Re: twisted internalizations

Diane Hodges (dhodges who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu)
Wed, 17 Nov 1999 01:10:11 -0700

xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu writes:
jay writes
>This is perhaps an underdeveloped perspective in education. Working class
>students being taught middle-class culture in schools. Girls being taught
>historically masculinizing traditional disciplines, knowledges,
>perspectives. Young humans being taught adult or middle-aged humans'
>norms
>of behavior. Africanized and otherwise differently enculturated students
>being taught euroculture. Queers of all stripes being taught the
>narrowest,
>straightest-laced official known-false (i.e. obviously unrepresentative,
>and not descriptive) version of the community's culture ... with what
>consequences?? NOT just resistance or appropriation or deliberate
>mockery,
>transformation -- but an inevitable twisting of the dagger so its point
>is
>aimed at its makers. Education for a time focussed quite a bit on the
>'hidden curriculum', on the hidden meanings of the overt curriculum (e.g.
>be on time, obey instructions precisely, defer to authority, don't joke
>around, doubt your own competence, etc.), and there was in this theory a
>notion of the 'received' curriculum (also there was the enacted or
>performed curriculum) -- but not so far as I know theorized except as a
>subset of the overt or intended curriculum, merely what was successfully
>internalized and what was not.

i would hesitate to say this is an underdeveloped conception of curriculum
(health & counselling journals research this constantly, so it is perhaps
a context of what might be relevant reading?)

though i empathize rather grievously with the metaphor of 'twisting' -
reading the recent statistics
of the increase youth suicide and violence,
i can only perceive this twisting of the ideology into the socially
powerless body -
>

>Do you know of research that looked seriously at the antagonistic twists
>of
>the learned curriculum? at the queered and monstrous versions, or less
>dramatically and from the dominant viewpoint, the merely bizarre and
>hapless ones? I do not mean here what students do in schools instead of
>learning; there is a lot of research on that. Nor the ways in which queer
>students learn by different kinds of doings, we also know a bit about
>that.
>But about what we make of the learnings themselves? how the doings we
>learn
>get twisted so that they become anomalous ways of talking, thinking,
>drawing, performing, relating ... no longer suited to their original
>functions, and with considerable potential as antagonists to those
>functions and the systems they support?

at the risk of misreading, i feel a little like 'tommy' - the very people
who suffer
and learn through/in spite of these oppressions
are invariably faced with conformity expectations in later years - that i
am writing a dissertation
which no one would/could/will supervise, and without any cttee to speak of
really,
speaks volumes about what happens to us queer students who

persist in the system that denies us our place and perspective. the
greatest danger, i have found,
is in assuming a role of 'persecution' and i think it is important for us
queers to not take

the differences personally and try, never the less, to be heard.
yoiks. did i rant again?
thanks jay.
diane

>

' 'We have destroyed something by our presence,' said Bernard, 'a
world perhaps.'
(Virginia Woolf, "The Waves")

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, vancouver / university of colorado, denver

Diane_Hodges who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu