A Jeanne Site
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: March 19, 2000
Faculty on the Site.
This is a story, a story of how a community was spawned in an academic setting between teachers and students. But it is much more than that, for the teachers were committed criminologists, so that the story is as much one of critical criminology and an understanding of the interdependence of "discipline" and "punishment" as it is of teachers and students. We believe the story has much to offer to both criminology and to the academy. And, yes, we realize that that statement smacks of metanarrative, but that's the story we have to tell.
Background: The Real Time Community from Which We Sprang
This virtual community was born of love, the love of learning. Back in the early 70s, the first seed was planted. the sandbox, give a sandbox right smack in the middle of the building, with lots of window space, so they can see inside. They will be drawn first to lurk, then to join in, and soon they will be playing with us. Then they will let go of their structural violence. They will see they have no need for it.
Didn't work. They lurked, they came, but they categorized us into what they could fit into their world, and the rest they left aside. They left the love and the joy, of which the sandbox had come, aside.
Susan and I went on. Who knows why? Probably because we both really believed in the love and the joy, and the fun we had in the sandbox. Susan had been there when the sandbox first came into being, when the college gave us the space we had chosen. I still have flashes of remembering her working on a PSA paper with me, in that room framed in glass, hoping the world would see, and come in. That was the PSA paper she gave during her first year at Berkeley, from which she recalls that she was the only "first year" giving a professional paper. I still recall the study was on church programs in Gardena, California. And given our work since then, I'll wager it focussed on their youth programs.
Lessons We Took from the First Stage of Real Time Community
That we were categorized, understood too quickly, if we didn't use jargon, we were excluded, but if we did use jargon we were understood too quickly. Simply everyone already knew what we had to say, and no one bothered to listen. We learned with Habermas to call that not listening to validity claims in good faith, and with Lewis Gordon to call that ignorant bad faith in Sartrean terms. In this paper, limited by presentation time, we summarize the work of many sociologists and philosophical thinkers as the structural violence of the academic institution.
We were attracted to that terminology in the Toronto ASC meetings in 1999. In a session on Peacemaking Criminology someone commented, "to be absent is to be structurally violent." Undoubtedly the speaker had a specific instance in mind, but what struck me was the concept of "absence" in terms of ignorant good faith, a claim of openness, of "objective" disinterestedness, that is denied by ignorant good faith's certainty that it has already heard everything worth hearing. "Absence," in the sense of the "knowingness" Jonathan Lear deplores .
Structural violence, as we are using the term, is violence that results not from individual intent, anger, frustration, but from the categorization process through which we tend to translate our "knowingness," the metanarrative to which we subscribe. Martha Minow speaks to the unstated assumptions on which we base our "knowingness." Philosophers, legal theoreticians, and criminal justice professionals have long dealt with the issue of how to reconcile multiple worldviews within the social context we call society.
As the cost of incarceration runs higher every year, as the problems of education, rehabilitation, prevention grow more complex every year, the problem of structural violence looms larger as an issue to which the criminal justice system must turn its attention. To what extent are our institutions, family, school, community, higher and professional education, contributing to the violence we find ourselves unable to stem? We refer here to the eruptions of violence in our schools, workplaces, and roadways, when violent crime overall has peaked and reversed. Whatever else, a six-year-old who shoots and kills, in anger and perceived retaliation, another six-year-old, is not a violent criminal. We cannot extrapolate our definitions of violent crime to include six-year-olds. And, if we cannot, then we must look to the structural violence of our social context, and we must understand ecologically the levels at which structural and personal violence interact.
This story is about how two criminal justice professionals came to focus on structural violence, and how that focus led to the growth of the virtual academic community, Dear Habermas, described in this paper. At first puzzled that we seemed to have started out trying to eliminate what we only much later came to call structural violence, we discovered the extent to which an abhorrence of structural violence had led us to the creation of community from the outset, and now, through that community, has brought us back to this analysis.
We promised in our abstract a review of the growth of this academic community over three semesters. But since that time, we've had a fourth semester added to our history. That was a telling semester in which we found that most of our objectives are long-term ones, for which there are long latent-learning periods. That brings to mind the structural violence of the academy in general, which expects us to publish the results of studies which lend themselves to final reports in relatively short time frames. How drastically our reports of Dear Habermas have changed each year! The criminal justice associations have been far more receptive to the tentativeness of each phase of this growth than have some of the more formal academic associations. We thank ACJS for that openness and willingness to break with rigidity and categorization.
