Progress Report

The class is progressing in ways that are surprising me. For starters, there’s the whole new group dynamic, which seems to have woken some students up and to have raised others to new heights. If the opening groups were “safe” in all the unproductive ways, these groups are “dangerous” in all the useful ways—that is, the thinking and analyzing these groups are doing could be dangerous to the powers that be. Inside the groups, there is a great deal of negotiating meaning. The students have lost whatever inhibitions they may have had about questioning each other and asking for clarification. In addition, the groups are keeping their members up to speed on the readings and the concepts found within them.

And that’s the next surprising thing—the extent to which the students can employ the strategies laid out by Gee. Not everyone—but a solid majority. And that majority seems very capable of helping the others stay on top of things.

In Friday’s class, we looked at The Academic Bill of Rights that comes from David Horowitz’s organization, Students for Academic Freedom. Just a side note—and something to go along with an earlier post—there was a time I would have foregrounded the presentation of this text with some snarky remarks or something. I didn’t here, and I think that’s for the best. Now this isn’t to say that students are deaf to my political leanings—they can’t be if they’re paying attention. And certainly the context-of-situation for the class is such that they could probably guess some of my reactions to the text. But my reactions were never the central point of the class. I tried to let the students respond to the text AND each other—not to me. And that kind of de-centering is becoming easier and easier with this class. In other courses I might not have been able to resist making the session about my reactions. Here, though, the students take the examples I bring in and run away with them.

The ABoR is interesting because the numbered “rights” are fine—it’s the context in which the “rights” are explained that’s in question. The rights are worded vaguely and, dare I say, neutrally enough that it’s easy to see them as creating some parameters for the academic enterprise. But taken in the context of SFAF, the ABoR reads like whine list. And that’s the beauty of the document—it enables itself to be taken out of its primary context and dropped into other contexts. I could go on, but I’d like read comments on this instead.

I’m going to spend the next few days writing about the DAJs and the group assessments. I’ve got the grades in for both, and I need to reflect on the data and see what it means for class activities. I’m hoping to put together a mid-term survey and to conduct some mid-term interviews with students.