A BLOG

Another important “why” question: “why not?”

note: I wrote this post in the last week of September, but never finished it. It’s still not completely finished, but I wanted to post it anyway.

This blog post is inspired by my visit to FWA’s 3rd grade classroom last week. In one corner, the teacher has posted a quotation from George Bernard Shaw:

Some look at things that are and ask “why?”. I dream of things that never were and ask, “why not?”.

At first when I saw this quotation, I was a little annoyed. I like the question “why?” a lot. And I’ve written about its value a lot on this blog (like here and here, for example). Asking “why” is crucial to being curious about the world and to refusing to uncritically accept “common sense” assumptions about the world and how it functions. Asking why can give us critical distance from those ideas/ideologies that shape and regulate our behaviors. Why can encourage us to ask questions and to be open to other ways of being and doing. So, why diss on “why”?

Having spent a little time reflecting on this quotation, I’m not as bothered by it. In fact, I really like Shaw’s promotion of imagining other worlds and ways of being. To me, it speaks to our need to be creative and imaginative and encourages us to develop the skills for transforming our worlds in ways that could potentially make them better (more just, more beautiful, more caring). But, I wonder, why does the critical (the “why”) have to be in opposition to the creative (the “why not”)? In my own work/life/practices, I’m currently struggling with putting my critical and creative spirits together—or least finding ways to put them beside each other. Maybe I should explore this struggle in the winter, when I have more time to write?

Oh bother: fitness ads for women

Last night, RJP and FWA needed to get haircuts for school pictures. As I waited for them to finish, I browsed through some magazines: Shape (september 2011 issue) and Cosmopolitan (october 2011 issue). While I anticipated that there would be tons of “oh bother!” moments in the magazines, I wasn’t interested in paying attention to them. Then, I saw an ad for a sports bra in Shape and I couldn’t help but take a picture with my iPhone.

The copy is what got me the most: Finally a sports bra that treats boobs as individuals. Oh bother! My immediate response to STA was, “yes, they will treat boobs as individuals but not the person with the boobs.” (aside: boobs, really? well at least they didn’t say boobies. The bottom copy is cut off, but it’s interesting to note that when they go into their more technical explanation of the product they use the term “breasts.”) Notice how the ad cuts off the head so you can’t see this body as a person. The ad also focuses on one body part as the object of our gaze; it’s Jean Kilbourne,101–from her excellent Killing us Softly movies. In terms of how this bothers me, I also want to add that I’m put off by the language here and its implications for the U.S as a neoliberal state (is this a stretch? Perhaps): yes, here in the U.S we are so democratic that we even treat boobs as individuals! Hmm…not sure if that explanation is quite getting at my problem with the language, but I’ll keep it for now…

 

After seeing this boob-as-individual” ad I was a little wary of skimming through the magazine. So I switched to Cosmo (ha!). It didn’t take long before I came across an ad for running shoes that bothered me just as much as the first ad. (Did I mention that I have recently become obsessed with running. I started running in June and I’m hooked). The copy reads: A Lady is never is a hurry but can still out run you. Lady Foot Locker. It’s a lady thing. Again, oh bother! What is a lady? Why is she never in a hurry? How is never being in a hurry and being able to out run others a lady thing? Why use the term lady, which connotes a whole history of behaviors and images of what it means to be a proper woman (cult of true womanhood, perhaps)? Maybe you could read this copy as attempting to challenge stereotypes of woman, I mean “ladies”,  as gentile and delicate (they can still kick your ass)? Or maybe, it is invoking the stereotype of the woman who takes forever to get ready. If this is the case, is the “you” in the phrase, “she can still out run you” a man (and presumably the partner, boyfriend, husband)? hmmm…maybe that’s another part of my problem with this ad. As the one reading the ad, I should be the “you,” right? I don’t like how the “you” here is attempting to hail me into existence (yup, Althusser and interpellation–see #3). I could probably say a lot about the “you” and how this ad bothers me, but instead I’ll just leave you with a picture of my reaction to these two images:

I'm bothered!

