Archive: Author: wade tillett
Chicago Housing Authority Plan for Exploitation
“How do I apply for housing?”
Wait List for Family Properties is Closed. The CHA’s Housing Choice Voucher Program (formerly called Section 8) is administered by CHAC, Inc, a privately owned company. At the present time, CHAC’s waiting list is closed.
(from the front page FAQ and apply for housing page of the Chicago Housing Authority Website, June 10, 2006)
[Besides, according to the FY2006 Moving to Work Annual Plan, there are already 147,730 people on the waiting list for public housing, and 9,756 heads of household on the Housing Choice Vouchers (aka Section 8) waiting list. (p. 137 and 144 in the appendix)]
TEXTS
`volunteer’ requirement rankles residents of public housing – matt stearns
targeting section 8 – the black commentator
a great chicago land grab – david peterson
a colossal exercise in moral deception – wade tillett
united nations testimony – carol steele
fulfilling the program – wade tillett
spatial deconcentration – yolanda ward
offsite
public housing: reading between the lines – cory oldweiler and brian j. rogal
LINKS
fifth graders attempt to get a new school at cabrini green
rooting/uprooting the west side
coalition to protect public housing
cpph_digest
process
Dear friends, what you took to be my works were only my waste matter. (artaud) leavings of becomings. this is where we put symbols of carcasses, images of who we were at a specific time, in order to become something else we do not care for products or museums. we do not care for art, as a discipline nor as a profession. we are interested only in a life unseparated and all-meaningful. a life in which the present is the continual end/result. that is, there is no end, there is only the continual present, recreated by us as we live within it, by how we live within it. there is no end, only means. our greatest fear is that this becomes an appropriation of, or worse, a blueprint for the everyday. our desire is that this be used as an experiment, a swapping of particulars, an idea factory, a temporary vehicle to be abandoned. what is the point, after all, of writing in an abstract medium and language, of concrete actions and particulars? well, what we hope is that there is a story telling that perpetuates the story, opens it so to speak. not a narrative, but a first person example. a collection of pieces that can be reshuffled and retried and reworked in different lives and environs. the cook takes from around them and (re)arranges assemblages. And these assemblages not only create a present, but recreate the self and present perpetually. nutrition shapes consciousness (the body and/of the mind). the cook takes a fuzzy idea of what to be and uses a recipe as a guide, not a plan or law. ingredients are substituted. processes are adapted. and then, when one learns how to cook, when one knows how to cook, the recipes are thrown away. temporary vehicles abandoned. the only way that the actual experiences relate to each other is that some sort of re-presentation of them has ended up here. between the experiences, we intend no meaning, no meta-narrative. by reading about other’s experience, by sharing your own, a certain respect for position can be established. this is not meant to be a meatgrinder – this is an understanding of an other we cannot become. fragments of my everyday life and yours. theory applied. everyday life. micro-politics. in response to all the meta-(whatever), this is for minute empirical concrete experience specific to each user. difference between places, between users. not for unification and congregration of ethereal beings. not interested in the big picture – what you did today, but in every detail of one interesting item. we filled glass jars with something we found interesting and placed them together. similar jars contained white rice, water, kidney beans, maple leaves. individually quite different, but an order was perceived not (only) from their display in jars, but from their specificity. the idea of ‘experimental’ is not shock art. rather, the idea is to destroy the boundary between art and life. and in order to do this, one must destroy all binaries. self and other, author and reader, artist and viewer, original and copy. said another way, the identity, the self, the body must be attacked and radically altered. meditation is the practice of controlling one’s own consciousness, of redefining the self. ‘practice’ here being defined not as a simulation before the real event, but as a way of life which refines itself, ‘controls’ itself. what we are proposing then is this: being is becoming. is this not the premise of all experimentation? materialization as conceptualization. perhaps at first this consists of (re)presentations, tracings, and directions, but it is our hope that these become pieces in a new collage, so to speak, pieces incorporated in a new life. that eventually, they are either abandoned as meaningless products and representations, or assimilated in totally new manners into a simultaneous being/becoming. we do not wish to hear grandiose theories. death to all transcendence! riveting life immanence, simultaneously flat and infinite we are. the particles are not metaphorical, they are pieces. between the pieces is the self we construct, an intuition that operates on them. we are the interval. the idea is this: we wish to be artists of life, action is our medium. an implosion of theory. a freedom attained through a micro/empirical/physical/immediate politics/economy – (or perhaps the destruction of above) to hear infinity you have to open your ears wide to the present. a spiritual present, mystic, cosmic, an ultra-awareness of now. kind of a research and development of life, of modes of production, convergence of theory and practice. art and writing? anyways, a sort of endless experimentation in the present. studying modes of creation – how to create while within the creation. process. intent to rigorously practice the process of creation within a context of disciplined research, experimentation, and development ‘to improve the space we live in while we live within it.’ (salvaggio) text by wade tillett
seclusion and the land of grandfather
Wait. There I was,
stranded in a dream
a beautiful dream.
