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WWW www.habermas.org

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: September 13, 2007
Latest Update: September 15, 2007
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
patriciaacone@yahoo.com

Topic of the Week:

So Where Does Learning Come From?
The Learner, Of Course

The first few weeks are tough. We have so much to tell you, and you have so many questions. But it's time to listen to you. About what? Well, today, I'm going to share with you what effort it took for me to make just a little progress in a new project. Maybe that will encourage you to make similar efforts with your own projects, exploring creatively, without fear of censorship, what works to project whatever message you'd like to project to people, people you know, people in this class, people you love, people you work with.

We spend a lot of time worrying about how to communicate our messages in advertising what we want people to buy, and in selling the messages our politicians and administrators want us to accept as good governance. It's time to focus on what we communicate. To apply our unique skills in the messages we send and to the ones we accept.

love and peace, jeanne

The Story of the Shrug

I spent the better part of the last six months planning how we could effectively expand the Dear Habermas Site to serve community groups that share our goals of using projects to motivate us to come together and share, and taking advantage of the skills we acquire in that process of building community relationships to share with friends, neighbors, and even strangers information on issues of social and criminal justice that bear on all our lives.

I've been knitting and/or crocheting socks and sweaters at least since the 1950s when I was in college. But there was no "funky" in those days. Men wouldn't have been caught dead knitting or crocheting. And when they designed clothes, they made big bucks designing them for women, whose husbands could afford them. Yes, there were anarchists then. But you weren't likely to see a ski hat or wrist band with an anarchy symbol on it. And no one would have dreamt of turning a paper clay "Interdependence" necklace into wearable art.

Susan crocheted an afghan when she was at Berkeley. No signs of anarchy there either. So I was amazed at how much I, as an experienced knitter, had to learn when we decided that knitting and crochet, when added to the art we had already introduced, would offer wonderful projects for embedded learning, learning that we hoped you would use creatively forever more.

The story of the shrug is an on-going saga that began several weeks ago. Myra Wood, the moderator of the Free Form Crochet Yahoo Group, was offering a class in knitting a Lace Sampler Shrug at the Santa Monica Fiber Fest. I love making lace. What a wonderful project for those of us that knew basic knitting. It fit my need to offer something new to those who came with some skills already honed. I signed up for the class.

© Myra Wood/ www.myrawood.com

Myra's long sleeve wool shrug, for the class.

Myra was using size 10 needles and wool, which is a little easier to work with. But in Los angeles, it's too warm for wool most of the year. So I sought out a lovely multiple color silk and cotton. The colors were beautiful, and the lace patterns looked great. And the yaarn knitted up beautifully.

There were just two things wrong. It was summer, and I didn't want long sleeves. And there wasn't enough yardage for long sleeves in the hank I had chosen. Solution: make the shrug short sleeved. But, without the long sleeves, there wasn't as much "pop" in alternating the various lace patterns in sample squares. Besides I wanted to make the shrug a little more free form, and I loved the yarn, so I wasn't about to waste it on something I wouldn't wear.

I frogged it. (Ripped it all out and started over.)

For me, wearable free form starts with motifs that speak to me as belonging with the background yarn. After weeks of experimenting, with no shrug to show for all my effort, I ended up with the motifs shown in this week's image. I had found the look I was hunting for. Unfortunately, it was crochet, not kniitting. So be it. My shrug will simply have to be a knitted and crocheted shrug. Maybe I'll catch up with free form knitting in the next six weeks.

Now, I suppose you'll recognize easily enough that if I were in one of our institutional schools, I wouldn't have gotten an A. Here I am six weeks or so after the course, and nary a thing to show for my knitted shrug other than some little bits of crochet. An A? I'm not even passing. But I have lots of motifs that just weren't cutting it:

Earlier motifs for the knitted shrug.

Anyone ever considered A's for effort? If you're expending that much effort, but packing the results away while you keep on tryin', please remember that your teachers haven't seen all that work. Myra has no idea how many of these motifs I've accumulated on my way to restarting the shrug. So, maybe it's important to share your mistakes as well as your final product?????

