The discussion we had in Tuesday really left me with more thinking about the question we are going to discuss this semester. Even from one reading about voice of students in educational research, Alison Cook-Sather studies it in so many different layers.  Surprisingly, each key word are intervened and connected through certain perspectives. The voice participated in the educational discussion might not present all the people present. Even though the voice participated might be heard, whether the advices brought by the voice can be enacted depends on who is in power. On the other hand, the interpretation of the voice totally depends on the listeners’ involvement in the conversation. Therefore, the process from the action of speaking to the final realization of the and actualization of the problem brought up by the voice is long and filled with uncertainties,

Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Position

As a non-native English speaker, I was stuck as the word pedagogy. Yes, I was stuck at the first line and doubted whether I should look the work up or just keep reading and hopefully get the sense of the meaning of the word as I read more. However, as I read more, more questions came into my mind.

In Ellsworth piece she writes "If an exact fit between message and understanding, conscious and unconscious, curriculum and interpretation, is impossible, then teaching, as it is conventionally understood, is impossible" (pg 15).  It is important that she used the word "teaching" instead of "learning".  I've come to learn that even if you have a bad teacher or a lesson plan that goes askew, every opportunity is a learning opportunity .  However, some methods of teaching are certainly more effective than others. Freire and Shor discuss "liberatory dialogue", which is something I would consider to be an essential aspect of most of my classes.  They discuss how traditionalists might think this method of teaching is bizarre, and I can admit, I probably would have felt that way in the past.  I used the think that the teacher was the most knowledgable person in the room, and that by having discussions with classmates, we were wasting time and losing knowledge.  I also thought about how if I were ever a teacher, teaching the same thing year after year would be mind-numbing.  Although repetitive curriculum may be a little boring for some teachers, I had never thought that each year the teacher has the possibility to relearn if they allow their students to discuss and hear new perspectives and ideas each year.  I know some of my friends and family members at home probably consider liberatory dialogue a little bizzare; sometimes they ask questions like "What are you learning from your major again? Why are you becoming certified to teach?

In Ellsworth's article, the networks of power in pedagogical relationships are compared to chocolate bands in a marble cake.  I found myself thinking about what exactly Ellsworth meant by power in her article and in this example.  Was she speaking of a Foucault-ian concept of discursive power within which pedagogy generated its own discussions of different enmeshed power relationships?  If so, then modes of address don't merely constitute these relationships but also the spaces in which and through which people communicate.  I think that the Internet, particularly chatrooms, are an interesting mode of address.  Even on this discussion board, I can never be quite certain about everyone's representations, and, though I'm writing for my fellow class participants, our pedagogical relationship is not exactly as deeply personal as Ellsworth describes it in her essay.  My mode of address may be specific to our class in this context, but I have to recognize that anyone with access to a computer can read my words.  I'm representing myself for a contact zone that is essentially constructed of the entire world.

In "What Is The 'Dialogical Method' of Teaching?", a lot fo interesting reasons for dialogical education being a good teaching style, most of which I agree with. But I really wanted to focus my post on specific lines and parts of the text. First I wanted to focus on Isa's point of "if public resources were transferred from the military to education to fund smaller classesm, that would make dialogue easier to have in school" (98). I am not sure if the  way I interpreted this line is the message Ira was trying to convey, but I completely agree with the fact that less money should be going to the military and more should be put in schools. As I mentioned in my earlier posts for Anne's class, a lot of public schools are extremely underfunded and are then expected to perform as well as any other elite school. Making it personal, my high school was one of the schools that was used as an "experiment" to prove that smaller schools will be more beneficial for students. The fact that my school was smaller did help A LOT with the learning experience, only problem was that my school was still underfunded which meant we did not have the adequate materials and resources we needed to excel - leading to the closing down of my school. If some of the funding for the military went into the education system, I believe there would be a huge improvement in schools.

"Professor contact is reserved for graduate students, or undergraduate majors, or honors classes, or for students at the most costly yuniversities, where money is invented in small classes for the elite." -Ira Shor, Pg. 98

Reading this quote for the first time gave me an inkling feeling that I myself, am a secret elitist. When I think about Bryn Mawr and the relationships I have with my professors, I feel incredibly priviliged and spoiled.A prime example of these relationships is this course. We are able to spend time with the same professors, who are also getting together themselved to improve our experience witht our classes.

