First Assignment

For my Comm & Ed class, we are keeping a 'journal' in which we are to reflect on the readings for the class and record our reactions and thoughts. I think I did well on my first assignment and wanted to share it with you. This is not a journal as in a separate bound book like a diary. These are loose leaf entries that we turn in every week and the professor recommends that we keep in a three ring binder for future reference. She will accept handwritten work as long as it is legible, so as you all know, I am typing it on the computer. And since I am already typing it up...

The professor is starting us off with prompts but we are encouraged to expand on the prompts as we feel necessary. This is the class I am really excited about. I think that comes through in the writing. I hope that you are able to follow along without having read the work discussed.

ASSIGNMENT: Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, read the Introduction, Chapters 1,2,3

PROMPT
1. bell hooks talks about her experiences in educational institutions and suggests a number of strategies with which she takes issue. Were your experiences similar or different from hers? How? Have you experienced "education as the practice of freedom?"

Our journal prompt asks us if our classroom experience was like the one that bell hooks describes. She talks briefly of her experience in the newly desegregated school and then moves on to her college experiences both as student and professor. My first thought of my own education experience was, ‘What diversity?’ The majority of my schooling took place in Simi Valley, a place most remarkable for its lack of diversity. As a Latina, I grew up with ‘white’ friends in predominantly white classrooms. Diversity was limited to lessons about how the pilgrims and the Native Americans (Indians) were great friends, how the California Mission System help civilize the West. All this was mere lip service to the idea that there was more than the predominant white culture for us to learn about. I cannot think of any professor who taught diversity in the classroom.

This lack of multicultural teaching continued into college. Part of the struggle for me came from my own lack of connection to my ethnic heritage. A main part of this disconnect took the form of my inability to speak Spanish. Language was and still is used as a cultural and ethnic divider. Three generations removed from Mexico, I was proud of my heritage but still remained in ignorance of what that meant in my every day life, of the history that created the cultural landscape that I live in. Today I have claimed my Chicana identity but not without struggle. It took me many years to realize that I was allowing myself to be defined by how others thought I should be. Just because I don’t speak Spanish doesn’t make me any less of a Chicana than someone who is fluently bilingual. I had learned through society that I should be speaking Spanish or else I could not claim that part of my identity.

I have seen tokenism take place in many of my classes. In classes where I spoke of an interest in feminist scholarship, suddenly I became the feminist scholar in the classroom, in a field that I felt I had no training in and did not consider myself an informed individual; I was suddenly called upon to be an expert. Yet when I was called upon, it was not uncommon for another classmate, on which this burden was not placed, would come up with resources and rhetoric far superior to my own and I would feel like a failure for being expected to be an expert in a field I had not trained in. I felt and often do still feel like a charlatan in my classes. I often feel like I have not had the training I need to speak with authority or even simply knowledge but instead have been faking my way through my education with personality and an overdeveloped ability to read others and give them what they want to hear.

bell hooks also speaks of the seminars she and a colleague put on to discuss how to create a multicultural and diverse classroom, to teach professors how to expand their curriculum. Recognizing the works of co-culture authors as part of the canon is an area in which I struggle and this passage really hit home, the words on the page highlighted an issue with which I have been struggling with lately. Is it diversity to point out an author’s race and ethnicity when discussing their work? I know that racism is alive and well in the world. An author’s experience with race and racism informs their work. Being called names and being treated as other affects the way we think, act and react. But at what point do we stop using our differences to define ourselves? To be ‘Other’ is to be defined against a norm, even if we chose to define ourselves in our own terms rather than allowing the dominant pedagogy to define us, are we still not ‘Other’? How is this cycle broken? I would love to have participated or even just observed these dialogues in the awareness sessions. I guess this issue of not ‘othering’ while breaking down the dominant ideology is what bell hooks is speaking of and what the point of a Communication and Education class is about. New dialogue has to start somewhere.

I don’t know that I have experienced education as freedom from dominant pedagogy and as a lesson in multiculturalism but I have experienced education as the personal freedom. I have experienced classes that helped with my freedom of self and which has allowed me to see myself as more that I previously believed myself to be. I have read and been exposed to great thinkers and I believe that I have absorbed some of that teaching and it has made me a better person. I am quicker to spot injustice, racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism than before, now what remains is for me to learn how to affectively and actively change these systems rather than simply identify them. That would be the second reason for taking a class in Communication and Education.