It's hard to know if "everybody" should reply to such a question, but for
a different perspective, I can reply that I had no such audacious
intentions of going to graduate school, or pursuing higher education in
1987, I was just finishing an arts degree at Simon Fraser University, a
kind of death-bed promise to myself when my mother died a few years
earlier that I would go to school and do something that I wanted to for
once. I was 32 years old, and had worked in the clerical and "corporate
communications sector" - and couldn't imagine going to university for
myself, despite the fact that I had been a good student in high-school
during the seventies.
a string of personal tragedies and an economic collapse of the resources
sector in British Columbia meant a drying up of the soft money in
corporate advertising, so my jobs were thinning out, and I thought I
would become a "copy writer' and I enrolled in a School for Writing,
which offered a practicum based/workshop approach to writing, and while
it had 'workplace writing' it's main focus was the arts, so for a
glorious year I met major Canadian poets, playwrites, short story writers,
philosophers and novelists every month, who rolled through our mountain
top campus, stayed for a week, gave workshops and colloquia talks,
hunkered over beers and wine, and talked abut how they worked ....
so that meant a creative writing degree, that was terminated when the
arts university was shut down, because we "weren't income producing
graduates" and a return to the academic stream, where I did my basic
college courses and then pursued an English degree at SFU
I supported myself as a community mental health worker with elderly and
mid-aged women in community mental health group homes in the Lower
Mainland of Vancouver B.C. it was there that I was being shaped as a
'radical adult education teacher/feminist" as I noticed a lot of what I
came to call the casualties of 'patriarchy effects" in the lives of the
women I worked with.. as they were the survivors of regular beatings,
poverty, sexual abuse, immigration as refuges, shock therapies, drug
experimentation and 25 years of institutionalized warehousing where they
were sentenced to life sentences forced labourd doing laundry and cooking
for cigarettes and $5.00/week" it was for me a life changing
educational experience
And because I was a poet in practice, and working on a editorial board of
a writing journal, organizing women's writing circles, sleep deprived
and shuttling back and forth between my two worlds of mental health
work, and english /women's studies and struggling to come to terms with the
slim gap of life choices between many of my residents's lives and my own,
and that of my mother and grandmothers, I wondered about the educational
issues in women's lives, I wondered why it was that I had all the
advantages of a middle class upbringing but couldn't imagine myself beyond
the mommy/teacher/nurse work options of my childhood.
And then I was fortunate enough to hear of an amazing scholar in Education
at SFU who was focusing on social issues in education, critical literacy
and through chance and luck got enrolled in an independent MA in education
working with suzanne de Castell, i eventually wrote about the the
activities of writing up - in the mental health boarding home, that was
later identified as "genre studies" where I am now finishing up my PhD.
on feminist literacy workers.
So I am still a work in progress from the events of 1987.
Interesting narratives we bring forth about such things. thanks for
asking the question Mike.
>
>
>At 08:15 PM 6/3/01 -0700, you wrote:
>>
>>I am curious about people's association with the year, 1987. What were
>>various of xmca's members doing in 1987? What theories were they using
>>to guide research? What research were they doing?
>>
>>Brief summaries would be really helpful to discusion of a book written, I
>>presume, between 1985-1987.
>>
>>for myself, I can contribute the following.
>>
>>In 1986-1987 I was on sabbatical leave at the Chid Dev unit of the Britisyh
>>Research Council in England. Cultural psychology, or sociocultural
>psychology,
>>or Vygotsky, or anything connected with such ideas was incomprehensible
>>to almost all the people I talked to.
>>
>>I was dividing my time between trying to write a book that, 9 years later,
>>was published as *Cultural psychology........*, not a title of my choosing,
>>but the best that could be arranged on the spot, with 60 seconds to make up
>>my mind about how to change the title I had selected.
>>
>>And, 18 hour a day efforts to establish "normal" working relationships with
>>colleagues in the Soviet Academy of sciences using the, then, exotic medium,
>>of email.
>>
>>I also spent a couple of months working on my book./lectures in copenhagen
>>which a few faithful friends heard through from beginning to end.
>>
>>It would take me 10 years to finish the book which became *Cultural
>Psychology....
>>......." in 1996.
>>
>>
>>In the spring of 1987 Yrjo completed his doctoral thesis which is the ms
>>we have been reading, LBE.
>>
>>Those of us left alive at now 14 years older. We interpret the text written
>>then through our respective personalities and experience.
>>
>>What are they? Having some idea whould help me understand the discusion.
>>mike
>>
>>
________________________________________________________________________________
"We live with strangers. those we love most, with whom we share a shelter,
a table, a bed, remain mysterious. Wherever lives overlap and flow
together, there are depths of unknowing." Mary Catherine Bateson, 2000,
from Full Circles, Overlapping Lives.
Kathryn Alexander,
Faculty of Education,
Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6 Canada
Messages for SFU: (604) 291 - 3395 /SFU FAX (604) 291 - 3203
Personal: email: kalexand@sfu.ca
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