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Miscellaneous Rants

DWIAWVSSBP#

[This piece was originally posted at nicenet.org as part of my participation in the NWP Electronic Writing Marathon.] FROM: Karen McComas   (09/04/04) SUBJECT: DWIAWVSSBP So I know the assignment was to pull something out of the article and respond to it but I want to pull something out of what Sondra said and respond to that instead.  Sondra wrote: I want stories. In my posting for the assignment I wrote about how I was finding all these articles online about how well our schools were doing which is complete and utter bulls*%t.  I sensed, as I was searching, that these contrived and artificial reports were hiding something and in fact they are hiding the stories and my guess is that the stories are hidden for a couple of reasons.  First, the Decider of What Information About WV Schools Should Be Publicized (DWIAWVSSBP) thinks that the stories we have aren't showing what needs to be shown.  That is, the DWIAWVSSBP has decided that the truth, the overwhelming truth for the majority of WV classroom teachers, cannot be made public because of any number of reasons (we all know what they are, top of the list probably includes something about money though).  Second, the DWIAWVSSBP fails to recognize the immense value of the stories whether or not they are considered to be positive and negative.  Bottom line is that until someone realizes that we must tell the real stories, the stories of the majority, then we'll never really know how the system works or doesn't work.  And without knowing what those stories can tell us, the system can never really be fixed.

Posted by Karen McComas on 9/6/04; 9:36:16 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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Freedom and Authority#

I wanted to write yesterday morning, and couldn't access my site so I let the time slip by...waiting, waiting, and then all of a sudden the day was over.  At a meeting yesterday, I struggled to verbalize how using social action principles in a writing project summer institute might look.  On one level, I know that what I've been reading is connected to this, but find that my own understanding of the social action principles and transformative education are still forming...and that was apparent in my awkward attempt to explain.  I have a vague sense of my own fears hindering my full understanding...my own fears of giving up control...of being the authority but not the authoritarian...of being directive of the process only and not directive of the students.  Freire says: Freedom needs authority to become free...authority...has its foundation in the freedom of others, and if the authority denies this fredom and cuts off this relationship, this founding relationship, with freedom, I think that it is no longer authority but has become authoritarianism. This is a very, very fine line to walk...and embedded in this process, that is, the process of maintaining authority without becoming an authoritarian, is truth.  That is, truth from me to my students about what I am trying to do in the classroom...the truth of why we do what we do, why it is important (at least to me) that we do what we do...without truth, I'm only being manipulative which Freire describes as "cajoling students with walks through flowery roads."  Pretty damning statement, and yes, I've been guilty of doing just that.  But I digress instead of pressing on to attempt to coalesce the notions of social action and transforming education.  At the foundation of both of these notions is a belief in personal empowerment and personal responsibility.  In a way, social action is more about process and transforming education is about the outcome of social action.  That is to say that by using the principles of social action, education can be transforming.  Shrouding this whole idea is the confines of the educational institution--context, grading, curricula--and this then presents the complications of providing a transformative education.  The difficulties we face with regard to the Summer Institute are no different from those I face in my own classroom.  The Summer Institute has restrictions imposed by both the institution granting the academic credit and the NWP with their own set of requirements.  What we learn from one (the classroom or Summer Institute) we can use with the other and vice versa.

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/7/02; 9:54:06 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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On Being Directive#

Still hanging in there with Freire and Shor (Pedagogy for Liberation) and I read an interesting segment last night dealing with the teacher's responsibility.  To preface this section, earlier in the text (p. 33), Paulo said: Liberatory education is fundamentally a situation where the teacher and the students both have to be learners, both have to be cognitive subjects. In this later section (subtitled "Teacher-Talk versus Dialogue, Domination versus Illumination") Paul resurfaces the idea that transformation never occurs when one is passive so the teacher must strive to make the students active participants in their learning.  He maintains that as political activists (which he believes teachers to be) we also have a responsibility to live our philosophy.  He says, "I cannot proclaim my liberating dream and in the next day, in behalf of rigor, be authoritarian in my relationship with the students."  On the other hand, even with a liberating dream, we have to be "radically democratic and responsible and directive."  This stopped me dead in my tracks...how was he using these terms authoritarian and directive?  To me, at that point (I was merely walking on the words) it did not seem possible that a liberating teacher could be directive.  Main Entry: auáthoráiátaráiáan Pronunciation: <TT>o-"thŠr-&-'ter-E-&n, &-, -"thor-</TT> Function: adjective Date: 1879 1 : of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority <had authoritarian parents> 2 : of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people Main Entry: 1diárecátive Pronunciation: <TT>d&-'rek-tiv, dI-</TT> Function: adjective Date: 15th century 1 : serving or intended to guide, govern, or influence 2 : serving to point direction; specifically : DIRECTIONAL 1b 3 : of or relating to psychotherapy or counseling in which the counselor introduces information, content, or attitudes not previously expressed by the client  Now, at this point my understanding of the terms begins to shift..."directive" is not the word I thought it was.  In fact, it's a much milder term than I had in mind.  Then I read on and made a fantastic discovery: On the other hand, I cannot be authoritarian.  I have to be radically democratic and responsible and directive.  Not directive of the students, but directive of the process, in which the students are with me.  As director of the process, the liberating teacher is not doing something to the students but with the students. I always have a lot of love for someone who talks about process.  This whole discussion begins to illuminate for me the ways that one can teach for liberation within the institutional demands and requirements that often seem to be at odds with the whole notion of freedom (Freire, in an earlier part of the book, does address the whole idea that teaching for liberation is not exactly what most schools want as that undermines their stature and political presence...but that might be another post for another day).

