Transformative Pedagogy

And so, it seems to me, storytelling can be an act of survival. The practice of storytelling begins in the day-to-day minutiae of one’s own life. Because we are meaning-making machines, we translate our experiences into potent narratives. We tell stories to make sense of our experiences. Through this act of translation, we develop opinions and assumptions about how things are. The human impulse to tell one’s own story is one of the basic human rights and freedoms in democratic societies. Speaking effectively, and communicatively, whether onstage, in poetry, in a book or in conversation, can free one from the prison of the past. Speaking a story can be an act of letting in light.

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

Lisa Diedrich in Treatments:

“According to Frank, the modern experience of illness is substantively different from the postmodern experience of illness. Frank identifies Talcott Parsons as the preeminent theorist of the modern experience of illness, an experience characterized by the patient’s assumption of what Parsons identified as the ‘sick role,’ which required an absolute surrender to the care of a physician and the institutional structures of medicine. Partly because  of the shift in the twentieth century from acute to chronic illnesses (thanks, of course, in no small part to the successes of modern medicine), the experience of illness has shifted as well. Formerly patients generally either got better or died; now, however, patients are often neither fully cured of nor dead from their illnesses, but, rather are in and out of remission. The body remains haunted by illness and its threat; the person is neither fully healthy nor precisely ill; they are somewhere in between. Frank maintains that in postmodern times there are many people, including himself, who occupy this liminal position between health and illness: thus, in the late-twentieth-century West, we live in what Frank calls a ‘remission society.’ In a 'remission society’ the boundaries between health and illness are permanently disrupted, thereby challenging the dichotomous formulation of health as the norm and illness as that which deviates from the norm.”

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically-minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past — properly handled — is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need techno-autistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

A study published last year in Psychological Science showed that students who write out notes longhand remember conceptual information better than those who take notes on a computer. “Whereas taking more notes can be beneficial,” the article’s abstract reported, “laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”

Do you know what percentage of children’s books feature boys? Twice as many as those that feature girl protagonists. In the most comprehensive study of children’s literature during a period of 100 years, researchers recently found that: * 57% of children’s books published each year have male protagonists, versus 31% female. * In popular children’s books featuring animated animals, 100% of them have male characters, but only 33% have female characters. *The average number of books featuring male characters in the title of the book is 36.5% versus 17.5% for female characters. It’s not just the quantity, but the quality as well. Female characters, as in movies, are often marginalized, stereotyped, or one-dimensional. For example, in Peter Pan, Wendy is a stick-in-the-mud mother figure, and Tiger Lily is a jealous exotic. The animated books featuring animals are particularly subtle. Think about Winnie the Pooh—Kanga is the only female character, and she’s definitely not one of the gang.

Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in the story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-conscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.

[C]ritical pedagogy illuminates how classroom learning embodies selective values, is entangled with relations of power, entails judgments about what knowledge counts, legitimates specific social relations, defines agency in particular ways, and always presupposes a particular notion of the future.

A printmaker I know showed me that if you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a sheet of white paper, you will see it, for a moment, as a violet….When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be the purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both.

Every novelist’s literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy—it’s always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

We shouldn’t be a voice for all Asians. We are such a varied group that there’s no one show that can be like, “This is what Asian America looks like!” But we’re given that burden because we’re so rarely represented. If you see Tina Fey on television, you’re not like, “All white women are like Tina Fey.” Yet people are like, “Oh, Jessica Huang’s not like my mother, but this show is supposed to be about Asians, so shouldn’t she be like my mother?” I understand the burden, because the history of our representation on TV is very sparse. But we’d be doing a disservice to the people who are worried about that by watering it down instead of trying to be specific. Specificity is what makes good storytelling, and good storytelling is what makes money, and making money is then what encourages new producers to invest in different stories about Asians.

I have a holistic view of the educative process. The universe is one … Instead of thinking that you put pieces together that will add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they are already together and you try to keep them from destroying life by segmenting it, over-organizing and dehumanizing it… The educative process must be organic, and not an assortment of unrelated methods and ideas.