A Place To Discuss

I am a 25 year old grad student who mainly studies Irish history. I have made this blog to discuss things that I have learned about in my classes and perhaps to provoke a conversation and get other people's opinions. This is a safe space to discuss opinions respectfully.

[historybuffposts]

How do you create a class with an oppressed group rather than for an oppressed group?

Today in class we discussed a reading by Paolo Freire from his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In this, he posits that the oppressors need to create classes with the oppressed in order to create a humane learning environment and facilitate the oppressed examining themselves inwardly and interacting with the course more freely than in a class that was created for them. The question that I would like to look at is how to accomplish this in the first place.

I think that this requires facilitating trust between the teacher and the student and creating a classroom environment where students do not feel afraid to disagree with the teachers/professors and can hold a discussion without feeling invalidated or invalidating others that are also in the conversation. This is a tough thing to do and I believe this requires a constant back and forth between the oppressed and the oppressors, asking questions that have no right or wrong answers and acknowledging that the person across from you is human. Mutual trust and respect in the classroom is how input to format a class should be taken, always molding as much as time allows for the things the students want to learn.

It is not only important for the teacher to see the student as human, but it is important for students to see teachers as human as well. This is the key and does not always mean that the teacher has to be completely open about things with their students, but it does require creating a relationship with students so they have confidence in what you, as the teacher, are telling them. This is, of course, just my opinion. I’d love to hear from others about what they think!

[verbomanichistorian]

So, here’s a question:

Can someone be oppressed and not realize they are oppressed? We can see as outsiders to a specific group something that WE could consider oppression but is there a line where oppression can exist universally?

[historybuffposts]

Firstly, I would like to thank you for asking such a good question!

In my opinion, yes, a person can be oppressed without realizing that they are oppressed. A student can be oppressed without realizing it fairly easily if they’ve always been in a classroom situation where they do not feel comfortable asking questions of the teacher for fear of ridicule by the teacher or other classmates. This is a kind of social oppression that is fueled by shame and the need to be conventionally “smart” all the time. Sometimes I don’t even think the oppressor, in this case a teacher, realizes that they’ve created such an oppressive and toxic environment for their students, which is why a line of communication between students and teachers is so important.

[historybuffposts]

How do you create a class with an oppressed group rather than for an oppressed group?

Today in class we discussed a reading by Paolo Freire from his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In this, he posits that the oppressors need to create classes with the oppressed in order to create a humane learning environment and facilitate the oppressed examining themselves inwardly and interacting with the course more freely than in a class that was created for them. The question that I would like to look at is how to accomplish this in the first place.

I think that this requires facilitating trust between the teacher and the student and creating a classroom environment where students do not feel afraid to disagree with the teachers/professors and can hold a discussion without feeling invalidated or invalidating others that are also in the conversation. This is a tough thing to do and I believe this requires a constant back and forth between the oppressed and the oppressors, asking questions that have no right or wrong answers and acknowledging that the person across from you is human. Mutual trust and respect in the classroom is how input to format a class should be taken, always molding as much as time allows for the things the students want to learn.

It is not only important for the teacher to see the student as human, but it is important for students to see teachers as human as well. This is the key and does not always mean that the teacher has to be completely open about things with their students, but it does require creating a relationship with students so they have confidence in what you, as the teacher, are telling them. This is, of course, just my opinion. I’d love to hear from others about what they think!

[faustonomy]

On critical thought.

William Cronon, in his piece “Only Connect…” discusses what it means to be a liberally educated person. What one gathers after reading this piece is that being a liberally educated person means more than just attending a four year university program and holding a degree. I’d like to situate this within the context of the continuously diminishing humanities that we are witnessing, at the very, least here in America. Cronon lists some characteristics that someone who is thoroughly liberally educated might have: such as, nurturing and empowering the people around them, being able to listen effectively and actually hear what someone else has to say without only preparing a refutation or counter-argument, and respecting rigor as a way of seeking truth. Of this list, what stuck out to me the most was the characteristic of being able to talk with anyone. To me, this means more than just talking to someone you meet on the street or a friend of a friend. This means the ability to talk to someone who has an entirely different life and cultural experience than you, this means someone who has entirely different linguistic patterns or philosophical and theological views than you. I think that this is where critical thinking comes into play most commonly for those who use critical thinking. What I mean by critical thinking, in this case of being able to talk to anyone, is being able to identify points of difference and points of commonality and  furthermore being able to actively engage those points of commonality without treading disrespectfully upon those points of difference. This is no easy task. And in my case has involved engaging with religious theory that has a scholastic orientation outside of the Western philosophical enterprise - theory I would not have come across had it not been for my being able to take humanities focused classes. Specifically, engaging this theory from a religious studies point of view, in my opinion, was particularly effective in cultivating critical thinking skills insofar that religious studies exposes the student to traditions where notions of truth and reality are constructed in ways that can be diametrically opposed to the ways we construct them here in the Western world.

