May 17, Here I Come!

Reprint - As I get closer and closer to graduating from UT with my masters degree, I find myself looking back over the last two years for what sticks out. I read dozens of books, hundreds of articles, brazillions of papers (slightly exaggerating here), participated in many discussions, listened to lectures, took notes, did research, etc, etc, etc. I know how privileged I am to have done this. So I think as far as my own products, the stuff that I wanted to get into and designed myself, I'm most proud of my graffiti project, my blog as a whole, and my research on juvenile correction facility curriculum. Because I've been a bit of a slacker lately as far as writing new stuff, I reprint for you below my graffiti project.

This project is about graffiti. I've been working on it since about the middle of the semester, recognizing early on that graffiti was an exception to the regular rules and theories about literacy, writing, art, and communicating. Despite its power in sending political and social messages, it's a crime. Regardless of what is written, the physical act is defacing "public" property, intellectual shared space set in the widest cultural context possible--people and life. The message has to be short and powerful, in a certain place. I got my pictures from a fantastic website which contains 500 images of graffiti photographed from all over the world, updated weekly. This site is a publishing house/record label type of thing, very cool.


Other thoughts--technically, cave drawings were graffiti.... it has existed since at least ancient Greek times. This is an ancient Pompeiian caricature of a politician. Tell me that doesn't look like Mr. Magoo. Here's an example of some vintage Roman tagging:

Quisquis amat. veniat. Veneri volo frangere costas fustibus et lumbos debilitare deae.

Si potest illa mihi tenerum pertundere pectus

quit ego non possim caput illae frangere fuste?

Whoever loves, go to hell. I want to break Venus's ribs with a club and deform her hips.

If she can break my tender heart

why can't I hit her over the head?

-CIL IV, 1284.

There's graffiti on the Great Wall of China, and on the Coliseum wall ("Suspirium puellarum Celadus thraex: "Celadus the Thracian makes the girls sigh"). It's on Signature Rock along the Oregon Trail, and has continued to evolve. Now closely entwined with hip hop culture, it can be found on subway cars, buildings, walls, bridges, and at the death cites of Princess Di, Biggy, Tupac, Jim Morrison, and many others, as well as in modern art galleries and museums. A portion of graffiti is considering tagging, known for its gangsta influence and territorial nature--taggers go by nicknames and have unique styles.

For these reasons and public fear of vandalism and high crime rates, penalties for public defacing are stiff. You might remember Michael Fay, the kid who got caned in Singapore in 1994. He got caught tagging. Here in the states, Giuliani and Daley passed laws in the early nineties as part of their Anti-Graffiti Task Force (NY) and Graffiti Blasters (Chicago) that resulted in $350 fines, regulations as to the locked-upness of spray paint in stores, and speedy graffiti removal when phoned in. But like all forms of expression when repressed by government, it continues to speak. Loudly.

Here's what I wanted to accomplish with this project:
1) To show how the messages evoke a particular emotion, a triggered memory, a communal agreement/disagreement, humor, sadness, self-reflection, etc.
2) To pay attention to the materials used--paint, props, scenery, etc, and notice how they are part of the message
3) To examine graffiti as both social action and art.
4) To explore the themes in graffiti messages I saw repeated with little variation--love/heartbreak, anger/revenge, anarchy/politics, religion/living, pop culture/materialism.

There were a lot of considerations in making this movie, my first. First, learning how to use Windows Movie Maker, importing sorted pictures, setting the timing, choosing the accompanying music, etc. Especially after our last class meeting when semiotics was discussed, there was a feeling of interconnectedness through all these decisions, and I realized making movies was harder than just yelling "cut!" and "print!" and dealing with movie stars. Each independent element is a sign--I didn't want the music to change or offer interpretation to the messages, but I wanted it to somehow fit the discordant moods that would result from viewing themed messages. I had originally used "Psychobabble" by Frou Frou, as the timing of the beats fit well with the slide transitions, but the words imposed a coherent mood that couldn't contain the rampant emotional changes from viewing the message. I settled on a classical piece by Philip Glass which was in the movie The Hours, from a particular scene that featured walking down the streets of NYC, where there is a huge graffiti movement. I also wanted some slides to be held longer than others for reflection. I didn't arrange them in any order within their categories, which were love/heartbreak, religion/living, politics/anarchy, anger/revenge, materialism/pop culture, and (part two) those that incorporated the physicality of the surface or tool in the message itself. I chose to use my blog to explain all this, as I can include even more pictures and ideas than I could in a traditional paper.

