I am searching for a critical space of understanding where I can engage in new discourses I had not known or even thought of before. Questions? Did I have some questions while trying to understand these last readings? Terminology? Oh yeah, talk about semantics! I had some questions about terminology, all right.
Anybody want to explain these to me, go ahead and comment.
1. Post-structuralist theory
2. hegemony - leadership or predominant influence exercised by one nation over
others, as in a confederation.
3. agency - a means of exerting power or influence; instrumentality: nominated by the
agency of friends
4. autonomy - being able to do things oneself
5. politics of subjectivity
6. gendered social lives (yeah, so, this is how we all grew up)
7. critical literacy
I’ll try the last one. Critical literacy was referred to in the text as “an umbrella term for politically sensitive research and practice that aims to change social injustices…draws on the frameworks of post-structuralist theories of discourse, critical discourse analysis, and feminism” (page 31). “Critical literacy educators strive to…ultimately change social injustices that hinge on inequitable power relations…critical literacy theorists argue for reading and writing as sites of social praxis (reflection and action).” And further, “critical literacy resists any simplistic or generic definitions because the agenda is to understand the complexity of the relationships between language practices power relations, and identities.” It seems to me critical literacy and qualitative research were made for each other. Who determines what is socially unjust? Haven’t we as a society always lived with social injustice; some of us even thrive on it. So, is it in the process of making meaning, as injustice occurs, that critical literacy takes place?
I remember way back when I first was going to school to become an educator, one of my teachers was talking about how important home visits were. That every teacher should do his / her best to visit the child at home to understand where the child comes from, how best to teach this child. This would be a fact-finding, eye-opening mission in many cases, I’m sure.
Further, aren’t we all subject to shifting relations of power, gender, and class? How many times have you returned home for the holidays and slipped right into your prior place in your familial pecking order? Fallen prey to your mother and her guilt trip prodding, or your sibling’s time-worn tricks that still manage to annoy you? Everywhere we go there is a hierarchy, and we have to figure out where we fit into it. Isn’t this a matter of shifting relations? And what about age? Age was mentioned briefly in one section. All ages can and do wield power. Small children can hold adults hostage, as the two preschoolers demonstrated. Do we still defer to our elders, I wonder? Or have the latest generations forsaken the wisdom of the elders for the speed and flash of the Internet?
One thing this last reading got me thinking about was the given idea that children are essentially powerless in almost all situations. Be it home, the classroom, church, or anywhere, older people are in charge, and kids just don’t have a say. No voice, no power. How do we empower our kids? How do we empower them to [learn, read, make good choices?] Are they really free reasoning agents? How could they be? They’re just children! They live daily with “the smallness of power” (page 33).
Also, isn’t adjusting to a different discourse pretty much the same thing as code switching? Every one of us has entered a situation “saturated with specific cultural meanings, values, and forms of knowing” (page 24). And yes, these specifics are foreign and strange to us, but we figure out a way to fit in and assimilate. “Children’s engagements in discourse practices are responsive…imaginative, resistant, ironic, sad, curious…. creating shared histories of response that become part of contexts of meaning” (page 33). Code switching, right?
There were an abundance of $10.00 words in this reading. It may take awhile to further digest and understand just what all we are talking about here.
Annie Croon