Which comes to full circle when reading the Ellsworth piece and she speaks about addressing the classroom and the students. With the unique experience of the 360, we, as students, are able to shape how our own information is addressed because we are able to experience different classrooms together and are able to shape and form how we interact within the classrooms. I feel that, so far, we have been given the spce to adjust our classrooms and take advantage of the time we have together. We are able to share experiences in one classroom and bring them into the next. Since we are able to talk and work through our classes together, we are able to wrok on our final outcome together. Both as individuals, as a class and as peers. Bryn Mawr has a sense of elitism but we are (hopefully) going to use this (and the 360) to enhance our semester together.

One thing I've been thinking a lot about since our class discussion on Tuesday is "imagined communities," the term my partner and I were given. It comes from the Pratt reading and was coined by Benedict Anderson. He says most human communities are imagined in that we give them traits that they don't actually possess, such as a feeling of finiteness and closeness among members. Though I think it is possible for communities to exist that really do have these qualities, I agree that more commonly, members of communities pretend their communities are the way they want them to be, giving them a false image of togetherness that ends up creating boundaries and forms an "other" where one might not have existed. This often results in contact zones (another term from this reading that we addressed a lot in class).

On an unrelated note, I found the disussion in the Freire and Shor reading particularly interesting with respect to our discussion in Silence class on Tuesday as well as our first Voice class. In one section they discuss the pressure to add to classroom discussion or dialogue, and it makes me think of what Ann said and then revised about not contributing to class discussion being selfish. Ira and Paulo explain that "In dialogue, one has the right to be silent" and that dialogical teaching does not necessarily mean everyone has to speak. That said, everything spoken in this class setting does contribute to the dialogue and therefore to the learning that takes place

     First, I’d like to comment that A Pedagogy for Liberation is a fantastic title. This was the most striking quote in the piece for me: “liberatory learning involves desocialization.”

     As we enter these institutional spaces of learning, even as we acquire language, we start to realize all of the restrictive social and communicative rules we must learn to navigate in order to survive and “move through the system.” This socialization can completely disempower us – turn us into helpless cogs in a machine who do not think critically because we are seeing the world through the structure of how we’ve been socialized. Our roles, as friends, partners, students, workers, are flat and formed.

      Transcending that socialization is the challenge. How do you impart that crucial questioning in someone that can allow them to reject the restrictions and think more freely?

The discussion between Shor and Freire on dialogical education continually brought up questions still lingering from our partnered discussions in class yesterday about Cook-Sather’s article.  I am very interested in both how student voice can lead to participatory learning and how the classroom can become a setting for egalitarian dialogue.  However, in reading both articles my initial reaction was to think about how these ideas can be applied to early childhood education, which might make their implementation less straightforward.  Freire explains that “dialogue is a challenge to existing domination,” implying that the power imbalance between student and teacher can be broken down through dialogue-education.   He acknowledges that at all levels of learning there is an intellectual boundary between student and teacher, but doesn’t delve into the very real power imbalance that exists between very young children and adults.  Presumably teachers can still “relearn” material from five or six year old students, and dialogue is possible in primary school classrooms, but can young students truly have a voice in their education?  As much as I think that these concepts are important for all levels of education, I am having a hard time reconciling them with the incredibly imbalanced relationship between children and adults.  In many ways this power imbalance is inevitable, so how can real dialogue and participation exist within an inherently unequal framework?

"Juxtaposition... [is] an attempt to get viewers and readers to make associations across categorical, discursive, historical, and stylistic boundaries." – Elizabeth Ellsworth

My first reaction to reading Ellsworth was excitement. Here was someone looking at the very things I find most interesting – intersections within the classroom. When we spoke in groups yesterday, I found I was writing more questions about intersections than I was writing answers. The term I focused on was "contact zone," (from Pratt's piece) and when I first looked at it, Michaela and I really focused on the result of two cultures meeting. What happens when the dominating culture appropriates aspects of the subordinate culture? What happens when there is "forced culturalization" of the subordinate culture by the dominating one? Does one need permission to take up aspects of another culture – especially for purposes of art?