Our Goals and Our Changing Understanding of Those Goals
Back in the early seventies, when we first began this project, CSUDH had a widely-diverse student population. To this new campus came adults who had had no opportunity to gain degrees, but with broad experience and the discipline of practical knowledge. With them came young people, like Susan, on her way to Berkeley and a doctorate. With them came others, young and older alike, to whom the doors of education had been closed until the civil rights legislation of the sixties.Reading sophistication spanned a range from difficulty at sixth grade level to relative ease with professional literature once the concepts were discussed and defined. Experience with academic resources ran the same gamut, as did sophistication with the use of argument. This meant our need for teaching basic skills matched our need for moving quickly to catch the fire of their imagination. Most of our students had had limited exposure to formal schooling, but were bright, eager, and hungry for knowledge. Hard to reconcile with "remedial" education. These were not children. Many of them were adults with fully developed minds. Mutual respect and gentle non-judgmental guidance were called for. Many were young people who would have made it on their own by sheer stamina and determination. And then there were those who came along, not sure of who they were, or where they were going, but sensing something happening. They needed firmer guidance, but freedom also to discover.
Into this mix the college threw traditional courses, traditional texts, the formal infrastructure of a university, and radical teachers who wanted to usher in a new age of equality and justice for all. The Social Systems Research Center was our answer to this strange mix. The basic idea was to break up the rigidity of classes and tests. We followed Dewey, learn by doing. This approach permitted us to give the respect due our experienced students' practical knowledge, for we were focussing on issues to aid the community. Real issues, real learning. To this we added a practical introduction to social research. During this period there were dozens of agencies that had no resources for needs assessment and evaluation studies. The university had professors experienced in such work, students who needed to learn such skills, and the need to establish links to the community it served.
In the early seventies, there were few private research organizations, no agency budgets for research, and little agency understanding of such research. We worked out what was essentially a partnership with non-profit agencies. Students would perform needs assessment and evaluative research in exchange for budget items allowing for student internships and the funding of future needs. We didn't know the word partnership in the seventies. We spoke of in-kind budgets. But they were real. Students would collect and analyze survey data for agencies. Agencies would then help students in their professional training, and include future budget items for students and/or their research.
Refusal to See "Difference" Results in Structural Violence
But how would it work? In reality? Day to day? Once the school granted us space, a large room, equipped at first with calculators, and an inner office, we moved in and opened our doors. We did schedule classes, but the schedule wasn't rigid. Students came to learn and work on interview schedules when they could. We posted times, and they came when the time worked for them. We posted several alternative times for the workshops. Faculty were in the Center whenever they weren't in class. A local grandmother came for classes, moved in a refrigerator, and mothered everyone. She loved the excitement, the discussions, and she made the day long stays in the Center tolerable.
Only when one professor, come later to the enterprise, insisted on assigning Grandmother the task of writing a research proposal did confusion ensue. Not all of those who come for education are going to incorporate it into their lives in the same way. Each day when I returned to the Center from class, I put aside notes from the proposal she had struggled with, and sent her back to coding, to administering the office, to counseling students with life problems. She liked working with us on designing interview schedules and proposals, but she was not there to write proposals, nor did she have the requisite skills.
This anecdote was the first in a series of our struggle with accountability. The university infrastructure was used to apply the same measure of learning to every student. But with open door admissions, we had promised not to let "difference" block access. To assess Grandmother's learning with the traditional academic methods task of "write a proposal" was to do structural harm by refusing to acknowledge the difference that open door admissions had been designed to overcome. Such an assessment did not build on Grandmother's skills, and did not provide any opportunity for integration of those skills with her life experience. Her failure to complete the task was internalized by her as failure to learn. Not the result we sought. Such an assessment, by failing to take into account the creative ways in which she herself was integrating her new learning with her life experience and life skills was a solid example of what we would call today "structural violence." It also taught the younger students, for whom the exercise of writing a proposal, though too broad to be of much use to them, wasn't nearly as traumatic, that they were intellectually "superior" to Grandmother. That led to elitism, the privileging of subjectivity, interpersonal competition, and ultimately to the elite being granted pay, while those not of that circle were expected to collect data and code for free.
The structural violence did not end with individual cases of refusal to hear and acknowledge "difference." Our HEW funding representative, in conjunction with the professor who assigned the "proposal writing" tried to assess the Center's success with a traditional test on "research methods." Again, there was an assumption that those who had been in positions of power and authority knew what the Center was about, with no attempt to work with its founder and director.
