Class Notes:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13gir6zDKbQb12pWFtEtcKmdZ_f8mDz1ENT16cCn7w_0/edit
I felt a tinge of anxiety before beginning the third session. My voice was down, I had been advised to use it softly, and I was worried it would lower my performance energy thus making the session a little more disengaging. However, as soon as class began, a strange rush filled me up--the worry of ‘under-performing’ was quickly replaced by the promise of taking a new class.
(Note for future post: write on the uses of ‘voice’ in the classroom)
Class started. I requested students to turn on their videos if possible, but had to disappointedly accept that not everyone could (owing to internet problems) or...wanted to. There’s a larger debate happening on whether students should mandatorily have their videos turned on (unless the internet or home situation makes it impossible) or whether it should be up to the student to decide. Those in favour of making it mandatory have two primary arguments: one, to surveil students better, to ensure they’re not mentally switching off from the class; two, to reduce the alienation of the teacher while teaching since it’s more difficult to talk and interact with ‘disembodied’ names. While I’m not sure about making it mandatory, I think I want to better understand the reasons why some prefer to keep it switched off and the difference in the quality of the experience when the video is switched off. Hm.
I announced that we would begin by initiating ourselves into the ‘critical literacy’ discourse/framework a little more and do a few exercises to generate more critical awareness of our existing literacy practices, particularly reading practices. I asked what students understood by the term already and after listening to a few responses, reinforced three main points: literacy as socially and historically contextualised practice; literacy as allied to social and personal transformation; and critical literacy pedagogy as active and participatory pedagogy. The question I wanted to explore was: what does ‘active’ and ‘participatory’ mean and entail? A contrast is drawn with didactic pedagogy, where the relationship between teacher and student is more hierarchical, the flow of knowledge is top-down, and the students are passively receiving (and accepting) the knowledge of the ‘master’. However, active participation doesn’t merely refer to talking and interacting in the classroom--it’s also about contesting so-called official and authorised knowledge (allied to the interests of dominant communities in society), letting student experience and perspective become an active part of curricular knowledge, and developing participatory agency to actually go out and intervene in society. The politics of participation is quite complex in fact--it’s something I need to explore more later.
In any case, to generate a discussion on literacy pedagogy, I showed a clip from Mind Your Language, where the British teacher is pedantically asking questions about the meaning of certain grammatical forms--the questions were rather abstract. The adult learners, belonging to multiple cultures and nationalities, were responding in terms of their own cultural understanding (or misunderstanding rather--that’s how the humour is partially generated). I asked students what they thought of the clip. Responses pointed out how there is a certain cultural stereotyping of the characters, how words hold different meanings for different people, how the form of pedagogy adopted by the teacher is not interactive, how differences between the learners are highlighted, how many of the adult learners might be confidently expressing ‘wrong’ responses because it is difficult for them to ‘unlearn’. To add to the points, I mentioned how the clip is an interesting example of how didactic pedagogic assumptions were ‘failing’--students were not adhering to the norms that they were supposed to and instead re-contextualising the ‘instruction’ in their own way.
I further flagged the idea of ‘failure’ as a useful analytic to think about a) how ‘rote learning’ pedagogy might fail to actually appropriately ‘master’ students but also conversely b) how attempts at developing participatory and interactive pedagogy (through teacher and curricular reform) in India also run up against existing habits and biases that students and teachers already have--teachers may resist or find it impractical to adhere to so-called progressive ideals of teaching and students may resist in different ways too. In other words, there has to be a more complex analysis of the ‘negotiations’ through which either didactic or participatory pedagogy is actually practiced.
