acting ideally/cynically

diane celia hodges (dchodges who-is-at interchg.ubc.ca)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 12:23:04 -0800

At 8:19 PM 1/11/98, Phillip Allen White wrote:
<snip>
>diane wrote:
>> There must be ways to help, there must be ways to act. That was more my
>> thinking.
>
> Yep! I couldn't agree more. And I'd start - if I may be so bold
>as to give out some advice - 'ways to act' may best be done by figuring
>out ways to teach within one's own
>immediate community. What are the best teaching practices in the
>university? Who does it? Under what circumstances? Yrgo sez that
>activity theory is about context. Rules - Tools - Blues (collar,
>that is: labor) So, how does context and best teaching practices and
>effeciency and grading and and and and work at the university level?

What rumbles awkwardly through my thoughts here is, unfortunately,
impossible for the university community to address:

after some six years of graduate study, I think that academic success is
absolutely correlational to one's social dysfunctionality: the greater the
success, the more socially dysfunctional; or, the more socially
dysfunctional, the more likely academic success.

(before folks shriek; I'd say the same thing applies to any position of
absolute power - government, for example: anyone who would *want* that type
of power is already untrustworthy) -

and I am not saying that this is "bad" or "good" but just that to succeed
academically, a person has to give up a social life: in my experience,
folks who succeed in the academy usually have never had much of a social
life to give up in the first place...

towards your point, Phillip, if university authorities were to honestly
evaluate themselves (their/our practices) first, _ideally_ they'd all go
to therapy for at least a year, preferably two. (I'm in therapy already, so
I've got that covered, ha ha)-

as such, I'd think that university folks aren't necessarily keen to
self-analyse their practices, because, well, one needs to be profoundly
insecure to be an academic,

to participate in the practices of the academy, I mean, requries an
incessant need for approval, a need to prove oneself to one's peers,

to say the smartest thing, to say something so smart that everyone quotes,
cites, makes reference to you/me/etc. - think about it: the Social Sciences
Index, that massive tome which is dedicated to counting how many times
someone is cited...
what does that tell us about our practices?

there is an appeal, a seductive one, to academic work; that is, analyse
everyone & everything else, diagnose problems and generate questions, read
the world and tell the other academics what ya think, etc., ...

Nonetheless, there is, my cynicism aside, a big difference between teaching
young adults in university, and teaching children in schools; for one
thing, the parents of the young adults are not participating;

young adults are not organized by developmental theories and age-segregated
on that basis - these organizational differences, I think, mark important
distinctions in schools and universities.

But your point is a good one - one which I often argue, which is that
individually we all represent the complexities of any social system, that
is, we are each kinds of weaves of multiple subjectivities and the dynamic
social.

>
> One rule I'd like to change is that before researchers/university
>community members can research the activity of other communities, that
>they first have an experiential grounding in the researching of their own
>community.

I would ask, WHY research more? My gawd, a quick ERIC search reveals
kajillions of classroom studies, ethnographic studies, community-analyses,
teachers, children, parents, administrators, ad nauseum, have been studied
and analysed and on and on and on... I'd ask again, at what point can a
researcher stop re-searching and start en-acting?

I don't believe that folks don't think they know what's "best" for
classroom contexts to work for children and teachers; this is not to say a
generalizable "best"; but a contextual "best", relative to each community,
each school, each classroom...

and even if change

were to take place in tiny increments, it would at least be a move beyond
the relentless studies and re-searches, and a gesture towards proactive
engagement with the social.

and yes there would be resistance, at times, but dealing with resistance as
knowledge is a useful tool for understanding people's experiences,
contexts, histories, and so on; resistance reveals what's "best" for those
who resist.

>
> Or, as Gordon Wells puts it, teacher as researcher.
>
>there! I've tossed out my half-baked potato - next?

Sour cream, bacon bits, and chives ?
;-)
diane