Staunton: Deranging English and Education

Staunton, John A. Deranging English/education: Teacher Inquiry, Literary Studies, and Hybrid Visions of "English" for 21st Century Schools. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2008. Print.

Staunton's 2008 book is a welcome contribution,perhaps the only contribution, to the hybrid field of English and Education. In many teacher education programs, English as a discipline is treated as separate from/than education, and I am not even sure that programs would label education as a "discipline." Education course work is generally seen as "covering" the history of education or surveying strategies to fill the teacher tool box. Thus, Staunton's work in this book asks that we re-see ourselves as more of a hybrid of the two to avoid mirroring back to those in power their assumptions about teaching,learning,literature, and students.

In this book, Staunton works to move beyond the paradigm of teacher success that looks more like transmitting the American canon of literature to something more about a joint endeavor of uncovering -"what you discover you're capable of doing in the face of student confusion, textual resistance, or serendipitous collisions" (85).

Not unlike Freire, which I don't believe he cites, Staunton sees the teacher and student as co-teachers and co-learners. (I am attempting to share the "teaching space" as well in this semesters ENGL 489 at UIC. We are all uncomfortable as "students" co-lead a seminar on Rosenblatt or teach a 10 minute lesson demonstrating active learning. During the Socratic seminar, I can feel them waiting for "my take," and I can feel myself resisting.) The "undercurrent" here is really social justice, as Staunton seeks to alter the relationship between teacher and student, student with one another.

One key concept is the notion of "found pedagogy" teaching literature for and with students (90).whereby our task is not to articulate meanings about literature or texts but to put those meanings in conversation with others" (148).

Below are notes from the final chapters -

Ch 4- anchoring points

Song of myself

92- Curricular informants moving from the sidelines of the curriculum to the front lines of the knowledge base of what and how American literature means

93- Or have we practiced so long to learn to read and to get at the meaning of poem that when confronted with the sound of language struggling with the mysteries of being in the world we are struck dumb and at a loss for words

97- What has the potential to unravel what we think we know about offering students freedom to explore their ideas in classroom settings that then close the door on any real application or test of the freedom

Disrupting the trans mission of American literature

104- To read Whitman's lines and not allow students a chance to filter meaning from their own experiences is to miss it crucial opportunity to create experiential learning and occlude a key component of the poem's own agenda

Picture- 108- It models a way of approaching history and literature that allows both to speak to contemporary context without being totally removed from their own fields of production

118- online discussion boards

122- That I need to work against the transmission of a master narrative about American literary history that is both historically and ideologically suspect

He argues for teachers to have an opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of American literature from exposure to primary texts historical and contextualizing documents and cultural artifacts from across media and artistic modes

To prepare students not to rely on the history package by their anthologies and curriculum guides which send it next messages about the content of American literature

Ch 5- what counts as knowledge

James gee -- the public discourse model - Shapes the expectations and assumptions of and about teacher candidates discourse models are theories storylines images explanatory frameworks that people hold often unconsciously and used to make sense of the world and their experiences in it

Common sense- but socially situated meanings and practices that Hyde powerful assumptions about people, communities, and literary values -124

133- finally mentions the actual students they will teach

Recognizing that either position throws us into existing and powerfully defining discourses about who we think we are when we are teaching English thrown ess into a discursive wilderness pedagogy marks the boundaries of one horizon of understanding. What we do and who we are is marked by what has come before us the way out is one that can be discovered through shared inquiry and recognition of those student students who join us on the way- 148

Ch 6

153-The work they do in English remain separate from an alien to the things they do in their pedagogy courses

Draws out this concern for social justice an undercurrent throughout this book

Hesford: Spectacular Rhetoric Notes

Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics

4/6/2013
“A task that consists of not—of no longer—treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.  Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things.  It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech.  It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (Foucault, 49).

