Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

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...

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 ...

Notes [showing more about my own note-taking habits than any obvious learning going on; see Zebroski, reading protocols] Awkward prefatory remarks -- condescending, even. Reflection: When I asked students the next day to discuss Orosco's presentation, everyone felt that the prefatory comments were a waste of time and "made no sense at all." Community Service Organization (CSO) > Chicago Industrial Organization (Alinsky, Rules for Radicals ) Reflection: My first reading of RfR was actually at North Harris College, class unknown. Things have changed. I still have that paperback copy and was looking for additional copies recently and found conservative responses to Alinksy, some of whom believe he's Mephistopheles himself. I tried to read portions of these responses and they're horribly written -- zeal, without knowledge. Nor empathy. Nor concern about community. Alinsky didn't start the culture wars, but those who fight them see him as a kaiser of...

Referencing the Egyptian Revolution, by artist Graphic Resistance, 2011 <http://graphic-resistance.deviantart.com/> Plenty of research has been published on resistance of/by students within the classroom, especially within the writing classroom. A brief, incomplete, bibliography: Carter, Christopher. Rhetoric and resistance in the corporate academy. Hampton Pr, 2008.  Corkery, Caleb. "Rhetoric of Race: Critical Pedagogy without Resistance." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 36.3 (2009): 244-256.  Flowerdew, John. "13 Critical discourse analysis and strategies of resistance." Advances in discourse studies (2008): 195.  Gorzelsky, Gwen. "Working boundaries: From student resistance to student agency." College Composition and Communication (2009): 64-84.  Palmerino, Gregory. "Opinion: Teaching Bartleby to Write--Passive Resistance and Technology's Place in the Composition Classroom." College English 73.3 (2011): 283-302...