Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Banning Freire part 2: Organizing a 'Read In'


Next Tuesday we are holding a ‘read in’ of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as a way of responding to the events unfolding in Tucson, AZ.  In the announcement I wrote for the ‘read in,’ which I took the lead in organizing (as a way of jumpstarting a project that received grant support from the Provost Diversity Initiative), I write:

In response to recent events in the Tucson, AZ public school district: a  reading and discussion of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  This book has been singled out by Arizona state superintendent John Huppenthal as the pedagogical foundation for the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson he disbanded on June 15, 2011….The 'read in’ aims to raise awareness about the challenges facing teachers and students after the passage of the controversial law A.R.S. §15-112. In the spirit of Freire’s life long commitment to democratic education, the aim of the 'read in' is to create the space for an open, free, and critical dialogue where any and all perspectives can be expressed, heard and discussed.

Using Freire's text as a mediating device for the dialogue, the ‘read in’ of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will be a demonstration of solidarity with the students and teachers  in the now disbanded program.   In this sense, the ‘read in’ is what philosopher Jacques Ranciere describes as ‘politics’: “The essence of politics is dissensus, a demonstration of a gap in the distribution of the sensible, in the partition of the sensible….Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be seen – it places one world in another.” (Ten Theses On Politics)

Participants who attend the ‘read in’ are asked to do some preparatory work by reading  all or some of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and also to take up some of the primary texts associated with this debate.  Below are links to the TUSD MAS program, A.R.S. §15-112 as well as articles, and radio interviews with state superintendent Huppenthal. Attached with this email is a copy of Arizona Administrative Law Judge Kowal’s decision in response to the hearing that was held to review Huppenthal’s June 15, 2011 determination that TUSD MAS was in violation of A.R.S. §15-112 Also attached is  copy of the Provost Diversity Initiative proposal  A Chance for a New Human Togetherness.

The aim of the 'read-in’  is to raise awareness about the events in Tucson by engaging in a Freireanesque dialogue that will take up some of the fundamental questions arising from Tucscon.    As Hofstra Professor Monica Byrne-Jimenez, one of the  ‘read in’ organizers puts it:  “There are two – related - issues at play in Tucson. The first is the belief that the Mexican American Studies Program studies is ‘unconstitutional’ and that any study of the non-dominant discourse creates ‘racial resentment.’ This belief undermines ethnic studies in general and ignores the role of ethnic studies as an important and necessary part of the educational process. The second issue is the subsequent banning of books that were in the MASP curriculum. This is just plain dangerous.  It is impossible to ignore the current political context in AZ. From SB 1070 to Sheriff Arpaio to the disbanding of ethnic studies, it is clear that AZ has anti-immigrant, anti-Latino thing going on. While this context may not be quite applicable to the NY metropolitan area, several racially-motivated crimes over the past two years make it clear that there are dangerous currents under the surface. I don’t think we can ignore this either.”

Putting this together has totally energized me, or, rather, has been yet another way in which my energy is being channeled in a focused way.   As I told my colleague Megan Laverty the other day, “I feel like my work has traction.”  

Preparing for the ‘read in’ has enabled me to take up texts I don’t normally have the opportunity to study:  interviews,  legal decisions, newspaper articles.  As I struggle to work on new forms of writing philosophy, I realize it is equally important to look at different sources for philosophy.   Foucault pointed to this in so many different ways, but so few of us take up these ways, spending, perhaps, too much time and energy reading his work, and not enough being inspired by it, and, in turn, trying to take it up for ourselves.  I realize most of his work was ‘historical’ and the research happened in archives.  But as I prepare for the ‘read in’ and go through these documents, I can’t help but feel a bit inspired by Foucault.  In fact, so far this year, 2012, it seems like that inspiration is guiding me in many areas of my work, especially my teaching where, as I’ve written in a previous blog, I’m asking students to “occupy the standards”.   Just this week I’m asking my students to do this,  taking Foucault as their starting point as they embark on a critical study of these standards and how the might move in and beyond them.  Here’s part of the quotation from Foucault, from his essay, “What is Enlightenment?,” that I am using as the prompt for their essays:

