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Amendment 2, which repealed all civil rights laws for gays and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_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca