The reader is introduced to a term coined and repeated by Pratt throughout the piece, "contact zones." She uses this term "to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today" (Pratt 584). Contact zones were not necessarily a positive interaction because these social interactions usually came out of ignorance resulting into an obdurate conflict. Dubois The Negro in the United States and Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation, and Pratt’s very own Arts of the Contact Zone correlate through Pratt’s terminology of contact zone, autoethnographic texts, and ethnographic texts. These texts are written in different perspectives but about the contradictory topic of oppression of cultures or misinformaty. Many quandaries have been introduced in the past but neither alone is correct because it is bias. One must incorporate both perspective of history in order to get the real picture.
Mary Louise Pratt discusses in The Arts of the Contact Zone, that the rulers attempt to unify the world in one person’s or group’s perspective. She goes on to talk about how Travel Writing was just based on Europe’s perspective of the rest of the world, and they wanted to produce these essays under their own influences. One essay argues that travel writing “didn’t report on Africa or South America; it produced places that could be thought of as barren, empty, undeveloped, inconceivable, needful of European influences and control, ready to serve European industrial, intellectual, and commercial interests” (Pratt 498). The Europeans thought they had to civilize these plac...
... middle of paper ...
...tic animal would be better than being a slave; at least animals are incapable of feeling emotions.
Pratt discusses how the student Manuel felt this his opinion had no value; the world was shown from only the teacher’s perspective. However, are teachers supposed to feel like it is their duty to “eliminate such things [discourse, parody, resistance, critique] and unify the social world?” (509). Some people believe that unifying all the perspectives into one idea is the best way for a community to get along. For example, teachers have their own language in a classroom setting; the “teacher pupil language”. This particular language “tends to be described almost entirely from the point of view of the teacher and teaching, not from the point of view of pupils and pupiling” (508). If teachers do not recognize something, it does not exist in the world of the student.
Before entering into the main body of his writing, Allen describes to readers the nature of the “semicolony”, domestic colonialism, and neocolonialism ideas to which he refers to throughout the bulk of his book. Priming the reader for his coming argument, Allen introduces these concepts and how they fit into the white imperialist regime, and how the very nature of this system is designed to exploit the native population (in this case, transplanted native population). He also describes the “illusion” of black political influence, and the ineffectiveness (or for the purposes of the white power structure, extreme effectiveness) of a black “elite”, composed of middle and upper class black Americans.
Millions of people of all nationalities came to America during the twentieth century with the hope of finding a new and better life for themselves. These immigrants were lured by the thought of obtaining the American Dream--"life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" in the "land of opportunity." Unfortunately, few immigrants were actually successful in achieving the dream. Most were faced with hardship and discrimination, instead of the expected equality and freedom. The dire living conditions hampered their ability to pursue "happiness" and created what W.E.B. Dubois called "the veil," which refers to the fabric of racism that separates whites from other ethnicities and causes non-whites to see themselves under the distortion of a discriminative society. Thus, the idealized images of America were shattered by a grim reality. The harsh realities that these immigrants found are depicted in literary works such as The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, America is in the Heart, and ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. Through the protagonist of the novels, the authors convey the dispiriting side of the America that the immigrants unknowingly fell into.
A student and teacher should be able to openly communicate or discuss the content and/or topic in class. To begin the educating process, one must set the correct tone and setting for it. Education is supposed to be an “experience”. An experience is supposed to engage all that are involved in it. “That every reader, everyone engaged in any teaching or learning practice, explicitly wonders about his or her work as teacher or pupil, in mathematics, history, biology, or grammar classes, is of little importance. That as teacher or pupil in the experience of the critical instruction in content that all explicitly engage a “reading of the world” that would be of a political nature, is not of the highest necessity” (Freire 49). ...
