used to be all for individualism, which Meiners mentions, but now I see how our society's mindset on individualism can obscure reality and make people believe that the conditions of their lives, good or bad, are a result of their own actions...or lack of action. When, in fact, systems of oppression play a huge, and yet distant, factor in everyone's lives whether to an advantage or disadvantage. I 100% agree that the gap in our education is actually a collection of overdue debts, particularly to inner-city youth. However, as I write this, I am not sure about what exactly is owed us--yep, that includes me--to succeed. What kind of reformation needs to happen? And is it the responsibility of the students who are negatively impacted by the "gap" to make change? This debt that we speak of is more than money, it is SO big--it's like asking to undo the history of racism! This seems highly impossible even though I really want to be optimistic.

Wanting to produce a paper multimodal, I turned to our syllabus for inspiration. Taking elements from the work that we did with scrapbooks, as well as the "roaming ethnographers" exercise, I have come up with this project. To view all of my posts that relate to this paper, click on the EDUC255 hashtag. (You should see it on the first post!)

My intention with this project was to challenge the method in which academic papers were presented. My approach placed more emphasis on the process of thinking through my ideas and thus, I have intentionally refrained from constructing any sort of "academic claim". Further, in the same vein as the "roaming ethnographer" exercise, I posted throughout the weekend as new thoughts came to me. Armed with my iPad, I captured and collected what I call "digital ephemera" -- items that I found floating around in cyberspace/digital representations of "meatspace" objects, that pertained to my key terms: "online identities", "privacy" (or lack thereof), Clark's term "intrusion", "workplace", "Facebook", "professional", and "employment". Using Tumblr seemed the obvious way to go for me; I regarded it as somewhat of an online scrapbook. 

Henry Takes a Walk: A Thoreauvian Storybook
 
Written by: Emma Thorp
Illustrated by: Sara Gladwin
 
Henry began to walk at the top of the long hill above the pond. Directions and destinations were not on his mind. He decided to see where this grassy slope would lead.
 
Henry wandered along side the pond’s banks, wondering where the ripples came from below the surface.
 
Several flat, gray paths lead him to a white house hidden among a green jungle. Instead of going through the front door, he followed a steep slope down to a small, muddy bank by a trickling creek.
 

Someone was leaning over the creek, watching the water skim over the slippery pebbles
Henry knelt down beside Someone, as they stared at the water’s clear surface. They wondered where it came from, and where it was in such a rush to get going.

 

I usually visit my sit spot in the mornings.  I only lasted a little while today...I came out of the woods and wrote! a poem?? I haven’t written a poem since the glory days of acrostics in elementary school. weird.  All this talk about words must be rubbing off on me.

That year,
when I leaned against your trunk
and felt your rough bark in my back

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7gV5C5mB7A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG3ieifrqyQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw9DADUh490

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBg7AqXRwqg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR2wfLyT-b0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GZZ13rJsus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb1ZvUDvLDY

This is my high school. To give you a picture of how many kids were housed in this school here is following statistic: My graduating class was over 500 students. This does not include students who didn't quite make the cut and all the rest of the school population. 

Visiting hours in prison. 

As I'm reading pages 26-27 in Brothers and Keepers, I could not help it but to pause and write. The part where he begins by writing, "The problem was that in order to be the person I thought I wanted to be, I believed I had to seal myself off from you, construct a wall between us" (26). This line really struck me. Although I am still trying to tie this theme/topic to silence, I'd like to reflect a bit on what he continues to say as he writes. 

I shouldn't be here.

Yet I am.

Why does it feel so wrong?

Darkness.

And emptiness.

It's eerie. And cold.

Bitterly cold.

But it's only October--

what has happened

to the climate?

Last year--the same;

short sleeves the year before.

Lacking consistency.

It's so quiet. Too quiet.

Why is there no motion,

no activity,

no sign of life?

No lonely bird chirp,

no car screech,

nothing.

The first and second nature,

silent.

It's like the Earth

stood still.

~~~

I chose to write this post in verse because I thought it would capture the "wildness" of my train-of-thought writing most accurately.

Original Paragraph (from "Wandering & Wondering," Section IV): I've been thinking about Yeat's poem, Adam's Curse. Just those few lines - about our labor to be beautiful, the construction of beauty. More specifically, I'm thinking about the post-Garden of Eden collapse, of how, in Genesis, all of Creation becomes wild, is infected with sin. It's uncontrolled, it's imperfect and strange. And the human relationship with nature is uncertain, there is a divide. Thrown out of the Garden, we must work the land in order to produce anything beautiful. We must re-define beauty for ourselves - we must re-create whatever we think beauty should be.

Notes/analysis: Since the paper was called “Wandering and Wondering,” I tried to enact those things in my style of writing – not landing on any one point of view or type of writing, not drawing definite conclusions, but leaving room for changes. With this being a series of observations – not personal reflection – I lost a directed commitment to one view over another. So now I’m struggling with deciding on the ‘genre’ for this piece/paragraph. I think it is more tragic than comedic – with the “we” positioned as a kind of hero, a portion of the “Created” that is actively working against “division.”