Eppert & Scott Reflection 10.27.10

Eppert & Scott Reflection

Oct. 27, 2010

Brad McDiarmid

            Upon reading the Eppert paper, the strong theme of questioning and one’s responsibility around questioning, especially of “others” became very apparent. As I read on, I began to think of the responsibilities that a teacher has with respect to the act of questioning. Teachers use questioning as a form of assessment. Teachers use questioning as a method to gain insight into the lives of the children in their charge. It is with these types of inquiry (questioning) that a teacher is drawn into an“other” (not a typo) and an“other” is drawn into them.  It is with this coming together of the “others” where each person’s responsibility is heightened. To question as Eppert states, is to enter into a dialogue with the “other”. Once we question, we commit to know, to understand and to learn from the “other”. This is then the charge of the teacher. A charge that mustn’t be taken lightly. Why does the teacher ask a question of the “other” if they are not committed to attaining an answer? Can as Eppert suggests, even come to terms with an answer? What I do know and teach myself is that questioning is an art form that teachers must master as they commence teaching and is a skill that the must continue to hone over years of practice.

            Questioning, the relationships and the responsibilities that go along with it, are paramount for the researcher as well. As I look at my research area, the only way that I can reach the answers to the questions I have is through the direct questioning of people. By entering into a dialogue with the very people I plan to study, observe and then write about. The ability to commit to the “other” will be of paramount importance to me in a phenomenological study.

            Eppert continues on in her paper and makes a poignant point when she speaks about “difficult freedom” where, “we find ourselves free only to the extent that we are infinitely and absolutely responsible for others before ourselves” (Eppert, p. 222). Teachers and researchers are faced with this “difficult freedom” in their classrooms and research everyday. This “difficult freedom” is something that must be accepted as part of the package of being a teacher and a researcher.

            In Scott’s paper on the “mission” of universities, we once again are shown how universities and education has been influenced by the church, the state and much more recently and now continually by corporations. The historical perspectives outlined in his paper are important for me with respect to the foundation they provide for the challenges that contemporary universities face. Challenges such as the infusion of technology and that of societies (the “knowledge society”) lust for information is forcing universities to rethink how they address pedagogy and learning.  Not only does technology and information pose challenges in teaching, they also and equally pose challenges for researchers. Scott outlines the issues of intellectual property, technology transfer as well as competition as new challenges that researchers face. How then does the researcher (me) find the correct balance, as Scott states, between …”academic freedom and the forces of control from business, government and the university administration” that this technology and “knowledge society” pose? How does a researcher, scholar and teacher function? I think that finding this “balance” with respect to academic freedom is something that the modern day scholar will have to wrestle with throughout his or her career and more specifically, my career. At this point, I am not sure I have an answer.

            Lastly, I would like to address the notion of the “multiversity”. Where is the balance between teaching, researching and service found if everyone is competing for money? If research and teaching have become so complicated that we can’t focus on any one thing and do an excellent job at that thing? Do we then lose the true spirit of what we as teachers and researchers are ultimately trying to accomplish? How can we be everything to everyone? With everything that Scott and Eppert have discussed in their respective papers, where do we find time to cultivate a personal relationship with a significant “other”. Do we then as academics resolve ourselves to a marriage with books, academia and “other” peoples’ children? If we have had all these “missions” over the history of universities, where is the “mission” to ourselves and to what we love? Does service to “others” outweigh our own needs? Maybe then, this the true “Mission Impossible?

Respectfully,

Brad

Macy-Simon-Frigga Reflection for Sept. 29, 2010

            In the opening of Macy’s paper she states that we have more technical prowess and knowledge now than the human race has ever before possessed. That statement got me thinking. If we have so much technology at our disposal, then why do we have so many starving, sick and disadvantaged people on this planet? Why does 10% of the population possess and control 90% of everything? Then it came to me. Even though we have the technology to save the planet and all of its starving and disadvantaged people, we as a race haven’t evolved as extensively in an intellectual or moral aspect as our technology. What if computers ran the world and made decisions for us? Would we or could we have a better planet? If we programmed computers with “fairness and equity” algorithms, could a machine run this planet better than humans? That then got me thinking about something Mr. (Agent) Smith from the 1999 movie The Matrix articulated to Neo,  

I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we … are the cure (Wiki Quote, 2010).

