Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Course Description In this course, we will explore the question of the actual and potential connections between democracy and education. Our focus of attention will be placed on a critical examination of democratic theory and its implications for the civic education roles and contributions of teachers, adult educators, community development practitioners, and community organizers. We will survey and deal critically with a range of competing conceptions of democracy, variously described as classical, republican, liberal, radical, marxist, neomarxist, pragmatist, feminist, populist, pluralist, postmodern, and/or participatory. Using narrative inquiry as a means for illuminating and interpreting contemporary practice, we will analyze the implications of different conceptions of democracy for the practical work of civic education.

Democracy and education.

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society

Against our will: Men, women, and rape

This essay connects personal, social, and cultural frames of resistant performances and performativities. Specifically, it focuses on the politics of food resistance and of autonomy and individual/collective change. Through Foucault, the essay traces the history of technologies of self as they relate food to the performativity of everyday life. Borrowing from de Certeau, the essay outlines strategic performances around food that recenter positions of dominance in society, as well as those that offer openings into alternative positions relative to the center. Two metaphorical linkages, body as food and body as land, are explored for their uses and possibilities as strategy and tactic and their representation as either social problems or social movements.

You are What You (Don't) Eat? Food, Identity, and Resistance

Traditional approaches to teaching about gender examine the politics of oppression and marginalization of women, and less frequently question the profound implications of the construction of gender binaries itself. This essay examines emergent meanings in students' (focus group) conversation about the alternative curriculum of a course entitled “Gender, Culture and Communication”. Three questions or concerns are central to this study, and are informed by a Foucauldian as well as a social constructionist framework. From a Foucauldian standpoint we look at desire and resistance as the terms are both present and invisible in the students' self reflections and their reflections about the course, and how those conversations might invoke tensions between the institutional and the material, disciplinary and social boundaries. From a social constructionist standpoint, we look for the stories students tell about gender as they emerge in interaction-in the focus group discussion about the class. Our final question ...

Constructing Gender Pedagogies: Desire and Resistance in the "Alternative" Classroom.

Education reformers, policy makers, teachers, scholars, and citizens have become concerned about what they perceive to be the disconnection between schools and society. Recent efforts to bridge the chasms between academe and community, students and schooling, and citizens and government (among other social, cultural, and economic chasms) have begun to look closely at efforts to engage students as citizens and leaders in a democratic community. At the forefront of these efforts in systems of higher education is community service learning (CSL), or learning that combines service to the community with classroom or academic learning. Scholars in economics, nursing, and communication have put forward designs for teaching and learning with/in a CSL format. Civic engagement is a central theme among several CSL scholars, who argue that CSL should promote and extend students' participation in democracy and community. Common among these discussions of engagement is the notion of CSL as the acquisition of skill sets that will help students participate, problem solve, and become civic-minded leaders. Battistoni (1997), for example, attempting to summarize most of his and others' efforts to develop students as "engaged citizens," identifies three essential areas that should guide practical skill development of service-learners: intellectual understanding, communication and problem-solving, and public judgment and imagination. Intellectual understanding develops students' cognitive abilities to make connections between theories and application, and think critically about their experiences and assumptions about people and society. Communication and problem-solving skills allow people to participate productively in any civil society. Battistoni identifies speech, argument, listening, and persuasive communication as skills essential to problem-solving in a democracy. Public judgment and imagination acts as a kind of moral compass, helping students to locate themselves and reposition their understandings of others. Service-learning can also encourage creativity through working cooperatively with members of the community toward new solutions. Battistoni's (1997) framework importantly brings communication into the mix. Other scholars emphasize engagement in their research, such as Schensul, Berg and Brase (2002), and Toole (2002). Specifically, the role of communication in establishing the basis for learning all skills for engagement in society is emphasized in this paper. Yet, as the authors increasingly acknowledge a world where cultures and identities are constantly in a state of encounter, negotiation, and flux, we also must recognize the very situatedness of learning itself. As service-learning educators attempt to understand how, when, what, and where students learn, we must also account for the ever-shifting social, relational, and cultural meanings which construct our own (as pedagogues, practitioners, and scholars), our students', and our communities' frames for making meaning of education and the educational process. Following from this point and important for the purposes in this paper, the authors posit the idea that communication is not only the outcome of learning an individual skill (through which one's competence in society can be measured) but is also central to the process of learning, and key to constructing engaged participation in a civil society. If individuals make meaning of themselves and society through communicative processes, then participation is itself defined in and through communication; without communication, participation in society would be impossible. As scholars who focus primarily on communicative processes, we are interested in a learning approach that embraces skill sets as important to competent communication, but situates those skills within their cultural and relational frameworks; in other words, as skills which have a variety of meanings, occasioned in specific circumstances and contexts, and assessed accordingly. …

/pdf/toward-a-social-approach-to-learning-in-community-service-2n9vsz8191.pdf

Toward a Social Approach to Learning in Community Service Learning.

Narrating and reflecting on our experiences as organizers and facilitators of campus dialogues about race, we perform the possibilities of silence to speak about, with, and to matters of race and citizenship in the United States today. Starting with our own experiences of silence in the context of dialogue, we open them to readings and responses. This article offers our reading, but ends with the silence of a punctuation—a dash— leaving the space for readers’ responses to contribute to exploration of how pedagogies of silence can work toward social justice.

http://api.ning.com/files/2r6NdP2wa8N6HAfLpAS2rGbDTzcwrKFOey7UigpmNdrxZcIfQkEKyB*Hy6S83WYB5-N54Wq5sUL9MyLYRMBYGnJAw1fZTb8h/VoicingSilenceCooks.pdf

Voicing Silence and Imagining Citizenship: Dialogues about Race and Whiteness in a ''Postracial'' Era

Schools and schooling, whether viewed as a right, a privilege, or compulsory, are sites for training bodies to behave in socially sanctioned ways. As such, they are primary spaces for the productio...

Leda Cooks

Papers

You are What You (Don't) Eat? Food, Identity, and Resistance

Constructing Gender Pedagogies: Desire and Resistance in the "Alternative" Classroom.

Toward a Social Approach to Learning in Community Service Learning.

Voicing Silence and Imagining Citizenship: Dialogues about Race and Whiteness in a ''Postracial'' Era

SomeBodies(') in School: Introduction