Cintron, in his notes about Hesford's book, suggests that Foucault is more interested in power, especially how institutions manage to shape power on behalf of some and not others. Rhetoric, as the study of language in action, must always be about something more  -- the formation of political life whether or not the signifiers match up to anything real or even probable.

Hesford's emphasis is on recognition: "The history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition.  As this history suggests, struggles for recognition are also struggles for visibility...The stakes are precisely the unseen in vision -- the process through which something is seen or not seen (30).

Her aim is to "integrate the visual into, rather than set it against, textual approaches and to scrutinize the objectivist model of visual evidence -- seeing is believing -- foundational to contemporary human rights politics" (8). Here I am reminded of one of my students who in response to the question "How do we imagine the unimaginable and speak of the unspeakable and know of the unknowable? " (with regard to trauma and atrocities) answered that she knew it because she visited a concentration camp -- as if seeing the camp today is knowing, understanding, and believing.

Cintron writes that the "very structure of the human rights claim is a kind of spectacle in which intersecting ideologies, visual technologies, rhetorics, and so on fuse to create a reality (or the representation of reality) that reinforces certain dilemmas regarding the dominated and the dominating.  In this sense, human rights discourses seem to contain the residue of colonialism, and in an ironic way continue neocolonialst thinking. So ekphrasis, then, (to bring before the eyes), which seems so foundational to rhetorical theory because it is bound up with notions of proof and persuasion, of certainty as opposed to contingency, becomes the rhetorical figure that is exploited in the human rights spectacle."

Hesfords working with Levinas: "To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition.  It is complete not in the opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him" (198).

Introduction:

• How do human rights internationalism get translated into cultural forms that target American audiences-14 
• Consider the rescue narrative how human rights law is depoliticize into a humanitarian intervention discourse 
• Consider how the discourse of American nationalism produces subjects who see themselves as a free in comparison to developing worlds 
• The human rights spectacle or spectacular rhetorical is the appropriation of human suffering to deflect Nationalist issues
• This book considers Intercon textuality how arguments travel across contexts
• The book thinks in terms of transnational rather than global because of the national or nationstates that impact others--Nationstates are relevant in human rights context and in presenting images of issues
• Ranchers-16- Emancipation starts to distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection it starts when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or monetize that distribution.... Interpreting the world is already means transforming it or reconfiguring it
• 17- I highlight the rhetorical intercurrent textuality of images and their meanings and approach the human rights spectacle as a rhetorical phenomenon through which differently empowered social constituencies negotiate the authority of representation. Furthermore I argued that spectacular X and the contradiction that they stage are emblematic of the political and ethical struggles with which human rights advocates and scholars are engaged.
• 19-I argue that instead of thinking about the spectacle as a narcotic we need to understand it as heterogeneous and as a rhetorically dialogic process that is nevertheless subsumed within repetitive forms. Truth telling genres are the most ardent hosts of human rights spectacle.
• How do deployments of the spectacular rhetoric advance political cultural and moral agendas? How do truth telling genres and the contexts they generate support the spectacular and increasingly panoptic culture of US internationalism and its regulation of human rights subjects?
• 20- I demonstrate that no genre is immune to the spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.
• 21- The studies are intended not to represent an exhaustive survey but to highlight examples of how international Human rights law and cultural practices work together to create sites of political engagement and creative intervention. 
• 21- I seek to counter the common assumption that legal approaches are the only politically viable means of taking action against human rights violations by the states and nine state actors...******
• Attending to the intercontextuality, I will cultural and law based human rights discourses we are able to grasp how the suffering body becomes sutured to the spectacle and incorporated into the visual economy of human rights....issues of who has the power to represent home and which events are rendered visible or invisible are profoundly important...and examination of interventions or transformations of the spectacle that challenge hierarchical social relations and the fixity of identity categories and yet and down at the human rights subject with agency-22
• 23- How truth Telling achieves political effects and to manipulate affect
• 26- Convergence of human rights and humanitarian discourses and representing non-western women and their children as sympathetic I text unappealing and site for Western audiences... Children as symbolically appealing and as passive victims... How about spectacle of childhood innocence and the transformation of the child from object property to agent 

