Reading Cathy Davidson’s The New Education had a nearly therapeutic effect on me. Her warm writing style is at once optimistic and edifying as she breaks down several of the major issues facing higher education in the United States today. Rather than adopting a doom and gloom outlook, as many critics (and, I might note, defenders) of […]
For Any Seat at Any Table for Every Student!
has me thinking about the spatial-material axis of learning. How is learning affected by proximity, and what shape does this proximity take? I couldn’t agree more with Davidson’s claim that “the lecture is broken, and so we must think of better ways to incorporate active learning into the classroom” (Davidson, 248). The hierarchy of the […]
The new education and the decolonial debate
Cathy Davidson’s The New Education provides interesting insights on how to better the current university machinery in the era of homo economicus and neoliberal rationality. Her proposal relies on an ethical assemblage of all the gears involved, achieved by interdisciplinary approaches and alliances with state-of-the-art educational technology. Her book showcases examples of engaging professors who […]
Re-learning How to Learn, and American Problem?
First Idea: In the introduction to The New Education we read “In the last decade, it has become fashionable to say higher education would be more efficient and modern if were run as a business, treating students as “customers.” (pos. 230). The author accurately presents some of the historical roots of the “buisinefication” of higher […]
(A) New Education
In The New Education, Cathy Davidson tells us how the United States’s current educational system was shaped 150 years ago, in a time of industrialization, and was modeled to emphasize outputs and productivity in order to satisfy the market’s needs. Now, in an era of internet, automation and social media, where careers are constantly under threat […]
As She Lays Dying
To find writing from an academic that flows in such a way is always telling of a person trying to be a person and to COMMUNICATE. I appreciate that congruency in Cathy Davidson’s book. I don’t think there is any other way to deliver this information, nor I think there was any other way for […]
Sketch of a Pedagogical Eating-lecture
We set our pedagogical project on, at, with, and under the table. We see the table as a setting that, drawing on Paulo Freire, scripts relationality—and for Freire, a radical pedagogical project begins with dialogical relations. However, the table was not our initial point of departure; rather, we arrived at it through hours of dialoguing, […]
Dicen: What Remains Unwritten; What can’t be Translated
(Inspired by Manifesto for Intellectual-Activists) They say. They said, they said. They also say that they said. This is what is said that they said. They say that they said, they said. They also say that they said. This is what is said that they said. They say. They said, they said. And not only […]
Writing Papers, An “Epistemicide”?
My working group for this class has been reflecting on different ideas and doings dealing with constructive ways to think “epistemologies” and “alternative pedagogies”. In those discussions the paradox of bringing forward the limitations of western academic while being imbedded in the system of an American private university, was central. We kept thinking, what’s the […]
18. “to think clearly–that is, dangerously”
For this response I would like to consider the following quotation: “In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly–that is, dangerously–and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what fundamentally is colonization?” (). We’ve read that Augusto Boal, who actualized and embodied Freire’s pedagogy in his “Theatre of the Oppressed”, […]