[historybuffposts]

I am going to have to agree with you. As a history student, I am often looking back at interactions between people who are diametrically opposed. It is interesting to see how people of differing cultures and religious views and interacted in the past and definitely shows a path for us to be better humans by either adopting those same attitudes or going in the complete opposite direction from them. I feel I have a unique perspective in this conversation because I was in nursing school and had my CNA license for a time before I switched over to history track. I can confidently say that while I was in that portion of the school, critical thinking was applied to signs and symptoms of disease rather than of mood. I could count on one hand the number of times a lecture or course focused on interactions with a patient past knocking on the door and beginning procedural questioning. Good bedside manner is applauded in the medical field, but it is not always required and often leads to disgruntled patients and doctors/nurses with frustrations regarding patients because communication is not prioritized. What is expected is for the patients or patient guardians to communicate and the doctors to deduce what is happening rather than communicating back. There has been some headway made in this aspect though, as patients are given surveys to fill out about their experience and whether or not they understood what the doctor was telling them. It is a small step, but a step in the right direction is a step nonetheless. 

[historybuffposts]

DEHUMANIZED: When Math and Science Rule the School

Today in class I had the opportunity to “teach” an article with the above title by Mark Slouka. It is biased and filled with imagery and provoking language. All of these things I have been taught to avoid by the history students of today. This is definitely in an attempt to make our writing more scientific, but that does not mean that this article did not hold truth within it. The basic idea is that the humanities are slowly being strangled out of existence as the US culture pushes for a production of workers rather than students. A lot can be said about this and I had many questions I wanted to ask my classmates that I did not get the chance to because of the time limit, but ultimately Slouka states that the humanities have hard-headed and un-budging base within them. There are people who refuse to be wiped away and thrown into a world of business and sciences. They create their own ecosystems around them and the fruits of their labor may not be immediately quantifiable, it does provoke thought and challenge the status quo over and over again.

I would like to post some of the questions I wanted to ask here and see what others believe about it. The top one is: Why is every crisis in the American Education system cast as an economic threat but never a civic threat? How can we describe a civic threat? All of the conversations I’ve had about issues in the education system talk about the detriment to funds and whether or not something is worth being kept on to save a budget. What is a civic threat and why is it never addressed? I believe that in the world of politics we are slowly beginning to address such a question by posing the statement “Stop asking if bills are bi-partisan and start asking if they helps people.” - Sarah Groh from Twitter

Perhaps this can be how we start addressing the detriment to the American Education system in terms of civic threats. Start asking what happens to the students of classes are taken away and maybe we can find a balance between the economic threat and a civic threat.

None of this is to say that STEM does not have its place and that people cannot be happy taking this course of action in their education. All it is trying to argue that the humanities create a space where conflict and humanization are rolled into one. The conflict that the humanities present to the world can create a better and more ethic society. As the STEM and technical fields increase, I do believe that the humanities should grow with them instead of being something that have people asking “well, what are you going to do with that?” In order to get to this point where the humanities and sciences are on the same footing in society some challenging of social norms and fighting are likely going to have to occur. That’s just my opinion though. I’d like to hear thoughts from others!

