[NLA] building policy vision

Mon Feb 3 11:18:50 EST 2003

Hello Nancy:

I have two questions for you about your recent note to
Eileen responding to her request for a reflection on our
educational philosophy guiding our work:  

First, you say:  

"Not when the subscriber who responds isn't allowed to 
keep their own opinion will you get any recipients to your 
challenge."

My question is:  As a teacher, do you think raising questions
about your own views and a dialogue about those views is
necessarily a bad thing?  Perhaps in a discussion you might
find your view wanting or badly defined for yourself?   Would
you want to "keep" it anyway?  Or perhaps someone might
have something you haven't thought of?   Or perhaps we might
clarify, verify, and validate our own view in a way we didn't
before?  
It's not a matter of telling you what to think.  It's rather a matter
of initiating the self-correcting process that resides in all of
us through dialogue?  If someone can't keep their own opinion 
after a discussion, perhaps it wasn't worth keeping?

Second, you say:  

"Add to it that your messages haven't made a whit of sense to 
>me< ... and I consider myself a halfway bright person ... THAT 
might be a cause for the lack of response to your inquiry as well."

Question:  I doubt anyone here thinks you are not bright, as you say.
However, If you read something once, and don't immediately
understand it, do you read it again for deeper understanding, or
do you throw it out and go on to something else?  I understood it
fine, though I had questions about what Eileen meant by some of
her terms--we are studying from similar, but also different, areas
of writing and I am sure our "meaning background" is not as
congruent as it would be if we (or any of us) shared that meaning
background more often.  

My own take on not understanding something on the first go-round
is that it may (not always) contain more and different meaning 
than I am used to working with--which means I have to read it
more than once to begin to "get it."  My own experience of it is
 that, if I assume it has no meaning right out of the gate, then it is 
>> I << who suffers for not having dug deeper.  

I also do not think it has anything to do with mine or your 
intelligence (brightness)--but everything to do with an openness 
and a habit of "mining" a text for meaning.  How do you know if 
something is worth mining?  One clue is that, in this case, it 
comes from Eileen who we know spends allot of time thinking 
and reading about such things.  That's a pretty good clue, I think.

I also have the disease of "hurry-up-and-understand," and have
to temper it all the time.  I'm fairly bright myself, but not everyone 
speaks "Catherine" or "Nancy", and so our provincialism of
thought needs to be "stretched" to the surrounding provinces
and is better for it?

I hope you don't mind the "teacher talk."   I teach teachers and am 
always struck by how many of us have it--we do not know how to 
read (go fishing or mining in the meaning) a text.--too much
bother   We all want it to jump off the page on the first go round--
and it just doesn't work like that--IF we really want to understand.  It's 
also good modeling for our students whom we are trying to teach
to read and understand what we read?  If we as teachers are 
passing on the "disease" of "sound bite-itis," it's not a good thing
for education--of which we are a part?  Now--keep your own view
if you still want it?

Regards,

Catherine King

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Nancy Hansen 
  To: nla at lists.literacytent.org 
  Sent: Sunday, February 02, 2003 10:31 PM
  Subject: Re: [NLA] building policy vision

  Eileen wrote: 

  << I asked if people would share the personal 
  principles that guide their own actions. A couple have used my own as the 
  basis for further dialogue, but no one has shared their individual view of 
  the "big picutre" or the principles they bring to advocacy efforts. ... But if we are going to advocate for policy that affects the field as a 
   whole, don't we have some responsibility to both engage in reflection about 
   how it all fits together, and to be accountable to ourselves by being open 
   about what we're advocating, and why? >> 

  Not when the subscriber who responds isn't allowed to keep their own opinion will you get any recipients to your challenge.  Add to it that your messages haven't made a whit of sense to >me< ... and I consider myself a halfway bright person ... THAT might be a cause for the lack of response to your inquiry as well. 

   Eileen Eckert <eileeneckert at hotmail.com> wrote: 

    Hi Catherine, and others,
    Catherine, you're right that the themes I listed are consistent with the 
    ideals of western democracy. I was operating mainly in the framework of 
    cognitive psychology, but I think Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory, for 
    example, has its own roots in the fundamentally democratic work of Jon 
    Dewey. While you see what I've written through the lens of your work on 
    building/protecting democracy (sorry, I can't do justice to your position), 
    my own experiences with liberation work that is not so classically "western" 
    also heavily influence my ideas.

    Involvement in anti-apartheid and other human rights work; travel to EL 
    Salvador and study of Latin American revolutionary struggles and the role of 
    popular education and literacy work in those struggles; community organizing 
    here; learning within a progressive framework; past participation in 
    program-, regional-, and state-level policymaking; extending teacher-student 
    and colleague relationships to know the people I've worked with beyond their 
    official roles--all of these and other experiences contribute to my current 
    level of understanding. They're also mostly outside the scope of teacher 
    preparation and certification mandates. I wouldn't say that everybody should 
    have the same experience and background, but I would argue vehemently 
    against policy that privileges one approach/philosophy of learning to the 
    exclusion or marginalization of others, or that sets boundaries that can 
    fence us into too small an arena. I would also say that the broader our 
    conception of the field, and our willingness to include many different 
    voices in the discussion, the more effective and powerful we will be. That's 
    another reason I think it's so important that we look at the basic 
    assumptions we make and the (often tacit) mental models we apply to our 
    advocacy work.

    This thread has reminded me of a diversity-training workshop I once 
    attended, where one participant refused to leave the level of political 
    analysis and look inward at his own personal beliefs and actions. While it's 
    certainly important to be able to analyze the world, I believe we also need 
    to be able to look at ourselves. I asked if people would share the personal 
    principles that guide their own actions. A couple have used my own as the 
    basis for further dialogue, but no one has shared their individual view of 
    the "big picutre" or the principles they bring to advocacy efforts. I don't 
    want to make assumptions about why this is so. Maybe most people deleted my 
    message without reading it, or just aren't interested in this line of 
    dialogue. Maybe this list doesn't feel like a safe place to share personal 
    reflections. I know I hesitated to share my own, and what I shared is more 
    academic and less "me" than it would be if I were among friends. 
    But if we are going to advocate for policy that affects the field as a 
    whole, don't we have some responsibility to both engage in reflection about 
    how it all fits together, and to be accountable to ourselves by being open 
    about what we're advocating, and why?

    _________________________________________________________________
    The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* 
    http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

    _______________________________________________
    NLA mailing list: NLA at lists.literacytent.org
    http://lists.literacytent.org/mailman/listinfo/nla
    LiteracyTent: web hosting, news, community and goodies for literacy
    http://literacytent.org

  Nancy Hansen, E.D.
  Email: sfallsliteracy at yahoo.com

  Sioux Falls Area Literacy Council
  Sioux Falls, SD 57104-1314
  Phone: (605) 332-BOOK
  Fax: (605) 332-9389

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Do you Yahoo!?
  Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.literacytent.org/pipermail/nla/attachments/20030203/f8fdacf3/attachment.htm