Sunday, July 25, 2010

EReaders, critical pedagogy and no fun.

Here's an interesting article on the various e-readers available on the market--interestingly, the IPad has apps to read books from both the Kindle and the Nook stores. Also, for those interested in trying them out first, Target is going to start selling the Kindle in stores.

I've spent most of the last week not reading anything terrible interesting, mostly focusing on critical pedagogy research. I read the aforementioned Stanley Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time, read Kompel's Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, most of Pat Bizzell's Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, and of course, the book that started it all, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Still not convinced that this is a good method. It presupposes that Marxist/leftist ideology is correct without investigating the dominant discourses behind it (oddly enough), it was meant for liberating the oppressed in Third World countries, and is often abused in practice (I speak from experience as one of the abused). It also seems strange to me to be using it in the American classroom, where to some extent, oppression really isn't an issue. I'm not saying that dominant discourses aren't being reproduced, etc. I'm saying that the very fact that our students live in the United States--and the fact that somehow or another, they are attending an institution of higher learning--

Well, I don't know what I'm saying. I'm still trying to work all this out in a way that's not going to sound like a right-wing diatribe, because that's not what I'm going for. Despite the fact that my fiance claims I'm a closet conservative, I think I'm closer to being a moderate. But I don't like the assumption that seems to be pervading a lot of this that conservatives are wholly reactionary and are committed to a dominant discourse that disenfranchises others. I don't think that's the goal of conservatives at all. And of course, anything I come up with is going to be drastically oversimplifying the situation. All this is simply my take on it, and I'm not even real sure of that.

So, like I said, no fun. Also, I'm now wondering, how long can pizza stay in the fridge? cause I just took a bite of mine and it's kinda nasty. *frowns*

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