 Chapter Five -- Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Poltiics of (In)visibility

• Rights bearing subject deflect attention from or draw it to the social and economic conditions that shape children's lives
• Questions depoliticizing the victim of children's human rights law
• There is a subversive element of children's agency when the substance of that Universalism is not innocence for children sense of familial and social responsibility-- and this is evident in so e genocude literature .. It resists victimizing demonstrating agency in the child... What is the mediator's role-- a call for greater collaboration between human rights activists artists and scholars in investigating how the axes of ethical engagement are regulated through the often conversion discourses of humanitarianism and human rights internationalism
• Educating as rescue narrative--159--This was in part a narrative in tree girl and was a narrative in my unit of about tree girl ; It is also a narrative at my melody school
• A humanitarian narrative of self actualization with an imperialist history emerge as a virtuous reporter and advocate whose value and agency are affirmed by the lacking other--160
• Teaching about international or transnational atrocities is dangerous for the teacher because the spectacular figure of the exploited child is most often depicted as foreign racially or ethnically different and non autonomous and innocent being betrayed by familial and cultural traditions
• Do the books and try that out western intervention the characters cannot be saved? Is there no agency? 
• Is there a larger transformation narrative which moves from pain and trauma to personal expression and growth
• 162-The literacy math graff -- The universalizing Idea that you respective of the particularities of any given context literacy correlates with social standing and economic advancement
• The taxpayers witness to a journey through their creation of a rhetorical space of transnational intimacy between children and an imagined western audience-163
• 174- The challenge is not to reproduce the colonial legacy of anthologizing societies as uncivil and repressing the agency of both children and adults then re-creating the spectacle of salvation through such interventions
• 174- Developmental narrative.. It plots a story of socio-civil incorporation by which the human rights personality becomes legible to the self and others
• 175-Cosmopolitan aesthetic... Redemption as subjects of a heroic narrative in which they and the imagined Westernview were triumphant over the deficient moral aesthetic boundaries of the brothel
• This transformation narrative distracts attention from the severe poverty and exploitation to which the children are subjected in favor of the expertise of the cosmopolitan arch critic which the children are encouraged to emulate and new forms of neoliberalism and its regulation of social difference subjectivity and public morality
• Darker side .. What is needed is a multidimensional analysis of children's agency that considers that interdependency of human rights including how poor labor conditions for adults inadequate wages lack of health for disability benefits unsafe working conditions contribute to the family's dependency on child labor176
• This confronts modernity 
• Be skeptical of the dualisms forced versus chosen moral versus immoral to terminate representations of women and children
• Account for the transnational national and cultural forces and narratives that define our alignments with children and those that limit children's agency has moral and political subjects
• The process that children are cultural actors the documentary reformulate what it means to see children as complex subjects who subjectivity is not grounded in a struggle for recognition but in their ability to respond to impoverished, social and economic circumstances.--182
• By focusing on the children's daily struggles and resilience the film counters the spectacle of children as passive victims that is common to human rights and humanitarian campaigns specifically those that target Western audiences--183
• The film does not have a transformation or rescue narrative there are no heroes or villains the film documents to children struggles the lack of choices and resources and the generational cycle of poverty and it exposes the contradictions of advocacy work 184
• Moments that kid viewers an opportunity to think about their role as witness a small dessert and otherwise continuous observation page and the potential pedagogical role of the film in the context of its making
• 185- ranciere- The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible the sayable and ithe thinkable.
• a refusal to construing the children as mere victims or to infantilize their families or the society in which they live
• 186-The film persuades by enabling a relationship built on the recognition of children as cultural actors and moral agents and by not translating the children's experiences in terms of idealized western models of development...reimagining the discourse of childhood dependence***
• Tensions between individual capacity and vulnerability in between protection and empowerment are not easily resolved
• See child agency as a matter of social and economic rights and not solely civil and political rights as a matter of both political recognition and the rest redistribution of resources. ... In order that the issue of children's human rights to be ethically grounded 