Grandfather was there, at least in spirit, as we drove through the barely rolling land, infinite and green. We were caught in the moment before, where desire spills forth onto the land like sunshine from within reflecting back, mounting an end to our separation. How the crops spring forth from the black fertile.
And we cannot find a place secluded enough. Neither in the fields nor the woods, which spring up like isolated island patches, but which are overrun and barren beneath (like woods sheep grazed), thus they are only continuations of the field, except with grass and a canopy. The breeze is in through the open windows, cool dew. The grass wet wiping on the underside of the car sounds like water and ice in a large cooler. Or was that only a memory, not in my dream?
We cannot find a place secluded enough, as we search through the rebuilt land of memory, or is it dream? As we search the fertile fields of grandfather, and grandfather’s father, and his too? (And then what, the native americans ran off, the trees not cut down, the swamps not drained – hell that definitely wasn’t part of the dream, or memory.)
Desire reflects back a rebuilt land of fertile memory. And we drive through searching for a place of seclusion, where desire can reflect back a body of fertile memory. How is it, that inhabiting the dreamscape of past and present, we seek out a lack, an object of each other, an intercourse that will overcome – momentarily? Did lack create desire create the dreamscape? Can the dreamscape overcome, reflecting back, overtaking the self within it, rising out of the body? That is the body becomes the landscape. As does hers. What kind of desire then? What kind of inhabited desire then? Is this only an extension of lack, or a reformulation of desire? Is zen inhabitable? Is this tantrism?
Why do we want it resolved? In my dreams, I search the fertile reconstructions of past and present with all its fields green, sunshine and blue for the place of seclusion. Am I struggling to preserve the self?
Grandfather was there, at least in spirit. He has merged with the land.
Why do I always write to resolution?
(But to keep it pregnant with commodifiable potential isn’t exactly what I’m after either.)
Look, I try to make the meta-cognition explicit. Do we see the decisions of writing as we write them? In dreams, can we come to know we are dreaming, and thus modify the contents while within them? And if so, hardly can we limit this to dreams. Seeing mechanisms of belief and their swirling shifty truthy landscapes as we change the structure of belief. What is the other way? Only a void? The blindness of creation?
Faith.
reworking my many colored days
of course, feel free to rewrite/reuse this as you see fit. its only fair – thats what i did to dr. seuss. (scissors, paper and glue = old school wiki?) also, i consider this a draft because of the fruity ending i need to rewrite.