Now, maybe I'll find that some of these motifs will work along with the ones I did last night. Some of them are pretty, and I'd like to use them. But you can see that the overall production looked pretty useless with all those silly strings attached, and lacking the bright pastel colors of the yarn I wanted to use for the shrug. Oops! Almost passed up a clue there. Did you notice: "all those silly strings attached?" I'm obsessive. The strings are getting in the way of my imaginary. Myra doesn't mind them. They're making me crazy, and interfering with the process. and did you notice "lacking the bright pastel colors?" I had gone shopping for more brights for value contrast a couple of weeks ago. Surely that had made a difference, too.

How about I go off and clean up those extra motifs and then see if some of them will fit in with the ones I did last night?

Another clue: what happened last night that made the difference? Serendipity. Waiting in abject frustration for inspiration, I kept working my way through crochet stitches in Volume 7 of The Harmony Guides. And on p. 54, I found this motif, that I casually started to crochet, while watching a "chick flick" on the Hallmark Channel. Let's face it, I need intellectual stimulation while crocheting.

Motif on p. 54 of The Harmony Guides that led to the newer motifs in this week's image.

The chick flick must have turned exciting, because when I looked down, I had begun to create the blue pattern of this week's image. The flower turned itself around after one of the petals and started to go in a different direction. I remembered Myra saying "don't fall asleep while your knitting [or crocheting] lace." Curious I just kept going, and the blue motif happened. Once the motif started to happen, I think I kind of missed the rest of the chick flick.

Now, if Susan were my teacher, and I had been planning this shrug for a project with her, a paragraph that would let her know of my efforts might be a good idea:

Dear Teacher, I haven't got much to show for my project yet, but I have discovered from motifs that didn't work for me that

• I needed a stimulus to turn my work in odd directions and do unexpected stitches. I learned that from a mistake. Might apply to criminal justice as a reminder that I need to think out of the box, and how to do that. By starting out and taking an unexpected turn.

• I am happiest with my project when there is a high value contrast. I learned that when I put my motifs together and noticed they seemed to lack something. Might apply to criminal justice by reminding me that we each have individual preferences for how to present our work, and some might be different from mine. I'll want to be less judgmental than I was about that on this project. I was pretty hard on myself, not realizing that I needed to experiment with color.

• I really didn't see anything of value in my project when the motifs were obscured by hanging threads. The most recent motifs that I had finshed up and cut off excess threads were much more satisfying. A reminder that we are each able to block out different background noise. I'll need to remember that when building different relationships.

Actually, I managed to pluck a project out of what didn't work, didn't I? There's a hot clue in there.

May your projects be as much fun. love and peace, jeanne

Saturday, September 15, 2007:

I cleaned up the other motifs. Here are some I scanned in, randomly placed:

A Collection of Motifs without Floating Yarns Attached

References:

• Volume 7. The Harmony Guides, 220 more Crochet Stitches. 1998. Collins & Brown.

Announcements:

• Slowing Down to Wait for Other Voices

  Susan and I wanted to be sure there was adequate material out there for the start of the Fall semester. We think the Summer and Fall volumes offer enough to let you start to explore projects that will let you choose ones that make sense to you. Every morning as I peruse the newspapers, I find more issues with which we as a country are struggling as we resolve that most basic of issues, am I my brother's keeper? And the concommitant, who is, then, my brother? and what do we mean by "keeper"? Do we mean "keeper" in the sense of loving protection, or coercive demands?

  In the most significant of ways, that question now includes, up front and personal, whether we should add "/sister" or find some new language that includes us all. Women, who joined the service as one of their limited paths upward and out of poverty, have been called to duty in Iraq, having to leave very young chidlren in the care of relatives. We have moved with little discussion and conscious attention from a position that says women should not be permitted into battle, to the calling up of young mothers with little regard to what we know of child-rearing.

  President Bush announced yesterday that the "surge" had been "successful" and that now he could begin a slow drawdown because of that success. Who will be brought home? How shall we choose? And why is no one concerned about the economic hardships imposed on those who serve and serve and serve?