The development of an "elite" circle, and of the exploitation that had to result from such a development, took place over many semesters. But it was the impetus that led to my leaving the Center, and beginning the project which has become "Dear Habermas," scion of the original Center.
Goals Carried Forth from the Social Systems Research Center on to Dear Habermas
We started in the seventies with some pretty clear goals, most of which have not changed over time. Here, we examine those goals, how well they were met in the original real time Center, and how they have evolved into Dear Habermas.
- Teaching had to include theory, policy, practice.
Most of our students sought either job promotions or jobs outright. Thus, we did not have the luxury of traditional liberal arts education with complete focus on theory and research. We needed to actively teach our students how to integrate theory, policy, practice.
- Teaching had to cover a wide range of academic abilities and interests, and reinforce mutual respect for the different abilities and tasks.
Limited access to college preparatory programs had produced an uneven background of skills. Although a student might be very bright and very angry about the structural violence that had limited his/her access, he/she was also very clear on the gaps that were there. Problem is, they had learned to be defensive about the gaps, and in denial about the lack of background practice with academic skills. We encountered a kind of belief in magic. Now that there was open door access, they could do anything others could do. Perhaps we could have dealt with this dilemma more effectively if faculty and administrators had not also believed in magic. "They're here now. So no more problem. If they were as capable as they claimed, then they could do the work, now that they're here." I think a corollary to this belief was that learning is really just hard work anyway. And if they were willing to work hard they would learn. Therefore, failure to learn was translated to failure to work hard. Thus, magically, failure was now deserved, and no longer the result of structural violence and lack of access.
Regardless of the actual state of reading, writing, and critical thinking skills, we needed to catch students' interest, and provide real tasks of use to real people, in which they could succeed. In the original Center we did that by putting them to work on actual projects needed by real agencies in their very real communities. We worked in research teams, so that those who were still at the level of coding had a chance to share in writing and analysis tasks. But when others brought in the traditional structure and recognized only the highest-level achievements, our research teams fell apart, as illustrated by our Grandmother example.
The End of the Center
I left the Center when the goals had been substanatially distorted from meeting teaching needs to getting small contracts and paying the elite students, though there was never enough money to pay the workers. My assessment was that the Department had institutionalized those elements of the Center it wished to maintain, and that the teaching components I sought to introduce would have to find another forum.
At that point, I went to law school. The market had switched to favor private corporate power over public administrative power. My students were clustering in law, rather than in public administration and agency fields. Law school seemed a good place to search for another forum.
Moot Court
Following my admission to the California Bar, Susan and I began to re-address the issue of how to meet the needs of target populations at commuter campuses, with broad diversity of academic skills and practical experience. By then, Susan had joined her classes at UWP to our efforts.We carried over a number of goals from the first Center.
- Mutual respect in learning.
We considered it very important to recognize that learning takes place in an environment which is supportive. We tried to use "learning by doing" and avoided testing, (link to Avatars of the Word, except for self-tests which provided feedback without negative sanctions. Moot court, modelled on the law school moot court, ended in an academic performance, with students arguing before well known judges. There was something real to work for, and there were many guides, including local attorneys.
- Recognition and respect for many tasks.
In the annual performance of Moot Court we managed to use a broad variety of different skills, and to maintain respect for all those skills, so that our students recognized that each task played an essential part in making the final performance happen.
- We operated on the principle that making the material available, without barriers, making the discussions interesting, would pique student interest and learning. In place of tests we wanted intrinsic motivation. Worked best for those who wanted to compete for final performance.
Without the Center, we had neither the time nor the space for students to come whenever they could. That moved us back into the structural violence of rigid time and place constraints.
Making Moot Court Less Restrictive: Dear Habermas
Our site Dear Habermas, grew from this long history of matching the institution to the learning needs of the students. In 1996, Habermas published Between Facts and Norms. Susan and jeanne found this a perfect opportunity to update their Sociology of Law classes. Habermas is hard to read, not what you offer to undergraduate students in law and criminal justice. But if not as undergraduates, when? We knew our students were bright enough to understand; we just had to find the way to meet their needs.These are the goals to which we paid particular attention:
- Accessibility of the information.
Annotations that make the concepts with which Habermas works accessible in terms of everyday experiences and plain English.
- Balance in terms of other theorists with different perspectives.
