25 October, Intersectionality

Fascinating, isn't it, that when a transgendered student presents with emotional challenges that inhibit learning we describe that student as distressed and offer that student counselling. When a black student presents with emotional challenges that inhibit learning we describe that student as difficult and threaten them with failure or expulsion. The self-declared mental health of each student does not really seem to be taken into account.

Responses (knee jerk) to Hartley's case study "intersection, race and the white teacher"

--ideas of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you suggest that all (loose category) students tend to (behaviour), students will site themselves within or attempt to fight against it, often causing it to happen. E.g. being known for thinking "all black students are difficult to teach" will reasonably prompt black students to find learning from you to be problematic. Is this the same as noting that "puppeteers tend to be emotionally vulnerable artists who live on narrow boats or in warehouses"?

I checked my privilege on Buzzfeed's privilege-checker. Interesting. If I ignored the aspects of my sexuality and religion that are non-binary but not particularly troubling, it declared me 'quite' privileged. If I acknowledged those aspects of myself even though they are irrelevant in my community (bisexual but happily married to a man who knows and isn't bothered by it. Atheist in a broadly atheist society. Overweight but strong in a workplace that values that. Had roommates because I chose to move to an expensive, crowded city.) it said I was not privileged. I am privileged, but the questions are built for persons of a specific age and location that defines these struggles differently. Particularly when it comes to sexuality. Had I been more assertive at a younger age maybe I would have had the conflicts and responses listed. Had I mentioned that I was attracted to girls maybe someone in my community would have intervened, or threatened or assaulted me. I didn't, specifically because I didn't want the attention, and I didn't want to put myself at unnecessary risk. The fun part about being bisexual is that you can behave like a garden-variety hetero without feeling like you're pretending. You can participate in the prescribed milestones without raising eyebrows. And deep down, you assume everyone is actually exactly like yourself. (Because they totally are.)

I think where Hartley struggles in her feedback is a place where we all struggle in art and acadaemia: the relationship between artist and art. Jamie the student is angry, and is trying to communicate her anger and pain through her dissertation. Can an expression of anger in the form of poetry constitute a dissertation? If so, can this dissertation stand scrutiny of its own accord, or does the reader need to understand Jamie's background in order for it to make sense?  What if you Do include a comprehensive biography of the artist in the back? Or at least, footnote the relevant aspects of her life and thinking? Is the dissertation research that contributes to the corpus of knowledge in the field?  Or was Hartley effectively being bullied into allowing acceptance of a non-researched expression of opinion as a degree-level dissertation? Is there is an argument for lived experience to be permitted to supplant published scholarship as a basis for research?

Ronit and her hand. Was it scholarship? Was it a dissertation? Was it even art? Or was it an attempt to use a project as therapy? Could she have benefited more from therapy? What is our role as teachers and facilitators of learning when a student is clearly not even attempting to study, but is just working a wound in front of us and calling it scholarship? Is it discrimination to refuse a student from a course who is not only distinctly mentally unwell, but who intends fully to explore the extents of their mental health as their research, in ways that put herself and potentially others at risk of physical harm?

Consider this blog. I as writer occasionally include personal information to back up or situate my thinking. I'm careful to justify my thinking either through the background information given or to justify it through a visible logical progression. If x then y. While (as is the case with all deductive logic) it is possible for my starting set of information (x) to be deeply flawed, as long as y responds to x properly, it is an argument. (I am a frog, and frogs are green. Therefore, I'm green. I am not a frog, and not all frogs are green, but aside from that the argument is water-tight.) In my writing I seek to consider the point of consideration itself, and only it. While of course my own lived experience is going to influence how I engage with that point or concept (or if I even choose to engage with it at all) and will undoubtedly influence my choice of supporting data as I try to justify my opinion of the concept, the whole discussion--question, answer and supporting data--should be present in the document. You shouldn't need to know me for it to make some form of sense. I can't just Be Angry. I need to communicate at whom or what I am angry, why this angers me, and what would be better in this situation. For instance: I am angry at Border Control for imposing new, expensive, discriminatory and deliberately harmful family immigration laws with the stated goal of reducing net migration. I am angry because they negatively impact me in an unfair way, and I am helpless to fight it because if I do I will be deported. A better solution would be to have laws that conformed to standard EU regulations about immigration.

Responses to The Labelling of African-American Boys in Special Education

Dude, lady. You just silenced a young man, who has just declared that it is his one goal to be heard, by summarising his statement and skipping to the end. I sincerely doubt that all those ellipses are pauses in Jessie's narrative--they're spots where you left out what he said. He's finally got a chance to be heard and all you're doing is listening for the thematic elements to support the gist of your article. You're not helping him, you have no intention of helping him, you're just using him to illustrate your frankly axiomatic points!  You're like one of those National Geographic photographers who stands by to document it while a village is set on fire or a lion eats a starving four year old. You've come in, prodded the poor kid until he talked to you, gotten him good and pissed off, taken your notes and left when you were confident you had enough AAVE-spiced text to make it sound genuine. You've just met a 16-year old who has been trapped in a spite-driven reduced education programme since the second grade, who appears to be at least as articulate as any other teenager in spite of this, and all you can think to do is construct a narrative to suggest that his internal and external senses of identity are influenced by these facts? Why not start a fucking march? Lobby the school board to have the special education programme audited? Do something? ALSO, you tried to use Jessie's testimony to illustrate the concerning points from the outset, that black boys are passive and apathetic, but in antagonising the lad you've demonstrated that he is neither of these things. He's upset, he knows he's smarter than his academic level, and because his lessons lack challenge for him he occupies his mind with other things, like picking fights with his teachers. There is nothing passive, apathetic or broken about him.