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WWW www.habermas.org

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: September 7, 2007
Latest Update: September 9, 2007
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
patriciaacone@yahoo.com

Topic of the Week:

Who's the Teacher? Who's the Student?
What's Constructivist Learning?

Yep! We're serious. No, you're not going to learn knitting from Kaity. Some of you don't have the slightest interest in knitting. But you are going to learn to respect many different sources, many different perspectives, and to listen to what they each have to say in good faith. They matter. They're your fellow citizens and/or neighbors. It's just a coincidence that Kaity lives in Southern California. I've never met her. Never heard of her until I encountered her guest appearance on Do It Yourself Network's Knitty Gritty show.

I couldn't resist introducing Kaity in this explanation of constructivism. Many of our students are 19 or 20, Kaity's age. But then many of our students are 34 or 35, too. We're all different. That's what diversity is about. And we all make up this reality we live in. Preparation for a career in social and criminal justice is about understanding that reality, about adapting to a world in which we all have a voice, in which we all can contribute, and need to have that contribution understood and valued within our local communities and as those local communities relate to a much larger global whole. At this point in history, there's nowhere else to go but this globe. Kaity has as much to say about her piece of the globe as we each do. That's what democracy is - the protected right of each to have a meaningful say in issues that determine our collective reality.

Kaity writes beautifully. She comes alive in her blog. She knits everything from cotton dischcloths to luxurious sweaters. And she gets bored, and puts many of the projects down to go on to something else. She comes back to some of them when it's cooler and doesn't matter if she has a wool sweater in her lap. She changes her sweater from a pullover to a cardigan. And given a bright idea or an unexpected flash of creativity, she might change it back again. She starts a pair of socks for a friend, but orders only one ball of yarn, so she changes the socks to ankle socks - that's all the yarn she'll have.

Kaity picks up ideas from all over the place, and adapts them into her own world. She has seen dress forms made of duct tape, but doesn't need one. She doesn't knit that many sweaters. But then, one day she sees a sock form made of duck [sic] tape. Her description of her mother helping her to make it is hilarious. Kaity might just find her calling as a writer.

We don't all write as fluently and naturally as Kaity, but we all have similar experiences, picking our way through all the stimuli of today's world. The Internet allows us to know Kaity. School enables us to know many who share our career and civic interests. Religion gathers us in like-minded groups. The simple need to nourish ourselves is bringing us together in local McDonald's, Starbucks, etc. Big box stores and malls have institutionalized "shopping."

Together, we all face the need to make decisions, governance decisions, about how this infrastructure shall grow, mold us into conformance, accept our needs to guard our individuality and democratic demand for flexibility that permit the individual to continue creative production. This site is about encouraging our growth in understanding the infrastructure that is springing up around us, its fit with our needs, its needs and responses to our diversity and values, and how we continue the freedom we have known till now in shaping our own infrastructure.

• Explanation of Dewey's concept of "learning by doing." Why that means constructivist learning theory.

• Explanation of "embedding learning in our apperceptive mass for future recall, evaluation, and application." Why in-depth higher learning can't avoid the schema of our earlier learning.

  More on embedding learning: Making art Why craft and handmade art are important in relieving the alienation of industrialization.

• Explanation of "plastic intimacy," "surface learning and banked education," and "creative learning." The dangers of "formulaic" training in place of searching for the many alternative understandings and building new and meaningful alternatives.

• Explanation of what knitting, crochet, and art have to do with all this. So that's what Dewey meant. Is that why he never did it himself in his teaching of higher learning?

• Explanation of how constructive learning theory fits with free form, and maybe why it fits with those through whom we seek to build a global and meaningful future.

love and peace, jeanne

References:

Announcements:

• Choosing Projects for Embedded Learning

  We use projects for active in-depth learning based on our belief that Dewey was right when he suggested that we "learn by doing." The projects are designed to produce something that can serve as a stimulus to approach others and share with them what we are learning. In this way you clarify your own learning, and encourage others to learn more about issues that are important to all of us.

  References:

  • Choosing Projects for Embedded Learning Detailed explanation of why and how we choose projects.

Issues

• Conscience of a Conservative

  Jeffrey Rosen has an article in the New York Times Magazine of September 9, 2007, starting at p. 40. And I am grateful for the article. Since the election {?} in 2000 of the Bush administration, I have been hard-pressed to find solidly written and reasoned material by moderate conservatives. Part of that is my fault. I guess I haven't made enough time for searching. Part of that is the fault of the administration itself which doesn't take well to moderate criticism, and uses the power of the ruling group to discourage dissent. As an academic I am horrified of that approach. Especially in this day of the sound bite, I need to peruse and understand the positions of those who disagree with my take on where we should be headed as a nation, as united group of people with many shared beliefs and values.

  Jeffrey Rosen's article tells the story of Jack Goldsmith's stint as head of the Office of Legal Council in the Justice Department.

  For jeanne's comments and discussion questions, please link to Backup file for Conscience of a Conservative.

• Listening in Good Faith

  Discussion or Aggression? Arrogance and Despair in Graduate School byToril Moi. Professor, Literature and Romance Studies. Duke University. This is an excellent letter to challenge all of us who aspire to higher education to listen more effectively to our peers, something that I agree we don't teach in academe. It doesn't give answers. It just asks us to think about how we are affecting others. I wish all my students would read it. jeanne

• Religion and Ideological Government Action in Prisons

  In the New York Times on Monday, September 10, there is an article on the front page about the purging of theological and spiritual books from prisons: Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries by Laurie Goodstein, at p. A1. Backup with some highlights and discussion questions.

