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Having grown up in a middle class American community, the ideas of diversity, acceptance, individuality, and selflessness have been stressed throughout my education as well as in my household. Growing up with my mother can be confusing at times, especially as a youngster. I would often here her yelling, “You can’t expect to be able to help others unless you figure your own problems out. Focus on your own life,” and usually around the same time she would also yell, “You have to think about others. What do you think everyone else needs? The world is not always about you.” At five or six years old, those statements seemed like contradictions, but as I grew up, I discovered the idea of “gray matter” or the fact that everything is not one way or another. My parents worked incredibly hard to “get me out” in the world by sending me to public school, private school, boarding school, putting me on swim teams, taking me to art classes, afterschool programs, music lessons and so on and so forth. And while their intentions were for me to become well rounded, they also wanted me to be placed in different communities with people of different socioeconomic status and backgrounds. As a child, I rendered these activities and experiences as “good” or “bad” depending on how I fit in each situation, but now, I see all of these as learning experiences that brought me to where I am now.

After listening to the TED talk about the dangers of a single story and reading about the dangers of damage-centered research I found myself reflecting upon my experiences from my teaching abroad in China this past summer.

For the TED talk, I agreed with a lot of what the speaker said. Even traveling around China for only two months I was able to see that there are a variety of different stories to be told of the Chinese people. There are vast differences between the urban dwellers and the people in the countryside of China. Thus it was easy for me to understand the dangers of a single story - how it create stereotypes and limits people's understanding of one another. I thoroughly enjoyed this talk because I felt it confirmed a lot of my thinking about how stereotypes get started and how people gain pre-convieved notions about others. It also confirmed my belief in the importance of seeing and experiencing things first-hand.   

Lemke said that spoken language falls before we have a chance to analyze it, but written language is forever.  I find it interesting the distinct difference made between spoken and written language. With spoken language more “mistakes” can be made because they are likely to be missed and forgotten about, only the main ideas will remain. On the other hand, written language has the ability to be analyzed again and again word for word. This seems to connect to the idea of how stories in Africa were once told compared to how they are told now. Before stories were all oral, they involved motions and emotions and were passed down through memory, but once the European colonizers arrived stories began to be written down. While now there is a “formal” way to write down the stories, what is lost from the oral traditions of the past? Telling a story from memory is a certain kind of literacy, it just seems to be less respected by the European world because it can not be analyzed or monitored in the same way as written stories can be. While written language is incredibly important what is really gained if the written and the spoken are completely different?

It's interesting being able to observe our classroom's dialogues from so many different perspectives. What we say in the classroom, what we post on Twitter, what people post in their Serendip blogs, and for those of us in the 360, what we discuss in our other classes and drawing connections between the three. Each medium brings out a different side to us. Those who may have difficulty speaking up in class may flourish through digital dialogue while others struggle with the barriers that technology presents. Through each form, we learn to process our thoughts and opinions in a new way, much like Lemke discusses when he talks about diverse literacies. Just how Riley's word came was French and didn't have quite the same meaning in English, using diverse mediums can create new understandings of concepts. Twitter forces us to make our thoughts concise and requires a very different type of language than the one we may use in class or even on Serendip. I was initially upset when I saw that Overbrook Elementary featured the Twitter as a means of encouraging the students to read but now I am beginning to realize that this generation has grown up with technology and that sites such as Twitter can serve as a gateway for students to encourage them to read and write, even if it only is in a 160 characters. The idea of using multiple mediums to gain new perspectives goes back to Adiche's The Danger of a Single Story, where she urges us to never make conclusions based on a single story.

Discussing language use particularly in the public education setting, I never feel fully comfortable with how I speak and my interaction with language within the classroom. This is relevant both for my method of speech in the classroom in college and also how I speak to students in the public school classrooms I work in. We all code-switch, speaking differently at work than to our friends than in the classroom. We learn in the classroom, as Lemke discusses, Standard English or “correct” or “proper” English as dictated by the dominant group in power and their normal speech patterns. Lemke pushes this concept to say that Standard English could be called Corporate English because not many if any people actually use this specific form of English in day to day life. In school students speak a variety of dialects of English, but are told that only is correct and are even graded on their ability to master Standard English. I struggle with speaking in a less formal way to students, which is something that I think puts myself and my students at ease, yet I worry about setting a “bad example” for later moments in which they are scrutinized over their method of speech. Working in almost 100% working-class African-American public schools, I constantly think about language and the way students use and interact with language in the classroom. I hear teachers make fun of and imitate students’ method of speech and constantly correct their students. I also see and feel the trust and respect students give to me when I speak in a form of English they feel more comfortable with.

