Procrastadabbler

I’ve been really discouraged about my research/writing recently and really hating my teaching as well (not all of it, just parts). I can’t give up my teaching (it pays the bills), but I stepped away from the writing to see if it would make me feel better – not so stretched. I have writing projects due which is stressing me out, but I’ll deal.

Anyway, after than strange twisted intro, I wanted to share some thinking that bubbled up today.
Part of what I’ve been struggling with is the “so what.” and “what’s new” to what I’m offering. In 620 we read a tiny bit about cultural modeling (in Kucer’s chapter about sociocultural dimension of literacy – far under developed, but not going there right now). But it got me thinking about cultural modeling and funds of knowledge.

Lee’s work and Moll’s work is geared toward AFrican American and Latino families/youth/children. All fine and dandy, but it leaves out the fact that whites have cultural models and that the cultural knowledge of the white working class is different from that of the white middle class (that aspect of Heath’s work often gets ignored too as people focus on Trackton and forget about Roadville). Anyway, I was thinking about how do we draw on the cultural models of the white working class (or just working class for that matter – but we don’t want to essentialize) in teaching. And I was making the connections to multiliteracies.

I interviewed three working class young men (one urban, one suburban, one rural) and their multiliteracies. I’ve got data. So to analyze that data in terms of the cultural models being enacted in those multiliteracies and how we can then draw on that in teaching. It’s not about the technology (although the cultural models are mediated by the technology) it’s about the cultural practices that are instantiated in the literacy practices (both new literacies and traditional literacies).

This is totally undeveloped. This is my raw thinking. But I wanted to capture it and see if anybody thinks there’s anything there.

I’ve not been doing much writing lately because I’ve been struggling with figuring out what I want to say or write about. Writing turned into an obligation rather than a way of sharing my thinking and participating in a broader dialogue about the things that are important to me.

Today I saved an article from a magazine that got me thinking about some things, and I was lamenting (internally) that I have no one to talk to about this article or the ideas this article captures. I do share them to some extent with my husband, and while he is kind and responds in a supportive fashion, he doesn’t have the scholarly perspective that I seek. I save the articles thinking I’m going to share them with my students, but for the most part, my students aren’t interested either. They read the articles because they are assigned them, but mostly their thinking is superficial. Not because they’re superficial people, but because they don’t have the same set of interests, or frankly the time to engage in ideas that are above and beyond their social realities of being novice teachers and working on their master’s degree.

As I was thinking about this, I realized that is the reason I write. I write because I am enthused or inflamed about an idea and I want to share my thinking about that idea, and I want to hear what other’s think about that idea. I’ve been struggling with my writing because (as I said the first paragraph of this post) I’ve been writing out of obligation not out of interest.

My task now is to rekindle my various interests and my voice in those interests. Because of my frustration, I’ve deadened myself to intellectual engagement lately. It is time to reanimate.

In my literacy theory class we’ve been studying the relationship of oral language to literacy acquisition and development. In my language, literacy, and diversity class we’re now reading about spoken word performance and it’s place in the African American Literate tradition (the work of Maisha Fisher among others). Fisher and others stress that it’s not just oral language that is used to support written language, but also written language that is used to support spoken performance. What strikes me is that they are studying the poetic tradition in particular (as well as oratory to some extent), but that this concept also extends to the academic. I’m thinking of conferences and how the papers we deliver at conferences are really first drafts for articles that eventually get published (hopefully). So in academia, there is a written to oral to written relationship.

Maybe this observation isn’t all that earth shattering, but it’s just something that click for me this morning as I was reviewing the course readings for the week.

I’ve come to see that there are two kinds of teachers/professors. Those that work out the course curriculum, learn it well, and then leave it there. They are hesitant to make changes because it represents uncertainty and lots of work. The result is a course that is well organized but static. The students walk away with a solid set of “knowledge” but no sense of excitment. Then there are those who are constantly changing the course by adding and removing assignments. These teachers/professors are haunted by the knowledge that for every thing they include in a course, they are leaving out numerous other things. This results in a course that is some what chaotic and uncertain. But ideally the students walk away with a sense of excitement or at least a sense of possibilities. I think the students “like” the first type better because it is more familiar and they are therefore more comfortable with it, but in the long run, I think they get more out of the second type of course. I’m striving to be somewhere in the middle. I want stability in my courses, but I also want the adventure.

Eating simply doesn’t mean one has to eat poor quality food. A long long time ago a friend invited us to dinner. She was totally into mega complicated cooking. She asked what we liked and I said, simple foods. I don’t remember what she serve us but it was unremarkable.

30 years later I now have a better idea of what I meant then (but didn’t know it). Simple foods means cooking that keeps what you are consuming close to the source. If you use wonderful ingredients, you don’t need sauces and complicated techniques.

For example, tonight I made pan seared scallops on a bed of chard and a side of brown rice. For dessert we had red wine poached pears. It was a simple approach to cooking yet incredibly delicious. The flavors of the foods are what came through. The scallops were seared in great olive oil with a bit of browned butter. The chard had carmelized onions, pancetta, tomato, and garlic with a wee bit of tamari sauce. The poached pears just red wine, sugar, lemon juice, and cinnamon. The food was the center piece, not my cooking. That’s the secret.

I think this way of thinking extends to multiple areas of our lives. I work in the field of education – teacher education to be precise. I am coming to believe that the art of teaching involves getting down to the simple. That doesn’t mean basic skills and drill. That means understanding what it is that people need. People need to be part of something, to do something important to them, to be loved. If we can do that in education we have concocted a powerful recipe for learning.