—
i didn’t really plan this as a great teachable moment, but it turned out that way. in the morning, i was sitting in the rocking chair across from grandma reading to my children. i was really enjoying watching them all listen intently and i love dr. seuss, but when the story about the different colored days came to brown and then black, i suddenly noticed what a definitely negative tone there was to these colors:
some days, of course, feel sort of brown.
then i feel slow and low, low down.
and
then come my black days.
mad. and loud.
i howl.
i growl at every cloud.
i decided right then and there i was going to fix the book. later, i re-evaluated whether the book was worth salvaging, or whether i should just throw it away – as i’ve done with innumerous children’s books. i decided i liked the books concept and it could be good if it only said things differently. this was an important decision because my children would not have learned anything if i had merely thrown the book away. i’m sure the copyright police and the purists who believe in the purity of the original work and the great author would be aghast. anyway, i’m not going to let the naysayers get in the way of actual positive (re)construction.
later in the day, my son and daughter and i sat down on the back porch with scissors, tape, markers and the victim of our surgery – the book.
instead or re-reading the book, i chose to have the kids describe what black and brown made them feel like. i knew if i re-read the book, they would only repeat it back to me, so i wanted to catch them fresh. the concept of feeling like a color was pretty abstract for a five year old and a three year old, so they immediately described night for black, and various brown things such as earth (dirt), leaves, bears, for brown. from there i pushed them further for what happens at night and what it might feel like. i then penned one line before i realized i had committed myself to rhyming with it and keeping the rhythm of the book. but we did ok. here’s what we came up with:
some days, of course, feel sort of brown.
then i feel safe and cozy
and warm all around.
and
on black days i feel calm, serene.
i walk. i glide.
i chirp. i sing.
hey, i wasn’t trying to make a whole essay on defeating racial stereotypes, but just trying to (re)write past a negative impasse. (also, we carefully pasted the words to cover up the scary teeth in the picture on the black page.)
well, then i was suspect of the whole book. purple seemed sort of negative but i left it alone. then i came to
then comes a mixed-up day. and wham! i don’t know who or what? i am!
of course i’m not going to leave that alone – my children especially need a strong sense that being multi-cultural is good – not confusing. so we re-wrote it to…
then comes a mixed-up day. and wham! no one can tell me who or what? i am!
and the last page of the book says,
but it all turns out all right, you see.
and i go back to being… me.
this assumes a certain stasis and non-colorful personality it seems (i.e. white). so…
but it all turns out all right, you see.
because no matter how i feel, i’m still the same person
… and that is me.
well, we were done. we cleaned up the markers and the paper scraps. but then, on the stairs to the backyard, we started to discusss why we’d changed the book. (i didn’t feel it was explicit before. it’s not easy to discuss this at a pre-school level.) we discussed how some people have negative ideas about certain colors, or don’t like certain colors. why? well, some people want to think their colors are the best. they want to think their colors are better than everyone elses. they feel they must have a favorite color…. i’m not sure if they understand until my three year old daughter says, i like all the colors. and my son and i say, me too.
bloom’s taxonomy end-to-end
connecting bloom’s taxonomy end-to-end evaluation redefines the base level of knowledge for example, who are the victims of war? can be accessed at pretty much any level of bloom’s taxonomy, but by taking it to the evaluation level, we redefine the knowledge level. in fact, perhaps all the levels work at once, redefining one another. or maybe another way to say it is that they are just filters we put over what is truly a complex non-linear, non-hierarchical structure.
when does food become part of the body? what is self and other? what is ethical? (basically, most philosophical questions have the ability to redefine the belief structure and therefore redefine its manifestations: knowledge/truth.)
impossible
ellsworth (p55 quoting felman) states that pschoanalysis “gives us uprecedented insight into the impossibility of teaching,” and that this opens up “unprecedented teaching possibilities, renewing both thte questions and the practice of education.”
