How to Plan a Day of Summer Institute

We are thematizing
our learning
in the present

It's not that we all appeared here.
Poof.
In the most unformed or forming only now way.
There is a room full of history that plans this group.

But a careful organization
script,
protocol,
logic model,
outline,
format,
essential question,
standard,
outcome set,
or google doc
couldn't have manipulated this feeling
of synergy of learning with people

In the room today.

Layering with #gnomes: Beginning to Name Values

Here is a beginning to my credo make.  I have some more layers to add to my thinking in upcoming posts... In fact I think I have a lot more to say, but right now I am going to throw out here some thinking I have going so far in terms of re-purposing my toyhack project and invite more voices to think with me in this voicethread.

Press Any Key

What does it mean to be bootable?  

Ready to go where the electric current takes you?  

Mapping onto the flow feeling, 

The current rippling effect

(Do currents move in waves?)

To understand your own interests and 

Let's do the wave 

That's what it's like

The flow of knowing for sure and still being open

To sparking

Somehow a connection to a teacher, learner, neighbor

Person beside you, whose arms flow up 

At just the moment to make that nice meeting place

Of bodies moving in a current 

Ideas that don't overwhelm to the stopping point

But rather well over the brim, 

Sipping to the next person, next idea, next moment

In activity 

Of making

P.S.

It was this little

Seemingly standstill moment

Overheating laptop

Remembering Kim's phone photography

Inserting (or asserting) my own interst

That became a device

To boot up a poem

Day 1 Poemified Storify

To Wobble

Definitions of Wobble: to shake or wiggle, to be weak, to falter, unsteady movement from side to side, to sway, to shake, to stagger, unsteady motion, to tremble or quaver, like a baby, bad stance, spinning

To wobble usually has pretty negative connotations.  It seems to be a problematic action, one that reflects the unknown, uncertainties, undoing.  I have been thinking with my students about reclaiming wobbling as learning.  Fecho (2005) writes about wobble in this way, as the unsteady places with potential for learning.  When our understandings and current positioning in the world is questioned in some ways and we are given the opportunity to reflect and figure out how to move forward. 

Wobbling is a lot more interesting to me than other words usually associated with learning.  Especially at this time of the semester (finals week here we come!), learning sides up with measurement, success, achievement, numbers, grades, objective (huh?) assessments of knowledge.   For their final blog posts I am asking students instead to narrate:

moment(s) of wobble from this course.  You will be thinking about time(s) when your thinking has been challenged.  When something has felt uncomfortable or different that your usual experiences.  You will unpack your experience of this as well as why you think this has been a moment of wobble.

This blog post should be one with more questions than answers.  More uncertainties than certainties.  This should be about what you are wondering now.  This piece or question or idea does not need to have a resolution.

Be creative.

Be thoughtful.

Dig in.

This is no easy task.  With the dominant narratives of heroes and bootstraps in our heads, it is really difficult to write about our own wobbling, our uncertainty, and call that learning!  Well in my own last blog post (for class) this semester I am drawn again to thinking about wobbling in the field I am studying this semester, gender and language studies.  An essay I read this week, “She Sired Six Children” Feminist Experiments with Linguistic Gender, Anna Livia names, problematizes and values the wobble of feminist science fiction writers.  She takes this lovely approach to Ursala K. LeGuin’s feminist fop aux in the 70’s in The Left Hand of Darkness where she uses the masculine generic (he/him/etc) in reference to the (supposedly) amorphous gendered people in her novel.  Livia puts this work in context with LeGuin’s future works and her own critique of the language.  Livia’s exploration of Marge Piercy and June Arnold’s more progressive moves to create new non-gendered pronouns for their novels is still a messy task as both women struggle to make the transportation hold in their works.  Livia questions and honors the works of these women and the ways that they negotiate their own wobbling.

