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Processing, 5 April

It’s been a long time since I wrote a processing post. I was working (for way too long) on a talk that I gave on April 1st for the Women’s Studies Colloquium Series at MSUM. You can read it here: On (Re) Claiming Education: One story, a few lists, lots of questions and an invitation from a Undisciplined Troublemaking Feminist Educator.

Wow, that was a painful talk to write. Partly because it was long (a 40+ minute talk), but also because it was hard to position my work within the academy again. I was confronting some haunting questions and feeling really uncomfortable about what I could possibly offer to an academic audience.

I’m glad that I wrote it and presented it at Moorhead. The audience was great and I got to see one of my favorite people, KCF. Plus, through the process of working on it, I clarified some ideas for my book. In particular, I found an additional angle for my interest in the syllabus. Syllabus as contract.

The Contract

In my talk, I drew upon Adrienne Rich and her address, Claiming an Education.”= (I had used it for my first teaching statement from 2006). In revisiting it for my talk, I was struck by Rich’s focus on the importance of an ethical and intellectual contract between students and the teacher. Here’s how she describes it:

If university education means anything beyond the processing of human beings into expected roles, through credit hours, tests, and grades (and I believe that in a women’s college especially it might mean much more), it implies an ethical and intellectual contract between teacher and student. This contract must remain intuitive, dynamic, unwritten; but we must turn to it again and again if learning is to be reclaimed from the depersonalizing and cheapening pressures of the present-day academic scene (Adrienne Rich).

and

The contract is really a pledge of mutual seriousness about women, about language, ideas, method, and values. It is our shared commitment toward a world in which the inborn potentialities of so many women’s minds will not longer be wasted, raveled-away, paralyzed, or denied Adrienne Rich).

This contract, which Rich envisions as intuitive, unwritten, and flexible, and that involves a commitment to taking education and students seriously, seems very different from how the University understands a contract between a student and teacher (as a fixed, not-quite legally binding agreement between a customer, the student, and a service provider, the faculty).  But, what if we imagined the syllabus as an ethical/intellectual (and not legal) contract? What would/could that look like?

In part 2 of my A Troubling Teaching Portfolio, I want to write a bit about the syllabus as contract. Bring in some of the discussion and literature about it. Offer up a few case studies. Experiment with how to reimagine it. As part of that re-imagining, I want to think about who the contract is between–a student and a teacher, a student and the other students, students/teacher/the University/the community? A learner and the texts/readings/ideas? 

I’ve added some sources to my Undisciplined Stories page.

Language and Water

From The Chronology of Water:

I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

Lidia Yuknavitch, 28

This is an amazing book so far. And I really appreciate this remembering.

What might it mean?

Do you write to figure out exactly how you feel about a subject?

Interviewer

No, I know how I feel. My feelings are the result of prejudices and convictions like everybody else’s. But I am interested in the complexity, the vulnerability of an idea. It is not “this is what I believe,” because that would not be a book, just a tract. A book is “this may be what I believe, but suppose I am wrong . . . what could it be?” Or, “I don’t know what it is, but I am interested in finding out what it might mean to me, as well as to other people.”

Toni Morrison

From An Interview with Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction no. 134

Processing, 25 February

I’ve been working on this book project this for almost four months (with big breaks for holidays and smaller breaks for unexpected difficulties) and it feels like it’s coming together. While I have a lot left to write, I seem to have figured out how to organize and structure my thoughts on teaching.

The Book Book, Volume One

I filled up an entire notebook with notes, quotations, ideas, questions, and “drawings” related to my writing project. It’s the first (of several?) processing notebooks that I’m calling, The Book Books. I’m hoping to scan the entire thing and put it online as part of this project. Is that too tedious? Hmmm….

A Tentative Table of Contents

Through the process of working through my teaching materials, I’ve realized that I’d like to combine my teaching accounts with my students accounts in one (not too big) book entitled, The Undisciplined Dossier: Detailed Records of a Life Beside/s the Academy. Here’s a tentative outline: TOC pdf

A Finished Notebook!

I rarely finish an entire notebook. At best, I leave a dozen or so pages blank at the end. But usually, my writing notebooks are only half-filled with messy notes that even I can’t read. Yesterday, I wrote on every page (minus 1 or 2 pages that had been ripped out) of my green notebook. To mark the occasion of this momentous event, I posted a picture on Instagram:

Now it’s on to a blue notebook. I’m hoping I can finish my book project before filling all 168 pages of this notebook, which I’ve titled “The Book Book, Volume Two.”