[xmca] strange situations & emotions

["White, Phillip" <Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>]

Jay and Larry -  you both considered the mutuallity/symmety of student and teacher engaging as both learner and teacher - and took note of my not divulging the suicide of my cousin.

i think that this relates to what Jay refers to as the contradictions within the activity of teaching - as the possibilities of / or missed possibilities of what Jay refers to as mutuality.

in one of Bryant Alexander's writings - (Re)Visioning the Ethnographic Site: Interpretive Ethnography as a Method of Pedagogical Reflexivity and Scholarly Production - Alexander uses the metaphor of drag to illustrate how teacher is a kind of performance in which the teacher is constantly aware of what to reveal and not reveal.

let me now step back in years - in 1992, Colorado voted passed Amendment 2, which repealed all civil rights laws for gays and lesbians, and denied the right for appeal.  in 1996 the Supreme Court struck down this amendment ( Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas dissenting).  however, in the immediate years after 1992 i found myself confronted by parents of children within my classroom, asserting that they didn't want a gay man (me) teaching their child.  as well, teachers within the school that i taught made it clear to me that they supported the amendment.  in time i transferred to another school some distance away, and within that school community i was not open at all about being gay.  

however, my lover, who is fluent in Spanish, did volunteer work within my now school, working with small reading groups providing additional classroom support, but in my classroom and in others, and was also a translator during parent conferences.

however, for myself with my students, i found myself divulging little about my own personal life - while we played soccer together during recesses, and did lots of sharing activities around books and writing, science math and social studies, etc. - and i saw myself as a full participant within the classroom, i still maintained a stance of not revealing much about my personal life.

Vygotsky suggested that emotions developed rather like scientific concepts, they also, i think, inform one's behavior.

phillip




Phillip White, PhD
University of Colorado Denver
School of Education
phillip.white@ucdenver.edu_______________________________________________
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