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Since I forgot to post about Tuesday's reading Interrupting Hate before Monday at 5, I've decided to instead reflect on my in-class conversation and reflection. In our small groups, I talked with Natalie about the differences between talking with boys and girls about LGBTQQ topics/themes/issues. Our conversation raised a lot of questions about cultural hegemonic gender norms and whether or not the "gay man" is somehow more threatening to boys than the "lesbian woman" might be to a girl. Is the stereotypical effeminate gay man more threatening to hegemonic masculine traits than a butch woman, or whatever the stereotype might be to women or girls? How might young girl figures like the tom-boy figure in to this?  

I think these questions connect well to many of the other quotes I saw posted around the room. For example, one quote discussed when/at what age it would be appropriate to expose childrent to relevant literature,these topics, etc. Natalie's and my conversation about gender stereotypes and how these relate to people's willingness to engage in such conversations seems to connect to this--specifically, I think if broader gender stereotypes and heterosexist stereotypes were combatted from an earlier age (without getting into the details of sex ed specificall), it might help boys be less threatened by these conversations. 

I really enjoyed reading Blackburn and felt that her arguments and points were extremely valid. By creating a second space for these students outside of school, they're able to think freely and be themselves. The Attic served as a safe-space for many of these students. I drew a connection between Lee and Hawkins community based after school programs and this text. This is a sort of a community-based space where the participants are not in a formal school setting. I was very interested about The Attic's Women's Group. I felt that the participants really took initiative to create and manage all aspects of the group. By allowing the participants to bring texts that they feel are relevant and worth sharing, it allows the participant to be in the position of power. By working together and creating agency for change, the participants are able to home and have a personal investment in what they were learning. I found the idea and the organization of the Story Time very interesting and intriguing. Story Time allows the participants to share their own feelings and pieces that they've composed as well as texts that they've found written by someone outside of The Attic. This space allows the participants to have their voice heard and their opinions and beliefs validated. 

Blackburn's book highlighted for me the potential in the overlap between school and "extracurricular" spaces. I couldn't help but think to Ceballo's "Bilingual 'Neighborhood Club'" and Lee and Hawkin's community based after-school programs when reading about the Attic, and appreciated the not-school space that the Attic made for students. However, I was most interested and engaged when reading the section about the Speaker's Bureau. I've found myself particularly and repeatedly interested lately in the ways students can act as educators and this program within the Attic was one space in which the voices of students were really important to transforming how teachers and other students understood homosexuality and homophobia.

I'm wondering now how students can be more frequently empowered to do this kind of educating within schools or whether the distance of an out-of-school program is needed to facilitate students as teachers?

Hannah Bahn
Multicultural Education
Inquiry Project

Research and Practice: How Teacher Practitioner Research can promote Culturally-Relevant Teaching

I am eager to engage in teacher practitioner research in my future classroom because the practice beautifully fuses my interests in applied education research and teaching. For many years, my entry-point into the field of education has been through academic, ethnographic research and then, later, applied education research. I love collecting peoples’ stories, expressed in a variety of mediums, and synthesizing them. For a long time, I thought I wanted to do this outside of the classroom.

But this past fall, when I was enrolled in the “Curriculum and Pedagogy Seminar” and a “Sociology of Education” course, I began to develop a newfound understanding of and appreciation for where and how educational change is created and sustained. As I read about top-down reforms that adjusted class size or the number of hours in the school day, I began to realize that these tweaks to the system matter little if they do not fundamentally inform classroom practice. This realization in conjunction with my growing knowledge of curriculum design and pedagogical practices prompted my newfound interest in becoming a teacher.

One question that came up in previous class discussions was how to connect the services and work provided by youth centers to schools. The Speakers Bureau offers a response to how programs can bridge that gap and be better integrated into teachers' and students' understanding, the cirriculum, etc. The Speakers Bureau gave youth an opportunity to engage in outreach and share their experiences as members of the LGBTQ community, as well as opportunities to work directly with teachers, exploring how literature can be used to question heteronormativity. It would be interesting to see how this outreach model could be modified for other topics like race, class and privilege. Connecting it back to last Thursday's conversation, I wonder how far a partnership between a community organization and a school could go in changing the canon of a school's cirriculum.

