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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: June 30, 2004
Reviewed:
Latest Update: June 30, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Retroactively Recognized Processes in Discourse Model

I've just added several links to the debriefing readings as I recognize their importance. Check out my fussing in Remain Open to All Knowledge, But Don't Send Me That Link Unless You've Evaluated It about Pat and Susan sending me links that then take me ages to conceptually relate to the site topics and get up discussion questions, etc. I was grumpy, and I meant it. I'm the only teacher I know who "fights" with my students. Most teachers seem never to have emotional outbursts like that. At least I don't see them. But sometimes I really yelp, and I've never quite understood what triggers it, unless it's emotional immaturity on my part. Michael, that's what "the guys" would say.

But this whole process of debriefing is making me look more deeply into some of this. Maybe the Carnegie Perspectives group was right to call this "deep learning." It's deep in the sense also that you don't get it right away, especially if you're in it. I've been too well-trained to deny my own grumpiness and yelling. But I couldn't explain it as an integral part of the teaching. Then as I was titling these new pieces to debriefing, I realized my discomfort with referring to ours as a "teaching model." I had just been looking at Jerome Krase's link (sent on IVSA listserv) on teaching in the freshman year the skills of visual sociology and website construction. But some of the New York Times' honored sites from CUNY wouldn't work properly on my computer. Now, that was probably my computer, but I want to create sites that use accessible enough technology that everybody can openly access them with reliability. I want my students and our discourse community to use visual and verbal (and audio, for that matter) technology, but not exclusively. I'm willing to make hardcopy and pass it around. Discourse must not be elitist, at least if we're following Habermas' concept of public sphere.

(Here I need to stop and throw in some theory from David xxxxx, on geography and the postmodern, and Habermas' as well as others' intent in the description of the private and the public sphere. Oops, I'm mixing up the geography book upstairs with the privatization of culture book by the Chinese author. Will clarify later. Too tired to go upstairs right now. jeanne)

This was the first time I've ever understood my anger with schools of education and their picayune focus on "teaching." It's discourse and deep learning I want, not tst-taking. No wonder they don't like me. I was right long, long ago when I told one of our Dean's I was just "passing" here. I was. I hated school as a kid. It was the forum I liked. Now, why did it take me so long to realize that? And how have we missed such analyses in the schools themselves. Surely, i'm not the only one. I hear Michael saying the same things. I'm not teaching, and I'm not doing qualitative research for publication. I'm working at maintaining the only forum I ever knew that allowed "bookish learning" and didn't try to kill it off until now. I don't fit with the "praxis" people either because I'm not doing models and seeking funding for doing more models and more conferences, etc. I want the freedom to discourse that I identify with the Sorbonne of the 15th and 16th centuries, with people like Rabelais and Francois Villon. If I think of the Dear Habermas community as a "working group" then it makes sense.

Then I'm not fighting with my students, I'm complaining about the division of labor in a work setting - it's not professional to leave me with so much of the work. Or is it? Do I want to stop and teach a course such as Jerrome Krase describes? NO. Definitively no. Been there; done that; discarded it. Seemed to be taking me in the wrong direction because I don't want to train future media people to create websites, albeit interesting and useful; I want to create many, many forums, both in the academy and in the community, where we can talk deeply about the real issues in our lives. And I don't think the Internet is going in a direction where web site building will make a difference in our dominant discourse. (Cite Zemsky)

So if I don't want to teach my computer skills to the Dear Habermas community, then I have to either fund them (which I absolutely won't do) or do the conceptual linking and uploading myself. Maybe Pat and Susan, and now Teresa, and all the others who send me those links, alone, no comments, aren't so wrong to do that. Maybe some of us have to rethink my aspersions of funding. Does that mean we're not doing a good job of developing Dear Habermas as a forum for discourse?

Hmmm. Not if we consider Dear Habermas as the work setting for such a forum, in which we prefer to avoid funding that would divert our agenda. We'd be like a small business then, in which the leader and the manager are still not sufficiently separated out with details in the purview of different people. The entrepreneur who starts the small business often dies of a heart attack before successfully delegating to hisher managers. That's because thinking the process through is still tied up with getting it done. OK. I apologize. You guys aren't mistreating me. We just need to do more debriefing so I can give you more responsibility.

But that fits in with the recent description of the model I wrote for the New Orleans Conference. Ay. There's the problem. I just finished writing that yesterday.

Maybe I could develop this all more slowly. No, I couldn't. We need the discourse desperately. And we need to make "education" understand that we need "deep learning" and discourse, including discourse on "bookish learning."

Transparency: Oops. Just saw another piece. One of the reasons that I keep getting Fwd:'s is the difficulty of transparency while I'm still working on the process. When you're struggling with social change from the dominant discourse model, you don't see the steps along the way. That destroys transparency, and frustrates both the one changing the model and the ones trying to carry out the changes. This may just be a condition of paradigm shift.

And maybe that's what I'm trying to say to Jerome Krase about the websites. I envy that you have them going. I envy that your kids can do them. But even if I had that, that wouldn't help in the discourse model to create and shift the paradigm to open access governance discourse in the public sphere, with the skills of the academy in active service to that discourse. Yes!