this parallels my own writing about creation. to summarize: to create is impossible, because creation redefines the possible. creation (as i define it) necessarily involves a reconfiguration of self/other because it is a change in the structure of belief. this change in the structure of belief changes the manifestations of belief (images, objects, truths). however, to create does not necessarily involve the manipulation of beliefs directly or abstractly, instead, for example, to rework a piece of clay involves a direct reconfiguration of self and other through a suspension of those categories via touch. what we are reworking when we touch clay is not the clay, but the border/intersection of self/other while within it. we are inhabiting the interstasis, the skin. (pedagogy is a performance that is suspended (as in interrupted, never completed) in the space between self and other (p17).) but not “purely.” creation exceeds re-production, but does not exclude it. so the process becomes one of (re/de)creation. re-production, re-presentation itself is an impossibility, but it denies its own impossiblity. re-presentation is blind to its own belief structures (or it pretends to be). it attempts to recreate truth according to belief, but to create necessarily involves change of the self/other – whether or not this change attempts to re-enforce what one believes or expects. that is, whether or not the process of creation is seen as open or closed, accepted or denied, it always involves change. and this process occurs moment by moment.
to teach then, as traditionally defined, is to have students understand. students are to distinguish forms in a designated manner. they must inhabit a certain belief structure in order to see these designated forms. students, in other words, are to be able to re-present the designated forms. in order to do this, students themselves are force to inhabit a designated space of belief re-created within themselves. students must reform their selves as re-presentations. to “understand” is to con/re-form, to reinforce the belief structure already established (therefore avoiding a crisis within the belief structure of the teacher, as baldwin notes “if i am not what i’ve been told i am, then it means you’re not what you thought you were either. and that is the crisis.” (ellsworth p50)), to inhabit the realm of pre-constructed possibilities (the possible), to be “empowered” rather actually having power.
understanding is framed in the old-fashioned terms of neutral objectivity. “it’s usually reframed as a matter of some onerous relation between students and their broader social and cultural contexts and constraints. in other wods, students would get it if only they had the right cultural competencies, intellectual skills, or moral virtues. / this allows understanding itself to escape scrutiny.” (ellsworth p47)
“understanding,” in other words, inhabits all the problems that representation inhabits. to understand is to inhabit the belief structure of an other, it is to become (to some degree) the person the other wants you to be – to inhabit a position within their belief structure, to be on the receiving end of the mode of address (ellsworth).
ellsworth discusses that because of the difference between (self and other?), it is necessarily impossible to actually re-present. (lacan via felman via ellsworth p55) or difference is seen as a way the individual resists identity by ellsworth (p44 summarizing donald).
we must be careful here, however, not to posit an actual difference. difference cannot be elevated to the supreme reality or actuality. (what is ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are in fact products of belief structures – see below.) “this ‘self’ is what is generated in ‘the gap between what we are supposed to be and what we have in actuality not become.'” (o’shea quoted in ellsworth p43)
i’ve been down this road before, “reality is the difference between the object and our thoughts about it.” (from my 1998 thesis abstract http://w.281c9c.org/objectification/abstract.htm(approve sites), based on bohm) therefore, in order to have more of a self, i concluded, “the person within the room of nothing becomes the difference, the failure, the reality within the design.”
this conclusion, however, led me to abstention and stasis. to define the self as the gap is to essentially dissolves agency (contrary to o’sheas argument, ellsworth p43) because the self inhabits only an anterior space over which it has no control of the structure which defines this space. because self-objectification is impossible, the best possibility for the self is to fail, to sin, to become ‘real,’ as defined in contrast to a structure of other.
it took me years to work beyond that, but what i found was that in fact it is i who define other. i was the architect designing the minimal space of failure for myself. the true believers fail to see their own agency in the construction of the structures they inhabit (the delusion of the architect – see my “the plan abandoned.” http://w.281c9c.org/log/archives/20(approve sites))
this is, in fact, what ellsworth defines as a passion for ignorance (p.57) and castoriadis (more accurately, in my opinion) describes as a passion for not knowledge, but belief.