I found Blackburn’s discussion of “negotiating threat lovingly” (95) interesting and helpful, and it reminded me a lot of what Kumashiro said about crisis. Blackburn writes about how youth perceived to be LGBTQQ and allies experience threat on a regular basis, but that what she had not previously realized was that, in efforts to combat homophobia, she was actually threatening those whose ideas she was challenging. Blackburn writes that she started to wonder whether threat was always good or bad. Like Kumashiro says for crisis, she comes to the conclusion that threat is something to work through, rather than avoid. She writes that working through threat lovingly requires a process of inquiry and “[believing] in others’ knowledge” (95).

"Where writing once meant print text- black marks on white paper, left to right and top to bottom - today 'writing' is in full Technicolor; it is nonlinear and alive with sounds, voices, and images of all kinds" (Lunsford, 2007)

I really appreciated the views of Paris and Kirkland on the use of AAL vs DAE. I feel that because students are often caught between 'a rock and a hard-place' (as my mother would say) when it comes to writing, students are not feeling confident in their communication skills. Traditional writing and grammar practice can often be exclusionary. The use of AAL through text-messaging as well as social media interactions allows students to have a "second space" to express themselves, their feelings, and their thoughts in a manner that is not necessarily academic. I feel that students should be encouraged to write as often as possible and through any and all creative outlets. I never was really "into" my English classes in high school, though I often found myself writing slam poetry and entering competitions because I was able to express myself and my feelings without the constraints of traditional grammar and structure. 

I always love reading Lisa Delpit because I find that her writing challenges me and my conceptions of myself as a future teacher very directly. In this week’s reading, she wrote about the importance of pairing high expectations for students with “social support.” She called this the “warm demander.” What struck me most in this reading, though, was what this warm, though tough, support looks like. Delpit discusses how often for African American children high expectations are manifest in tough (and sometimes harsh) language. For example, Delpit writes that her great niece DeMya turned to her once and said, “When people’s mamas yell at them, it just means they love them.” After reading this and other passages with similar messages, I had to re-acknowledge (its something I’ve known and gappled with for a while) that this type of language and way of expressing oneself is not a practice this a part of my culture. I am not used to love and support being expressed in this way.

I'm going to be completely frank here (and probably expose myself as a bit of an emotional mess) but I teared up multiple times while reading Delpit's "Multiplication is for White People." I felt so inspired and so empowered by her highlighting of good teachers – "warm demanders" – and it brought back memories of teachers who did that very work for me. I'm also having a really meta moment: recognizing that I'm pushing myself to stay awake now to post this instead of going to sleep and doing it in the morning out of my respect for Jody as a professor (still coming in late –– but hoping my presense at both the Race and Diversity Town Hall and Toni Morrison's talk at Swarthmore this evening act as a reasonable excuses!). In the same way that students in Delpit's writing were willing to be pushed and to push themselves, I've found myself voluntarily doing more work and spending more time in courses where I know my professor or teacher really cared about my learning and my identity as a whole person. And I appreciate this meta-cognitive moment for my learning.

I don’t feel I can write about my praxis in this forum. Even without naming students or sharing identifying information, the dialogue we have in our focus groups is so personal and vulnerable making that I don’t want to either expose people by reflecting on moments in the groups or make them personally uncomfortable when seeing the way I’ve reflected specifically on a moment in the work (by telling a vignette).

In spite of avoiding or rejecting the idea of writing a vignette on this Praxis, I will reflect on an important moment of connection I had with theory and experience within the Praxis. In our group on Sunday, I used educational theory to help reflect with our participants on the meta-processes happening in the sharing they were doing. After a moment of tension, we reflected together on Ellsworth’s idea that true dialogue is impossible and acknowledged that we were all coming into the room with different assumptions about each other’s identities. We also acknowledged the immense listening and openness required to understand – even partially – the many layers of identity we all came with. At the tea for the Identity Matters 360º yesterday, one of the professors mentioned that she doesn’t see a person as a single identity or whole being, but instead as many layers and intersections. I definitely see this play out in all of the focus groups we’ve held, and I appreciate the way it complexifies our understandings of topics, events, and each other.