personal responses: how was it for you?

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> Terrance,
> 
> Yes, there's nothing wrong with readers responding any way they can. It's
> better than no response at all, which is often the problem. Students
> (probably of all ages - I teach pre-university) don't know what to say and
> feel intimidated. What intimidates is the notion that they have to be
> 'right' and it doesn't matter what you tell them about there being 'no right
> answers' etc. 



so much depends 
   upon 
 a red wheel 
  barrow 
 glazed with rain 
      water 
 beside the white 
   chickens 

What does this poem mean? 

Silence

Well boys and girls, what Williams is saying....

http://educ.queensu.ca/~russellt/howteach/holt.htm

Practically everything we do in school tends to make children
answer-centered. In
the first place, right answers pay off. Schools are a kind of temple of
worship for
'right answers,' and the way to get ahead is to lay plenty of them on
the altar.





But there are hundreds of reasons why students may not respond. 
There are cultural reasons. There is gender. Getting students to
participate is also 
a power struggle.  Once students get passed the traditional power
struggle it's often a matter of promoting equity. 

Ira Shor,  When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical
Pedagogy.
Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1996. 

A wonderful book on the power struggle in traditional education.  Why do
students sit way in the back of the class?  

What can you do if you find yourself having a conversation with one or
two students?  What if you have students from one culture where speaking
in the class is discouraged and other students from a culture where the
students are encouraged to speak their minds?  

What can you do when the male students dominate the class? 






The education system is designed to measure, often very
> mechanistically, and then exclude the majority from further participation
> (another glib over-simplification, I know, and I dare say someone will now
> accuse me of peddling cheap leftist propaganda): this includes prescribing
> what to read and how you'll read it. 

Alternative assessment? 





The cannon that kills? 






Teachers of literature, often, cannot
> be bothered to engage with critical theory; they promote personal response
> on that basis, which is where I was coming from originally. This, I suppose,
> is what I consider dishonest because self-serving. Students might deliver
> imaginative readings against the grain; such analyses might be considered
> 'interesting' or dismissed as 'irrelevant'.

I think an extreme subjectivism has little value. Moby-Dick, I like to
say, is not about my mother and her little black cat. 


> 
> Apologies now - I haven't read Huck Finn in too long, and I always thought
> Puddnhead Wilson was better, anyway.

In 1982-83, Susie Guillory Phipps unsuccessfully sued the Louisiana
Bureau of
Vital Records to change her racial classification from black to white.
The
descendant of an eighteenth-century white planter and a black slave,
Phipps was
designated as "black" in her birth certificate in accordance with a 1970
state law
which declared anyone with at least one-thirty-second "Negro blood" to
be black.
The legal battle raised intriguing questions about the concept of race,
its meaning in
contemporary society, and its use (and abuse) in public policy. 

http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/Omi-Winant.html