  Young families weren't expecting this long drawn out war in Iraq when they chose the service as a means to training and education to better themselves. Concern for those who serve is just one aspect of our decisions to build security and dreams for all, or for those who have better access to training and education and "networks."

  The issues we face are complex. It's easy to ignore them. We have so many real problems of our own. This site and our discussion forum and the projects we struggle to make meaningful are one way to face those complexities. Sometimes it's easier to talk to one another about art, knitting, crochet, whatever, than it is to worry about the big decisions we have to make and values we have to choose. Having projects helps us talk to one another and share. Having projects let those who would normally stay silent find less obtrusive ways to participate in the dialog.

  I will try to put up detailed instructions on whatever you need to make your project work. We hope you'll help each other, too. This isn't about competition for prizes. This is about hearing one another's uniqueness, and learning to respect it in less affect-laden exchanges, hoping that that practice will make it easier to hear and to respect each other about the deeper issues that really count.

  My next endeavor is to straighten out Transform_dom, our Yahoo discussion group. Probably not today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But soon. Meanwhile, it's time for you to think about what matters to you, in your learning. Freire would admire our effort to get you started in this thinking, but he'd hasten to remind us that the minute the teacher takes the role of determining what she thinks you should learn and so constrains your choice, she ceases to be a teacher, at least in the sense of the deeper learning we seek to encourage.

  Of course, we think we're right, about so many things. But you'd be amazed at how often listening in good faith to another has helped me rethink my own values and beliefs. That's growing. That's learning beyond the banked education of Trivia games.

  love and peace, jeanne

Issues

Going back to some of the basic concepts that help us understand one another:

• Explanation of terms that Susan and I use:

  • "plastic intimacy" - I used this term a lot during the early 70's, even before Susan was my student. Those were the days of the Vietnam War and the end of the famous "hippy" era. Many of the young men who had gone to Canada to escape the draft filtered back into the country and engaged in various forms of social and political activity. They genuinely wanted to serve their country and their fellows, but they believed more in "making love than in making war."

    One of the activities they engaged in was creating and staffing "free clinics," almost all of which came with a "consciousness-raising group." These were also the times of the second wave of feminism, that primarily including women of a certain class, privileged through a good education, who rebelled (in the tenor of the times) against the "Dr. Spock suburbs" that relegated them to over-controlling child rearing and suburban "teas." It was a time of much anger: women's "feminist" anger, young men's anger over the draft, "love" children's anger over the hypocrisy of middle-class suburban striving to outdo the Joneses, and the anger of young women who wanted to be able to earn a fair wage to supplement their husband's salaries for a faster-paced journey to those golden suburbs.

    "Consciousness-raising groups" provided a forum in which women, with whose struggle for liberation they began, could express their innermost fears and concerns, listen to each other in good faith, and support each other to take steps toward greater freedom for them to choose the ways they would spend their lives. They sought more freedom to be true to themselves and the things they believed in. (It was also the time of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, the novel in praise of being true to our dreams and beliefs, with a strong libertarian cast that provided superficially the justification for taking from the system according to one's power, strength, and ability to lead. To become a great leader, who made good decisions on behalf of rationality and long-term gain for the "successful," was seen as good for the whole community of "mankind." "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.

  • Maria Pia Lara's illocutionary understanding

  References:

  • NYT articles.

  • Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. The introduction to this book gives an important and concise understanding of the 1970's feminist movement's faith in and support of "consciousness-raising groups."

  Visual Sociology

  • Crocheting a Free Form Bag for DressUp Wear
    

    This is the bag I started Wednesday, confidently assuming that I knew how to make it! I think I had forgotten how hard it is to learn something, try to explain it to someone, and then realize you don't know how to do the next step. Now, how could that happen?

    In school, that meant we didn't get an A. In life, that means we need to keep growing, to keep polishing our skills, and I'll have a great bag when I'm finished. "I hope," adds the little school gremlin on my shoulder. Or was that my mother reminding me that I always rush too readily into things, just because it looks like fun!

    Guard that spirit to have fun. Don't let the gremlins get you down! jeanne

    References:

    • Paulo Freire. Learning means letting the learner guide and respect his own learning. Reference up soon. 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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