Find the quotes in your reading that relate to at least one of the themes or questions listed below. Your blog post need only contain the 4-5 quotes (from different pages in your reading) that expand your understanding or articulate an interesting perspective in relation to these themes/questions. In class, you will verbally share what you learned from these readings in connection to our Beauty in the Struggle premise, themes, questions, and activities ( I heard from Lynn that you all went into production mode and whipped out 40 T-Shirts! Sorry, I had to miss it but meetings called. . .) Be prepared to discuss which of the themes below your reading focuses on, how the quotes relate etc.:
The education system is in crisis, here and abroad. While there are places in the world without access to schools and youth who clamor for an education, in this country, the public education system is failing many youth.
A living democracy is sustained through the active participation of its citizens, through the questions and innovative responses of engaged individuals, grassroots groups, and public figures.
The expressive arts and humanities are crucial to education that challenges us to see from multiple perspectives, to confront and communicate both the differences and similarities of our shared human identity and the resulting tensions.
Imagination is a critical part of learning how to envision and participate in the creation of a better future.
The existence of suffering, inequity, gross disparities between the “have’s” and the “have-not’s”, challenge the ideal of the American Dream, of “freedom and justice for all “
Education is a vital tool in the struggle against the forces that work to oppress and suppress our collective humanity. Education is integral to democracy.
Questions: What are some challenges we face and hope to overcome? What helps us dream of a better tomorrow? How does the passion and resilience of those who inspire us remind us of our ability to create positive change? How can we inspire change using convincing and memorable visual/ verbal expressions? What is the path towards quality and equitable educational models? How can we articulate a possible route?
John Sansone
ReplyDeleteThinking For Change
Reflection 10
9 November 2011
1) “Underlying the philosophy of both Freire and Horton is the idea that knowledge grows from and is a reflection of social experience” (Freire and Horton, 2).
2) “You can go to school all your life, you’ll never figure it out because you are trying to get an answer that can only come from the people in the life situation” (Freire and Horton, 3).
3) “Participation in turn is realized through an educational practice that itself is both liberatory and participatory, that simultaneously creates a new society and involves the people themselves in the creation of their own knowledge” (Freire and Horton, 5).
4) “We have to understand how books as theory and practice as action must be constantly dialectically together, that is, as a unity between practice and theory” (Freire and Horton, 18).
5) “For me the reading of books is important to the extent that the books give me a certain theoretical instrument with which I can make the reality more clear vis-a-vis myself, you see. This is the relationship that I try to establish between reading words and reading the world” (Freire and Horton, 32).
6) “I think the problem is that most people don't allow themselves to experiment with ideas because they assume that they have to fit into the system”(Freire and Horton, 44).
Youth in a suspect Society: Henry Giroux
ReplyDelete“Moreover, children make up a disproportionate share of the poor in the United States in that “they are 26 per cent of the total population, but constitute 39 per cent of the poor.”7” (pg3)
“It also seems reasonable to assume that under the current financial crisis, young people, particularly youth marginalized by class or color, will experience even greater economic and educational hardships, while becoming even more invisible to the larger society.” (pg 4)
“Disposable populations are increasingly relegated to the frontier zones and removed from public view.” (pg 9)
“Instead of a federal budget that addresses the needs of children, the United States has enacted federal policies that weaken government social programs, provide tax cuts for millionaires and corporations, and undercut or eliminate basic social provisions for children at risk.” (pg12)
“Viewing the more recent U.S. federal government budget for 2009 as a political and ideological statement, it becomes clear that children continue to constitute one of the nation’s lowest priorities.” (pg 13)
Araceli:“The Murals speak to political histories, social struggles, everyday lives, and beliefs about justice” (Dunahue 71)
ReplyDelete“Arts are funadamental repositories of human wisdom, that prepare us to discern, express, communicate, figure out, and understand the human universe. Because the arts are so vital to understanding others and ourselves” (Donahue 71).
“The Murals speak to political histories, social struggles, everyday lives, and beliefs about justice” (Dunahue 71).
“From Paulo’s perspective, if we were to solve the educational difficulties of students from oppressed communities the educators had to look beyond the personal” (Freire 3)
“The more that we are willing to struggle for these dreams, the more we apt we were to know intimately the experience of fear, but also how to contril and educate our fear and finally transform that fear to courage” (Freire 4)
Phillip:
ReplyDelete"Just as democracy appears to be fading in the United States so is the legacy of
higher education’s faith in and commitment to democracy. Higher education is
increasingly abandoning its role as a democratic public sphere as it aligns itself
with corporate power and market values." (Giroux, 2).