feeling trouble not troubled in the classroom, part three

I’m continuing to work on my troublemaking pedagogy and the value of feeling trouble. And continuing to be in denial about the looming due date for my manuscript–sept 1. how much have I actually written? not much. how much time do I have to actually work on the manuscript considering my 5 yr old doesn’t start kindergarten until Wednesday? not much. I had a breakthrough last night; with a slight change in my title, I’m able to focus my project. Instead of “Feeling Trouble and Troubled in the Classroom,” I’m calling my essay, “Feeling Trouble not Troubled in the Classroom.” Why? Because I’m interested in exploring the positive effects/affects of making and staying in trouble in the classroom. While I don’t want to discount the discomfort/trauma that trouble (in the form of being uncertain, disrupting the status quo and challenging one’s own deeply held beliefs) can generate, feeling trouble can also generate “good feelings” (of openness, generosity, curiosity, wonder).

Envisioning trouble only as crisis suggests that making trouble (critiquing, challenging, disrupting, unsettling) is a necessary but unfortunate part of the process of coming to awareness. In other words, we may not like making/being in/staying in trouble and the discomfort and uncertainty it causes, but we have to struggle through it in order to learn and gain a better awareness of the world. But, what if feeling trouble didn’t make us feel troubled? What if didn’t always lead to crisis and result in trauma? What if we valued feeling trouble and imagined it as a goal instead of merely an unfortunate byproduct of our efforts to engage? Within queer theory and pedagogy, trouble is valued. Challenging, disrupting, critiquing, subverting knowledge/ideas/authors are central to queer engagements. But this value is most frequently read negatively (as being against) and can, as Eve Sedgwick suggests in her chapter, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This is Essay is About You,” result in an overemphasis on and valorizing of suspicion and paranoia.

In this essay, I want to position my practicing and theorizing about making and staying in trouble beside but not in opposition to pedagogical theories/practices about trouble, coming out of critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, queer pedagogy and anti-oppressive pedagogy. I want to make space for imagining a classroom that embraces staying in trouble as productive and as central to engagement and critical and creative awareness. And I want to describe the strategies I use in my classes to feel trouble as curiosity, wonder and (sometimes?) joy.

Okay, that’s all I have time for now. I want to take RJP to the park on this beautiful day!

2.5 hours later: We’re back from our hike by the Mississippi. Fabulous!

 

what does it mean to engage, part two: even more questions

In part one of this series, I provided one framework for engaging with an author/idea/reading: appreciation, critique and construction. I have found this framework to be very useful for students, particularly because it is concrete and logical and because it requires that students spend time really thinking through what the author is attempting to argue before moving on to critique it (this is what grad students love to do first) and/or discuss why it is/isn’t relevant to their lives (this is what undergrad students love to do first). But, even as I find this framework to be useful, I can’t help but wonder, particularly from the perspective of someone who draws upon queer and feminist pedagogy, about the aspects of engagement that it might be leaving out. The three part framework of appreciating, critiquing and constructing seems too rational; it is based on the goal of knowing an idea/author’s argument and being able to effectively describe, critique and apply it. But, what if knowing isn’t the primary goal? Or if it is only one part of what I am trying to get my students to do when they engage? Or if it can sometimes come at the expense of other, important aspects of engaging (and developing a connection) with ideas?

In posing these questions, I am thinking about the frequent need to emphasize feeling/experiencing over knowing and unlearning (as in, breaking down bad habits, busting binaries, challenging assumptions, reworking master narratives) over learning. And I am thinking about the various passages from feminist and queer pedagogues that I posted in a recent entry. What sort of framework is needed for getting students to feel the effects of ideas (Kumashiro) or to experience the force of the questions posed by/in a reading (Freire) or to process how they are implicated in a theory (Luhmann) or even to commit to bringing their full (personal, intellectual, spiritual, embodied) selves into spaces of engagement (hooks in Teaching to Transgress)? What sort of strategies are necessary for encouraging students to unlearn their assumptions (about ideas, about how to read, and about even how to be/act in spaces of engagement)?