Chapter 3: Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle

• 95--Hesford critiques Mackinnon's anti-pornographic stance and causal argument that pornography created conditions whereby Serbian men raid Muslim and Croat women ... McKinnon is more interested in linking human rights violation to her anti-pornography stands then in exploring these women's testimonial for what they say about the complexities appointments victimization cultural location and agency.. Thus the text is in-service of her argument and not in service if the women.
• Pedagogically we need to be aware of how we use the tax and her classrooms are they in service of the conceptual idea or framework or in-service of complicating the subjectivity of the people
• 95- Consumption of great as spectacle exemplifies the pervasive visibility of women as rape victims and international news media and US public discourse and the emphasis and women's human rights campaigns and violence against women
• 96- If human rights images and testimonies aim to create a rhetorical space of intersubjectivity of bearing witness how can human rights activists and scholars account for ruptures and identification and crises and witnessing? 
• 98- Bearing witness--a critical stance of bearing witness wherein the witness listener reviewer does not take the place of the other... The original subjects themselves did not register the experience in the fullness of its meaning (Baer) There is a danger in responding to trauma that indulges in the illusion that we might somehow be able to assimilate atrocities fully into our understanding.
• 99- The process of documenting human rights violations is paradoxical in that violence is often represented in order for it to be resisted...." And for me this is a problem in the classroom because we are reading representations of violence in order to confront progress and development for its darker side, so we are reading violations and projecting narratives-- hero narrative, rescuer narrative-
• Hesford asks what forms of empathic engagement are constituted as solutions to violence and what are the limits of such forms? She talks about the crisis of witnessing referring to the risks of representing violence
• Life writing studies-- the mediated nature of the testimonial genre and the editorial process if collaboration and mediation 
• 100- She argues the need to recognize the interdependence of witnessing and listening... The paradoxes of representation involved in becoming a rhetorical witness of rape warfare as genocide and of the allegorical structure of human rights claims to this recognition. The paradox that such representations bring front and center of course this configuration of the individual has an embodiment of group identity and group vulnerability a sense of collective identity recognized by the genocide convention. 
• 103-- secondary witness- gets stuck in the gap between what is said in testimony in the way of speaking body or written text says it
• Cambodia 
• What assumptions about children contributed to Khmer rouges plan?
• What beliefs about progress and development?
• Can our research tell the truth? Can a memoir testify?
• How do they make sense of their experiences, how do they channel their pain into a struggle for justice, the process if recognizing themselves as human rights subjects -- not interested in what happened to the people(as victims).
• Works against western expectations that victims were all poor an uneducated 
• Memoir/ testimony- the individuals trauma is implicated in the social regardless if whether she chooses to speak -- live witness's speech act is a violation as it makes her live through it again; the witness and viewer recreate the spectacle of victimization as a scene if forced recognition.
• Can one testimony speak for a collective?
• Tensions between witnessing and spectacle 
• Inadequacy of representation - limits of narratability and public reproduction and exposure of the private
• Think about how the global economy and international politics including the United States have intervened is supposedly local conflicts, and how such are configured rhetorically-- how and why would it matter if accounts of systematic violence and its legacies were part if our memorial landscapes-- 122
• Hesford deliberates the potential if a differentiated politics of recognition that move beyond recognition

Fecho: Teaching for the Students

Bob Fecho is a professor at the University of Georgia's department of language and literacy education. The book provides a framework for creating a classroom built on dialogue, inquiry, and critique.  He addresses concerns that education students bring to class. While I am an 8th grade English teacher, teaching full time, I am also a teacher educator and know that I am in a unique position to not only inform but shape teacher practice.

