Walled Women

I chose to use this picture as my avatar because it's a photo I took while in New Zealand this summer visiting family. The fern is so common in native forests there that I can't help thinking of my family when I see them. I also really relate to this photo because the fern is actually hanging over a waterfall. In many ways, I feel like that's a great analogy for the risktaking we do in class and every day of our lives. 

Though "Prisoners of a Hard Life" shared various statistics and facts about incarcerated women, it was not the numbers nor the narratives but the images, particularly the faces and bodies of the women, on which I want to comment.  The graphic-novel style of work adds a dimension to the stories of these five women that I'm not used to seeing.  In grayscale, the women come to life and, were I able to take the figures out of the harsh words of the pages and environments of the panel, it would be easy enough to insert them into a children's book--as just another illustration of a woman.  In this, I think the authors allow the reader to see the humanity of women who are used to being seen as criminals first and women and mothers as a distant second and third.  The ink drawings make it easier to notice similarities between people instead of focusing on differences like race or class indicators like style of dress.  The stories of these five women are each unique, but, through the medium of the graphic novel, more so than the photographs or other outside images that are included, it is easy to recognize that the women in the panels are more than their childhoods, their crimes, their addictions, their race, their poverty, or any other factors I may have previously focused on to define them. 

Each of our texts this week provides powerful anecdotes and statistics regarding the history of women in the American justice system. I was particularly taken by the story of Alice Clifton, the slave tried for murder of her own child. To connect her story back to the similar story of Regina McKnight presented in “Prisoners of a Hard Life (The Real Cost of Prison Project)” was particularly heartbreaking. How long has this injustice been going on? How long will it continue? 

I was interested in Gross' statement about how a white factory worker named Gabe Blum asserted that black men were the most intelligent and honest of workers but didn't have access to more job opportunities simply because of the color of their skin (47). It makes me think about how some people think we actually live in a post-racial society. I find it hard to agree with that idea because of the institutional racism that still exists in our world. It's subtle racism - the policies we maintain in certain instituational settings may not be made purposely to discriminate against a particular group of people, but the outcome is that it does. I volunteer at an organization where I help my clients access social services, and I was helping one of my clients apply for a job at a retail store. The questionnaire on the store applications are unnecessarily tedious and repetitive, but at one point it asked for my client to identify her race. Although it was ultimately her decision whether or not to disclose that information, I still felt annoyed that that was even a question. Why did I have this nagging feeling that if she indicated that she is black, it would be a huge factor in whether or not she would get the job? If a white man were competing with a black man to get a job, who do you imagine would get the job? I acknowledge the fact that other factors are considered when employers look at different applicants but can we really say that race has nothing to do with it? I feel like this situation would have the potential to involve racism, but it's so subtle.

Gross makes an observation in the introduction of Colored Amazons that's stuck with me as I read about these cases and their history.  "For most [of these women], their criminal records serve as the only documentation of their lives." (pg.4-5)  It strikes me in a way that I cannot shake.  We, after all, live in a time where we are constantly anxious of the legacy we may leave--may it be by the "greatness" or change we want to bestow on the world, or even by becoming paranoid over the paper-trail we leave on the internet.  In other words, we understand that we have a history and constantly think about it.

These women, however, would have almost never existed.  They were given no birth certificates, no social security code, no formal identification of any kind was given to them when they were first born to let us know that they were born and continued to lead lives.  Instead, we were close to not acknowledging their presence on this earth and to being blind at their imprint on the world.

In Ellsworth piece she writes "If an exact fit between message and understanding, conscious and unconscious, curriculum and interpretation, is impossible, then teaching, as it is conventionally understood, is impossible" (pg 15).  It is important that she used the word "teaching" instead of "learning".  I've come to learn that even if you have a bad teacher or a lesson plan that goes askew, every opportunity is a learning opportunity .  However, some methods of teaching are certainly more effective than others. Freire and Shor discuss "liberatory dialogue", which is something I would consider to be an essential aspect of most of my classes.  They discuss how traditionalists might think this method of teaching is bizarre, and I can admit, I probably would have felt that way in the past.  I used the think that the teacher was the most knowledgable person in the room, and that by having discussions with classmates, we were wasting time and losing knowledge.  I also thought about how if I were ever a teacher, teaching the same thing year after year would be mind-numbing.  Although repetitive curriculum may be a little boring for some teachers, I had never thought that each year the teacher has the possibility to relearn if they allow their students to discuss and hear new perspectives and ideas each year.  I know some of my friends and family members at home probably consider liberatory dialogue a little bizzare; sometimes they ask questions like "What are you learning from your major again? Why are you becoming certified to teach?

In "What Is The 'Dialogical Method' of Teaching?", a lot fo interesting reasons for dialogical education being a good teaching style, most of which I agree with. But I really wanted to focus my post on specific lines and parts of the text. First I wanted to focus on Isa's point of "if public resources were transferred from the military to education to fund smaller classesm, that would make dialogue easier to have in school" (98). I am not sure if the  way I interpreted this line is the message Ira was trying to convey, but I completely agree with the fact that less money should be going to the military and more should be put in schools. As I mentioned in my earlier posts for Anne's class, a lot of public schools are extremely underfunded and are then expected to perform as well as any other elite school. Making it personal, my high school was one of the schools that was used as an "experiment" to prove that smaller schools will be more beneficial for students. The fact that my school was smaller did help A LOT with the learning experience, only problem was that my school was still underfunded which meant we did not have the adequate materials and resources we needed to excel - leading to the closing down of my school. If some of the funding for the military went into the education system, I believe there would be a huge improvement in schools.

One thing I've been thinking a lot about since our class discussion on Tuesday is "imagined communities," the term my partner and I were given. It comes from the Pratt reading and was coined by Benedict Anderson. He says most human communities are imagined in that we give them traits that they don't actually possess, such as a feeling of finiteness and closeness among members. Though I think it is possible for communities to exist that really do have these qualities, I agree that more commonly, members of communities pretend their communities are the way they want them to be, giving them a false image of togetherness that ends up creating boundaries and forms an "other" where one might not have existed. This often results in contact zones (another term from this reading that we addressed a lot in class).

On an unrelated note, I found the disussion in the Freire and Shor reading particularly interesting with respect to our discussion in Silence class on Tuesday as well as our first Voice class. In one section they discuss the pressure to add to classroom discussion or dialogue, and it makes me think of what Ann said and then revised about not contributing to class discussion being selfish. Ira and Paulo explain that "In dialogue, one has the right to be silent" and that dialogical teaching does not necessarily mean everyone has to speak. That said, everything spoken in this class setting does contribute to the dialogue and therefore to the learning that takes place

     First, I’d like to comment that A Pedagogy for Liberation is a fantastic title. This was the most striking quote in the piece for me: “liberatory learning involves desocialization.”

     As we enter these institutional spaces of learning, even as we acquire language, we start to realize all of the restrictive social and communicative rules we must learn to navigate in order to survive and “move through the system.” This socialization can completely disempower us – turn us into helpless cogs in a machine who do not think critically because we are seeing the world through the structure of how we’ve been socialized. Our roles, as friends, partners, students, workers, are flat and formed.

      Transcending that socialization is the challenge. How do you impart that crucial questioning in someone that can allow them to reject the restrictions and think more freely?