- Meaningful work. From much needed data collection to analysis, we had gone to impressive academic performances of our students reasoning with professionall jurists. In this last phase, we have gone to academic commentary, to intertextuality of a new kind.
Intertextuality is a postmodern word. It's almost a red-flag to those who see postmodernism as the enemy of reason and objectivity. I've never quite understood that. We've been using intertextuality for decades as footnotes. References in texts to other texts, which help clarify what the author is trying to tell us, or, in some cases, further obfuscate whatever he thought he was saying. And Nicholas Fox's paper on Intertextuality and the Writing of Social Research had much to do with helping us solve the dilemma of structural violence in the academy, as we have experienced it.
Fox described the deleterious effect of silencing when certain works are excluded from forums. His focus is on notes which he left out of his dissertation because they were not pertinent to the tight frame of his research and report. But he saw those notes as valuable anyway, and worked at finding a forum for them, and at expressing the effect of leaving them with no forum.
That led us to the analogy of materials we wrote for our students, materials our students wrote for us, that had no forum. They weren't needs assessment studies for which agencies waited to apply for grants. They weren't polished research. Maybe we could have published them as texts, but we were opposed to the structural violence of texts, and didn't have the luxury of workloads that allowed the time for the serious publication we might have attempted in an elite institution. They were meaningful texts that helped us and our students fit theory into policy and practice.
In the beginning, our texts started with questions from our students that always started with "what would Habermas say about . . ." In deference to their interest in Habermas', not our, ideas, we began Dear Habermas, and answered as well as we could, based on our understandings of what Habermas had to say. In the beginning, Dear Habermas was xeroxed handouts. A semester later, a student put the Dear Habermas handouts up on a Web site. And a semester after that, jeanne put up the Dear Habermas site.
From the beginning we called it a site by undergraduates for undergraduates. But that was fantasy in the beginning. Just as in the early days with both the Research Center and the Moot Court, modelling took longer than we had predicted. Not much longer, but longer. During the original Dear Habermas semester, we found interactivity highly prized, especially the interactivity in which we brought in oil pastels, art paper, and encouraged our students to draw while we discussed issues. We had learned that when dealing with high school students. When issues that touch their lives are on the floor, they are more comfortable when we build in a ready means of escape from prying eyes. Drawing works. Sharing pastels also works. And the students actually begin to feel comfortable moving around the classroom. This teacher finds it enormously distracting, but I come from a period when the structure of structured violence was not so violent. Mine was not a computer campus. We had the entire day at our disposal. And classes were shorter then.
With our high school students we kept the artwork for an exhibit. With our third graders, so also did we keep most of the artwork for a studi-sponsored exhibit, the proceeds of which sent our third graders to Knott's Berry Farm! But our university students were less willing to give up their artwork. In one class only we asked them to let us display it. We still have that exhibit and hope one day to offer it again. Art has played a major role in facilitating communication for us.
In that exhibit, a female police officer brought a painting of her police car. The story her painting told was of a young boy in a class she visited. She invited him to sit in the back of the police car. He burst into tears; two days earlier his parents had been taken away in the back of a police car!
In these unorthodox ways the site was, from the beginning, by students. But their participation as we had imagined it, in an academic journal in which their work could find a forum for publication, well, that didn't happen for a while. So we kept writing and encouraging them, and began once again to take them to professional meetings, as we had in the days of the Research Center. Modelling behavior may seem simple with pre-school children. They imitate easily the agressive gestures of teacher. Anticipatory professional socialization is a lot more complicated. Lots more than an agressive gesture. I think we forgot that as we designed Dear Habermas. Yes, they appreciate. Yes, they want to practice their professional roles. But slow down while they learn the process. No, actually, don't slow down. They like being able to run all over the site. They like that there's more than anyone could exhaust during the semester. They even get mad when they discover the need to go to external sites, as though I've failed to provide a necessary path. They are spoiled. But what a wonderful spoiled. Just recognize that faculty will have to carry the writing burden until the students find their own special path.
We hope our struggle will convince you that it will happen. And with pioneers having tread the path before, your students might just leap right to publishable materials.
In the fourth semester of its existence, the students began to design Web pages. No, we didn't assign that as a task. That was the natural way they found to participate. We taught them to design them when they asked, and uploaded them. There began to be a community that centered in jeanne's office. They learned html and uploaded their Web pages. But not everyone was there to share the face-to-face interaction. I watched and listened, and learned that the connection didn't have to be direct. That was when I began to suspect that a Dear Habermas was developing into a virtual community.