Last week's readings resonated deeply with my constant vigilance for misrepresentations/misconceptions and flat-out misinformation. I am sensitive to this insofar as it applies to my own experience, idea of self and heritage - the catchall term for history, place, community, culture, experience, memories etc. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recounts the story of her own narrow-minded expectations upon arrival in Mexico, I recognized that moment when one's personal disdain for ignorance is abruptly challenged by one's own ignorance thus begging the question, am I a hypocrite? I've found that generally, one responds "no" and toys with becoming indignant about how others' lack of knowing is worse. I've born witness to this in my interactions with many people who do not identify as American. We can all indulge in stories similar to that of Adichie's roommate and yet we are rarely able to recognize that our own knowledge of another region of the world is as limited and often informed by stereotypes as perverse as any.

I am so excited to be taking this class this semester.  One of the things which really interested me about the class was the international perspective on literacy.  As we touched on in our last class, it often feels as if we focus on issues primary to the United States.  I find this in my sociology classes as well, that the major issues and topics are U.S. centric without an international perspective.  In many ways it reminds me of Chimamanda Achide’s concept of a “single story.”  I’m definitely not trying to say that we shouldn’t learn about issues in education or educational practices prevalent in the U.S. but especially as we become more dependent on digital literacy it’s important to know another story, a global story.  To unpack that statement a little bit, allow me to explain.  This class is relying heavily on what I would consider digital literacy.  We are using resources such as Twitter and these blogs, Google docs, e-mail – all of these things are part of our digital literacy.  Now, more and more people internationally are using these tools as well.  I have been fortunate enough to travel quite a bit and have noticed that it is increasingly easy to stay in touch with people I meet abroad through the means of Facebook, etc.  As difficult as it is for me to use Twitter and write a consistent blog, I do think that these are valuable tools which can really give us new perspectives on how education is changing and what education looks like outside of the U.S. 

When my small group started our discussion on how we define feminism I assumed that people would all have a similar definition, but I was wrong. We had a very hard time assigning a single definition of this word, and the more I thought about it I realized that feminism can have all different meanings depending on the person and context. Although I have read some feminist literature before and had brief conversations on feminism, I never really tried to think about the meaning of the word, and I’m very excited for what this class will bring me to think. Yes, I understand a basic definition of feminism, women being equal to men, but I want to learn more about the ways in which this goal was fought towards throughout history. Our group agreed that being a Bryn Mawr puts us in a bubble where I believe we have more respect for women because we see them succeed in all academic fields, and we are more defensive of each other for this. I feel that at Bryn Mawr students are much more supportive of a women’s choice to dress and act how she wants, and words like ‘slut’ are looked down upon. I really think this environment will make this material feel very relevant to my life, and I can’t wait to learn more about all the different meanings of feminism.   

I want to expand on a definition of literacy that I’ve been working on through this class and my Music Education class. @jrbacch tweeted “Music a form of literacy? Music notes themselves, crescendos, learning how to read music, etc? #BMCed250” and I responded “thinking of literacy as access to a way of connecting w/ppl, ex cultural literacy, tech literacy makes music fit” [into a definition of literacy].

I spend a lot of my free time working on music for my a cappella group--I teach songs to the group and arrange music for the group to learn. When I’m deciding who will sing which voice part on any particular song, as well as while I’m leading rehearsal, I think a lot about who can read music. In auditions for my group, we ask if the auditioner can read music, because it’s a valuable skill. Within the context of a cappella, if I ask “can she read?” I’m asking about whether a singer can read music. And it does feel that fundamental to me. It is possible to be in the group and succeed without being able to read music, but it requires that I take a different approach in my teaching. I have to refer to notes’ position within the measure rather than their duration and name (e.g., “the altos need to watch the second-to-last note in measure 85--it should be longer and higher” instead of “altos: in measure 85, you’re jumping up a third, and it’s a half note, so be sure to hold it out”).

Throughout this first week of classes and the 360, one book keeps coming to mind as I have read the readings. In Teaching the Postcolony, we read a speech by Ivan Illich called “To Hell with Good Intentions,” which was a commentary about white middle class Americans going to “help” other countries. While I was reading it, I wondered how to reconcile this power relationship between middle class Americans and the Mexican population that the Americans were trying to help. Illich suggested that Americans go to study and enjoy new cultures instead of trying to help. An example came to mind from the book The Help by Kathryn Stockett on how to somehow equalize these relationships. The book is about a white woman in Mississippi in the 1960s writing stories about African American maids by interviewing them. When the white woman, Skeeter, asks Minny, one of the African American maids, to tell her stories for this book, Minny has the same reaction as Illich. She does not understand why a white woman of power and standing would want to write about African American maids. Minny completely disregards her good intentions to change attitudes and does not believe she can help at all. However, throughout the book, Minny and Aibileen both become close with Skeeter as they work on the stories of the maids in Jackson, Mississippi. These women who seem so different by society’s standards become friends who love and respect each other.