Epiphany..

Response to:

Assignment J

Frans H. Doppen Teaching and Learning Multiple Perspectives: The Atomic Bomb (2000).

Melinda Fine “You Can’t Just Say The the Only Ones Who Can Speak Are Those Who Agree with Your Position”: Political Discourse in the Classroom (1993).

This week's reading really hit home...

In Dramaturgy in American Theatre, Susan Jonas writes,
"Theater could be a dazzling conduit of lofty aims:…Well rounded education that introduces students to a variety of different disciplines and fosters familiarity with a broad canon of ideas as well as critical and associative thinking…The ability to recognize and desire to seize the infinite opportunities to pursue knowledge"

Isn't this also what Doppen (paraphrazing Levstik) is begging for? A school history that no longer "ignores historical thinking by presenting unitary sanitzed version of what happened in the past?"

At the end of my undergraduate studies my colloquium maintained that if students were to become "dramaturgical thinkers" they would be able to enter a historical world.

Upon writing that statement, I believed that educators having students engage in Dramaturgical inquiry was the solution to "surface social studies" (social studies education that, simply tried to chronologize or "make sense of the past") I believed that dramaturgical inquiry was a way of looking at history through worlds. Examining characters and groups of people through the environment that surrpunded them learning what a macaroon tasted like or what the Tarantella looks like. ( references to A Doll's House)

Maybe I wasn't nuts... However, reading these articles made me realize I was missing one huge component
Empathy... what a novel idea!

My dramaturgical approach to social studies education wasn't any better than those already proposed! I was, in a more convoluted way, still subscribing to top-down information presentation, devoid of student opinion.

Fine's statment on Facing History, "guid[ing] students back and forth between an in-depth historical case study and reflection on the causes and consequences of present day prejudice, intolerance, violence and racism." made me realize that I should be a hell of a lot more conscious about blending my two passions, dramaturgical inquiry and teaching social justice issues. I should be consistantly be tapping into the push pull between modern psyche and canonized worlds. All with the goal of bringing-in an appalling large number of students who statistics show, "fail to see the relevance of the subject to their own lives." (Doppen).

Now...

I write briefly on The Cornell West Quote:

"The democratic idea (that we are all equal in the eyes of God) is one of the grand contributions of the age of Europe even given the imperial expansion, the colonial subjugation og Africa and Asia, the pernicious and vicious crimes against working people and people of color and so forth. So ambiguous a legacy means-- we have got to keep two ideas in our minds at the same time. The achievements as well as the downfalls. The grand contributions and the vicious crimes."

I think this dichotomy between man as good and man as bad perfectly examines the two distinct ways that people approach the teaching of social studies. I find that so rarely do teachers address both the "vicious crimes" WHILE paying tribute to "grand European contributions". This begs the question... can it be done?

I think both articles give it a go... but neither really succeeds at addressing the HOW to fuse the two. Pro and con lists? active debates? socratic seminars? constant linking of the past to the present? Cause and effect lists? 

I STILL think puppets.

ADDENDUM:

I have selected this post for two reasons. 

1) I did not complete Assignment L

2) As it was noted in the title the readings sparked a real turning point. 

I have actually retooled a few of the phrases in the text for my graduate school applications.