"The traditional academic imperative to “publish or perish” is now supplemented
with the neoliberal mantra “privatize or perish” as everyone in the university
is transformed into an entrepreneur, customer, or client, and every relationship is
ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms." (Giroux, 5).
"Many middle- and working-class students have
either found it financially impossible to enter college or, because of increased
costs, have to drop out. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, young
people from poor and disadvantaged families faced even more difficult hurdles in
trying to attain a college education because the Bush administration decided to
cut Pell Grants, the nation’s largest federal student aid program. In addition,
because Congress changed the federal needs-analysis formula, more than 90,000
disadvantaged students were disqualified in 2005 from receiving not only Pell
Grants but also state financial aid (Burd, 2005).
As all levels of government reduce their funding to higher education, not only
will tuition increase but student loans will gradually replace grants and scholarships. Lacking adequate financial aid, students, especially poor students, will have to finance the high costs of their education through private corporations such as
Citibank, Chase Manhatten, Marine Midland, and other lenders. According to
The Project on Student Debt (2006), nearly two thirds of both undergraduate
and graduate students at 4-year colleges and public universities have student
loans. While it makes sense to focus on such issues as the impact of corporate
interests on research, the shift in governance from faculty to business-oriented
administrators, and the massive increase in adjuncts and casual labor, little has
been said about the corporate structuring of student debt and its impact on a
sizeable number of people attending higher education. Rather than work their way through college, students now borrow their way to graduation and, in doing
so, have been collectively labeled a “generation of debt” (Kamenetz, 2006)." (Giroux, 7-8)
"Of all groups, university and college educators
should be the most vocal and militant in challenging the corporatization of education by making clear that at the heart of any form of inclusive democracy is the
assumption that learning should be used to expand the public good, create a
culture of questioning, and promote democratic social change. Individual and
social agency becomes meaningful as part of the willingness to imagine otherwise,
“in order to help us find our way to a more human future” (Chomsky, 2000, p. 34).
Under such circumstances, knowledge can be used for amplifying human freedom
and promoting social justice, and not simply for creating profits." (Giroux, 12)
As university leaders increasingly appeal to the corporate world for funding,
engage in money-making ventures as a measure of excellence, and ignore that the
line between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions of higher education is collapsing, many schools, as educator John Palattela (2001) observed, will simply
“serve as personnel offices for corporations” and quickly dispense with the “historically burdened though important promise of creating democratic mandates
for higher education” (Giroux, 12)
Christian Cruz
ReplyDelete11/9/11
Quotes from "Teaching Abstract of Love" by Antionia Darder
1. "Intead, it was a love that i experienced as constricted, rooted in a committed willingness to struggle persistently with an emancipatory purpose to intimately connect that purpose with that he called our 'true vocation'-- to be human." (pg 3)
2. "Through the courageous vulnerability of his humanity-- with all its complexities and contradictions-- Paulo illuminated our understanding of not only what it means to be a critical educator, but what it means to live a critical life." (pg. 4)
3. "In Paulo's eyes, fear and revolutionary dreams were unquestionably linked. The more that we were willing to struggle for these dreams, the more apt we were to know intimately the experience of fear; but also how to control and educate our fear, and finally, how to transform that fear into courage." (pg. 5)
4. "Paulo urged us to strive for intimacy with democracy, living actively with democratic principles and deepening them, so they would come to have real meaning in everyday life." (pg 10)
Ryan Astudillo
ReplyDeleteQuotes from Where We Stand: Class Matters
1. “Living in a world above the absolutes of law and man-made convention was what any black person in their right mind needed to do if they wanted to keep a hold on life” (Hooks, 17)
2. “Caring and sharing have come to be seen as traits of the idealistic weak” (Hooks, vii)
3. “Breaking the silence—talking about class and coming to terms with where we stand—is a necessary step if we are to live in a world where prosperity and plenty can be shared, where justice can be realized in our public and private lives” (Hooks, viii)
4. “The rich, along with their upper-class neighbors, also live in gated communities where they zealously protect their class interests—their way of life—by surveillance, by security forces, by direct links to the police, so that all danger can be kept at bay” (Hooks, 2)
5. “Downward mobility is a thing of the past; in today’s world of affluence, the message is “You got it, flaunt it.’” (Hooks, 3)
Brittany Philpot
ReplyDeleteDemocracy’s Nemesis: The Rise of the Corporate University
1. “ Higher education is increasingly abandoning its role as a democratic public sphere as it aligns itself with corporate power and market values. Instead of being a space of critical dialogue, analysis, and intrerpretation, it is increasingly defined as a space of consumption where ideas are validated in instrumental terms and valued for their success in attracting corporate and government funding.” (2)