“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”

If I were asked to chose a quotation, an aphorism, a fragment, or something piece of a work that best captures what I’m up to these days it would be this bit from Foucault!   First, it’s the ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ that I wonder about.  What might this be?  And I’m put at ease, because I’m made anxious by the expectations of producing a systemic piece of work, that Foucault emphasizes this is  an attitude, an ethos, which means it’s both something we take up, and also something (not sure what this ‘thing’ is? Zeitgeist?) that takes us up.   It’s an event between ‘us’ and ‘it’ (History? Culture?  What and where is this ‘it’?).   Second, I’m drawn in because it is called a critique, and I have an almost aesthetic experience with the word “critique.”  I’m not always sure what it means, because there are so many different forms of it, but, for sure, when we engage in critique, we perceive something acutely, and from a distance, and in that perception we are moved somewhere.   The “something” we perceive in critique is in some ways a part of the world that presents us with a challenge, and thus it seems as if when we engage in a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ we are attempting to perceive ‘ourselves’ (so there has to be something collective or communal about this work?) from a distance, and, in doing so, move ‘beyond’ ourselves.  Something like a communal experience of ‘self-overcoming’ that Nietzsche talks about.  Third, when we look at ‘us’ we are situation ourselves in a particular place, as defined by a specific set of norms, rules, regulations, laws even [I hesitate to write ‘law’ because I’ve just finished reading a paper on Agamben  and Derrida on ‘the law’ and my head is spinning, as I consider the possibilities of the project unfolding from the Tucson events…before and beyond the law!!!!]   The “historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us” are precisely the boundaries to be identified when we locate “us”.  In the case of my students and I, the “us” is the community of educators.  The openness of this exercise, or experiment [which is the most inspiring word in Foucault’s fragment!], is the fact that there are so many possible boundaries for us to take up.   This may sound counter-intuitive.   How can the ubiquity of boundaries offer up the ground of openness for the experiment in critique?   Because the more boundaries we identify, the more we are able to ‘know’ who we are, and, overcome that very being.   The law is the point at which our freedom begins insofar as we move beyond it.   Freedom is always the moment after the door of the law is closed…[I seem to be taking up that project that will involve reading Kafka, whose parables I’ve taught so many times before, completely unaware that they are being taken up by so many important voices in philosophy!]

So, we can and will identify the indictment of Freire’s work (his writing and his practice), and the indictment, by direct and explicit implication, of those who “teach” Freire, by the State of Arizona, as inclusive of “us”.  That, anyway, will be our experiment next Tuesday!

Friday, February 10, 2012

Banning Freire


02.10.12   Banning Books

It’s almost impossible to believe that books are being banned in the US, that librarians and public school officials are literally removing books from shelves, placing them in boxes and carting them away.   There’s something surreal about that, something totally bizarre, and yet, at the same time, it seems completely in synch with the ongoing culture wars that have waging in the good ole USA since the 60’s.  Conservative backlash….that’s what the latest intellectual counter-insurgency has been all about….belated conservative backlash.  Really, isn’t it about time that neocons stopped with the lashing back and invested in finding a constructive alternative path?   Wasn’t that the ‘promise’ of W’s compassionate conservativism?  What about those “Christians” and their mega gatherings?  They seem to have a ‘positive’ alternative that doesn’t involve banning, nor lashing.  I’m all about gathering in the alternative you’d like to see in the world, the old Ghandian principle.  Unfortunately that’s not what’s happening in Tuscon, Arizona these days, where “Public school officials in Tucson, Arizona, have released a list of seven books that can no longer be used in classrooms following their suspension of the district’s acclaimed Mexican American Studies program.” (Democracy Now, Jan 18, 2012) 


The book ban in Tucson was brought to my attention at last Friday’s full faculty meeting that I was chairing, when my colleague announced  this most recent implementation of State of Arizona  House of Representatives Bill 2281.   HB 2281 which was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer in May, 2010,  http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/12/nation/la-na-ethnic-studies-20100512
and less than two years later, the Tuscon school district has taken steps to ‘enforce’ this laws.  For excellent coverage of this story go to Democracy Now! 