[faustonomy]

On the Utility or the Utopia of University.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, writing for the New York Times in September of 2015, discusses two trajectories of the university experience for a student : Utopia or Utility. A utilitarian trajectory would ensure that a student is given and taught the tools and skills to procure for themselves the means to ensure financial stability in their lives and be an asset in their field of work, The Utopian trajectory seeks to engage the student in fields of study that explore knowledge from a multi-cultural perspective so that the “soul” of the student as it were is developed so that they might better understand themselves in regards to the world they live in. It would seem that the world we live in values one of these trajectories over the other. We see this in the decline of the humanities and the privileging of STEM majors. I do not think that one is more important than the other; that each inform and influence the other in more ways that most would think. Science, as a distinct category of study, in the grand scheme of human history, is a relatively new category. It has become a dominant distinct category in the global marketplace as its applications are extremely profitable. Yet, without the humanities (and I am here imagining a world where the study of philosophy, history, art etc. is even less valued globally than they are now) it would be quite difficult to understand how science became itself, and even how to understand where science is going. There is a timeline of events that have charted where we now exist as humanity. How does one understand this timeline? How does one interpret where we are or where we are going? I think that one of the humanities fundamental goals is in learning how to interpret this timeline not only from a localized point of view, but simultaneously seeking to include any individual entity’s peripheral perspectives.

[historybuffposts]

I would even go as far as to say that without the humanities the world would have no form of entertainment. Almost everything that is considered a leisure activity has to be produced by someone who studied in the humanities. TV, Film, Plays, etc. are all only available because of the artists, those who study how to write scripts and books and those who find that acting is their passion or that film studies and animation are something they cannot live without. Surely a world without humanities would be dull and filled with people who have little to no creative outlet for the days they are off of work. The sciences and STEM fields are incredibly necessary for the survival of humans, but the humanities are what give many lives purpose and change humanity from just survival to living freely.

[teachingtolearn]

What is the Point of a Teacher?

I was quite intrigued by the article I read for class last week that asked a question I’d never really considered before: what is the point of a teacher? I get annoyed when I hear people say teachers are ‘nothing but glorified babysitters,’ but Barre’s op-ed really got my wheels turning. What is the point of a teacher? If humans can learn on their own, why do we assume a guide is necessary in formal education? I think Barre’s explanation of the two types of teachers answers the question well. 

The teacher-as-author and the teacher-as-tutor are two common types of educators, especially on the college campus. While Barre finds both models to be useful in some aspect, I disagree. I believe the teacher-as-tutor is the only true way to teach, particularly if the course is below the graduate level. The difference is that the teacher-as-author is an academic while the teacher-as-tutor is an instructor. There is certainly value in academics and their roles in the bubble of academia, but often the two roles are conflated when really, the academic is there to provide access to knowledge, rather than to make sure the student absorbs it.

As a graduate student, I see benefits to learning from academics. In our classes, most of the learning is self-facilitated and the professor is there to provide guidance and correction. At anything below the graduate level, however, the students expect and should receive an instructor. This person should be equipped to ensure students achieve growth and advancement, not just to provide access to knowledge. 

[historybuffposts]

I really like your take on the teacher-as-author and teacher-as-tutor question. I do believe that they both have significance and their place in the world, but I think we begin to differ on the place of a teacher-as-author. In my opinion, while it is the professor of undergraduate student’s job to make sure they absorb the information given, it should also be a place where students begin to formulate their own hypothesis guided by a professor’s knowledge. The first two years of college can be stressful for students and perhaps they do need a certain amount of “hand holding” provided by the professors, but I think that ultimately they should be weened from this process as they continue into their later years of college so they are not as blindsided by the differing methodology once Graduate school begins. I believe that this will also lend itself to a higher ability to find solutions in the working world if the student does not wish to pursue a graduate degree for whatever reason.

[historybuffposts]

Are schools and teachers required for learning?

This is my first post on this blog and the question I would like to address is written above. The short answer to this question, in my personal opinion, is no. A person does not need to be in the environment of school to be able to learn things. We, as humans, are learning from the time that we are born until the time we die. A plethora of experiences help guide us in life and learning happens outside of the school every day. Do we need teachers to learn? Not necessarily. humans learn by making mistakes just as much as they learn by being told what to do. You can tell an excitable child a million times not to mess with a bee hive or hornet’s nest, but they do not always listen or learn from verbal warnings. For some people it takes making the mistake and seeing the consequences for a lesson to be learned. This is just my two-cents on the matter and I’m excited to see what others have to say!