“passion is in effect brought to its maximum intensity on account of the fact that the soicalized individual has to, under penalty of being faced with his own non-sense and with the non-sense of all that surrounds him, identify himself witht he institution of his society and with the significations that society incarnates. to deny the instituteion or to deny these significations is, most of the time, to commit suicide physically and, almost always, to commit suicide psychically. the obvious underside of this passion, of this boundless love for self and one’s own is the hatred of all that denies these objects, namely the hate of the institutions and of the significations of the others and of the indeividuals who embody them.” (figures of the thinkable “passion and knowledge” p272 http://notbored.org(approve sites)).
(conversely, if the self is seen as the failure (the sinner in relation to god) then we are left with a perverted self-hatred.)
ellsworth states that “the field of education is driven by research aimed at determining ever more exactly who the student is so that s/h can be more efficiently and effectively addressed.” (p58) and that all learning takes a detour through prohibition and the repressed (p64).
foucault, however, examines how the soul/identity does not pre-exist the power/position structure. instead, the student is created by allowing the inhabitation of a certain empowerment structure. repression or prohibition sound like negative impositions, instead, what are offered are possible positions for the self within a predefined structure. education is not so interested in finding out who students are, but in directing/guiding/empowering students into (entrapment) structures of identity. we can re-write ellsworth as, “”the field of education is driven by research aimed at determining ever more exactly who the student is.”
difference, instead, is inherent within representation because of the tension between re-newal/re-presentation/re-creation (that is belief and its structure) and creation (changing belief and its structures), between the possible and the impossible, between our desire to believe and the impossibility of a closed system (see castoriadis, passion and knowledge in figures of the thinkable). (ellsworth (and psychoanalysis?) seems to locate the impossibility of difference within the unconscious as it’s tactic, rather than as a logical problem. the “necessary” failure. p.52)
it seems somewhat ridiculous then, to ask, “how can we cause difference and resistance to spread?” (ellsworth p53)
to move beyond attempting to define the self through self-objectification or through a converse other-objectification, we must abandon the attempts to see the self. instead, the self can be seen as so many sites of construction, vectors, directions, vehicles – with porous and changing borders. (thus temporary positions of desire are inhabited because of their use, their function, what they allow us to be/experience instead of aligning themselves with a pre-defined identity. (see ellsworth on this difference, p37)
“the self is no longer cathected as the possessor of the truth but, rather, as source of, and incessantly renewed capacity for, creation.” (castoriadis, p.274)
in other words, abandon the project of representation as an end in itself. we must exceed representation.
“learning, felman (1987) says, comes ‘as a surprise: a surprise not only to the others, but also to the self.’ learning happens, she says, when ‘the answer is bound in effect to displace the question’ and when what ‘returns to itself, radically displaces the very point of observation.'” (ellsworth p18) learning is creation.
faith (as i have defined it) is the understanding that creation itself is always blind. possibility is simply our way to limit/visualize/cope with the impossible, to finitize the infinite.
[above, i have used ellsworth’s book as a vehicle that has allowed me to translate much of my previous thinking about creation and belief towards education and learning. my “belief structure” approximates ellsworth’s “unconscious”]
“what if we teachers became as curious about the productiveness of our continuously remodeled ignore-ances, lacks of fit, and limitations of knowing as we have been about how to achieve full and complete understanding?” (ellsworth, p53)
what if we throw out a million scraps and tools and students take what they want and combine it with other things they have and find and start making something, and then search out a few more pieces, and then re-order the whole thing and then it starts to work, or works in a different way, or they get bored, or they push it to the back of their minds as they work on the next thing?
ellsworth, elizabeth. teaching positions. isbn 0-8077-3668-6
how to write beyond the rational?
is this a ridiculous proposal? is language the rational? morrison leaves the political-historical intact and creates the political-historical as real living mystical apparitions. the real is seen as a product of the past turned onto the present, giving it form, taking form as “reality”. the trees on the backs, the aborted baby… is poetry a form beyond the rational? is the mystic? the mythic?
