This week was the first one I spent at the center with the participants, having spent the past three weeks in the labs at Haverford making art with bacteria. We began by checking out the wood shop again, and participants guided us around the space to—with the help of the woodshop teacher, Sarah*—demonstrate all of the different tools available to us. Many of these were basic saws or sanders that she had adapted to make them more generally accessible (for instance, a sander that would have originally required a lot of dexterous finger movements was now attached to a stationary bike. Participants could work together to sand a piece of wood, with one pedaling the bike, and another holding the wood still against the moving sander).

I attended a talk tonight given by Haverford alum, Class of 1986, Vincent Warren regarding his work in activism and, in particular, the Black Lives Matter movement. A political science major while at Haverford, he did not shy away from an attempt to find applied solutions to issues to accompany his anecodotes and more philosophical points regarding race relations and police brutality. It was clear throughout a majority of his talk that he was in a room filled with people who very much agreed with his more theoretical claims regarding race. His assertions early on were met with nods, snaps, laughter, and a general air of affirmation and agreement. Yet, towards the end when he began moving towards applied practices, I found myself deviating from the masses witht regards to his message.

This is the article that Sarah was talking about: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-c-mcginley/what-really-happens-when-you-use-the-r-word_b_4896444.html

In the mindful classrooms video, I noticed the class doing a sort of loving-kindness meditation for the members of the class who were not present. This really connected to a discussion I had in class last week, in which I talked about a previous class in which we had discussed the use of mindfulness as a way to break out of a focus on the self and engage with other people. I think that this focus is a saving one for the use of mindfulness in classrooms. Offering mindfulness as a tool for connecting with the world is a very valid option, and one that seems to not impose a certain view upon one's students. This all reminded me of a speech by David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water," that we discussed in my class on mindfulness.

In the mindful classrooms video, I noticed the class doing a sort of loving-kindness meditation for the members of the class who were not present. This really connected to a discussion I had in class last week, in which I talked about a previous class in which we had discussed the use of mindfulness as a way to break out of a focus on the self and engage with other people. I think that this focus is a saving one for the use of mindfulness in classrooms. Offering mindfulness as a tool for connecting with the world is a very valid option, and one that seems to not impose a certain view upon one's students. This all reminded me of a speech by David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water," that we discussed in my class on mindfulness.

In reading Yergeau’s piece, I began thinking about dynamics that lie at the heart of oppression in many forms. This line of thinking was sparked by a talk about whiteness and racism by George Yancy that I attended on Monday afternoon. When I began to read Yergeau’s piece later that night, I read it with Yancy’s words about blackness and the treatment of black people fresh in my mind. Following these threads through Yergeau’s work helped me to pick up on crucial intersections between racist and ableist oppression—and likely between other forms of discrimination as well. In both Yergeau’s and Yancy’s stories of injustice, I heard about dehumanization, the stripping of agency, and the denial of subjective experience.