We had an extra small office across the hall. But for two semesters, because of the need for equipment, I had not been able to effectively work that office into spatial expansion. Students were still gathering in and staying in my office, even though we desperately needed more space.
Then in the third semester, we began to see new patterns developing. Genuine dialog had begun. Students were e-mailing reactions to new pieces on the site, and others, after class discussions, were joining in the discussion. But our volleys didn't last too long. That semester we prepared and submitted several papers on critical theory and peacemaking. And that semester Susan and I and Patricia (an academic advisor at CSUDH who has worked closely with us on Dear Habermas) attended the peacemaking criminology sessions in the Toronto meetings of ASC. We found similarities with convict criminology and the structural violence of incarceration, as we had earlier found similarities with Fox's intertextuality.
Within a month, I proposed and had included in our Spring 2000 schedule a new course in Love 1A, named for Leo Buscaglia's course of similar name in the late 60s, early 70s at USC. I planned the course around our early Center successes. Come and share in face-to face discussions whenever you can. The faculty member will be there three days a week all day into evening. An end to time constraints. And because we considered the face-to-face interaction so important, we chose to use all our face-to-face time for discussions. The only way that would work was if we could trust that all of us would have prepared, and that lectures could go up as annotations and comments on the Web site. Lectures could be distanced. Then discussions could be real.
We liked it so much, we extended the concept to include all jeanne's classes that semester. Students who had been forced to wait four hours for a second class, or drive a second time to the university through horrendous traffic, now found that they could adjust the discussion times to their commuter constraints. Students were grateful. Discussions were solidly prepared and exciting. Discussion time was extended by e-mail, as had been done since the site was started. But now more students were taking part, and they were far more creative in their participation, and more decisive in their plans.
What led to this extended participation? We think the insistence upon face-to-face interaction was a factor. With 255 students, jeanne still insisted on knowing each of them by face and name. A part of knowing them was knowing what difficulties they were having, what excited them, what they wanted to learn about. That made measurement of their learning much more effective.
To know them, I had many hours to put in. But they were stimulating hours. Over the semesters we had continuously added substantive materials to the site. Our students couldn't afford to buy six or seven books for every course. We couldn't get through all those books with them. But we put up annotations and ordered some copies, so those who were intensely interested could find them. By mid semester the students assured us that they were challenged and excited by having such in-depth materials from so many authors. They were excited to have Habermas' text on the legal system. And they did want to know what Habermas thought, what Lewis Gordon had to say in Anti-Black Racism, the role that Jonathan Lear ascribes to Freud in sociological theory. We found increasing participation to follow on both the growth of the site and on our understanding of what students were comfortable expressing. They needed for us to isolate and share with them the linking of theory to policy and practice. They needed for us to identify with them their patterns of latent learning.
By mid-semester they comfortably helped decide on priorities in updating site materials. And we didn't need a vote to do it. They had learned, somehow, out of all our awareness to reach consensus, to discuss the values of different approaches and exercises, of different tasks. Patricia asked jeanne for access to her responses to e-mail. By the time Patricia asked for them, jeanne had already begun to put them all up as comments on the site. Students also began to see the value of shared information, asking to know what had been prepared by whom. Students, as they had two semesters ago in the construction of Web pages, took initiative in finding tasks that met their own needs. One woman included her third and fourth grade students. Two others joined her by including theirs.
As MIT found with Project Athena, the more we provide that is exciting, the more they ask for. Susan and I have undertaken more than is humanly possible. But we can manage that, for a while, because the results are so exciting. Just last week I looked at my posted schedule on the site and realized that I had re-created the old SSRC. I was here all day Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and the students came and went all day, with full scale discussion groups, questions, workshops. It's different now. They have to access the Web to get the preparation materials and my preliminary lecture materials, but they can do that at their leisure. In exchange, we have more discussion time.
As in the old days, in the SSRC, we have made the learning cooperative, and eliminated testing. Instead we work with each other to understand real issues that have a real effect on our lives. And along the way, I'm finding that a new wave of students is thinking about graduate school, reading extensively and deeply, buying the books they choose, not ones I assign. They take the time to write and say how much they liked Buscaglia, and that they're sharing his work with friends.
We find together examples of structural violence, and practice finding non-violent ways to cope with the harmful effects. We speak now of Buscaglia's warning not to have expectations. And then we speak of Jonathan Lear's deploring of "knowingness." We speak of postmodernism, understanding Habermas' embrace of metanarrative at least for a discourse of critical analysis. And we speak of Eagleton's caution that there cannot be cracks in the system when there is no system. We speak of the Rhetoric of Reaction and struggle to read broadly and argue well, for these are the skills of public discourse.
