Today in our MA Writing Group, Vicki Tolar Burton presented on writing our thesis and strategies involved. Two things stick in my head: 1. Write 15 minutes a day, at least. 2. Play to your strengths, according to this online strength assessment we took. My strength, according to this assessment, was my curiosity. Vicki gave the example of a student who was struggling, and she asked what was his/her/hir strength, and when it was curiosity, she/he/zie said curiosity. Vicki asked him to just write questions regarding the topic.
I’m at a brainstorming stage. I’m very confused on what I want to write about. Because of these, I think that asking many questions, and freewriting at least 15 minutes every day is a great idea.
Questions:
What does it mean, as a teacher, to engage in conscientious moral revolt (Camus’s term)?
How much should politics be explicit in the classroom?
How does one enact change ethically?
How can one teach ethically? How does one teach without reinforcing too many paradigms that one believes are oppressive?
How do I teach without reinforcing oppressive paradigms?
How does one get people to listen?
How does one get people to think?
Is thinking the only form of rebellion left?
Does capitalism, the Enlightenment, and the cultural industry co-opt everything? Are they totalizing?
Can one teach in an educational institution ethically?
Is there room in education to effect change?
How can discourse be changed to effect change?
How can poetry as an artform and as a polemical public act engage with ideas and cause change?
How does hyptertext do the same?
Does art effect change more quickly/more effectively/more radically than other polemics?
Is there such a thing as art anymore?
What effect does playfulness in writing change what is valued in writing? In thought? In “logic”? In polemics?
To what degree do we need to dangle ourselves in controversy, in confusion, in ambiguity?
Is questioning values and ideas effective? Is this polemical?
What does it mean to be polemical? Do I understand this word?
What should be changed? Why?
What causes oppression? Does the cause matter? Is there a root? Does understanding a possible cause help illuminate a possible solution?
Are there solutions?
If any pedagogy can be perverted, is there hope that I can come up with an ethical pedagogy?
Should teaching and education be removed from institutions? What does education do now?
What is the goal of me getting an M.A.? What is my goal when I get a PhD?
Is it ethical for me to engage in higher education?
How can one act in an oppressive society in which one must engage?
How do the polemics/arguments/ethos of counterculture movements inform pedagogy? How does punk ethos inform pedagogy?
When we are asking to query and confuse, how much are we asking to queer?
How can we make ethical arguments? Is it ethical to persuade? Is it violent to persuade?
Is violence always bad?
I’ll have to write more later. I have to go pick up a friend at her house.
