Professor Zero tagged me with the Passion Quilt meme. What is an image of what I am most passionate that my students learn?
Change your perspective.
The image is from the Upside Down Map page, which reminds us that "it needn't be a Eurocentric world."
What other ways can we change our ideas about who we are in relation to others? What kind of difference can we make if we listen to the stories other people are telling us about the way they see themselves in the world? My first teaching experiences were language instruction--French and Spanish. The first literature class I was able to teach in English was about women's autobiographies. Since then I've gone on to teach about the literatures and cultures of many regions of the world, but my hope as a teacher is always to have students make a connection to their own lives, so that they might see that the way things are is not necessarily the way things have to be. My most recent "teaching" is not in the classroom, but as a member (an ally) of the Transgender Commission where I work, because we can't teach and learn if we do not feel safe and welcomed. When some students came to me to asking for help in working to make the bathrooms more safe for them, as people who were assaulted because their gender presentation did not match the expectations of people they met in the bathrooms, I had to do some learning so that I could be a more effective ally.
Do you want to tag yourself? I am tagging Gugeo and Thinkery, for now.
Here are the guidelines:
+Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
+Give your picture a short title.
+Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.”
+Link back to this blog entry.
+tag five other educator-type blogs.
This post appears to be the origin of the meme: Miguel Guhlin.
There is a Flickr Passion Quilt pool.
You can see some of the other Passion Quilt images here.
Posts
4 comments:
Eek! I've always wanted to be memed! I'll have to give it some thought.
I might have come up with the upside-down map myself. It was an eye-opener to me too--not just in getting past Eurocentrism, but in getting past the idea that there is some sort of natural "up" and "down," whereas in fact, there is no such thing in outer space.
Talk about a blow to perspective!
One of the scientific criticisms of Star Trek (and other such shows) is that when two starships meet in space, they are always oriented in the same direction (both facing "up"), which they really wouldn't be, at least not usually.
Same here, this is my first tag! If the meme had asked for a text, I would have posted Grace Paley's "Midrash on Happiness." I'll have to do a post on that soon.
Oh, that was fun: I just posted my passion quilt!
Thanks!
So, to return the favor: consider yourself tagged to post a favorite text!
(I don't know that Paley one.)
Hmmm... a meme should have a bit more instruction than that, so you can design one yourself to fit what you want to post, eh?
I had a realization about this this semester: in gen ed courses with various authors, some of this, some of that, put the Black author first.
In these classes I've learned long since that it works well to put Xican@ / US Latin@ last - it wraps things up well and students get interested in it even when tired at the end of the semester. But my unconscious Eurocentric tic is to put some Euro or white type first, and usually a man as well - that unmarked category. This time I put the Black author first, but not for perspective-changing reasons ... the reasons were more mundane, having to do with picking something long enough to last until Labor Day
and short enough to finish by then.
But this reframed the discourse of the class because it foregrounded certain kinds of questions right off and decentered the Euro- perspective ... everything ended up referring back to that first book, and engaged the students far more interestingly. So: perspective shift, yes!
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