Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

Why Literature of Resistance? Or, Who's Afraid of Pol Pot? Next spring, I'll be teaching a course I'm calling "Literature of Resistance" I'll be collaborating in a literature criticism course where we'll examine fiction and non-fiction examples of resistance -- critiquing the social/cultural kairos in which the work was framed, the author's intentions (if available), the literary/rhetorical moves made, the audience's reception, and any short-term or long-term effects of the literature. Currently, the authors' list includes Acosta, Frankl, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Thoreau, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglas, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jefferson, King, Atwood, Mandela, Chavez, Chief Joseph, and Malcolm X. Those are on the tentative syllabus, though I intend to introduce each of these in the first week and have students choose which authors they are most interested in, then prioritize our syllabus based on those conversations. Further, I'll ...

"School Board" sounds quaint, but the Aldine Independent School District can't be described as quaint. It's about 110 square miles of variously developed and undeveloped suburbia north of Houston. Aldine -- Largely Latino, 2012 In my second semester course, students choose a local "concern" -- local being limited to sub-county level administration -- and perform various rhetorical analyses on their peer stakeholders (similar community members; not the government entities), the "state" (gov), and texts the "state" produces to address the concern. Plenty of reading genres they've never seen, talking to neighbors they've never spoken to, understanding local political structures they've never heard of. Ironically, Texas insists on multiple exposures to state government and history through secondary and higher education, but apparently little education is provided to actually empower citizens in their local ecology -- where t...

The Parable of the Mote and Beam, Domenico Fetti, ~1619, (c) Metropolitan Museum of Art Sinned Against and Sinning I feel that somewhere, sometime, we've all sinned. We've all sinned in criticizing, mocking, deriding students' work. It's a mote-beam, problem, really, as we forget where we come from, where our writing was when we were first year students. Many of us in the teaching professions also come from different economic and literacy backgrounds that can't compare to those of our students today. This is certainly true for many students who attend community colleges such as mine, many coming from lower SES environments, struggling schools, homes with few literacy experiences other than those of mass media and family lore. I don't devalue these last two discourse environments, but too seldom are these discourses are undervalued in the first year course, many instructors adamant that the course is designed to inculcate those middle class values (Bloom) o...

The Singer Poets First, the song itself, here sung by Baez in 1965. We shall overcome We shall overcome We shall overcome some day Oh, deep in my heart I do believe We shall overcome some day Note that this was a BBC4 production, when UK and US broadcasters felt a greater social need to reflect and cultivate culture more than make profits, including profits based on shock TV strategies just to make people angry or afraid. What I find beautiful in this video is not only Baez's beauty and her simple guitar, but her intimate invitation to an audience to participate  instead of simply observing. Her solo performance would have been moving enough, but the idyllic faces of the singers in the room make this as intimate a performance as I've seen. Not spectacular. Community-building.  Note, too, that in this video, she simply assumes her audience knows the song -- "Will you sing 'We Shall Overcome' with me, please?" and then leads a simple call a...

Molten bronze could not brighten more than Morning sunlight Crashing on November's hickory tree. Civilizations were built and razed through the melting bronze, Making bowls and scimitars, anklets and crowns. But here, boys made forts. We leaned logs against the hickory tree, Then more around those -- Palisades around our little room, Small enough for skinny boys in shirtless summers, Too small for prying adults. We gathered hickory nuts to throw, Still in their green husks, Each a round treasure turning green to brown. A scent of earth and tree gave a high of nature Potent in our noses, we coming back to that smell Like a peyote that connected our Dirt-stained bodies with the ground we loved. Hickory limbs still reach out, offering those bronze leaves. Their kinks and crooks Impervious to our hardened bare feet. Adults would cut the limbs for fire. Mammaw would keep a hickory switch to threaten us, Holding one arm while swinging with the other. ...