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/5/02; 9:03:14 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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Dr. Evil#

A lightweight posting today...mostly because I spent last evening visiting my sister at the hospital and didn't get much reading done.  Of interest and relevance (and I have a friend that tells me everything is always relevant..."everything is everything" she says) was my conversation with my niece.  She's finishing her sophomore year, majoring in French and Math, and last semester got her first B in a college class.  It wasn't a class one would consider hard, particularly for her.  We chatted about the class and here's where I discovered. Dr. Evil (as she calls him) had a different teaching style than she was used to.  He had the students reading primary documents (in old English!) and his class periods were interactive lectures.  My niece admitted this was a style she was not used to and through our conversation I began to sense that she resisted this style (here's the relevance) because it required a transformation on her part, one she wasn't ready to make.  I shared with her the essence of what I wrote yesterday and some of what I've been reading, talking in particular about my epiphany of yesterday that one of my classes wasn't fully ready for transformation at this time, in this place, or in the ways I was trying to facilitate this transformation.  As we talked about some of the reasons Dr. Evil might have approach teaching in the way he does, she realized that near the end of the semester she had begun to adjust to this new way of teaching, that is, to a way of teaching that required her to actively participate in ways she was unaccustomed to.  Her description illuminated for me how one student became ready as a result of the experience, the opportunity.  Now, the question that remains is:  How long do I wait, should I wait, before adjusting my teaching style to fit the situation?  That is, when is reverting back to more traditional information delivery systems giving up and when is it acknowledging the right pedagogy for the situation?

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/4/02; 9:14:44 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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Walking on Words#

