[AAACE-NLA] Which list?

[Eileen Eckert]

Hi Debbie,
I'm just posting my response to the NLA as a policy issue. I don't know 
about the mechanics of what goes where on the lists. For myself, I can say 
that when I post to a list, I try to address its purpose; like addressing 
how an issue is related to PD when I post to AALPD, and how it's related to 
policy when I post to NLA. There's another issue affecting posting right 
now, and that's the secretive purging of the archives.

In the spirit of civil disobedience, I posted a message to both the NLA and 
AALPD that included a clear challenge to whoever's censoring the 
archives--maybe it backfired, as discussion seems to be centered on whether 
the list members should demand self-censorship of participants, and the 
issue of official censorship seems to have gotten lost for the moment. I 
posted it to the AALPD <because> that's a NIFL list, as the AAACE-NLA is 
not.

As a matter of policy, it seems to me that criteria for evaluation of 
research, theory, lesson plans, or anything else in a field should be driven 
by a vigorous discourse in which all sources of controversy can be debated. 
Also, in a democracy, the workings of government should be visible to 
inhabitants of the country. Looking at the re-structuring, editing to 
conform to the Bush administration's notions of quality, purging, or 
censorship (depending on your point of view) of ERIC and the NIFL archives, 
I see government/politics driving and narrowing the discourse of the 
discipline. I also see the opposite of transparency around the disappearance 
from the NIFL/LINCS/discussions archives of 6+ years of NLA archives and the 
selective editing of the archives of the other lists.

Scholars and practitioners use those archives; I don't know how many times 
I've read an article that referred to or quoted discussions from the NIFL 
and NLA lists. I just finished writing one myself, and I'll have to include 
a note that the citations for NLA quotes can't be checked because the 
archives are gone. How can we trust in the integrity of the records if 
they've been edited or purged to meet some political agenda? This is damage 
that will last well beyond the current administration.

To me it seems that the censorship discussion needs to happen on a NIFL list 
because it is there that the censorship is happening. I also think the NLA 
list is a place where we could/should discuss responses to the 
implementation of the Bush administration's political agenda. I don't know 
if this is a policy discussion as much as it's a discussion about 
establishing a policy climate. Such discussion and action seem urgent right 
now. For years since WWII people have wondered how ordinary Germans could 
"let" the Nazis consolidate power; I'm really starting to understand how it 
can happen. By that I don't mean to say Bush is just like Hitler, or to 
trivialize the Holocaust; I do mean that there are some parallels in the way 
the two implement their agendas and marginalize/criminalize people who 
disagree with them, and I find it scary.

Eileen







_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail