2005-02-16 - 2:57 p.m.
Ever since the movement discussion on Sunday, I haven't been able to stop thinking, even when I'm extremely tired-
--
Reflecting on the national lawyers guild-
lawyers are mainly good for supporting grassroots/community based/mass line organizing work in a secondary role (legal trainings for community folks/organizers, defending people on trial, giving legal advice, maybe filing lawsuits in specific circumstances)- advocacy work done by the guild is somewhere between progressive groups with a petit-bourgeois base that conduct pure advocacy and progressive groups that occassionally work on legislation- this is not to malign its work, but any lawyering work I would want to do would be somehow integrated with organizing
--
thoughts on the asia/api movement-
there is a huge gap between babyboomers and children of babyboomers- the younger folks are not grounded and do not have a clear vision of what social movements look like on the day-to-day on-the-ground level- i fully acknowledge that i fall into this category- the problem is that many younger folks are oblivious to this problem and the need for older folks to guide the discussion-
i am still unsure about concrete goals-
--
thoughts on language-
malia has done research work in indigenous communities in alaska (where she's from i think) where the way 'proper' language gets imposed is a sort of re-colonization- jane does pre-literacy exercises where she writes down exactly what the kids say instead of 'correcting' black dialect- she also writes all her essays in informal, stream of consciousness narrative- calvin consciously writes essays that are accessible, free of jargon, and where steps of reasoning are not condensed into short statements or esoteric terms- a few days ago, katie showed me this packet that glenn omatsu gives to every student where ideas of organizing and popular education are summarized in extremely accessible ways-
in pedagogy for liberation (ira shore and paulo freire), ira shore talks a lot about the importance of students and teachers educating each other about their language- through observation and interaction, shore begins to pick up students' manners of speaking "I also asked myself about the social relations of discourse, the politics of verbal exchanges int he classroom, the script for talking we inherit from the traditional curriculum. It's one thing to change lexicon, syntax, style of humor, and cadence of speech, but it's another to have the relations of classroom discourse change as well...The teacher speaks in a loud voice and the students speak in a low one. The teachers says most of the words uttered out lout, dominating the hour with her or his subjectivity, limiting the subjectivity of the students. The teacher's didactic voice occupies the classroom with correct usage that surrounds the students and inhibits their utterances...An imposing teacherly voice confirms their cultures of silence or sabotage...I have to give up the right of the professor to bore students...this is an unwritten law of school inequality: teachers have the exclusive right in class to go on and on even if everyone is bored." - i found this section of the book particularly illuminating
--
more later
