A Public-Sphere Awareness Site
Dear Habermas
WEBSITE RestructuringAll underlines represent HOT LINKS. Just click on them.
Dear Habermas Sites:
University of Wisconsin, Parkside (UWP)
This is a first draft of our permissions page. (July 4, 2011) We are committed to our students and to the power of education to broaden our minds and to lead to the self-reliance and competence each of us has potentially. We are dismayed by the competitiveness of students against one another, of the grading curve that makes unwarranted assumptions about the range of plausible student performance, of the continuation of the aggressive competitiveness in ranking students by grades, of the dependence of grades so largely on "testing," and of employment based largely on those grades. (1)
We are dismayed even further by the extent to which we have lost human empathy with those unavoidable tragedies that limit access to learning for some of us.
“All images at this site are licensed under a Creative Commons [insert description] 3.0 license.” I have to think on this. Most of the images are by jeanne. Those are the ones to which you have access. If you're not sure, please e-mail either jeanne or Susan at e-mail addresses given above. Be sure to give us the file URL of the image you want to use. It will end in ".htm". As part of restructuring the site, we're going back over the almost 14 years it's been up; but that's going to take a while. jeanne"
I have a thirty year history of giving exhibits and performances ( The Stanley Mosk Undergraduate Moot Court) that filled the University auditorium with a largely local audiencee. We have also done Web exhibits. These were all part of our commitment to public-sphere awareness and replication. Our communities at all levels, local, regional, national, and corporate need such praxis in civic discourse.
Our universities afforded us the occasion for expanding our teaching into the "town," long before social media came onto the horizon. Our plans with restructuring the site are to actually carry the teaching into the community, while encouraging "each one teach one." To that end I joined Facebook. We hope that the social media will afford us even greater opportunity to disseminate and replicate our work.
As I complete the restructuring of the site, I will include instructions, at least minimally, for replicaton and dissemination of these activities. Other universities have already completed replications:
Our students dress as for court, and one of the Compton judges thanked me for the fact that I did dress formally. I didn't think it was fair to our students, who were mostly inner city, for that faculty member to participate any longer. So I complained to the Dean who had invited him to participate and never did that again. It left a very bad taste in my mouth, but I do believe that there are many faculty there who would have created a very different collaboration. Please add your own strengths, and build on what we have started.
By the way, my legal opinion is that the Dean and his friend who gave permission to their Long Beach friend to participate in our college final rounds had absolutely no right to do such a thing. To all intents and purposes, Moot Court was technically my class. I had a grant to pay the studio costs, and I had a clear right to the materials I used, having written them myself, or in collaboration with some of my better students.
I'd be happy to exchange materials and all my teaching stuff. But I do expect whoever replicates to be minimally familiar with the material and manage his/her own replication. I like the section in Creative Commons that suggests you add your own creativity to your dissemination and use of our materials, and then make the new product available through Creative Commons also. Be sure you can trust your administrators.
UWP exhibits, transformdom, prof. presentations, a 15-year-old prof. paper from a tentative school dropout. Later finished school and works in an engineering establishment in Northern California. In Victoria, British Columbia.
Lois founded Children of the night. Lois and Carol went to Sociology at UCLA. And Lois followed me into law. Susan went to Berkeley, and followed me into law, though without the insanity of law school.
Public-Sphere Awareness project:
Painting, printmaking, a major part of our activity. Sure I get derogatory comments. John came in one day and saw me with lots of yarn and students in the inner office. "Going in for crafts now, jeanne?" Yeah, crafts. I think any activity that earns for the suppliers big bucks (consider scrapbooking, yarn work, home work shops, sewing, etc. ) and absorbs that much of talented peoples' well-develooped skills is worth sharing with other members of the community and mentoring of the young with whom they come in contact with to preserve those skills. I also think it's important that we all get to try lots of things. I weld. I work in bronze. I paint. Those are all important skills for the human side of us. Sample of printing for susan and pat from Gallery 825 classes.