what about academic writing – can it go beyond the rational? (look up alchemy – williams? referenced in ellsworth teaching position book)
it seems imperative that we not cut the cord to history, to the lines of thought, to the forces that have converged to create our present and our selves. is it? do we otherwise return to the tabula rasa of modernism? how can history remain as a site of re/deconstruction – opened, rather than as an enclosing mechanism that purports to produce people as products/objects (objectivism)?
is going beyond the rational simply a means of leaving an opening? ambiguity? is that not always there? and how do we avoid attempting to simply enclose more space in false empowerment structures? is diffusion simply a power strategy? is minimalism too tidy (reducing the self to nice binaries)? does it even matter?
how about starting with the rational and then finding openings, slowly cycling off-center, debasing the original, as the text whirls off in tangents of its own directions? or derrida’s ellipsis? how far off can one go before it is no longer an ellipsis?
the self is not so fragile. says the buddha (suzuki). we are being too cautious?
i wrote about finding the way, the path, heading east to the next sunrise, with no hope of return… that was during my binary modernist days, before i understood how the self/other relation exists. i wanted to abandon the self into the other…
now, traces, trails, directions out/from… where? why start with rationality? do we know how to start without rationality. do we know how to start without rationality?
which reminds me of some other writing i did, and that long period of abstinence i went through in which i refused to write or produce for fear of commodification…. i came out of it finally when i realized we cannot partition off the rational as other (else we are still controlled by it), instead we have to enclose it, embrace it, love it to death – show its own limits, its ridiculousness, its discrepancies. and then show its borders as porous… leading outwards and inwards are many paths. the rational and language are subsets of a larger picture, or one possible picture of multiple pictures. they are limiting/enabling modes we can inhabit – vehicles, bodies. they define possibilities and forms. they are beliefs. (see feyerabend or zen).
language and rationality are not the evil other. they are not pure. the medium is not only the massage. (mcluhan?) instead of attempting to partition off another world (which, by the way is politically impossible at the present moment) we can find those discrepancies and inhabit them. widen the cracks. (as castoriadis (or lefebvre?) said (look up email to teh)… 2 choices are spectacle/nihilism or finding the discrepancies within global capitalism/rationality/language…)
that being said, it means that we must be conscious of the tools we use, and look in particular at the places they fail us – for these are the places where potential reside, else we are simply re-presenting rather than (re)creating.
to forsake the self (zen buddhism – abandoning the self allows seeing the self as construction) vs. subverting the self (derrida’s ellipsis – is this an active destruction of the self… self-destruction or self-dconstruction) (where is deleuze on this?)
we must avoid taking the outside stance of the critic. to criticize meets that which is criticized is met head-on, as some sort of opposite, essentially leaving the framing/battleground/platform intact. instead, new non-binary vectors must take root from the old and spring forth in tangential (or elliptical) directions. see deleuze’s introduction to bergsonism. diagonal lines cutting across rather than pure intersections of this is mine and that was hers (footnote, footnote). instead, salvage what you can, modify it at will, and use it as (part of) a vehicle until it stops taking you the direction you want to go. (or maybe you have to switch mediums.)
