A Jeanne Site
A Jeanne Site
Shared Ideas for Working Ahead
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: January 18, 2000
Curran or
Takata.
Love 1A: Non-Violent Responses to Structural Violence
Academic Discourse, Interactivity and the Internet
Feminist Perspectives on Crime
Critical Race Theory Perspectives
Juvenile Justice, Social Justice: Our Children
Non-Violent Measurement in a Climate of Structural Violence
Re-Thinking the Structural Violence of Our Institutions
WSSA Research
Theory to Policy to Practice: Teaching and Community Outreach
Academic Discourse in Practice: Dialog Workshops
Love 1A will be offered as Special Topics, Sociology 395-03, in Spring 2000. Course reference number: 22980
A good place to start working ahead for the Love 1A course would be to read Leo Buscaglia's Living, Loving, and Learning, or any other of his books, for that matter. My notes are keyed to Living, Loving, and Learning, but his basic themes are repeated of non-violent response are repeated throughout his books.
"People are not here to meet your expectations." (Living, Loving and Learning, p. 109) People are each unique; each worth knowing in their own right. To have expectations is to shape the world by your own perspective, to try to fit others into where you have categorized them as belonging. That is structurally violent, for it causes you to set up categories into which you try to make people fit, and it makes it harder for you to categoize and interpret their communication because your own categorization preoccupies you and places structural limits on the categories you consider.
Buscaglia reflects always the joy of learning, the wonder of how much we can do. That is important in dealing with children who are challenged, but we all deal with challenges every day. We forget to "wonder" at how much we have, and how much we can give to others. Buscaglia is sensitive to the special needs of special education. But he is equally sensitive to the special needs of all education, to set wonder once again before us.
Buscaglia quotes from Brynner's translation of Lao Tzu's The Way: "And whether a man dispassionately sees to the core of life or passionately sees the surface, the core and the surface are the same, words making them seem different only to express appearance. If a name be needed, let the name be wonder, and then from wonder to wonder, existence opens." Buscaglia adds that all we need to do as teachers, even of those with special education needs, "is make it possible for them to recognize [their potential] in their way and be there to help when they need help, support, encouragement. 'And if the name be wonder,' they are all going to succeed." (Living, Loving and Learning, p. 110) Questions for academic discourse:
How about in statements made by students or teachers? Although there will rarely be room for such statements in our present texts, couldn't we make room for such statements somewhere within the concept of intertextuality? Would it not be important for us to the understanding of the texts to recognize where others experienced wonder in interpreting such texts?
How about in academic dialogs in our workshops? Could we make a special effort to articulate our wonder? Consider Bloom and Krathwohl's Affective Domain. Consider Honneth's "Patterns of Intersubjective Recognition: Love, Rights and Solidarity," in Contemporary Social Theory. Consider also the structural violence of our tendency not to consider this aspect of our learning.
Look for expressions of Buscaglia's wonder at learning: "I was reading Orenstein's book on consciousness, and you should really read it. It's gorgeous." (Living, Loving and Learning, p. 100) or "I don't know how many of you have read Saint Exupery's book called, Wind, Sand and Stars. If you haven't may I, with all my heart, give you this book? It's beautiful, and it gets more fantastic with years." (Living, Loving and Learning, p. 41) How often have you read a wonderful book? How often have you dared to say so? How often have you given such a gift to others?
What is the basic unstated assumption here? That failure is the mirror of success? Do we really need failure to define success? Must we have failure so that we can be NOT failure? (Ernest Gaines reference. Nag me to add it.) Must there be Fs for your A to be meaningful? We used to call that a zero-sum game. If I win, you must lose. That's what Minow would call "categorical thinking." Why not choose instead to look at wonder?
If we consider the unstated assumptions we are privileging, and the structural violence of imposing pre-set categories without considering the local narrative, we might see the many goals of learning. Then, wonder could be one of our concerns, and mastery of database concepts another. Why must one exclude the other? Why must there be one totalizing narrative that says that conceptual competency is all there is to learning, or all that really matters. Some of us believe the wonder matters more.
You might also want to read Elliott's Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory when that text comes in.
Look for more conceptual links here later this week. jeanne
Celia Pearce's the interactive book is designed to guide you into browsing through it. It's like having a small piece of the internet right there in your hands, in hardcopy. And that's a good transition to our site. I'd suggest this for all our courses, as a good guide for theory to practice and back. I'd also suggest that several of you share in buying this book. You won't need it constantly at your side. And mine was $40.00!