Collaborate. goal is not to be good at everything, but to determine what you enjoy most. She who can build a neat frame in the wood shop can be of great help to he who knits or paints a lovely scene. Everyone can do something. And doing is a way of getting our overweight populace off the couch. jeanne
Tentative End of conditions for Creative Commons licensing of Dear Habermas.
The Story of Our Site: 'Everybody's got a story."
This is a first draft, folks. I'm writing it in html, under the pressure to get our site updated in time to do effective community outreach way before the 2012 elections. I know this is way too long for this file, but as it's just a draft, I'm going to put it up here, and then slice it into appropriate pieces where you'll be easily able to find it in more appropriate files. jeanne 07.02.2011.
Background:
Dear Habermas belongs to me, jeanne curran, and to Susan Takata, a dear friend and teaching colleague. But Susan teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside (UWP), and I am emeritus faculty at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH).
We've been teaching and doing research together since Susan was a young student at CSUDH. By the time I got out of UCLA Law (I was 50 at that time) and Susan got her doctorate at Berkeley and started teaching at UWP, I bought my first PC, and Susan and I, together, began Dear Habermas., by formalizing our intense commitment to praxis, based on theory. The website at first represented a faster and more efficient opportunity to make our work quickly available to our students, so that our courses could remain up to date. Susan, at UWP, promptly replicated the Social Systems Reserch Center (SSRC), my Fipse-funded research lab at CSUDH, where she had learned to write her first professional papers. We met each year at the American Sociological Association's conference, and, as Susan specialized in criminal justice, at the ACJS and ASC meetings.
breaktime - - - I'll pick this up in a half hour or so. jeanne
Without quite knowing what I was doing, I opened our Website, Dear Habermas, to lots of people on Facebook: knitters, crocheters, film makers, and, I fear, every yarn shop on the Internet. Our almost fourteen year old site, had never been completely updated. Susan and I are State University Teachers. Each of us is married, and that means staying in whatever institution will hire you wherever your mate has work. We've each been married a long time. That means our careers didn't allow us to move around as a different day job might have.
Everyone assumed that we were teaching methods and research. This is another chance for me and Susan to challenge that simplistic assumption. We were teaching undergraduates, who wouldn't have enough time on an urban undergraduate campus to really delve into research methods. Besides, if they had, they would have been certain they knew it all when they got to graduate school, and that normally tends to produce catastrophic results. Just ask any law school.
. . .
We were teaching critical reasoning, collaborative learning, collaborative sharing with faculty research, and a sense of where data belongs in any endeavor is we are to understand rational thinking. No, not all thinking is rational, pace rational choice theory. (Jonathan Lear, Chicago, Twentieth Century Thought). Old folks sittin' together on the front porch (Their Eyes Were Watching God) - and the young people who asked me if Zora Neale Hurston couldn't speak good English. Bakhtin and answerability. The arrogance of knowingness. And I'll add more. Not a study list . . . a reference list with FAQs.jeanne 07.03.2011
This is what we taught. That no one (at least not in modern times) can be an expert at all things, that we must continue growing, and that we must use our own judgement in how to manage that lifetime learning and praxis. Elizabeth fed us, nurtured us, and was always there to provide empathy. The lab was called "the hugging place." We taught our students that we believed in them and that they were capable of more than they had ever imagined. We prodded their imaginaries to help them make choices for their own lives.
Community Site: Jeanne (Los Angeles)
UWP Site: Susan (University of Wisconsin, Parkside)
CSUDH Site (California State University, Dominguez Hills)
California State University, Dominguez Hills(CSUDH)
Created: July 2, 2011
Latest update: July 4, 2011
E-Mail to Jeanne in L.A.
E-Mail to Susan at UWP.
- Alfie Kohn On how grades harm us.
DEAR HABERMAS
by Jeanne Curran and Susan Takata is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license are available at
http://www.habermas.org/jeannecurran.htm