He believed children had innate skills that required space for growth and refinement, without the need for rigid structure. In his ruminations he proposed teachers and students venture into nature allowing children to explore their interests and freely ask questions of the instructor. This model emphasized that it is not best practice to have a teacher inflict their ideas on a student (Hergenhahn & Henley, 2014). I do think it is important for teachers to be open in permitting students to form their own opinions because personal potential can be suffocated
When I first decided to be a teacher I had many thoughts and opinions about teaching and education. Some of my thoughts and opinions have stayed them same; however, many have changed from the discussions and readings in LL ED 411 and 480. When I first decided that I wanted to be a teacher I thought that most students learned in the same manner. I also thought that the teacher should have power over the classroom. Likewise, I thought that technology should not be used in the classroom--except to type papers. I now know that there is not much truth to my ideas and thoughts because my thoughts were shaped only from my experiences. My experiences are narrow because they were shaped from the problems in schools and the old ideas that teachers still have. Now that I have learned the other sides to these problems I know that my thoughts about teaching and education are not fully developed.
Appearing in the 1903, The Souls of Black folk had emerged, a collection of 14 proses, written by one of the single most intellectual blacks in America, W. E.B. DuBois (Oxford Companion). This dynamic collection of essays reflect on African American history, sociology, religion, politics, and music. DuBois begins saying “The problem of the 20th century is the color line (5). This quote pronounces DuBois bases for his collection, that is being different form the others (Whites) makes you feel like you are being shut out from their world by a vast veil; hence the color line(8). On the other had we have Birth of a Nation, which comes out later in 1915 (TCM). Ironically it becomes the top selling film in White America during that time, but degrades everything that DuBois and another activist stood for. While DuBois hopes to educate White and Black America on their boundaries, the color line, the film’s director, D.W. Griffith, undermines these ideas. Defiling images of African Americans by distorting the perception of Blacks using stereotypical examples such as the mammies, mulattos, and bucks, Griffith tries to justify that blacks were inferior to Whites. In spite of the many controversies that are expressed in the film, it had become a known as the most innovative, American Epics and was a top seller during its time because of Griffith’s technical breakthrough and format. While comparing and contrasting these two pieces I hope to reveal to you this why this ‘double consciousness’ exist, even todays society as a result of these stereotypes displayed in “The Birth of a Nation.”
Starting with the publication of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Europe thought of itself as a supremely rational people who could ultimately conquer the world around them with nothing more than the vaulting powers of their own reason. Indeed, this attitude would dominate European thought for centuries. Working under this ethos, Europe built up a massive colonial empire and realized the dream that was global hegemony. In many tangible ways, the road to this massive global empire was paved by European science in the form of the naturalist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most early expeditions to foreign continents were conducted in the hopes of exhaustively classifying local flora and fauna, though the purely scientific nature of these trips is often called into question. Regardless of their initial motivation however, these naturalists fanned out across the globe, their trusty European reason in hand and a confident air of rational superiority about them. Each scientist would, once his journeys were complete, send back to Europe his semi-factual, semi-adventurous musings. Over time the greater majority of these works built up to become the genre of ‘travel writing.’ A modern scholar may well be inclined to look back on these works as evidence of the racism and egocentrism that defined the European consciousness at this period in history, as the works themselves evidenced a strong belief in the prevailing stereotypes of the time. Focusing specifically on European imperialism, Mary Louise Pratt notes how the psychological effects of travel writing on the European populace contributed to the later acceptance of imperial policies. While accur...
