Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

Parce que le crayon sera toujours au dessus de la barbarie... The reality of the American academy is that the public institution creates so many meetings to justify itself, its bloated administrative bureaucracy, as well as meeting demands of the state's own bureaucracy that the central mission of learning-through-teaching is obscured. One can rationalize the necessity of learning objectives and accreditation, especially within the language of competition, standards, and other jargon, but ultimately the arguements end up in a cul-de-sac of ad absurdum  when the collaborative relationship between/with students and professors is erased. That's pretty much how my last week went. Part I and Part II of this mini-series. The Study of Literature as a Critical Thinking Dialog Irvin Peckham quotes Freire: “Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking-thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people a...

What Is the Relationship between Critical Literacy and Citizenship? Part I of this mini-series As I continue to draft the syllabus and calendar of my "Literature of Resistance" course for 2015 Spring, I ask myself what I want from the students -- not in the form of assessment material, not as quizzes and papers -- but what they will teach me about their own literacy in 2014 2015 from their life experiences. My students are among the people I respect most in this world -- honest, frank, true, loyal, friendly, scared, vulnerable, brave, and full of humor. These are people -- humans, adults -- I want to surround myself with in my life. Their experiences with literacy and citizenship are different than mine, and so they have much to teach me. I hope to present the entire course, then, as a form of critical literacy where we all learn from each other. It's my place to facilitate discussion and to teach writing strategies, but I expect to learn from their discussions and l...

I presume that we would not want to be overcome by barbarians -- from without, or from within. I learned the etymology of "barbarian" when I was just a boy, when I was interested in the meaning of my family's names, when I searched the origin of my aunt Barbara's name. barbarian (adj.)   mid-14c., from Medieval Latin  barbarinus  (source of Old French  barbarin  "Berber, pagan, Saracen, barbarian"), from Latin  barbaria  "foreign country," from Greek  barbaros "foreign, strange, ignorant," from PIE root  *barbar-  echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (compare Sanskrit  barbara-  "stammering," also "non-Aryan," Latin  balbus "stammering," Czech  blblati  "to stammer"). Greek  barbaroi  (n.) meant "all that are not Greek," but especially the Medes and Persians. Originally not entirely pejorative, its sense darkened after the Persian wars. The Romans (technically themselves...

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 ...