I just had a conference with Lisa and I wanted to transfer my notes to something that would be legible to me later and allow for some written reflection.
Lisa notes that one of Sirc’s phrases has always bothered her—something along the lines of we can either train students to make bombs or we can open them up to punk carnivalism. She sees this as a dichotomy, which is always a problem, but also as dismissing students’ control and choices. What does this perspective assume about student control and student desire?
I am glad Lisa brought this up, because student agency is important to me, and something I want to consider. Also, this quote reminds me of Deleuze’s essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in which he discusses education as corporation and how we have changed/are changing education into a training facility meant to perpetuate the war-machine. I think there might be connections here to play with later.
Lisa also asked me to think about how to apply this to the actual classroom, to what is feasible. Additionally, just as we might ask if a feminist classroom has to be explicitly feminist, does a carnivalistic classroom need to be explicitly carnivalistic?
Carmen Luke, in her book The Struggle for Pedagogies, on the struggles between feminist and critical pedagogies, redefines the word pedagogy as the construction of knowledge in the classroom. Giroux, in an essay working on a similar definition of pedagogy, writes about his own pedagogy and how it falls short of his own expectations.
Lisa also suggested Victor Vitanza, whom I’ve already checked out some books by.