In many ways, these questions have inspired how I am shaping a class that I’m teaching this fall (and that I have taught four times already). In my next post, I want to talk more about how I’m emphasizing troubling/troublemaking–partly in the form of feminist curiosity–in my readings and assignments. For now, check out the course blog (still in progress) for it: feminist debates: fall 2011. I love my design for it, especially the header. It visually reflects how I’m trying to integrate our blog and twitter (via the course hashtag, #femd2011).

What does it mean to engage? part one

Quite frequently I require my students to “engage” with readings, authors, and concepts from class. I prefer this term over other options, like critically assess, analyze, critique, or even describe. But, what does it mean to engage? Last semester in my big class, one of the TAs had to devote about 30 minutes of her 50 minute discussion section to explaining the term “engage.” At first, when she told me that the students had required that she spend so much time discussing how to engage I was incredulous. Really? I wondered. How can students come to college and not know what engage means? However now, as I think through some of the readings that I’m using for my feminist pedagogy article, I’m reassessing my reaction. Maybe understanding what it means to engage is not as easy (or obvious) as I thought. Maybe I need to spend some time unpacking the term (ugh….I don’t really like using the term “unpack,” but it seems to fit here)? Maybe I also need to think through why students wouldn’t necessarily understand what it means to engage. Or what resistances they might have to engaging in the first place. In (hopefully) a series of posts, “What does it mean to engage?”, I want to spend some time and space engaging with the term “engage.”

So, again, what does it mean to engage? Maybe a good place to start is the dictionary; I’ll use the one on my computer dashboard. While not all of these fit, I do find that several of the definitions can help to clarify what I mean when I ask students to engage. To engage with an author or an idea or a conversation or a reading is to do more than just read or attempt to comprehend what someone believes or what they assert in an essay. To engage is to participate/become involved (def. 2.1) with those ideas, to establish meaningful connections with them (def 2.2) in ways that require thinking about not only what they mean but what they do and what they do to us. In other words, when I ask students to “engage with an essay,” I want them to do more than read the essay, I want them to really try to understand what the author is claiming and then think about how that claim affects how they see/experience/feel the world. To engage is also to critique a reading/idea/author, not by dismissing it immediately as wrong, but by working through it, exploring its limits and possibilities and by debating it (def 2.6). Perhaps the biggest key to engaging is to be an active, involved, serious participant in the process of learning/thinking/feeling about an idea/author/reading.

When I was in grad school, one of my professors provided me with a helpful framework for engaging with an author/text. I use this framework to think through my own writing and as I develop assignments for my classes. Here’s an example of how I used it in a class last fall. It involves three key elements: appreciation, critique and construction:

APPRECIATION involves figuring out what the author is saying and demonstrating a clear understanding of their argument and how they develop and defend it. Appreciation does not require that you agree with the reading. Instead, it requires that you clearly state the author’s argument. What is their main argument? What is the purpose of that argument? How do they defend it? This element of engagement is crucial; you can’t have a critical conversation about (or with) an author until you spend some time really thinking about what they are claiming.

CRITIQUE involves assessing what the author is saying. Critique should not involve a total rejection of dismissal of the reading. Instead, it could involve raising some critical or questions and/or exploring the benefits or limitations of the argument. An important thing to note here: critique does not mean trash (or reject or dismiss). Critique involves entering into a critical conversation or debate with the argument; it’s hard, if not impossible, to do that if you enter the conversation with the intractable position, “this author is absolutely wrong!”

CONSTRUCTION involves applying the concepts from the reading to your own thoughts, areas of interest and research or experiences. It could also involve applying the reading to the topics/discussions of our class. This element is especially important for engaging. Construction is about doing something with the author’s argument: applying it, translating it, re-working it to function in unexpected ways, taking it in new directions. 

But, this isn’t all that engagement is, especially engagement from a queering feminist perspective. To engage with ideas is to resist them: to refuse to merely accept them as the truth, to push back and talk back at them, to trouble and disrupt them. It is also to be generous with them: to be open to taking them seriously and to allowing them to disrupt your worldview. I have a lot more to write on engagement, especially in relation to both my own troublemaking pedagogy and bell hooks’ notion of engaged pedagogy. But that will have to wait for part two of this series.