Here 'tis, please enjoy (turn off my playlist first):

Gaughan

Reinventing English stretches the mind. We've all been saying for months the benefits that would follow if we were to somehow take the traditional structure of English education, with all its inequities and shortcomings, throw it up as high as possible, and put the pieces back together. But in a better way. Practical, no.

But Gaughan is teaching me to change what I can change, in the smallest of ways--a mindframe, a conversation, a question. Just the simple questions he asks in the first chapter, designed to examine the underlying assumptions that make up our kids, are brilliant. Too much of the time, we throw pre-packaged lessons their way, one size fits all, denying room for identity construction is in its most developmental phrase. Watch a John Hughes movie. Kids who don't like school are the ones stuck in Saturday detention. It doesn't mean they don't want to learn, just that they don't want to play the game. I don't blame them sometimes, depending on how anarchist of a mood I'm in.

Subbing gives me the chance to check out other teachers' rooms and meet different classes of kids, and I like talking to them about their lives and what they think about things. A lot of them sound like Billy--"the familiar suck continues to populate his language and his emergiving identity. No one wants to 'suck.' But if everything around you 'sucks' (at least, as you perceive those things), it is difficult to find the flowers of hope." (16) The 6th grade class I subbed for today was plagued with conflict--we had all the stereotypes present: a fat kid, a dumb kid, a funny kid, a non-verbal kid, a follower kid, a big girl, a popular girl, and a gay kid. That's not me labeling, this is how they viewed each other. And they all viewed each other as dumb, even themselves. From the moment the bell rang, I struggled to make them understand how mean their comments about each other were and prayed a fight didn't break out.

"But I don't like him!" the gay kid screamed about the fat kid.
"Darlin, don't you think you're going to have to work with people you don't necessarily like sometimes in real life?"
"It's ok," said fat kid, "I hate him too."

Sigh.

Life is harsh. It can suck, and often does. Why keep presenting learning as a sterilized desk-filled room and a scantron? Teach kids how to deal with life, to examine their culture and upbringing and how it affects them, to understand what things mean, who they are, what do they think. In the very least, don't ask them to check the horror stories some of them live everyday at the door so they can try really hard on your worksheets.

Ok. Down a notch. Back to Gaughan. Is anyone else putting this on their syllabus? I'm thinking about it.

"As teachers, I believe we silence too many conversations, in our fear of stepping out of the politically neutral perspective assigned to us by society."

I particularly like Gaughan's ideas on leaving our mark.

By the way, Mary Pierce Brosmer apparently opened a school for women writing for change.

growling flowers

"these so-called avant-garde artists seem to be rediscovering the basic alphabet of aesthetics; though their works are often very minor indeed, they may be performing a function by educating a public largely wedded to the purely efferent attitudes to begin the slow development of aesthetic attention to an awareness of their own responses." (Rosenblatt, 82)

8 Interesting Ideas in Myers

I've been grappling with the task of writing another post about Myers since his book is so jam-packed, so I decided to shift modes and write a decontextualized and succinct (sort of) rehashing of top points, based on my notes rather than the text. This is almost more for my purposes, as each time I rewrite notes I learn and remember it a little more.

1. the effects of tools/technology -- tools expand cognition, "every student must have a full range of tools in order to have the opportunity to be able to generate a full range of thoughts and to have a complete opportunity to show what he or she can do...." (161)

2. Sign shifting leads to new ways of knowing. Every sign system has levels of understanding. See also Bruner's new interpretation of Vgyotsky, Piaget's decalage, and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences.

3. Types of speech events (Hymes) -- notational (memory retrieval, avoids personal agency), academic/ritual (distancing, nominalization, 3rd person), conversational/social (linked to local identity, vernacular, colloquialisms), presentational, multivocal. What are we teaching in schools?

4. National Assessment of Education Progress recognizes 3 types of writing -- informational, persuasion, narrative (where Kinneavy's subcategories of expressive, referential, literary, and persuasive could fall). In Translation/Critical, there are 5 modes -- expressive, narrative, descriptive, expositive, argumentative.

