I promised you a few resources.

The classic text on standpoint theory is Sandra Harding's 1993 essay, "Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is 'Strong Objectivity?" --
which argues (as I said in class) that the perspectives of marginalized and oppressed individuals can help to create
more objective accounts of the world; these individuals are placed in a unique position to point to patterns of behavior
that those in the dominant group culture are unable to recognize....

During our discussion of the very "classed" history of Bryn Mawr today, I mentioned some of the racial history as well. If you'd like to know more, check out
Florence Goff and Karen Tidmarsh. Examining Our History: Inclusion/Exclusion at Bryn Mawr. Making Sense of Diversity: A Series of Conversations. November 18, 2005.

I don't really know where I'm going with this; all I know is that I need to get the words jumbling around in my head down asap, and rather than write on paper, I want to get them onto serendip so they can be seen by a pair of eyes besides my own. That being said, this won't be particularly coherent (and given that I've been drugged up on Dayquil all day, it'll probably be erring towards incoherent--hence the words jumbling around in my head).

We brushed on the directionality and agenda of education today, specifically in the context of education about economics and capitalism, etc. Anne highlighted in her notes a statement which, in skimming over them to find some sort of framework for my thoughts, stood out:

This is an interesting use of the same core technology that we are using (Jupyter Notebooks). Except in this case, anyone is able to run a notebook! This is accomplished via a commercial hosting company (Rackspace) and the "tmpnb" service that spawns up a "docker image". We aren't using docker on our Jupyter@Physcis server, but this technology might be one to keep our eye on.

-Doug

How do we in society move beyond labels? Student, victim, survivor, criminal–all designations carry a certain connotation invoke a certain image of the person described, but those assumptions seldom contain the truth. What is more, so many of thease labels come from a place of damage. Both in and out of prison the assigned identities of "prisoner" or "convict" or "ex-con" or "inmate" carry a lot of weight as far as first impressions and asumptions of who a person is, and Pinkert found that same mentality to be true of Holocaust survivors. That very term "survivor" even starts at a place of damage, emphasizing that a person has "survived" and come through some sort of orderal.

Hill’s Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life piece raised many points of interest for me in terms of my work at my placement. He discusses the importance of “appealing to the experiences, cultural orientations, values and worldviews of students in order to effectuate greater educational outcomes… [and the need to] make explicit connections between students’ everyday knowledge and the demands of subject-matter learning.” (Hill, 8.) This reminds me of the importance of engaging students’ diverse “funds of knowledge” in order to affirm their innate knowledge based on lived experiences and utilize this as a springboard for conversation, contemplation, and success in teaching and learning.

"Many of the course texts reflected what Forman (2002) calls the "extreme local," or hip-hop's narrative preoccupation with specific cities, area codes, neighborhoods, housing projects, and so forth within its texts. Throughout the semester, students consitently expressed a preference for texts that emphazied geographic secificty and local knowledge..."

I think that Carters’ idea of  “Black cultural capital” is extremely powerful, especially when speaking of class “dominance” and participation. While reading this piece, all I could think of what the Women in Walled Communities 360 as well as the Black American Perspective class (which I ironically called my Black class), and even this class/Ed classes. Because of the nature of the 360’s theme, it focused a lot on the issues of mass incarceration. For most of the class, students of color would tend to dominate/lead the conversations while white students listened more. I could say the same for the Black class, although I would add that the majority of the class was composed of students of color.

As I was reading Hill’s chapters on Hip-Hip Lit (specifically “Real Recognize Real”) and the article from Pinkert et al. I was struck by the empowerment and opportunity that students in both classrooms experienced. Both curriculums gave the students space to explore and define their own identities.

**In my post, I use the term "we" to represent today's society.** Dehumanization of the opressed in our country seems to be a common theme for marginalized groups. We give people an undesirable lable, "prisoner," and then assign that label to an entire population. Once we've clumped enough people under the umbrella of negative stereotyping, we can forget about their needs and move on with our lives. This injustice is even more oppressive when we also take control of the group's destiny. Controlling where they can go, what they eat, and how long they must remain in their opressive position-with prisoners, we not only dehumanize, label, and dictate their lives, we also starve them from emotional stability.