More from A Pedagogy for Liberation (Paulo Freire and Ira Shor) today.  Freire says: ...reading is not just to walk on the words, and it is not flying over the words either.  Reading is re-writing what we are reading.  Reading is to discover the connections between the text and the context of the text, and also how to connect the text/context with my context, the context of the reader... When did I learn, and how did I learn, to do this?  As a student, I remember flying over the words (I had precious little time to even walk on them) and rarely did I sense any connection between me and the words themselves.  I've always loved books, but in my younger days, my favorite books were fiction and my least favorite were text books from my classes.  It was the latter, the textbooks, that had me flying over the words.  But, even with the fiction, I walked on the words...I wasn't in love with words but in love with the stories.  Over time I've come to appreciate the words themselves...finding here and there phrases which take my breath away, independent of the story.  As for textbooks, or academic writings, there are some that compel me to fly and some that compel me to re-write what I'm reading...and what I want to discover is the nature of those readings that compel me to re-write, to make those connections between the text and the context of the text and then the connection of those to my context. This book is a good example of one that compels me to re-write (see, I'm doing it right here!).  What is it about this book that does that?  An obvious, and key, function of this book is not the book itself, but what drew me to the book.  The fact that a general dissatisfaction with the learning that was (or wasn't, as the case may be) going on in my classes when I first began teaching sent me off on a search to understand what was (or wasn't) happening within the confines of each classroom community.  My first discovery was simple, that is, I did not have classroom communities.  There was me, and there was them.  Focusing on community, and how to develop that within a classroom, made me want to understand what happens in communities.  From there, I discovered the notions of constructivism, learning within a social context, and a host of other invigorating and hopeful theories to provide a frame for my teaching practices.  The ideas discovered have recharged my batteries, but more importantly, they have made me hungry to know and it is this hunger that causes me to read more and in that reading, to re-write the text.  Later, Ira Shor talks about student resistance to changing from a traditional information delivery pedagogy (this seems weird...kind of like military intelligence) to a liberatory pedagogy.  He says: I have to rediscover the distance that this new group can travel [to the new pedagogy].  It may resist transition all the way, even if I am teaching the same course that produced noticeable transformation just the term before.  I can take very little for granted from class to class...This was my education into 'situated pedagogy' or situating the learning process in the actual conditions of each group.  On the other hand, because student consciousness so determined the outcome of any class, I could stop blaming myself for classes that didn't go anywhere.  If a class did not work out, it did not invalidate the process of dialogue.  If a course did not transcend the transfer-of-knowledge pedagogy, it did not make me feel like I was a failure.  I just concluded that the situation was not open to transformation.  The human beings in the process could not begin transformation at this time, in this place, through this means. Yes!  The notion of situated pedagogy is useful to me at this time.  I've noticed these differences in classes, and have written about the personalities of classes, but have not been able to understand these differences in a useful, informative way.  Realizing that each group is different, that each group comes to me with a myriad of experiences and experience, both collective and individual, makes it easier to understand this notion.  I'm experiencing this a little in one of my classes right now.  In previous offerings, I've only to offer a few comments at the beginning of class and discussion has ensued that has allowed the content I wanted addressed to be explored in more depth than I would have been able to explore by transferring information to the students.  In this situation, this has not happened, and while I was slow to respond to that, I recently intuited (because I was unaware of why this was happening in a way that would be useful to me) that I could keep attempting what wasn't working, or I could change and adapt.  To that end, I've taken more control of the class back...serving to transmit information.  What was bothering me most about this was the idea that I had given up on them...I don't think it bothered them, but it bothered me a great deal.  Shor's views help me realize that it wasn't a matter of giving up, it was simply a matter of realizing that now was not the time for transformation for this class of students.  I have hope that transformation will come to them at another time, in another place.  For now, I need to listen to what they've been "telling" me and attempt to meet their perceived needs.  I tried, they tried, and things just didn't click...yet! And, this whole rambling piece is really not about walking on words, or being ready for transformation...it's really about motivation.  What I learned about being able to read critically, to re-write a text according to my context, was that my motivation was the key factor behind my work...behind the change that allowed me to move from being a walker on words to a re-writer of words.  The same is true for my classes, when the situation provides a strong motivation, students will be able to make the transformation.  They will be driven by their own contexts...by the questions that arise out of their own clinical work that were unanswerable at the time.

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/3/02; 10:01:07 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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Old Favorites#

Dug out an old favorite last night...primarily because Charles and I had a brief discussion yesterday about Freire and I remembered this book.  A Pedagogy for Liberation is based on conversations between Ira Shor and Paulo Freire and still incites my passions, as it did the first time I read it.  One section talks about a "critical theory of knowing" and the "gnosiological cycle" or the "distinct moments in the way we learn."  Freire describes two distinct phases in the gnosiological cycle:  the phase where we produce new knowledge and the phase where the produced knowledge is understood.  Freire discusses the idea of knowledge transfer (when the teacher simply passes along to students the knowledge they wish the students to have) and how that breaks the gnosiological cycle...apprehending the knowledge is only part of the cycle...without the other part, the creation or production of new knowledge, we can never really apprehend something.  With the transfer of knowledge, the teacher takes away from students the necessary opportunities to produce new knowledge for themselves, takes away the need to be critically reflective, curious, inquisitive, uneasy, and confused.  Without these qualities, that is without curiosity, without a critical reflectiveness, without the uneasiness, students can never fully come to know the thing they are trying to know.  Without the completion of both phases of the gnosiological cycle, Freire suggests, schools are nothing more than institutions obligated to pass along the "official" ideas-certainly not places where critical thinkers are not just encouraged, but required.  This then, is what he means by "liberatory education."  When students are subjected to the official "party" line (and every discipline has an official party line as does every institution), they are disempowered, subjects of a greater or higher authority, destined to believe what the authorities believe-a prisoner.  When students participate in the full gnosiological cycle, that is when they are required to produce their own knowledge and then perceive and come to understand this knowledge, they are then liberated, free, no longer prisoners of the prevailing ideology.  Is it possible to do this?  Yes, I think it is...and I don't mean to imply that is it easy, for I think that is not true....but it is possible....one student at a time perhaps.

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/2/02; 9:03:27 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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