5. The Enlightenment precipitated a shift of methods of knowing from time and space (narrative/descriptive) to parts or fragmentation (exposition/argumentative). Here I see an overlap to the first chapter of Schon's The Reflective Practitioner where he discusses the crisis of confidence in professional knowledge structures as one organization after another falls or fails. Translation/Critical literacy sees a balance, a shift from types of texts to types of readings -- here Harding and Rosenblatt collaborated, in 1938, the same year as John Dewey's Education and Experience came out.

6. The importance of play--"Pretend disarms and enchants; it suggests heroic possibilities for making changes." See Dibs: In Search of Self by Virginia Axline

7. Trans/crit lit. "keeps traditional literacy and pairs with previously marginalized voices, adding other forms, helping students to express themselves, comprehend/appreciate/critize literary texts within the context of other cultural artifacts, encourage a diversity of response." This definition of literacy is organized around apprenticeships and situated in communicative events.

8. There will be and is a struggle of local forms of literacy with the dominant form--parents with analyzing/decoding jobs vs parents whose jobs feature problem-solving and translation/critical type tasks. There will be those who fear a loss of nationhood in this view of literacy, those who fear exclusion in the melting pot.

more of the same

I couldn't help but think about the maniac at V Tech as I read through the mountain of text for this week. It was inescapable as I waded into the part about social skills being part of the New Media Consortium's 21st century literacy, and participatory cultures. Earlier this afternoon, unable to fight off morbid curiosity, I watched the media package he sent to NBC the morning of the shootings--pictures of himself (many of them with guns), short clips of him talking crazy into the camera about random life problems, etc. I heard over the weekend that Nikki Giovanni is a prof at V Tech, and wouldn't allow the psycho into her class. Like those other kids who shot up their schools, this kid had been tormented and picked on all his life. In no way does past bullying justify the massacre of dozens of people, but it got me thinking about how many hurting kids are relying on public schools to teach them how to live and cope and communicate, and how they're falling short.

I was tempted to link Cho's video but didn't, to make a point. I will say that youtube has some interesting video responses, 2 cents, and personal stories to share about V Tech.

"Corporate cultures and their discourses of familiarity are frequently more subtly and more rigorously exclusive than the most nasty - honestly nasty - of hierarchies. Replication of corporate culture demands assimilation to mainstream norms, and this really works only if a person already speaks the language of the mainstream...these new workplace discourses can be taken in two very different ways - as opening new educational and social possibilities, or as new systems of mind control of exploitation...market-directed theories and practices, even though they sound humane, will never authentically include a vision of meaningful success for all students." (New London Group)

Most schools haven't really changed dramatically in a general sense, kids and their situations have. You can't keep teaching the same way for fifty years and expect the same results. I feel like the grading/testing/ranking effects of mass public school hurts us overall, as does the small box it forces everyone into. And I'm not saying that in a "no more teachers, no more books" kinda way, I'm taking into consideration what I've read about authentic assessments versus standardized testing, the psychology of learning, multicultural curriculum, arts-integrated curriculum, the plethora of stupid rules in place, the micromanaging of teachers, etc. I think it's kinda funny in a sad way that the New London Group article claims the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate regional, ethnic, or class-based dialects, when in real life it seems like learning the white middle-class way to do, say, and think things is really what we're after. For the most part, attempts to validate and even respect other cultures or styles of expression are met with polite tolerance at best and fear/avoidance/persecution at worst.

"Schools regulate access to orders of discourse...the role of pedagogy is to develop an epistemology of pluralism that provides access without people having to erase or leave behind different subjectivities." (NLG) Yet we base nearly everything on a multiple-choice test. I still have nothing but admiration for teachers, but I won't be going back to the classroom myself until there are significant changes and a new administration. I appreciate the changes that some brave teachers and faithful districts are trying, using the new skills of our 21st literacy. But in real life, teachers lose their jobs if they don't do what districts and superintendents tell them to do, even if it's in the best interest of their kids, and it's the same at the administrative level and above. There are future educators who need jobs too. We need a change up at the top, someone who will follow through with what has shown to be successful.