To start with, read Hal Pepinsky's letter to his Feminist Justice Seminar. Many of you read Pepinsky's Peacemaking Primer last semester, and you've heard me speak of him often. Here's a chance to hear him talking directly to his students. Seemed like a good place to begin.
More up soon. jeanne
Critical Race theory intersects with feminist theory for many of us. To this end, I am particularly interested in Race, Place and Risk: Black Homicide in Urban America, Harold Rose and Paula McClain, State University of New York Press, 1990. If you can't locate a copy in one of our local libraries, come by to borrow mine. I want particularly to go over Chapter 5: Black Females and Lethal Violence.
Critical race theory emphasizes the importance of theorists taking an up front and personal stand against the ills of racism. It no longer suffices to remain quiet. Stories of what racism feels like need to be told and heard. In support of such a stance, I ask that you read Excerpt from "Bathroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Jim Crow's Racial Symbolic" by Elizabeth Abel. Be sure you follow the link to photographs of segregated drinking fountains and to more photographs. I grew up with such sights. I understand the critical race theory position that these are images we need our young people to see.
I'd suggest you start ahead on this topic by trying to find Holes, by Louis Sachar, at your local library. It's a Frances Foster Book, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998: ISBN 0-374-33265-7 This book is the winner of the John Newberry Medal for the Most Distinguished Contribution to American Literature for Children. It is a wonderful, magical tale told in the voice of a child who experiences juvenile detention in a camp.
At the time we ordered our books, the paper back version was not yet out. You might try sharing this book, since it is a novel, and once having read it, you will be able to share it for reference as we discuss the theoretical and policy implications.
I'll be putting up some questions on the book shortly.
This will be our principal focus in Statistics 220. We need to recognize the extent to which measurement is dictated by our theoretical perspective, so that we are likely to bury unstated assumptions in our quantitative data. This course will use SPSS, so that you will become familiar with the most typical statistical results and be able to interpret the results from a variety of theoretical perspectives.
If you'd like to get started before the text gets in, start with Understanding Statistics. This text material needs editing, but you can survive with it as is, and I probably won't get the editing done before the semester starts.
Another good place to get started is with some of the articles on College Binge Drinking. Note that the analysis in this program was done with the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), not with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). We will use SPSS. The bad news is that you may someday need to use SAS. The good news is that if you have learned to use SPSS effectively that will transfer to SAS, so not to worry. And the best news is that you don't have to do the math yourself. These two programs do it for you. What you do have to do is understand how to interpret the analysis. That's what we'll be doing in class. You will need to understand the logic of the analysis. For that you will need to come to class, to nag me to put summaries of my lectures on site, and help each other.
Learn to use the Website for our text. Dowdall's Web Page for Adventures in Criminal Justice Research, Revised Edition
Find the following materials under Substance Abuse Among College Students and Youth, about half way down the page.
More later . . .
We'll be taking a normative ordering approach to understanding how people relate to institutions in their lives, and how the institutional structure has violent repercussions on those for whom its underlying unstated assumptions do not apply. Here we want to draw on Susan Silbey's work to illustrate Marlene's story of how we disseminate word of new theoretical work: Just leave the computer turned on at Dear Habermas. Analysis of how that's local, and how we can move to cosmopolitan.
Start by reading our work on structural violence.
More up soon. jeanne
Start work by accessing the WSSA Submissions Re-read our work. We've all forgotten a lot since Christmas. Send in your thoughts. Don't wait until you have well written paragraphs. These are team work. We will build on each others' ideas. I'll post them as quickly as I can.
Dolly Klett is working on the child labor fears that recent developments have wrought. Look at the abstract. Then look at Human Rights for Workers Information, child labor section. See also: 'They Need the Work,' But Why Little Boys and Girls?.
And see the latest edition, which addresses the cruise ship dilemma we discussed in criminology last semester. Clifford Parks, this isn't downsizing. This has another name. Try slavery. International Child Labor Study Office
Bureau of International Labor Affairs, U.S. DOL (1993- )
This section is for those who will be doing the teaching practicum with me. You'll want to follow this section and the Internet section, for most of our work will be documented as we work over the Intenet.
For starters, read the Love 1A section, since all my teaching revolves around love, wonder, caring. Make sure you read the sections on structural violence, for one thing we want to insure in the Practicum is that we will not engage, any of us, in structural violence.
This will represent a very special section of the Practicum in Teaching course. We will use Bourdieu's work on Academic Discourse, and postmodern theory on public discourse to design workshops in which we can practice discourse. To start work on this I think you might like to use the file on How to Dialog and on How to Overcome Shyness in Academic Discourse. These files will serve to hold our threaded discussions on how to teach the skills of academic discourse.