reading list
religion the other gospels, ed. ron cameron the mystic fable, de certeau
oneness, faith some of the gnostic texts a radical reinterpretation of the new testament (forgiveness/grace/redemption, holy spirit, inhabiting faith/the kingdom, forsaking (also see gospels mentioning judas as the one who’s destiny was to forsake), rejection of reason/modernism/childlike (kierkegaard)) krishamurti bohm? (wholeness and the implicate order, and science, order and creativity) zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance suzuki on zen buddhism bergson deleuze spinoza? leibniz (monadology)
education
the miseducation of the negro, carter woodson
white architects of a black education, william watkins
vouchers etc, the black commentator
illich deschooling society grummet, arts and everyday life in reflections from the heart of inquiry william james, varieties of religious experiences eric fromm, to have or to be caroline pratt, i learn from children uhlich – 3000 years of educational wisdom charles sanders peirce (pragmatism, semiotics) l. thomas hopkins, the emerging self in school and home towards a poor curriculum kate millett, sexual politics schwabb: the practical, a language for curriculum. hermeneutics – i am a text, meet with another text to produce a revised text (sounds remarkably like a preface i’ve been working on for years now) gadamer axiology – what is more valuable, the desired (lack) or the desirable (inhabitable?) taoism tolstoy teaches by ‘infection’ with porous borders of school (cppp p70)
mind/body non-dichotomy montaigne (p. 64 in cppp) spinoza froebel (p68 in cppp) with doctrine of unity – each unity has a worth of its own, does a disservice to treat it as a means to something else. first kindergarten. included religious mysticism. somewhat based on schellings identity b/w mind and nature. taoism and poststructructuralism, wen-song hwu pinar daignault
embodiment grumet – bitter milk (“body reading”) sandra harding george laikoff, mark jackson the embodied mind margaret mead, composing a life delanky?, women’s ways of knowing
before books, jessie stanton
structure of politics
killing the black body, dorothy roberts
making the second ghetto, arthur hirsch
orientalism, edward said
the prison, michel foucault
http://www.asondheim.org/(approve sites)
http://www.capedmaskedandarmed.com/links/links.html(approve sites)
topics
history of philosophy
asa phillip randolph
eugene debs
cesar chavez
questions for a curriculum of the self
representation – the self and belief
how did we come to have a self? how was it constructed? what is its construction? see foucault for above 3 questions. schuberts idea of backwards (deconstructive) curriculum – trace it back (as foucault did). what are the limits of the self? what is it constructed of? must it be binary? what is the economy of this binary? can we escape the self? how? do we want to?
what are we to do with ourselves? how are we to avoid the binary (self/other) and its implicit economies? how can we construct a self not based on binaries, not based on static or consummable images? is the self a force connected? a vector? can math exist without implicit equivalence? can disciplines, such as art, exist without the division between art and life? how do we reconceptualize identity/representation (or do we)? how do we avoid objectivity? how does belief affect us? how can we reconceptualize desire to not be based on lack? (binary=lack=economy=power_over_another)
see gnostic christian texts, zen buddhism.
creation and faith
what is faith? can we inhabit faith? what is creation? or (re)creation? how do we create? what casts us into creation as a process of re-forming, re-creating self/other? change involves change of the self and the environment – both and always. it is the manipulation of the manifold between them.
is curriculum the process of selection? how can we avoid essentializing the process of selection? (i.e. giving an answer that is meant to serve all)
space is a concept. death itself is a concept.
a living past (not the past as static self/representation/limit)
how can we see the present as sacred/mystic? how can we look at the past as fluid/mythic/oral_tradition living in the present? (without becoming subject to a meta-power mass media style historical narrative)
how do we begin/overcome the power problems inherent in writing? how can we reconceptualize language and its power structure?
desire
how can we reconfigure desire to not be based on lack?
preface
action research questions
relevance how can we rework the math curriculum to begin with real life concerns and interests and applications? math is a language/discipline which is usually only part of the answer. how can we learn the appropriate contexts for mathematics usage when math is portioned off as its own discipline? how can we emphasize math’s reliance on equivalence and the subsequent political problems which can arise from this? how is identity conceived in math? what is the history of identity in math?
how can students base their writing and research in language arts on their concerns and interests? how can we take time to really study something in depth? how can we come to understand it in a personal sense?
power how can we involve students who are shy, without forcing them? how can we productively engage those students with a negative or comical attitude towards math? how can we revamp the power structures of the classroom to become more equitable? how can we rework team teaching with my special ed provider to better service the whole class? how can the teacher become facilitator? what are the inherent constraints of the teacher/student (which link back to the society-school-teacher power relation) power relation?
page last modified on october 10, 2005, at 12:22 pm