• Maria Pia Lara's illocutionary understanding

Visual Sociology

• Line, Form, Color
  
  At I.B.M.’s research lab in San Jose, Calif., Stuart S. P. Parkin is working on a device that could increase chip data storage by 10 to 100 times.
  

  Redefining the Architecture of Memory By John Markoff, in the New York Times on Tuesday, September 11, 2007, caught by attention by the clarity and strength of its line, form, and color. The red pops out. The focus is clean and clear. And the forms are clearly those of industrialization. That makes of this photo a good metaphor for industrialization in the 21st Century.

  It's a copyrighted photo, so you couldn't use it for any profit-making endeavor. But you could use it to stimulate your own imagination; to take similar photos; to understand how to create an icon; to play and experiment with using details from it to create your own icon. Simple words like technology, industrialization, 21st Century, could find a place in such artwork.

  Here's something I played with, briefly, on Microsoft's Paint program, the freebie that came with my computer. Don't have a computer? Play with a simple program like Paint in the computer lab at school. Save the file, and send it to me. I'll see if I can put it up for you. Play. Play is important. I think a card or anything else you'd like to make, like polymer clay blocks held together with plastic color-coated wire and strung on a necklace or sat in a plate holder or made into a key chain, would attract lots of attention, and start up plenty of conversations about technology and what it means to us today.

  

  Consider that I gave the letters a pink background. Females have come to play with technology, too. Not true that they can't or won't learn it. Math is, by the way, related to language, at which the female gender is very good. Consider that the patterns are not immediately discernible, and so confuse many of us used to linear thinking. Make that a chance to talk to older folks about how you've grown up with the TV and are used to multiple things going on at once. Play, and talk to one another. It leads to much better governance and might just preserve the democracy of which we are so proud and on which we are so dependent to preserve freedom and creativity and spirituality.

  Take my work (that's what our Commons License copyright means - you may build on our work as long as you're adding your own work to it and not selling ours for profit) or start one of your own. Translate what technology means to you into your work. jeanne

• My Mother-in-Law, the Crocodile
  

  Of course one can love a crocodile. You just have to be careful how you handle them. My mother-in-law wasn't mean; she was just, well, as a niece of hers put it: "acquisitive." If she wanted the sweater you had, she wanted it, and her teeth might bare if you gave it to your daughter instead. It happened in Rome, as we were crossing the Via Veneto. Our daughter had just come out of the hotel, wearing the flowered sweater I had picked up at a sale. Bubba had seemed to be eyeing it, so I had offered it to her. "No, no; I don't want it." So I bought it. It was black, and our daughter likes black. Good for travel. And now she joined us, wearing the black sweater, covered with intarsia roses.

  "So, you gave it to the kid!" she hissed. Startled, I looked up, to see my mother-in-law as a crocodile. Ever since, I've collected crocodiles. They remind me that we're all so different. We're not happy or sad or angry or acquisitive or brilliant or slow all the time. We're all those things. All mixed up in a context that changes constantly. I just hadn't realized I could love a crocodile before.

  Long after we returned home to California, I discovered a beautifully colored Mexican-made crocodile of straw. She was in a big rectangular straw box, brightly colored also. I bought her and scooped her up in my arms, carrying her eagerly to show off to my husband, her son. As I grinned my way through the shopping mall, an older gentleman stopped me to say, "You must love that package, you look so happy." "Oh, yes," I replied, "She's my mother-in-law!"

  Probably didn't make much sense to the gentleman who stopped me, but my husband and I understood. I would love to adapt the monster blot above, by James Powell, to the vision we share of our crocodile. No time. But maybe some of you have a favorite crocodile you can teach us to love? I'll get back to Monster Blot 18 when I have this issue finished.

  love and peace, jeanne

  References:

  • Stefan G. Bucher's Daily Monster. Site consulted September 7, 2007. Check it out. He turns ink blots into all sorts of monster images. Bet I could love some of them. He offers open source monster blots that you can draw with yourself and that he shows on the Daily Monster website if you send them to him. James Powell sent this one in. jeanne

  Resources For Governance Discourse:
  

  Local and Global

  UNDER CONSTRUCTION - jeanne

  • Finding Issues that Matter and Reliable Access to Information on Those Issues:
    General Information

    • Newspapers:

      New York Times - Los Angeles Times - Chicago Tribune
      

  • A Range of Scholarly Sources
    on Issues that Matter from Many Perspectives, Left, Right, and Other

    Left/Right Perspectives - Cursor - The National Review
    Arts and Letters Daily - The Economist - The Sierra Club - The Guardian
    Wall Street Journal - The Weekly Standard - The Nation
    The Cato Institute (Libertarian) - The Open Society
    BBC NEWS | Americas - truthout - Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles
    - La Opinion - The Washington Post
    Cursor's Al Jazeera Archive - Ha'aretz - Palestine Monitor - Palestine Report
    - Web Sources Linked from Dear Habermas
    Concept Index - T.R. Young and the Red Feather Institute
    The World Wide School - Free access to important works

    The Slought Foundation: New Futures for Contemporary Life
    The Church and Postmodern Culture: A Conversation

    California Connected -

    Wikipedia

 

 

 

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