Well, Hollywood has taken a run at the idea of machines (computers) running things and every time it ends with the humans outsmarting the computers and taking back the world. So, I come back to my original question. If human beings are so smart, why do we choose to be so blind to the severity of the problems this planet is facing?

            Macy suggests that people are not blind to the “pain” in the world. She suggests we are just programmed to shut it out, perhaps like a bad childhood memory that is suppressed? Maybe all of the technology that surrounds us is the human race’s way of distracting us from the real ills of this planet. If we can be connected to and distracted by a variety of technologies that pass for entertainment, maybe we can just shut out the real world. Is this why people choose to have a “Second Life”? Does the real one “suck” so badly that people need to escape it? I can tell you from first-hand experience, people are not creating worlds and lives for themselves in “Second Life” that are polluted and where people are starving and dying from disease! So, if we choose to create an artificial world where all is good and right, why aren’t we doing this in the real one? Why aren’t we diverting the time we spend being distracted (entertained) and putting that time and effort forward to save this (real) planet and the people on it? Would this time not go along way to fixing some of the damage? The Kaiser Family Foundation (2010) states on its website that,

With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation.  Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

       If people confronted their despair and reasons for ignoring the problems of the world, would people as Macy suggests, have an increased devotion to fixing the mess we as a race find ourselves? Macy seems to think that from her discussion with Jim Douglass that people can examine and substitute possibilities for loss of hope. I think that Douglass might be right. I think that possibilities equate to hope and as long as people can see possibilities, there will always be hope. I think Mr. Smith is wrong!

       When I read Eppert and Simon’s paper entitled, “Remembering Obligation”, the first thing that struck me was the reference to “lived past” and how that might relate to phenomenology and investigating “lived experience”. The other thought that came to me was how this lived past connects to the passing down of human history through stories, legends and myths and the power that storytelling has with people. I then got to wondering if there was a way video game developers could capture the context of the stories we are trying to pass on to our students/children and capitalize (respectfully and not necessarily monetarily) on the exciting medium of video gaming? Stories are only remembered if they are heard and then retold by many people. Could video games not accomplish this?

        I have played many video games in and around the theme of World War II. Many of these games include historical content as background for the game. Could video game developers include content that portrayed the Holocaust and other atrocities of the Nazis and teach kids (people) this history? Could this be done in a tasteful and respectful way? If we revisit the statistics I quoted previously in this reflection, I would think that the video game medium could be a very successful vehicle for delivering the message and content we want kids to learn, know and remember about historical events for any era in history. Kids and video gamers of all ages could become “witnesses” to history in a fun, captivating and educational manner! Could these games not make, as Eppert and Simon state, “history come alive”? Would video games as the authors again state, “…represent that story in concrete forms for others?”

       Frigga’s paper offers an interesting insight to how people, particularly women, attempt to fit themselves into the social constructs and limitations of a male dominated world. This paper had interest for me in the respect that I have two daughters who are in fact attempting to find their way in this world. My eldest daughter (20) serves in the military which is very male dominated and is often frustrated by many of the “male” social structures that exist that exclude or assume diminished capacity in the female soldier. I have to applaud her for her patience and determination within this system. She has, as Frigga suggests, “…constructed herself into the existing structures” and she is thereby formed by the structures in place. She has figured out how to cope within the structures and does very well, but the experiences she is exposed to are different in many respects to the experiences of the male soldier. Frigga states that, “We live according to a whole series of imperatives: social pressures, natural limitations, the imperative if economic survival, the given conditions of history and culture” and this could not be more true than in the Canadian military. All of these imperatives exist on a daily basis.

       In an attempt to stay within the confines of fairness to this reflection’s length restrictions (which I have already greatly exceeded), I will say that the inequities that women face are great. As a white anglo-saxon male and father of two girls, I understand this and try to be a male who treats women as equals. I treat women in the manner in which I would like to be treated and how I’d like my daughters to be treated. This, of course, reminds me of something I tell new teachers: “Don’t treat the kids in front of you any differently than you would want your own kids treated!”

Respectfully,

Brad

The Destruction of Society and Invasion of the Soda Snatchers!!

