Anne Dalke's blog

Notes for Riverside Book Group, 9/6/13

(imagining 10 inside women, plus us…?)

(both w/ the women inside and amongst ourselves outside):

Outside-->

New issue of Radical Teacher on teaching inside carceral institutions
http://www.radicalteacher.org/default.asp
http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher/issue/current
(really piercing questions here about the relationship between teaching against and teaching inside prisons...)

Inside-->
first suggestion (from Anne):

Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement

On August 9, 2013, Jody and I met w/ five women in Riverside Correctional Facility (below find the outline for the class we conducted). The point of doing this before the semester started was to get a sense of how the new book group we want to run (with the help of Hayley, Sasha and Sara G) might function--what sorts of texts are the women interested in reading? how open are they to writing? what might it be like to conduct a conversation that loops back and forth between reading, writing and our own experiences?

These are the images that we produced, to "figure" one another's gender presentations. Do we understand what we are seeing? (Ask about the ones that puzzle....) And then: what larger patterns do we perceive here? What does gender "look like" in our classroom? Represented on our boards?

Here are the "poems" Anne's class distilled from our texts today.
The first one we wrote is called "What is a City?", the second
"The Cultures of Cities," and the third "The Metropolis and the Mental Life."
Also of interest, we found, was the history and etymology of "gentrification."

These are the books we said have been important to us, in understanding gender (our own, and the way the world divvies up this category). What patterns can we see, taking our books (and our gender role models?), as a whole?

I’ve had a Serendip account for six or seven years. A few years ago, when the “avatar” option emerged on the site, I selected this picture of myself, which suited me quite well for a long while: I liked my smiling, welcoming face, the face that went with my user name (which is my real name). I liked being out, claiming, as myself, what I said on-line.

Last fall, however, I was co-teaching a cluster of courses called Women in Walled Communities, and some of the time we met in a women’s prison in Philadelphia. As a get-acquainted activity, we asked the “inside” women to pick an image to represent themselves, then printed off the avatars of all the BMC (or “outside”) women—and we had to go around and try to figure out who we were (we’re going to repeat this exercise ourselves on Thursday). But nobody wanted to talk to me, because it was so obvious who I was…. They were much more interested in figuring out who had chosen to represent herself with a cactus flower, or a bike, or an owl, or a beach…and why…

strong feeling that this news needs to be entered into our course archive:
A Family Consents to a Medical Gift, 62 Years Later 

Mark and I have created a page where we're conducting an on-line discussion of inspirations for/thoughts about/second-and-third thoughts about this course. Come look behind the curtain, and play along….