Teaching and Learning in Wartime

Dear All,

I am wondering if we might be able to bring up the war within the context of our "Pedagogy in the 21st Century" series. 

It seems to me we have all been operating from the hidden premise that it is possible to practice, research, or otherwise examine pedagogy without addressing this. 

It seems unacceptable to me that we at QCC have debated whether or not students should be allowed to perform poetry on the quad because it is offensive to some while there is complete silence about the war and what it means that military recruiters may set up their tents on the quad. 

In writing this entry, I was unsure about which category it should go under because all of them seem appropriate.  At first, I thought I might write it as a comment in response to Peter's latest entry about race and class because I see many points of intersection between our entries.  I finally settled on Politics and Ethics in the classroom, but it really belongs to all of the categories.

I believe it is vital that our discourse situate teaching and learning within this historical moment - as difficult as that may be.  It would be good to have an open discussion on campus and I would be willing to help with it.  I'd really like to know what the students feel about all of this. 

Comments

[Pete]

I think this is going to be a messy post as I'm so unsure about how to makes sense of the morass of ideas that Belle is provoking here. I'm just going to leap in an think out loud:

it is easy to hear arguments (or really suggestions) that our work teaching and doing research has and should have nothing to do with the war: we are hired to teach our specialities, period, not to either protest or advocate for political movements or in relation to historical events. But this construction has never been a reality, I don't think. The academy and those who work in it have always responded to political forces and historical moments, and it has shaped how we do our work, the kinds of research projects we undertake and that are funded, right?

Maybe it's all a matter of framing? I'm upset at the ways military recruiters are able to use college campuses to pull in students. Or maybe it's a matter of how we conceive of intellectual work in the academy. If we see our disciplines as a body of (rather static) knowledge taht students must acquire, the anything not directly related to that already established body of knowledge is out of bounds. But I think more of us than not understand our work as teachers in our own disciplines to see our jobs, our very enterprise, as inviting students into conversations and inquiry that is at least partially circumscribed by sets of intellectual practices or habits of mind. To locate myself within Writing Studies/English, and to define that discipline as an engagement with the study and practice of rhetoric and poetics means that any text is up for examination and inquiry.

What a better use of our collective time, vis-a-vis our collective charge to make quantitative thinking meaningful in our courses than to take a look at General Petraeus's and the Pentagon's accounting of casualties and killings as part of the Iraq war. There is rhetorical framing, there is ethos building, there are numbers, there is performance (see Tony Snow, daily), there is debate (see The Politico; TalkingPointsMemo; etc.), and there are numbers, numbers, and more numbers.

I'll stop by asking about the and in "Politics and Ethics," as well as "ethics". The "politics" I'm strangely cool with as how can we not be....

thanks for your patience, Pete

[Peter Gray]

So I can’t keep this thread out of my head and I keep finding references to the issue, near and far. I'm not clearer in my own thinking, that's for sure. Here is a recent one I found while browsing Harper’s magazine’s website. It’s by Garret Keizer, in his essay “Specific Suggestion: General Strike”

(http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/0081720)

He writes, early in his essay:

"The question we need to ask ourselves at this moment is what further provocations we require to justify digging in our heels. To put the question more pointedly: Are we willing to wait until the next presidential election, or for some interim congressional conversion experience, knowing that if we do wait, hundreds of our sons and daughters will be needlessly destroyed? Another poet, César Vallejo, framed the question like this:

A man shivers with cold, coughs, spits up blood.
Will it ever be fitting to allude to my inner soul? . . .
A cripple sleeps with one foot on his shoulder.
Shall I later on talk about Picasso, of all people?

A young man goes to Walter Reed without a face. Shall I make an appointment with my barber? A female prisoner is sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Shall I send a check to the Clinton campaign?"

His piece takes on the larger question of what to do in a time when hope (to change course, to alter, to intervene) seems lost, lost most visibly in the face of an administration that has variously said over the past six years “fuck you” to institutions of governance, including, from my limited historical and civic understanding, the Constitution. One suggestion he floats is a general strike. The entire piece is worth the time; it’s provocative, to say the least.

Peter

[kpli]

Another Great Post Written by a Great Blogger...enjoyed reading it ;)