Purpel

I am going to start off by saying that this was my least favorite of the three articles. I guess what I saw in this article is more of the US government doing stupid things and putting crazy ideas in the heads American and the rest of the western world’s population. The Americans and many other governments create situations that appear as threats to the “American way of life” (or western) and then get the populations of the US and the western world to react. This way the Americans can control the foreign policies of western governments. This means that the curriculum of school systems is influenced and changed to deal with the current political climate of the world. Strategies are created to get kids and teachers to think in ways that promote and support American foreign policy. There are examples of this from the days of Sputnik, the Vietnam war, all the middle eastern conflicts up to and including the current situation with the Twin Towers and the alleged terrorist attack on the US in 2001. What really disconcertss me is that very intelligent people (teachers included) buy into these lies and promote governmental foreign policy in their classrooms.

I guess this shouldn’t surprise me. I know that curriculum since the time of the one room school house has been slanted to create good little citizens that obediently obey the policies of the governments that create the curriculum for schools. After all, wasn’t the spelling curriculum created as a means of control in schools? Beauchamp and Parsons (2001), intimate this in their book Teaching from the Inside Out.

Dalai Lama

I really enjoyed this article. More than I thought I would. Even though I am not a person who believes in religion, I thought the Dalai Lama made some excellent points. My favorite point from this article is that science and technology has become the new religion. He asks what is faith? I ask, what should we put our faith in? Science, technology, government, a deity? Is one of these religions better or worse than the other?

The Dalia Lama says that outwardly people look happy, inwardly, they are not. I think I agree with this. The media is out of control with the images and expectations it imposes on people. Men and women alike want to be someone else. They want more money, but even with that, people don’t find happiness or contentment. Comedian Louis CK describes this quite aptly and humorously in his appearance of the Conan O’Brien Show when he rants that. “Everything is amazing and no one is happy”. 

So what is the secret? Is it religion? Spirituality? Where people anymore happy when Catholicism reigned the planet? Are the Catholics happier than the Muslims? The worship of anything to fanaticism is wrong in my opinion. It doesn’t matter if it is a person or machine.

Has the worship of technology and the ability to be “friends” with anyone, anywhere and never having to actually physically be with that “friend”, created a generation of people who can’t be nice to one another in-person and even sometimes online? What does it say about our society when people are looking for belonging in virtual worlds instead of their own communities? Is it wrong that people know more about another person in another country than they do about their neighbours? The Dalai Lama states that we can, “…lose touch with the wider reality of human experience and in particular our dependence on one another” (p.12). Is science and technology creating and perpetuating this? Is this bad, wrong or destructive? I don’t know because we can’t see what the future holds. I do however think that we need to put much more thought into the things (everything from technology to lunch programs) we adopt and implement in our classrooms.

Finally, I really liked that the Dalia Lama said that “…democracy, liberalism and socialism have failed…”. This notion for me ties into the whole idea of governments trying to control people. How governments are bullied by corporations to think in certain ways and then how governments download these self-serving ideologies to schools.

Schlosser

             I would have to say that this paper was my favorite. It truly is the reading that opened my eyes to what’s going on behind the scenes of corporate (North) America. It is a paper I want my friends and family to read. To say that I was appalled by what Schlosser was describing would be an understatement. On a superficial level, I know that companies target kids, but the things that these companies do is truly despicable. The sad thing is, is that I can’t even just narrow my sites down on any one of these monsters because it is every company. Cell phones providers, television stations, magazine publishers, food manufacturers, beverage companies and clothing designers. The targeting of our youth is everywhere. It is criminal that children as young as two are the targets of these companies.

A piece of me was also very embarrassed after I finished the last part of this paper. The depiction of the invasion of soft drink companies in schools is something I have a history with. In a small way in my last school, I used to be Dan DeRose. I was the person who actively sought out and attained over 40 business partners to donate money and gifts to our school. Two of these partners being Coca Cola and McDonald’s. Now that I have read this article, I am ashamed.

But, part of me completely understands the frustration and desperation of administrators who bring companies into their schools. Every year it seems that schools have to do more, with less money. The kids (and parents) seem to be more challenging and needy. So then, how are schools supposed to offer quality programs, “save” the world and create good little tax paying citizens when they are not equipped to do so. I have taught long enough to see the frustration and defeat of teachers and administrators. I am one of these people.

With this said, I offer a parting shot by asking if it is any better for parent associations to run bingos and casinos to raise money for schools than it is for administrators to bring in pop machines? Is this reliance on gambling any better than the reliance on food and beverage companies? The one thing I do know after reading these papers is that I have more questions now than I did before I picked these readings up.

Respectfully,

Brad