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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: November 6, 2004
Latest Update: November 6, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Give Me Space to TeachMy feelings were really hurt Thursday when a graduate student asked to use his thesis for an exhibit project. He told me that he had listened to my talk on Thursday about all the things we brought for the exhibit that you could work with and my concern that we make all projects accessible and understandable to young people and visitors. My take i nthe rush of students after class was that he had dismissed that as trivial and beneath his more serious academic pursuits. So I can just take his thesis. Talk about substituting your own agenda. Do you kids really get away with this somewhere?
Changing dominant discourse, providing safety nets, gaining fair wages and job security all depend on our ability to communicate these issues in depth to the body politic. To lock your precious academic material into writings that only other academics will have access to and understanding of is to assume an academic arrogance that has led us into morass of difficulties dominant discourse and the colonization it brings with it have already foisted upon us.
Even if you have so little regard for the theory and praxis I teach, and for me personally that you don't mind telling me how inferior my "knowledge" is, it is grossly disrespectful to say it to me in so many words when classmates are standing all around. When I asked if he had looked at last Spring's exhibit on line, he said "Not yet." I think I would be angry if it weren't such typical non-answerability of a dominant authoritarian academy. He just told me he hasn't heard a word I said, read or understood a word I've written, and sees no need to. He'll just take another professor's academic material and substitute it for me and all I stand for.
So I'll pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again. I'm serious about what I'm doing. I believe in democracy, and I believe we can save it, even if it is hard work. So I persist in spite of the insults, in spite of all those who "know" so much more than I do. And sociology is about the interrelationships of people as they form and maintain the communities in which they exist. But I guess they have another definition for "real teachers and real classes."
Do me a favor guys. Try not to insult me. Let me be more specific. Try not to tell me you don't have the time to read transform_dom and the website. It's your textbook. Your classmates and I are writing it, putting up resources; it's your class work. Try not to tell me you're too intellectual to try a different approach to transparency of certification. I'm pretty smart, too, and it isn't beneath me. Try not to demand that I explain why I haven't dug out, responded to and posted every blasted thing you did all semester, when there are over 300 students and we're five weeks ahead of the end of the semester. It hurts to be insulted. And it's a very poor indication of your understanding for illocutionary discourse, which puts an A in my course at risk.
