Respect and Movement: Notes Towards Day 7 (Tues, Jan. 31)

I. (2:25-2:30, Anne): coursekeeping
* names?
* reminder that we will gather tomorrow @ 2 PM in Thomas 104
we'll spend the first hour processing our experiences @ our field sites last week;
in preparation, please read all of one another's postings, incl those at sites other than your own
* bring a copy of your own first field posting to class (hard or electronic);
[if you couldn't go to your site, bring a copy of your most recent posting on reading]
* coupla reminders:
--great you used PSEUDONYMS for all ppl; need to do that places also!
--some of you forgot to make these postings PRIVATE
if you didn't do this, need to re-post it as private, then tell me to delete the first one;
you can't shift from public to private without leaving a trace--Angela, Aubry, Martina
--also need to tag it as Praxis posting--Una

II. (2:30-3:00) picking up today from your earlier/
Thursday night postings about how we talk together:
lot of appreciation for each other and this process,
plus a few suggestions for what we might continue to work on together

Jody--three of you wrote about "respect":
Sierra: “we all have different understandings of what respect is”….
Aubrey: …taking a moment to define what respect looks like to each of us, and how we can accommodate each person…
it would be good and interesting to hear some personal ways in which points can be made "respectfully."
Farida: we do not go beyond what we may be able to take in and process.

Anne--three of you wrote about "movement":
Dani: none of us were born knowing what we know now
Amanda: By working with the concepts presented instead of tieing them inextricably to who said them,
some of the pressure or anxiety about being defined/judged by what you say in class is released. It
also allows us to be in a mutable, flexible kind of learning environment where changing one mind is okay.
Matey: When we are having a conversation, regardless of topic, it's always important to own
your intent and your impact. When we say something offensive, taking the initiative to try and
understand where the misunderstanding is coming from is always important.

Work with these ideas some more....? Add/clarify/make concrete....?

III. (3:00-3:30) Kirk Branch exemplifies this sort of movement,
in the Introduction we looked @ last week:
p. 6: "Teaching in the jail, at that moment, lost its exotic appeal...
this was a crisis unlike any I ever faced in twelve years of teaching...
I was volunteering my time and expertise in the service of what? And more vitally, of whom?
What role did I hope [to] play...How did I know what my students needed?"

(Jody): where does he move to in Chapter 1,
"Educational Literacy Practices and the World in Which We Need to Live" ?
what are his claims? hard going/work together to break it down:

count off into 4 groups of 3 to discuss:
center of p. 21 through center of p. 22, from "I want teachers to recognize that the work they do..." to "held sway during the educational process."
pp. 29-30, from "Part of literacy's emotive power" to "We have to die to continue living."
bottom of p. 36 to top of p. 37, from "the formation of english studies" to "debased or threatening."
after break on p. 47 to middle of 48, from "Within pedagogic discourse" to Instructional Discourse/Regulative Discourse"

Once you've worked through the passage,
figure out how it to contributes to the
argument of the chapter as a whole.
(What is that argument?!?)

Return to large group:
what is Branch telling us in Chapter 1?
How are we taking it up?

IV. (3:30-3:45, Anne):
Let's reconsider Branch's his argument about the
conflicting roles of teachers from the pov of a student:
how are you complicit in this educational structure?
how are you resistant to this institution?
(Write for a 5 minutes about this.)

This exercise is  our bridge to Ernest Morrell's
chapter on “Critical Literacy as Care for the Self"--
not time to dig into, but gesture toward:
Morrell says that "critical literacy can be about repositioning oneself with oneself" (167),
a process in "excavating my own thoughts; often i do not know what I...have been thinking
until I see the words on page...writing becomes staring at mental activity" (169).
AND BUT ALSO! THAT!
"The writer...is..committed to...being lucidly conscious of involvement in the world...
under a moral imperative to disclose to the reader a reality in which...
a historically situated being...is committted to a quest for authrentic freedom" (176).
"It is through this writing for others...that we come to know and love ourselves...
committed writing becomes the care for the self in that it is a process that
allows the writers of committed texts to know and become thesmselves" (176).

We'll work with this some more on Wed & Thurs;
bring back that essay so you'll have it when we do.