I agree with your message about lived history...especially when I've seen
examples of historians writing bullshit about things that happened much
differently. Some of the histories of the ILWU and the waterfront done by
Stalinist sympathizers are more mythology than truth, for example.
But if you think unreferenced trade union experience is hard to use in
scholarly writing, try using communist history. In my few years at UCB
I've learned not to even bring it up, although I know it's more real than
most of the stuff i'm reading. For example, when you talk about adult
literacy classes, community college, etc....the workers' study circles and
literacy schools run by revolutionary parties around the world have
probably always had the highest success rates, getting unschooled workers
to read and think about Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc But bring that up in a
Theory of Literacy class and watch the chill spread through the room!
How's things in Iowa?
Pete Farruggio
By the way, I'm doing a paper on developing bilingual paraprofessionals
into bilingual teachers, and I've run across some stuff on "developmental
advising" at the CC (it's a big issue for this population of older, working
class minority folks who need a unique support structure to survive in
college) Do you have experience with this?
>I would like to add my voice to the discussion of the role played by
>one's personal life story in the evolution of one's intellectual and
>academic consciousness. For about half of the years that I was teaching
>(in community colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area and at the University
>of San Francisco) I worked for the California Federation of Teachers,
>the labor-movement affiliated teachers union. I had various positios,
>some elected, some appointed. As an elected person, I had a duty --
>a duty parallel to the union's duty of fair representation -- to
>represent the faculty who had elected me -- that is, to study and
>interpret the ambitions and conflicts they were conscious of in their work,
>and to try to express them in terms of fairness, and to do something about
>them -- that is, use the powers available to myself as part of the
>union collective to work for the benefit of the people I represented.
>During those years (this is quite recently; I stopped teaching to write my
>dissertation and prepare for my orals only last spring) I probably worked
>with hundreds of faculty individually, and thousands if you think about
>classes of faculty (full-time, part-time, tenured, non-tenured, etc). One
>consequence of this was a profound training in thinking about how the
>working conditiosn of faculty influence what they can do. Another was
>an ineradicable conviction that implementation of any kind of reform comes
>bottom-up. There are others: For example, I can't read any report of
>research, written by an observer, without hearing the voices of faculty
>who have had to put up with researchers in their classrooms. Some
>welcome it, some tolerate it,some resent it dreadfully but don't dar
>complain -- I know this, from having spoken with the people whose classes
>have been "studied" -- but these are things they'd never say to the
>researcher directly.
>
>Here's the problem: this is not knowledge that I've come by from reading
>books. If I tried to do a literature search to rationalize this knowledge,
>I'd wind up with mostly stuff that is produced by unions -- not just the
>AFT but industrial and trade unions where people talk about being watched
>and studied -- at any rate, the sources would be advocacy-type sources,
>not legitimate academic sources. So how do I, in an academic situatio,
>justify this knowledge? There actually was a moment during my orals last
>spring where I began talking about the difficulty of accomplishing change
>in a system like the California community college system, where so many
>faculty (two thirds) have not only no tenure, but no job security, and
>therefore are unwilling to take risks -- one of my examiners asked me
>if I had come by this knowledge through reading, or through personal
>experience, and I had to admit that it was not through reading -- yet
>is organizational experience that comes from having represented hundreds
>of people in a position to which I have been elected merely personal
>experience?
>
>If I were to try to write an article for an academic journal about this,
>how could I leave out my organizationally-constructed knowledge? Yet I
>sense that this knowledge, because it is "advocacy", is illegimiate; maybe
>not because it's advocacy, but because it doesn't come out of other
>articles in other journals. Yet for me to write anything without uding
>this knowledge feels like a mockery of serious intellectual work, to say
>nothing of a betrayal of all the people I've worked with.
>
>Helena