Hi everyone- This week I started answering some of the questions for our end of semester reflection.
- What did you set out to do in this class? What were your initial objectives and expectations? Were they personal? Were they political? Did you want to elicit and/or evoke and/or understand or make sense of and/or persuade? What did you want your project to serve and do?
When I saw this class on the course schedule I was drawn to it for a few reasons. Firstly, I am researching education in a community based setting and what kind of pedagogy can spark collective insight into the relationship between structural realities and lived experiences. I’m interested in how community based educators working for social justice create a process whereby critical reflection on the things we experience each day can lead to political action and political action can lead to new lived experiences in conditions that foster a greater sense of dignity. My mother had been a driving force in my interest in popular education- first, introducing me to the highlander center (if you haven’t heard of it, look it up! It’s been a behind the scenes force in the past 100 years of social movements in the us) and as a teacher at the Bank Street School for Children (which is an elementary school that values the arts and integrates it into all the core subjects). My interest in arts based research grew out of my interest in popular education and a hope that it would give me greater insight into the philosophy and practice of making systematic and personal change and transformation interconnected.
When I started the semester it was a very good opportunity for me to explore my own lived experience, which often, as a facilitator I don’t have the chance to do (more working towards creating this process for other people). I was so aware of how our personal practice is connected to the work we can do with others, and I felt a big need to have an experience myself of looking at my life and thinking about how to go deeper into the themes it brought up for me and the ways in which what I have been through is connected to larger societal systems and ways of thinking. When I thought about what my starting point would be, it was obvious to me that at this point in my life that I had to do something related to my mother. I needed this both because I wanted to know how other people made sense of and got through these experiences, and I also wanted to bring my experiences into a public space because one of the things that has been so difficult for me is the cultural silence around grief and death. I wanted to ask myself and others, what is there is to learn about life from these experiences? How does life look different when we think of these experiences as central rather than as something to fear and run away from?
To be continued soon….
Gene’s comments re: Amanda’s post
Hi Amanda:
Your introduction to these questions is brief but compelling. Hopefully I can respond in a way that respects that combination. Having been deeply involved in political movements both domestically (Attica, civil rights, Vietnam) and abroad (Nicaragua), I have come to the realization that the values that represent movements for justice, the declared values, are far too frequently not lived by those who claim leadership of those movements. We see this of course also in the sobering implementation of Marx In Russia, China and elsewhere, countries that give communism a bad name though the communist vision, at its best, is so expansive and liberatory. Bad structures can whittle away at human dignity, turn humans into things; indeed this was Marx’s critique of capitalism. Human beings can change these structures that are made by them, but maybe only if they consciously seek to transform themselves as well. Randall Collins argues that all transformation is founded on micro-level change (we could interpret this as the internal, and Buddhists might believe this is all that’s important), but I see the levels of change mediating each other, they are dialectically engaged, so that macro change is built on the micro (and meso) and visa-versa. What levels are you working on in your project? Are you doing it with a political goal as well as a personal one?
Your current exploration, though seeking collective roots and collective support, does not seem geared toward “political action,” but when you talk about “conditions that foster a greater sense of dignity,” I think you are going somewhere close to where Freire is going when he talks about becoming “fully human,” which a person cannot do by her/him self. How does your project, and its materiality, fit into the goals you articulate here. Where have you arrived at this point?