I read all your comments with great interest and realized what all I had missed in preparing for my presentation on Monday. As I write now, I believe I am standing on a storehouse of information trying to augment and reinforce what has been covered in the past few weeks.

I think as teachers, we are constantly faced with the dilemma about what kind of cultural values we wish to pass on to our students. After all, students look up to us. We are to them what the Statue of Liberty is to the immigrants who come to New York. However, the question here is whether we as role models can stand the true test of time, or whether we will be swayed by the winds of reason and social expectation?

In his writing, Minister Mentor Lee highlighted the role of the teacher in shaping the nation of tomorrow. He  mentioned how the stability of the country can be disrupted by the lack of “care, the attention and the inculcation of good responses, good habits and good attitudes.” given to “the bottom layer of average boys and girls”.

Booth refers to the ethical problems that teachers like Elizabeth Anne Leonard ( as cited in Booth) encounter in becoming role models for their students to emulate, “How ... can I encourage them to interrogate the academy and its power structures and simultaneously enjoy the experience of becoming a creator, a thinker?... [I]f I'm changing students how do I change them in ways that I feel are most useful to them".

I feel that to connect to a student we need to understand their world view and find a common thread that links both the educator and the student. In the movie, “Dangerous Minds”, we see how the teacher makes an earnest attempt to fuel the imagination of her students and ultimately succeeds in drawing them out of their apathy.

A book I feel can possibly inspire students to think for themselves is the book - Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window by Japanese Television personality, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi.  
What I like about the book is the way in which it showcases the educational upbringing of a child in a nurturing environment. One particular incident is when Totto Chan is digging up the playground looking for her lost purse, her headmaster calmly tells her “You’ll put it all back when you’re finished, won’t you?”, instead of reprimanding her like an adult, “ What on earth are you doing!” I feel when students are allowed to make their own interpretations of the text within a loose framework; they are encouraged to grow more.

Culture - what for?

Hey everyone!

For Noel's sake, I thought i'd do a partial recap of our lesson on Monday. Brigit took us through many of the salient points and arguments in Michael Apple's wonderful article, and gave us a interesting example of an "ideologically-rigged" text in the form of a newspaper op-ed piece (aren't all ISA-produced texts ideologically rigged anyway?). Then she showed us (using a painting by Manet) how it was possible for the gifted and socially conscious artist to produce texts that were self-reflexive and reflective of the ways in which readers/audiences/viewers construct their own ideological biases in the act of interpretation. 

In the last part of our lesson, we extended the analysis further into our reading of Horace Miner's famous "anthropological" article on the Nacirema - a text that ingeniously conflates the discourses of science and art, fact and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, anthropology and literature, orientalism and post-colonialism, innocent wonder and cynical satire. My challenge at the end of it was: how can literature - and by extension, writers AND readers of literature - discover and apply the subversive/oppositional potentialities of Art? Is this our ethical responsibility - i.e. to read against the grain? To challenge hegemonic authority? To refuse complicity with the dominant culture? Or are we as EDUCATORS constrained to play our parts in this play of cultural assent and affirmation?

So here's the online task for this week (and hopefully, our blog will be a better place to talk freely about how we feel and think). Consider the words of Matthew Arnold (1869) in the article "Sweetness and Light" (which you read two weeks ago):

CULTURE "does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, - nourished, and not bound by them" (p. 226).

- Does Arnold have a valid point here? Or is he (blindly) on the side of "cultural domination"?

- If the best of literature is supposed to transmit "cultural literacy" (as E.D. Hirsch would have it), are we as good literature teachers not somehow complicit in the workings of cultural reproduction?

- Or can we, through our curriculum choices and pedagogical practices, be engaged in a process of cultural transformation? 

My Response to Rashmi's

If this sounds different to you that's because I edited it!


