Rule #2: A title

Rule #2: A master’s thesis requires a title

  

  

“Education as Protest”

Rule #1: A thesis

Rule #1: A master’s thesis requires a thesis statement.

I could have guessed when I picked up the “More Comprehensive” edition of Feminist Thought that I wasn’t making life any easier. I should have known that trying to define Ideology would only add fire to the flame. Then there was the time I tried to inculcate the infants of America with proletarian politics. And let us not forget the past six months of #BLACKLIVESMATTER. Really, the moment I hung this banner, I should have known this wasn’t going to be easy.

I could have easily predicted that choosing a thesis topic would be utterly and completely debilitating. So naturally, I put it off.

While others proclaimed their thesis statements to advisors and peers, I hid behind my copy of Marx’s Capital, pretending I hadn’t given up 15 pages into the heaviest book I owned.

I assured my advisor in nods and illusory emails that I was “making progress”, all the while I was rereading The Bell Jar for the fifteenth time and had spent ten hours debating whether or not I could find anything positive to say about education, philosophy or really anything that existed. ever. Somewhere in there I *may* have watched four seasons of The West Wing. Let’s call it political research.

Painstakingly as the immediacy of the situation comes to confront me, I have found potentiality in the intersection of all the things I hate most, the patriarchy, racism and capitalism. Oh what a joyous occasion! I don’t want to spoil anything, but the phrase “ideological state apparatus” comes up, so buckle your seatbelts, it’s gonna be one wild ride.

on writing anxiety

you see, it is rumored that there are people who have the ability to write. without hesitation. sentences scrawled across pages of leather bound notebooks, ideas typed away behind the glowing emblem of fruit.

people whose words come fully formed into being, whose entrance into the world is not inhibited by a second, third or fourth doubt. whose very existence is documented as their owners spill their form onto the page as if they had existed there all along. ideas transported from the internal monologue into the material world where they take on 26 distinct shapes in which others come to recognize them as brilliant! or deplorable! whose very shape reveals their essence and whose presence on a page introduces the possibility for communion. authors who write without the pause of reluctance, where one raises her pen and never allows pen to meet paper. where first words are not replaced by visits to a thesaurus and sentences do not disappear live without fear of annihilation. the existential moment where private speech becomes a known utterance. the translation from inward material to outward experience is seamless. translation as natural as the child’s first word on his tongue. hesitation has no role, the words have been playing on the tongue of the speaker since his birth. pen to paper, he writes.

Backer on The Distortion of Recitation

In his piece On Recitation, or The Second Distortion, David Backer describes the occurrence of the practice of referring to “recitation” as “discussion”. Backer calls this mislabeling a form of distortion, one which reflects the larger societal context of neoliberalism.

Backer begins by looking at recitation; as a process, recitation is most often cited as a process involving “facilitator initiation, participant response and facilitator evaluation” (IRE) (77). In this method, facilitators may speak freely on any topic, without objection of others and hold the attention of participants for the majority of the interaction (77-78). Backer describes this instructional practice as conservative, passive and undemanding for participants (78). While the efficacy of recitation is acknowledge, the political critique presented (through the work of Gutierrez and Larson) highlights the hegemonic and unequal nature of recitation; the language of recitation “protects the cultural capital of the dominant society through a hierarchical participation structure that forms rigid borders around activity” (79). The hegemonic position of a teacher in recitation inherently presents an unequal variety and sequence of turns (81) (this contrasted with the equal and discussion).

Backer uses studies found in a 1969 article by Hoetker and Alhbrand to present data surrounding the prevalence of recitation in classrooms; from the article we read findings such as:

• the majority of talking in classrooms, with both “good” and “poor” teachers, is done by teachers (82)
• Responses made by pupils remain alarmingly short (on average about 12 seconds) (82)
• leaders have been found to ask more than twice as many questions as the students (83)
• somewhere around 65% of teachers used the conventional procedure of teacher questioning (83)
• One study found that 90% of instruction involved zero discussion (85)

Despite studies resulting that recitation may be a poor methodological method, Backer observes that it remains the dominate form of educational interaction in US classrooms. At certain point in time, however, the word “discussion” began to refer to this practice (85). Backer engages Bahktinian circle author Valentin Volosinov to interpret this shift and it’s political and social implications.