DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

“Physician, Heal Thyself”

The Power of the Theoretical ‘Selfie,’ Pt. 2

 

“I [paint, dance, draw, sculpt] write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means”

Joan Didion (1976)

 

 

January 21, 2014

 

When we approach criticism or education, too often as educators we appear to be nothing more than lifeless cadavers, isolating ourselves behind the protective, stultifying walls of academia. By contrast, as artists, students and critics who draw upon our own experiences, our own communities, our own cultures, we step closer toward self-actualization, which in turn nurtures our ability to reach out to others.

 

One of the crucial steps toward realizing self in the classroom is creating a learning environment in which each student feels her or his own narrative is an integral part of their shared classroom experience. The more students are empowered within the democratic classroom, the more they will feel comfortable moving throughout the world outside of the classroom, first reveling in their abilities to apply newly learned concepts in daily interactions, then eventually reaching out to share their knowledge and experiences with others in their community.

 

As students assess and evaluate one another, an essential part of a truly democratic classroom, they engage in a pedagogy modeled upon Ferreira’s notion that education be a “process in which the projects, strategies, and tactics used are produced collectively by the participants themselves” (p. 19). Ferreira notes that students who interact with “important national and international socioeconomic, political and cultural issues” develop their own “projects, strategies and tactics,” tools which are “considered indispensible” not just in the classroom but also in daily interaction within their own communities (p. 23). By knowing they are able to control and direct their own educational processes, students develop the confidence necessary to reach out within their community, striving to make a difference outside the classroom in the same way that they discover to apply learned concepts within the non-academic world. They become actively occupied in life-long learning.

 

In addition to keenly becoming life-long learners and engaging more fully in their local communities, by implementing their own learning styles into their coursework, students will be better equipped to apply their own learning experiences, expressing their cultures and histories both in and out of the classroom setting. Kazu (2009) notes that students who have identified and are allowed to work within their own individual learning modalities likewise “will identify their aims…[and will] know what they want to learn and ‘how’” (p. 90). A student who pro-actively directs his or her own learning, as Kazu states, will posses an “awareness [that] will change their perspectives on learning new things” (p. 90). The student who employs his or her learning style in the classroom is better prepared to adapt to new learning situations, approaching each new task with a new and unique perspective.  

 

This same principal must be extended to the instructor and critic as well. Too often, since Barthes, we hesitate to insert ourselves into our academic or critical work, relying upon a bank of coined, trite, overused terminology that only serves to further alienate our readers, turning us into academics who, though we are obsessed with studying our own navels, refuse to allow our readers to fully understand that it is specifically through that linty lens of self-reflection that we view our world.

 

Buckingham 'Selfie'

Chicago, IL

June 19, 2013 

As educators, we are instructed to encourage students to explore their own world and express themselves through their own narrative voice, yet as the “specialists” in our own fields, we hesitate to make that step toward our own self-actualization. As educators, we are frequently reminded of how important it is to bring our students onto a higher plane of self-awareness.

 

David A Gruenewald (2003b) notes the necessity of centering students within their own communities through place-based pedagogies, which “are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit” (p. 3). By grounding students in awareness of their own selves and own communities, as educators we teach students to be active, critical citizens within their own circles of influence. We consistently encourage them to develop their own narrative voice.

 

The process of developing our students’ individual voices is a vital part of teaching to a diversified classroom. Gruenewald adds that education of migrant students as well as interests in “issues of race, class, gender, and corporate hegemony have become central…to rural community life and education (p. 4, as analyzed by Lopez, Scribner, & Mahitivanichcha, 2001; Weyer, 2002). Gruenewald also points out that within the framework of Freire’s injunction that students read the world as texts, “students and teachers should ‘decode’…the images of their own concrete, situated experiences with the world” (p. 5). Inclusion of classroom discussions centralizing upon race, class and gender are important in rural and metropolitan classrooms alike.

 

As educators, we are comfortable with that notion, striving to teach our students to become active citizens in their local communities, yet too frequently, we ourselves as educators and critics are reluctant to view the world as a text that we actively, progressively continue to read ourselves. We become complacent with our own statuses as “specialist,” as “educator,” failing to continue our own processes of critical engagement within our own communities, something that Gruenewald warns us against by encouraging “students and teachers” [my emphasis] to enthusiastically interpret our surroundings.  

 

In a classroom that highlights students’ awareness of global issues, Gruenewald states that place-based pedagogy provides “a challenging socio-ecological framework, a framework focused on cultural conflict in a multicultural, global society and attuned to…particular local places” (p. 6). Gruenewald (2003a) reiterates Apple (2001) and Burbules & Torres (2000) notion that “it is essential that educators and students develop an analysis of how [global economies] function through space, geography and social institutions” (p. 629). Students in a democratic classroom step towards not just self-actualization by developing their own narrative voices; additionally, they learn to apply the phrase, “Think globally; act locally,” internalizing it, thereby lending the phrase power that transcends mere cliché. Yet again, Gruenewald specifically includes educators in this process as well.

 

By actively engaging in our extended community and incorporating our own narrative voices rather than just merely losing ourselves in our research, our books, our theory, we as educators and critics step outside of those trite, coined cliché phrases that comprise the secure Ivy Towers in which we are wont to hide. 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.