Anyway as the semester wraps up I am thinking about my own wobbling right now and hoping, like Livia I can  find value and not just judgment in this uncertain, unsteady, rocky stance.

Fecho, B. (2005).  Appreciating the wobble:  Teacher research, professional development, and figured worlds.  English Education, 37 (3). 

Livia, A. (1999). “She sired six children” Feminist experiments with linguistic gender. In M. Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, & L.A. Sutton, Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse.  NewYork: Oxfod University Press.

Two Corners of Same Room, I Think Mine Has a Window, Though

Reading Rebecca Dobkins’ storied research about Native American women and girls interactions in early twentieth century federally mandated boarding schools has me thinking of all things about the open house at a local public Montessori school that I could apply (through a lottery system) to be my son’s kindergarten school for next year.  These two schooling situations in most ways couldn’t be more dissimilar.  The boarding schools described by Dobkins worked actively and without remorse to assimilate Native American children away from their home cultures, languages and lives.  The forces used were long distance separation from family, difficulty in returning home for any reason and use of legal language and even force to maintain the authority to separate families.  Our local Montessori school is the most progressive public opportunity available in my county, I, especially as a white, middle class, academic have a great deal of power/knowledge available to negotiate my and my child’s position in the school and his entrance to the school at all.  I don’t have any power over whether he gets in, but I can choose some other kind of schooling option altogether.  I don’t have to send him at all. 

It would seem that the differences between me and the Native American mothers who I have been reading in Dobkins’ essay are gulfs, but I’m interested in thinking also about the interconnectedness we share.  I was also reading today Dias Soto and Blue Swadners’ The Politics of Early Childhood Education.  The first chapter unravels the ways that schooling (again), particularly college education of some early childhood teachers and mothers worked to professionalize and make scientific some mothers and some teachers.  These professional mothers and teachers, I can count as both of these, are still under the reign of patriarch through discourses of white, male generated child development theories or the more modern neoliberal models of education and child rearing based on new business (still white and male) dispositions approaches to foster problem solving and flexibility, for instance.  Progressive schools that take up, for instance,  21^st Century Learner frameworks, seem to work to the success of individual students, who can be self starters and business-ready but the benefits are not to all students, but to a few who are already benefiting from the corporate model of exchange in late capitalism.  I am left feeling cornered.  I can option to send my child to our neighborhood school, where worksheets abound, possibly to the Montessori alternative (although unlikely since I declined to enter him in the lottery at age 4, where most slots are taken) or I can homeschool him in a local community of thoughtful people, but with political consequences of separatism.  If I’m not interested in testing, structured curriculum, focus on “the basics,” then I am not at all compelled to be part of this public system, and though politically a powerful choice, it is a very difficult family one to make. 

The public schools push me (and family) out in some ways as zealously as they pulled in the children of the Native American children Dobkins writes of.  This power to separate groups of people, like women, mothers, who could be united is a major component in the colonialist efforts of schooling Dobkins illustrates.  So while I am faced with resisting guised power that works through me as a professional and as a mother.  My resistance seems separate and different and scaleless compared to the need for resistance of Native American mothers, who are marginalized and erased from history even.  But as Diaz Soto and Blue Swadner point out my schooling, my professionalization, has been another tool to create a hierarchy of differences, separating me from the other women in the world and in history with whom my resistance could be aligned.  

References 

Diaz Soto, L. & Blue Swadner, B. (2006). The politics of early childhood education. NY: Peter Lang.

Dobkins, R. (1999). Strong language, strong actions: Native American women writing against federal authority, In M.Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, & L. Sutton (Eds.) Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.

Exhilaration for Connected Learning at #nwpam12

There is a
welcome,
welcoming,
well come on
conversation in

A room
Of people who
Aren't only here
But are here
In the convo
From other rooms
And non-rooms
At other moments
Talking in my head
In earphones
And not
Making me smarter
When I hang in
A non room
Of real people

Who care

About having
And being
A conversation
That matters.