Needless to say that being Brazil’s neighbors Freirean pedagogy is common currency in Argentina. But I absolutely agree with George: coordinate means and ends within it is a tricky issue. When reading about radical teachers in the section “Who is to be liberated from what?” I thought about my position here in the US as a teacher and my past experiences as a teacher. When teaching in Argentina, I worked in really poor areas, where some of my students were sharing a bed with a sibling due to lack of resources, shootings were everyday reality, and food was many times provided only by the school. I thought my position was similar to the one that George describes. I did learn a lot working in these areas. Sometimes I think that is more what I learnt than what I taught. On the other hand, here in the US, many times I am the one who is in a lower social position. And not only because I make less money than most of the students in my class, but also because I lack many other resources, including cultural ones. On the other hand, there is something that positions me in a different space and that is the fact that I am not American and I am here to study. I think that all these things have to influence my teaching and I think that swimming among books all the time in my PhD studies many times sets me away from the world. The thought that kept on coming to my head and it keeps on coming every time I hear, read, or try to profess a critical pedagogy is that one thing is the pedagogy and the other is classroom practice. Many pedagogies sound great but when it comes to apply it in the classroom teachers find themselves in not one but many crossroads. I do think, though, that informed decisions are better than non-informed ones. And that’s why many times I think that the phrase: “to know it’s to hurt” holds a lot of true. Because the more we know the more conscious we became and the more we have to acknowledge that sometimes reality overwhelms us and that there are many things that we could have controlled and we did not. There is a good thing in all this: we learn from our errors. These are some of the more than two hundred teenagers that taught me so much in Argentina:
George and Trimbur text got me absolutely lost. I guess this is in part because it establishes are really high-context dialogue with many authors and trends in the composition field. In addition, in the section “Connections to composition”, where the authors start to define how British cultural studies were connected to the composition field, I felt that they were using the term “cultural studies” as an umbrella term, that included many “trends” (as the authors call it). Reading the trends that were included in cultural studies I felt that everything was included. Leaving aside the cognitivists, the author included almost every movement that we had analyzed in class. At the same time, got really lost because I felt the authors were bouncing between defining pedagogies in the composition classroom, theories in the composition field, and content of the composition classroom. The three aforementioned elements are, in my opinion, interrelated but are not homologous. One more thing that I’d like to mention is that it was hard for me to see a straightforward relationship between the cultural theories outlined at the beginning of the chapter and the composition classroom. Again, I guess this is due to my lack of knowledge, but I would have liked to have a little more contextual information.