It is interesting to note that Fecho acknowledge Bakhtin's work as the "backbone of this book" given that my current dissertation committee has found problems with my use of Bakhtin as a framework for   my argument to teach novels in this age of Common Core's movement toward informational texts.

Chapter Notes

Fecho 

 12 the intent of dialogue rather than to destroy is to create without creation there can be no dialogue

The purpose of the chapter case to emphasize the importance of Generative lesson. It is done and service of gaining confidence to develop their understanding of future Texts and genres  they encounter

Ch 2
P22--What made this teaching critical for me was the overt focus and tacit implication that we live in a political society and that all social institutions including schools are driven by powerful political forces

24---Don't drive ideas into the ground where they won't be turned over examined and perhaps be considered--Instead post questions Perdenalas alternatives engage in dialogue and provide tools which current and future dialog could be achieved

Ch.3
Transaction--When we read we are encountering the text and ways for which only our experiences can prepare us; There are no generic readers or generic interpretations that only innumerable relationships between readers  and texts -29

My experiences don't preclude me from imagining or engaging in dialogue in order to gain insight into other perspectives but they do color, inhibit, enable, spin,  or somehow shape my eventual understandings

31 My job to teach students how to read and respond to those and other text... Helping students develop skills for unpacking text and using writing as a means for doing so. Much more motivational weight

... Works as complex investigations of the human condition and wanted my students to have the opportunity to save those texts in order to have the text shape them

33--I seek yo create wobble in the dialogic classroom. - To get students to notice and consider their beliefs and the worlds they inhabit 

Ch 4-- tension , squeeze and release 
41-I believe it's not tension  itself that represents a concern but how we respond to end-use tension that causes complications in our lives... The point isn't necessarily to remove tension to gain insight into the tension and have that insight support your efforts 43

Ch 5 difficulty

Ch 6 wobble 
Wobble US on the shoulder and induces us to ask why it nudges us toward action it suggests we get out at our chair and do something

54- The intention of the course is not to develop a consensus of understanding but to create an atmosphere and which wobble takes place

56- The paradox that a class where it is safe to investigate complex ideas sometimes feels risky and unsafe to the participants

Make it safe to experience such uncertainty

ch 7  
p. 69 -- to be a dialogic teacher is to question the engagement that occurs in your classroom; if you are unhappy with the current state of that engagement -- it it seems that too many students are merely occupying  seats and waiting out time -- then you need to admit to yourself ..it's you

ch 8
p. 75 -- by not realizing the importance of changing contexts, we tend to position our learning experiences in narrow ruts of understanding.  Our sense making can go only so far because we have fenced it in. 

ch 9 
p. 81 - Is it just about going from not knowing to knowing, as if we all cared about the same ideas, learned a the same pace, and prioritized what we learned in the same ways...Shouldn't our intent as educators be to understand the make-up of these varied contexts and what powerful potential they bring to our learning? Isn't it important for us to have insight into the diversity  among and within individuals  and how that rich mix contributes to learning in different ways? 


p. 83 -- Love...is an act of courage and unless we enter classrooms with love, humility, and faith in the power of humans to create and recreate, we will fail in our attempts to dialogue.

Of course, from Peter Elbow I know that part of grading student writing is that you have to choose to "like" it, and I have been known to use the word "love" with my students as in "I do this because I love you." There are times, however, that I get stuck in this "I have the answer" routine and feel like the class is against me only too late realizing that I failed at the love and humility and the faith in my students to dialogue with me on a topic. Such moments eat away at me until I see them again and ask for a redo or just try harder to love, possess humility, and have faith in them. 

ch 10
questioning

ch 11
constructing a simultaneously  unified and diverse self...p. 96 "Who we are becoming depends on where we are, how we have constructed ourselves to date, and to what extent we remain in dialogue with our contexts and diverse identities."

p. 101 -- "But if we who educate can grasp  that all of us are entered into a complex mesh of dialogical transactions with our selves and our many contexts, then we can also grasp that we teach for so much more than competency on a test."

ch 12
seamlessness