This weekend I find myself consuming and being consumed, now entertaining the ways in which this state can be one of sordid “glass half empty” or blissful “glass half full” existence. As Diana Taylor says in Dead Capital, we are at once the spectator and the product (15), both the almond milk and the almond […]
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 […]
Running To / Fro
They come pouring off the highway, salt caked to their faces, thousands of them. It looks like some will need medical assistance. Hopefully they have family waiting for them. If not, perhaps they made a friend along the way who can provide support. Some volunteers hand out shawls, others bread, fruit and water. This is the […]
The Question of Present(E) Form
“Presente”, to be present, in the present, a wrinkle that merges time and space together, to be present, a call for embodiment and attention to our surroundings, an interpellation of the environment …. shouting to us: “stop… and listen”. Reading Diana Taylor’s text “Presente” is especially relevant in the progression of our class, the text […]
if you can make it there you will make it anywhere
When I woke up today, I lazily got rid of my comfortable and warm Chinese blankets and went to the kitchen to drink my Colombian coffee. I absently skipped through the news on my American computer while trying to explain to my Californian roommate that, despite what she had seen in films, Rio is not a jungle […]
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, […]
Past Tense, Future Perfect
“Past tense, future perfect” is a combination of words oft-used by author Zadie Smither in her 1999 novel White Teeth about immigrant identities and dehumanization in late 20th century London. Something between past and future is a desiring, unrepresented present. This gap is widened by the the physicality of “tense” versus the grammatical association of […]
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 […]