I have taught Paulo Freire every year since I began teaching college in 1993.  I have presented and published a number of scholarly articles on Freire, and have a poster of him on my office door. It’s bizarre to imagine that a few thousand miles to the West, the teaching of Freire is illegal.  Yet, there’s something inspiring about the criminalization of Freire’s work.   It’s a call to action, for sure, and I can’t wait to get back to my grad course next week, where students will be presenting papers that are, in part, responding to Freire’s work.  I have so much energy running through my mind, body and soul at this moment that I can hardly type.   All this news, these links, images, sounds, words are producing a crazy adrenaline rush!  So I’ll just share a few links as a way of initiating some context for some follow-up posts in this blog

The significant lines of HB 2281 are the following: 

Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona:

2 Section 1.  Title 15, chapter 1, article 1, Arizona Revised Statutes,

3 is amended by adding sections 15-111 and 15-112, to read:

4 15-111.  Declaration of policy

5 THE LEGISLATURE FINDS AND DECLARES THAT PUBLIC SCHOOL PUPILS SHOULD BE

6 TAUGHT TO TREAT AND VALUE EACH OTHER AS INDIVIDUALS AND NOT BE TAUGHT TO

7 RESENT OR HATE OTHER RACES OR CLASSES OF PEOPLE. 

8 15-112.  Prohibited courses and classes; enforcement

9 A.  A SCHOOL DISTRICT OR CHARTER SCHOOL IN THIS STATE SHALL NOT INCLUDE

10 IN ITS PROGRAM OF INSTRUCTION ANY COURSES OR CLASSES THAT INCLUDE ANY OF THE

11 FOLLOWING:

12 1.  PROMOTE THE OVERTHROW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

13 2.  PROMOTE RESENTMENT TOWARD A RACE OR CLASS OF PEOPLE.

14 3.  ARE DESIGNED PRIMARILY FOR PUPILS OF A PARTICULAR ETHNIC GROUP.

15 4.  ADVOCATE ETHNIC SOLIDARITY INSTEAD OF THE TREATMENT OF PUPILS AS

16 INDIVIDUALS. 

Here's a link to the actual text of the law:



TO BE CONTINUED!....

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Occupy the Standards! or, On my conversion to distance learning





This morning on our way to campus I was telling Kelly about my plans to begin recording lectures for the latest of my courses that I am converting into the distance learning format.   I’ve had a bit of conversion towards the distance learning wave in the past two years since the idea was first offered to me.  Actually, it was less an offering than a mandate, of sorts:  we need your philosophy of education course to be part of the new online only master’s in higher education.  In fact, we also need your course on multiculturalism too.  And, if you have any other courses you’d like to offer as distance learning course, well, why not bring those online too!  Oh, and there’s some compensation.  Not a lot, but enough to make it worth the time and energy you’ll be expending.  And so I was drafted, and then, after I got into the studio and started recording the lectures, I became a convert to distance learning, or what my esteemed colleague Nick Burbules calls ‘ubiquitous learning.’   (I’m wondering if I’m just an example of the so-called Stockholm Syndrome?  But, I dare say, I’m not being held captive by this mandate.  Truth be told, one of my colleagues who was recruited to be part of the distance learning program jumped ship at the 11th hour.  Coincidentally, he’s now in a dire situation with regard to making his load, which, for any non-academics reading this blog, means that he doesn’t have enough courses to fulfill his contractual obligation at the university.  Translation:  he shot himself in the foot when he turned up his nose to online teaching.  Maybe he’ll change his mind and listen to that old aphorism:  necessity is the mother of invention!)  

