Some disjointed thoughts (mostly about our class)

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