A ref. on ... "basics"...

Angel M.Y. Lin (mylin who-is-at oise.on.ca)
Fri, 3 Nov 1995 22:02:24 -0500 (EST)

Some time ago (in September?) there were some discussions here on "back
to the basics"... I happened to uncover this ref. on the issue (yes, I'm
entering my refs. into Endnote and in the process have been recovering
many interesting refs :-)

Well, I'd like to type out one paragraph from it, for it seems to bear on
what we've discussed before in Sept.:

Michele Sola and Adrian T. Bennett: "The Struggle for Voice: Narrative,
Literacy, and Consciousness in an East Harlem School". In C. Mitchell
and K. Weiler (Eds.), Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of
the Other. New York: Bergin and Garvey, pp. 35-55.

p. 53:
"... We have tried to adumbrate in our examples the pull and push of
various discourses that inhabit a particular environment, the struggle
for voice. What we believe we have seen is an important piece of a
larger struggle between a minority community and the classes that rest on
the labor f the community. This is the struggle for hegemony over the
productive processes of consciousness formation--or ideology in Bakhtin's
terminology. Against this backdrop, the concern with so called basic
skills becomes only one more piece of the struggle for consciousness.
Questions remain: WHO WILL DEFINE THESE "SKILLS"? WHO IS TO SAY WHAT IS
"BASIC"? WHOSE PURPOSES WILL IT SERVE THAT PARTICULAR "SKILLS" BE
LEARNED, NOT BY EVERYONE, BUT BY A SELECT FEW? ..." (Captitals added)

Angel

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Angel M.Y. Lin
Doctoral Candidate
Modern Language Centre
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada
E-Mail: MYLIN who-is-at OISE.ON.CA
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