2. “Consequently, higher education appears to be increasingly decoupling itself from its historic legacy as a crucial public sphere, responsible for both educating students for the workplace and providing them with the modes of critical discourse, interpretation, judgment, imagination, and experiences that deepen and expand democracy. Unable to legitimate its purpose and meaning according to such important democratic practices and principles, higher education now narrates itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial, and practical.” (3)
3. “right wing forces have attempted to exert more control over higher education, and there is little in their vision of the university that imagines young people as anything other than a market for corporate exploitation or an appendage of the Department of Homeland Security.” (4)
4. “ Rather than work their way through college, students now borrow their way to graduation and, in doing so, have been collectively labeled a ‘generation of debt.’ As Jeff Williams pointed out, the average student now graduates with debts that are staggering.” (7-8)
5. “Caught on the treadmill of getting more grants, teaching larger classes, and producing revenue for the university, faculty become another casualty of a business ideology that attempts to “extract labor from campus workers at the lowest possible cost, one willing to sacrifice research independence and integrity for profit.” (15)
"I'm afraid the day of 'teacher-as-artist' is coming to a close" - Keizer, 35
ReplyDelete"If everybody can 'read at grade level,' then we need not be overly concerned if some people get to read fabulous dividend statements and other people, who may be working twice as hard get to read pink slips."-Keizer 36
"
My point here is that even under ideal circumstances,
public-school teaching is one of the hardest jobs a person can do... or, to put it
another way, a typical expert on everything that’s wrong with American public education and the often children it serves." (Keizer, 34)
"The more that we were willing to struggle for these dreams, the more apt we were to know intimately the experience we fear; but also how to control and educate our fear, and finally how to transform that fear into courage." (Darder, 4)
"I do not live only in the past. Rather, I exist in the present, where I prepare myself for the possible." (Darder, 8)
From J.C.: The modern university was once governed, however weakly, by faculty, with the faculty senate naming the university president. That era of faculty control is long gone, with presidents now being named by boards of trustees and governing through handpicked (and well-paid) bureaucrats rather than through faculty committees. Pg12
ReplyDeleteArendt and Dewey believed that there was a strong correlation between the death of substantive democracy and the demise of those public realms where individuals practiced the art of critical thinking, participated in spirited debate, exercised an engaged thoughtfulness, and learned the necessity of holding authority accountable. Both insisted that without such public spheres, politics loses its democratic characterand human beings grow irresolute and irresponsible, failing to act as thoughtful agents and engaged citizens “in concert.” Pg1-2
The former Bush administration willingly supported the corporatization of higher education through both overt statements and by reinforcing the conditions that make such corporatization possible. Reductions in grants for students, pressure on students to use their education as job-training, and the replacement of government grants with corporate-sponsored loans have facilitated the process. Pg 7
At the same time, as universities increasingly begin to pattern themselves after multinational businesses, they are more willing to allow corporations that sponsor research to influence the outcome of or place questionable restrictions on what can be published. Pg 10
At the same time, while compassion and concern for students and teachers wane, universities are eagerly courting big business: “In recent years academic institutions and a growing number of Internet companies have been racing to tap into the booming market in virtual learning
From Josie: Where We Stand; Class Matters by Bell Hooks
ReplyDelete“Even if we had been dressed alike she would have looked past attire to see the face of the underprivileged she has been taught to recognize”(4).
“Strangers entering these neighborhoods who look like they do not belong, meaning that they are the wrong color and/or have the appearance of being lower class, are stopped and vetted”(2).
“For so long everyone has wanted to hold on to the belief that the United States is a class-free society—that anyone who works hard enough can make it to the top”(5).
“They are afraid to face the significance of dwindling resources,the high cost of education,housing,and health care.They are afraid to think too deeply about class”(6).
“To work for change, we need to know where we stand”(8).
From Teaching as an act of love.In Memory of Paulo Freire
ReplyDeleteHence for Paulo a democratic education could never be conceived without a profound commitment to our humanity-a humanity that was not merely some psychologized notion of "positive self-esteem," but rather a deeply reflective interpretation of the dialectical relationship between our cultural existences as individuals and our political and economic existence as social beings."(3)
"Paulo illuminated our understanding of not only what it means to be a critical educator, but what it means to live a critical life"(4)
Paulo also questioned the uncompromising resistance ( or refusal) of many radical educators of color to assume the national identity of "American"-an act that he believed fundamentally weakened our political position and limited our material struggle for social and economic justice."(8)
Paulo urged critical educators to build communities of solidarity--networks to help us problematize the debilitating conditions of globalized economic inequality and confront the devastating impact of neoliberal social policies on the world's population. (9)