Like Rashmi, I was initially confused by the intentions of the writer. This made me wonder how readers of this report would know when and where to stop rejecting the words on the page (i.e. the 'narrative' as it is presented to them), and instead, begin to (re)build their own version of the story. When does this turning point occur and what are the potential signifiers (if any) that might "disrupt one's inclination to identify" with the anthropologist (Lewis 9), and instead, (re)construct an alternative narrative? The report  only becomes 'ironic' and/or 'parodic' when the reader (who is part of the 'discursive community') 'gets it'. The reader is thus complicit in the production of the 'alternative' narrative. Readers are therefore not just "produced as subjects by the texts they read" (Lewis 4), but they produce interpretations - this performative act is then a diachronic process that not only discloses the world they reside in but also produces the possibility of transformation. Parody and irony are then very powerful devices that facilitate this process within the space of a single narrative. 


Both Lewis and Booth emphasize the value of this performative act. For instance, Lewis argues that this recognition (of the 'limits of identification') leads to a  "creative reconstruction" that "addresses the social and political dimensions of the texts […] invit[ing] students to take pleasure in both the personal and the critical" (Lewis 9). Similarly, Booth in "The Ethics of Teaching Literature", suggests that teachers not only pick novels according to the needs of the students but also select novels with competing ideologies/systems in order to "inculcate the right kind of casuistry" (53). In both the Lewis's and Booth's examples, the writers highlight the "pleasure" (Lewis) and "excitement" (Booth) that comes with  'doing literature'. 'Doing literature' is thus addictive and fun - but is this a 'good' kind addiction? What are  the consequences of the 'possibility of transformation'? Parody, according to Dentith, "has the paradoxical effect of preserving the very text that it seeks to destroy" and this can create some "odd effects". While I'm not sure what Dentith means by "odd effects", the word 'effect' still suggests to me that it is, as I've mentioned before, 'productive' though obviously not in the 'positive' sense of the word. Similarly, Lewis's "creative reconstruction" (emphasis mine) may be both a 'positive' and 'negative' one, while Booth's does not go on to specify what this 'right' kind of casuistry may be (we know he does not mean the alternative definition of casuistry which is 'unsound reasoning') but there still remains the possibility of the production of moral paradigms that are not align with the moral values that most teachers hope to teach/reproduce. The irony it seems lies in the system itself - how can such processes (which some even claim to 'free'/'democratize' the individual) promote democratic values of "equality" and "justice" for all when we know for a fact that real democracy comes at the price of the freedoms of other members (and animals?) of society? How can (literature) education create the possibility for friendship and kindness (the equal kind based neither on the materiality of the bodies nor on 'universal values')? 

A response to " Body ritual among Nacirema"

I liked this piece because it was thought provoking and humorous. The anthropologist tries to understand  the rituals and culture  by living with a tribe. The author adopts a serious tone in describing the rituals of the so-called nacirema. On one level, it is amusing as we all know the author is trying to parody the rituals of the tribe. However, the tone used is quite matter of fact. At times, I was confused by the intention of the author as his tone was neutral and unbiased. In order to understand the piece, I tried to find out more about this tribe and realized that the author had deliberately corrupted or subverted words to mock the rituals of the Americans. E.g ospital without the 'H'.  Personally, I feel the author sees these urban rituals as part of the American  identity that cannot be totally ignored. In other words, these "exotic" rituals define and complete a tribe member's perception of life. 

The panoptic interaction order?

Discourse moves in the facilitation of a classroom discussion:

1.     establish norms (e.g. Grice’s maxims)

2.     invite participation

3.     compel participation (“cold calls”)

4.     evaluate participants’ comments

5.     wait for responses (“intuitively” assess appropriate wait time)

6.     probe for explanations, clarifications and elaborations

7.     clarify and summarize participants’ ideas

8.     repeat, highlight, or emphasize salient points

9.     make relevant and insightful links between participants’ comments

10.                         (re)direct and (re)distribute turn-taking

11.                        respond and participate in ways that model quality of participation

12.                        banter; insert appropriate witticisms

13.                        promote self-forgetful / unself-conscious participation

14.                        maintain lively pace of conversation, adroitly pacing students’ interactions