My conversion to the distance learning format happened as soon as I got into the studio where I record The Dead Zone.  That happened way back in the summer of 2010, when my goal was to nail down a set of 20 min lectures (short by most standards) that would complement the assigned readings.   After I’d recorded the third of the ten lectures I realized that I’d stumbled upon a ‘missing link’ in my teaching: a mooring for the ideas that formed the basis of my teaching.  It might seem odd that I would only discover this in year 17 of my teaching.   Didn’t I use the same lecture notes semester after semester, especially since I was teaching the same courses year after year?  No, I wasn’t.  In fact, over the decade and a half of teaching I’d collected a large pile of notes, both typed and hand written.  Each semester produced a new set of notes, even if I were using the same readings.   I couldn’t imagine working from the same material.  I still don’t.  It doesn’t’ feel natural.   But there is a certain kind of discomfort associated with this itinerant approach to teaching.  It’s unsettling because it’s so unsettled.  Of course, its counter-intuitive to ‘settle’ in one’s teaching.   Or that’s how I’ve been thinking oh these many years, until I discovered a satisfaction in the recording of lectures.   Sure, part of it is the pleasure of the performance, of putting on the head phones and standing behind the board, speaking into the mic.  But once I’d completed the set of lectures, I found that there was something reassuring about having documented my thoughts on the set of readings we were studying. 

So today, when I went into the study to record the first of my lectures for my ethics class, I was beginning the production of my third distance learning  course.  The multiculturalism course, which I redesigned as a study in the philosophy of difference, was a huge success.   I recorded a set of 7 lectures that average about an hour in length, and was so pleased with them that I had a grad asst transcribe them.   But for all that, I was nervous when I entered the studio this morning, in part because it had been almost a year since I’d recorded my last set of lectures, and sometimes past success can be more of an impediment than an inspiration.   Can I tap into the source that produced the philosophy of difference lectures?

The real inspiration for the work remains the energy behind the questions being explored.  I’m energized in a new way with the question I’m exploring in this ethics class, which are philosophical in way that’s a bit different for me.  Indeed, at the moment, philosophical understanding is a matter of what Aristotle called phronesis, which we might roughly translate as ‘practical understanding.’   We can understand things conceptually, abstractly, and this kind of understanding is what we usually call ‘theory.’   I’m a dyed-in-the-wool theorist, and most of my work for the past 8 years or longer has been what I like to call ‘formalist.’  That is, I’ve mostly been concerned with exploring new forms of writing.  This is the project of ‘originary/original philosophy’ that I’ve mentioned in this blog, and which will, in time, be given some attention.   So for me, phronesis is new path to take up.   And this is partly where the energy behind the decision to go into the studio is coming from.   Another source of the energy is the realization that this sociopolitical event of ‘standardization’ in education isn’t a trend, or fad, but, something that is taking root, or, at the very least, is going to be with us for some time.  Hence, the decision to occupy the standards!  This, anyway, was the way I phrased the agenda of my ethics course when I was sharing with Kelly what I was up to, and why I was going into the studio.

Occupy the standards!   This is the experiment for this semester, in the work I doing with my students.   Own the language that is being dictated to us from the State, and from the national accreditation organizations.  

Begin with a serious, careful study of these standards, of these ‘Quality Principles’.  Then,  occupy them:  take them up, fill them with your meaning, reside in them, dwell in them, perhaps even overrun and subjugate them.  

Here’s how I expressed it in a recent email:

Just wanted to share with you all an experiment/project I'm undertaking this year, which will be an attempt work against the creeping cynicism vis-a-vis the increasing standardization and outcome based assessment of teaching and learning.

My experiment/project is happening in my ethics course  The thesis is the following:  if, in our courses, we make a study of the principles underlying TEAC, we will increasingly 'own' the language that is being 'dictated' to us and our students.   In the case of TEAC, I'll be using it, first, as the basis of my Ethics class, where we will study the language of TEAC Quality Principles, specifically, the principle of 'care'.  In turn, I have a working paper/pamphlet that I've proposed to write for a three day summer institute at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.   That piece will be a theoretical study that I intend to write in the wake of teaching this spring.  In turn, the fleshing out of my piece will be based on the work I undertake with my students, and, as a result, will be an authentic and organic reflection work happening in the course.   My plan is to circulate my piece next year to the faculty as a 'working paper,' with the hope that it will initiate a conversation about the TEAC principles, which, today, remain a set of abstract and empty concepts that are ostensibly guiding our work in teacher ed.