Then we moved on to the first exercise where everyone had to think of how the dominant meaning/associations of a word developed through particular lived experiences. I asked someone to read an extract from Freire’s introduction to Literacy, where he demonstrates how the meaningfulness of words he learned happened through his sensory engagement with the social and material environments he lived within. I mentioned how I learned the word ‘manipulate’ after I was caught lying about examination marks by my parents--the shame of that experience created a deeply negative and fearful association with the word and the idea of deception at large, including self-deception. A few students followed suit: words such as independent (implying a sense of personal agency and empowerment), virtual (in terms of something not being real--this was, of course, a moment of irony for the class), and lethargic (implying undesirable behaviour in an educational context) were mentioned. After having established the recognition of words as necessarily contextualised with personal experience, I asked why is it that certain meanings get standardised or are considered to be dominant meanings? This is the next important insight of critical literacy: to recognise how words are standardised and codified through acts of power. I used the examples of ‘development’ (as dominantly implying urban development in terms but also used in the context of ‘’human’ development vis-a-vis healthcare, education, and income equity ), ‘gender’ (as implying a binary notion of gender, synonymous with biological sex but also non-binary, non-normative notions of gender), and ‘anti-national’ (as both a label to invalidate one’s claim to legitimate citizenship as well as to demonstrate legitimate dissent against the state) to reinforce how each of these words have acquired different meanings through the production of various institutionalised discourses. There were a few responses from students: for example, how the meaning of a ‘sustainable’ product can refer to the idea of sustainable production in terms of resource and labour usage rather than the narrow notion of being biodegradable; how words such as snap, block, and cloud have acquired newer meanings through internet experience; how the word ‘depression’ has different meanings for different generations; and how the meaning of inequality tends to dominantly refer to wealth inequality instead of various structural inequalities in terms of access to resources and opportunities).
By the end of this section, I felt okay, phew, lots of different ideas--did I manage to convey the commonalities? I also don’t quite know what is the right number of responses to ask for--for each exercise, it’s usually around 3-4, but they extend beyond the time I allot for the exercise. I become slightly greedy for more, I think, to listen to more inputs and perspectives on the particular issue we discuss, but the clock is always ticking.
I moved to the next section: students were divided into groups of 5-6, asked to discuss separate sections of Freire’s essay The Act of Study, and come back to convey the points. I asked each group to choose one or maximum two volunteers to represent the discussion points of each speaker--I always wonder if and how the discussion points are represented partially, and if and how certain viewpoints are emphasised more than others. This is a problem we are going to tackle in another session--how the politics of representation shape how knowledge is produced. I’ll quickly go through some of the ideas that came up:
How there is a need to question the construction of ‘facts’ and ‘perspectives’ and not be ‘mesmerised’ by the use of language. Active reading is critically contextualised reading. The examples of the need to probe the construction of scientific ‘facts’ or economics data were particularly important.
How the act of studying betrays an attitude towards life: there might be a tendency to visualise or assume what is not experienced or verified, thus leading to various forms of misinterpretation. But at the same time, texts generate newer ideas, which might generate both opposition as well as confrontation. One may choose to not go through the process of negotiating with something new or different challenging existing beliefs; or one may be forced into a necessary confrontation, leading to new possibilities for how one understands the world. There was an interesting discussion on the use of Freire’s word ‘assault’--while assault can have a connotation of destructive violence, there is also the sense of how ideas strike one with unanticipated force, almost as an emotional assault, forcing one into a necessary ‘creative’ re-orientation.
How genre-awareness is essential in developing a contextual reading of the text. (I’m quite intrigued by this point, especially since it bears upon how particular rhetorical templates shape the meaning of a text)
How the context of the author and the context of the reader come into a relation through the process of reading; and navigating ideological differences/positions shape the reading of the text. This also depends on the kind of text that is read. An interesting question was asked about how one could also separate the text from the author--and how that had a bearing on the reading itself?
The role of humility in reading was discussed: through re-reading as a process of working through the text; by recognising what one does not know; and by developing a sense of commitment to the act of reading.
I have not been able to adequately capture all the points which came up--noted down the ones that particularly interested me. But the richness and complexity of discussion was <3. It’ll be interesting to see whether some of these insights go on to influence reading practices--and in what ways. To be investigated a little later in the course. :)
Finally, we moved on to the final exercise, to immersively write about a particular experience of reading. This was a rather interesting exercise for me, to both participate in as well as go through the various experiential evocations. I resonated with many, frequently paused to admire certain turns of phrase, and felt as if I was changing a little bit through all the pieces. But I also wonder if some might have felt the exercise to be merely mechanical ‘work’, a thing-to-get-done-with rather than an exercise to facilitate honest introspection. This is one of the most difficult questions to work through in the writing classroom: how to understand how students value the act of writing.
In any case, let the writing speak for itself:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hmb5aHWTYyUHE-Y-F2Sdsn8iwqZkZbtgYh3Wct2rhvY/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UyHNbivjoqSxxOfMvX48p0Z_JgAOrcdstFk_TB-2g2A/edit?usp=sharing
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