W.E.B Dubois is recognized as one of America’s most prolific scholars. He was the first African American to receive a Ph. d from Harvard as well as the first to complete a through scientific study of Black life in America in 1899. Today, Dubois’s The Philadelphia Negro is regarded as one of the earliest examples of American sociology’s transition from being purely philosophical discipline to one that included the use of quantitative data. In the first chapter of his 1903 book Souls of Black Folk, Dubois sought answer the existential question of his time, what does it mean to be Black in America at the turn of the century? In Double-Consciousness and the Veil, Dubois asserts that the American Negro navigates society while experiencing an internal battle. Described as “two warring ideals in one dark body”, Dubois’s double consciousness asserts that the Black American struggles with being a person of African descent born in America but has to reconcile their existence within a hostile environment that doesn’t guarantee his/her full humanity. At the time Souls of Black Folk was written, Black people had been emancipated from slavery for forty years and
Assuming that the best way to develop reasoning and judgement is by interaction with those whose views differ from yours – traditional schooling defeats that purpose of education altogether. Let us see how. We have already addressed the idea that children are not all the same. We cannot have a classroom with 20 children and all of whom can cope with the teacher. With the definition of classroom in the previous chapter kept in mind, let us try to remember what it is like to be in the classroom. Since the environment is so teacher-centric, the child remains unable to speak through the lesson till the teacher allows them to. Usually by the end of the lesson, the child would have forgotten the doubt it had in mind.
“Hegemonic assumptions are assumptions that we think are in our own best interests but that actually work against us in the long term “Teacher S. Brookfield (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. University of Michigan: Jossey-bass. P 203. In this report I am going to describe one of my hegemonic assumptions to do with the issue of classroom management. I will reflect on the issue from my learning inside the classroom and critically reflect using Brookfield’s four lenses my learner autobiography, the student’ perspective, peers/ colleagues perspective and theoretical literature. In this essay, I will identify my hegemonic assumption; explore why the assumption is hegemonic, how this assumption came to my attention in and prior to TP
In her article entitled Teaching to Transgress, Bells Hooks effectively speaks to her readers by using the rhetorical strategy of personal narrative, argumentation, and exemplification, in order to call for a “renewal” (29) of teaching method called “engaged pedagogy” (35). By this Hooks means teachers should not merely call on students to participate in class discussion, but also call themselves to be “vulnerable” (49), taking the risk of coupling their points of view, or “confessional narratives” (49), with that of their students, defusing an image of an “all-knowing” (49) teaching authority as a result. Though Hooks’s theory is clear, and her methods of argumentation and exemplification introduce her pedagogical theory, her method of personal narrative requires that the reader be able to relate to her daunting experiences. As a result, readers who have had different experiences to those of Hooks’s might miss her point because they cannot relate to her.
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Dubois is a influential work in African American literature and is an American classic. In this book Dubois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." His concepts of life behind the veil of race and the resulting "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," have become touchstones for thinking about race in America. In addition to these lasting concepts, Souls offers an evaluation of the progress of the races and the possibilities for future progress as the nation entered the twentieth century.
Paton is able to convey the idea of racial injustice and tension thoroughly throughout the novel as he writes about the tragedy of “Christian reconciliation” of the races in the face of almost unforgivable sin in which the whites treat the blacks unjustly and in return the blacks create chaos leaving both sides uneasy with one another. The whites push the natives down because they do no want to pay or educate them, for they fear “ a better-paid labor will also read more, think more, ask more, and will not be conten...
In “What’s Wrong with Schools,” Casey Banas uses the experiences of Ellen Glanz, a high school social studies teacher to express how different students and teachers feel about schooling. Ellen Glanz chooses to improve her teaching by pretending to be a student and sitting in on several classes and what she finds in the typical classroom includes students doing the bare minimum, disinterest, cheating, detachment, the list goes on and on. I agree with Ellen Glanz in that this separation between educators and students causes a great amount of passivity. Unfortunately, these types of circumstances in classroom settings are becoming more and more typical.
Jaime Escalante, a great educator, once said, “The teacher gives us the desire to learn, the desire to be Somebody.” As a teacher, my goal will be to show students that each of them can be whatever they want to be, and not only are they capable of being good at what they do, they can be the best. To reach this goal, I must be an effective teacher, which I believe can best be accomplished by teaching in a way that is comfortable for me. Therefore, I will not base my classroom around one single philosophy; I am going to seek comfort by utilizing certain aspects of different educational philosophies, namely essentialism, existentialism, progressivism, and social reconstructionism.