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Audre Lorde memes are pretty popular in feminist circles, lol. |
Carribean-American journalist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde is famous for her quote, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." My pedagogy will be centered on helping students navigate their identities in the racist, sexist, ableist, and classist cultural context in which we all live. What this means is that I need to cultivate student understanding of intersectionality. While teaching students to read is and will be the primary focus of my pedagogy, the texts presented to my students will be tailored to the identities represented in my classroom as well as alternative identities which might parallel lived experiences of my students. Most emerging bilinguals are marginalized by their non-white bodies. Many of them are womxn, come from low-income households, and/or exist on the disability/non-normative ability status spectrum. In order to structure a socially responsible and significant education for these deviant bodies, I aspire to facilitate a learning space in which student funds of knowledge are developed in ways that are meaningful to the students through understanding identities and their intersections.
At this point, my pedagogy is mostly theoretical and underdeveloped; I've taken a few curriculum instruction courses and have had moderate field experience. I recognize that the radical curriculum that I aspire to compose and perform will be challenged and edited by administrative powers. I'm also still learning and developing my social justice and pedagogic perspectives. This blog is to be used by and large as a medium of exploration. I will not claim to be an authority on ESL education, reading comprehension, critical race theory, nor intersectional feminism. I will also assert that I don't need to be. My role as a teacher is defined by my capacity to facilitate a productive learning environment and to learn from that environment; my students' role is no different.
For the reading in content areas course requirement part of this blog, I will be challenging mainstream definitions of reading and literacy through presenting alternative forms of text and making meaning from them. I have little insight as to how alternative texts will cultivate reading comprehension, but I'm confident that I'll begin to develop a more concrete understanding of how this works as I read and write for this course. A few alternative text forms with which I aspire to work are video game footage/playthrough media, fanfiction writing, and comic books.
Here is a list of sources that have worked to inspire my experimental pedagogy thus far:
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/960000/950595/p20-gee.pdf?ip=129.89.130.91&id=950595&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&key=A1A99F259FE23D76%2EA1A99F259FE23D76%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35&CFID=526741690&CFTOKEN=36777637&__acm__=1436448370_7f6ca97eafb9d29b27946de8ab4a9cf3
http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol5/iss3/8/
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.5175/JSWE.2011.200900118
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=950583
http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=570716
Cheers to a new blog and pedagogical development!
I don't really know where to begin here. I guess my first question would have to be, as a male - regardless of your personal orientation - in this world, what made you want to defend women so vehemently in education? I know as a scientist, I would like to see more women in our field because it has historically been a male-dominated profession, but I don't consider myself a feminist because of that desire to see more women in science. What caused you to set your torch alight?
ReplyDeleteWomen are often culturally disenfranchised in the academic world. Contemporary media, even explicitly pedagogic media, normalizes male bodies and is extremely male-centric. I don't think that male-centered narratives are culturally relevant texts for young women often times albeit it depends on the text in question.
ReplyDeleteIf you mean to ask why I specifically value women's education, it's because I have a sister and many friends who are forced to deal with the ways in which womanhood is marginalized in the academic world. As an educator, I will have some degree of power to mitigate the damage done to women by this culture. I don't want to be complicit with a system that rejects deviant bodies, so it becomes of high priority to address the issue.
I find your points and perspective interesting. I am not a woman, but I am married to a professional, strong, driven and brilliant one. I see the trails and tribulations that she goes through. I look forward to reading your posts.
ReplyDeleteThere is a great conversation already started here and will continue, I assume, throughout the next few blog posts as well. I think the focus gender and race and/or intersectionality of student identities will be a very relevant topic for students to take up. While I don't know if it will be possible to have a unit per se on the topic, I think you can address it with high quality texts in any and perhaps all of the disciplinary units you teach or support in your future teaching. I look forward to seeing the student-friendly texts you select as well as hearing how this investigation and selection process ultimately pushes your thinking on the topic. Excited to read more!
ReplyDelete