I feel great joy that so often now my students ask "What can we do about this?" They don't want to retreat from their world. They want to change it, to make it into an auto-poietic learning sub-system, emphasis on learning, on listening in good faith to all claims.
The site, in the process of growing as a teaching site, has helped us find a climate of learning that lets us all participate, that makes our texts (we really mean written work or art or music or video) available to each other, so that our discussions are enriched by our collective understandings. Instead of receiving our work back with red marks and negative comments, spelling and grammatical mistakes are corrected as part of editing. We get to see our work published on the Internet! Not hidden in a box of old papers under the bed or in a closet.
We've found a non-violent way around the cost of texts, the constraints of commuting, the problems with equipment (students share and the pc lab helps). Because we started out before computers were popular, we have learned to live with hardcopy interspersed with whatever computer access we can find. Instead of giving up, we patch the way around. jeanne doesn't have a computer in her office that can access SPSS, yet she teaches SPSS. So she accesses it at home, then someone prints a copy of what she needs in the lab. None of her printers are working. Not ideal, no. Structurally violent, yes. But we're finding ways to respond that reflect peacemaking, not violence.
Perhaps that is because doing something is empowering. And as we are empowered, so do we learn. Not necessarily what the structure certified as learning, but when creativity is allowed, new measures are the least of our worries.
The site needs polishing. We all, teachers and students alike, need to move quickly from link to link. For that, the site must be intuitive, and we mustn't get lost as we move. Latest request - Jerry's "I found this great museum site, and then when I went back I couldn't find it." Someone comes in the room. You want to share; and you can't find where you were. The site index and the linking are time consuming. There is no tech support. For any of us. So we have begun teaching our students to help with some of these tasks.
But even when our reality is not perfect, we are discovering what it might one day be. What good fun to be there, looking forward. . .
Conclusion
Perhaps the crowning achievement of the story is the offering of a new course, Love 1A. Bobby said, I liked it better when you called it Structural Violence. Well, yes, that was more "academic." Shouldn't we ask ourselves why? I did waver, and present the course proposal to the dean as Structural Violence, to which another colleague responded that I should call the course the Sociology of Structural Violence so as to avoid the possibility of a misunderstanding that I was teaching structural violence. I think that might have been the final straw. The course is Love1A. Now and forever, in honor of the man who said he was the only one in the country with the courage to teach it, Leo Buscaglia.
Perhaps the crowning achievement is that we survived the structural violence of the academy. Colleague said last week: some students actually want to do "real research". And this from a critical sociology adherent, a friend! And what I do isn't real? Challenges to structural violence can be dismissed that way. Donald O. Hirschman calls this the "rhetoric of reaction." We think it's real, even at the risk of ascribing an objective quality to reality, with which some will quarrel. Actually, as Susan puts it, we think it's "really real." We mean by that that what we are doing is using reflexivity to examine the structure through which we are teaching to root out the violence and punishment in that infrastructure and to turn the very real need for discipline into the self-discipline that leads us to examine our own biases reflexively, and to delve into the validity claims that abound in our fields to be sure that our own biases have not denied a good faith hearing to any of them.
The classroom space they gave us in 1974 for the SSRC is still there. Turned into the Teaching and Learning Center. Now it's drapes are permanently drawn. No one can see inside. No one lurks. But traffic patterns have changed in the last 25 years, and our students' lives have moved with ours to the commuting fast track in Los Angeles. We no longer have the real time space. But we have the Web. There, the drapes are still open. There, we struggle to make the sandbox attractive. There, we hope people will lurk, hang out, and someday join us in research on Love 1A, non-violent responses to and restructuring of the structural violence of our social institutions. We still think it's "really real."
Abstract
We only meant to team teach our criminology classes across a few thousand miles. Seemed like a good idea. And we were committed to interactive discussions with our students, with their and our contributions added as "texts" to the site, the better to interpret formal academic texts. But translating terms like "interactive," "intertextuality," "process text," and "student enhancement of curriculum" can be tricky in the world of the "really real." This paper describes how an unusual and exciting academic community coalesced around the web site over an eighteen month period, providing "real" participation by students, "real" sharing of teachers, and strengths to the Web we had never suspected. The site: Dear Habermas. A Tour of the Site will be included with the paper.