Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
Good/Bad
07 July 2004, 12:14 am
The following is lifted from my personal blog, which explains the relative lightness of tone, but the issues it describes will probably occupy me here for another entry or two.My mind has been passing back and forward across moral tundras today, not (regrettably for you) due to any particular quandaries or capers in my own daily round, but rather because I have been worrying away with my new arts students on what is proving to be something of an elephant of textual, contextual and cross-cultural investigation. The question at hand: is Phuong (in Graham Greene's The Quiet American) a Good Girl or a Bad Girl? So asked one of my Chinese students when I called for questions about what had been read so far.We worked today on the question and all the thorny assumptions implicit in its asking for over an hour and still the cries of "she a bad girl" came. My aim is not so much to change students' point of view (although my own sensibilities are clearly tweaked by the question) but rather to get them to see, by their own lights, the way in which their response to the character is conditioned by moral judgements that are external to the novel's world, and while they don't have to accept that world, that have to suspend just for a little while those crashingly reductive verdicts that demand of women complete sexual loyalty whatever the cost.
Pardon me for talking shop, but it's an interesting challenge, this one. I ended the class by asking if anyone had a ten dollar note (to which one student quipped, "I don't know what those look like; I'm too poor", which sounds mild enough but was very funny when said with a Japanese accent), and then, holding it aloft, invited them to tell me what they knew of Kate Sheppard, whose picture is featured thereon. I then claimed what I thought was correct, which was that she married her husband's best friend shortly after being widowed, but, checking my facts this evening, I see I have got that quite wrong. It was Elizabeth Watts Russell, later Elizabeth Creyke I was thinking of. Is it pedagogically unethical not to worry if truth fails in the service of a worthwhile point? The gasps at the thought that the woman who led the suffrage movement could also hop from one (dead) husband to another were audible in the corridor.
Experiment
05 July 2004, 9:26 pm
My Foundation Arts students are about to begin their cultural studies unit. This is the first time all of them will have studied in this field--indeed, many of them hadn't heard of the discipline until they turned up for my course.I've decided to build a class blog for this unit, since several of the topics we'll consider will be concerned with the gathering and display of cultures and the manipulation of information therein.
Not much to show for it at this stage, but come back to the site, called Particular Angles, in a week or two and see how we're getting on.
Returned.
05 July 2004, 7:54 pm
Pardon my silence this last week. I've been on sick leave, but am recovered now and back at the coal face, which is timely, since my February students are back and the programme is now firing on all cylinders.Staff jaws are already looking more tightly clenched, but I'm just glad I'm not lying in a dark room in a nauseous half-sleep.