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CSUDH Habermas UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: May 6, 2001
Latest update: May 8, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

Research has shown for some time now that we learn through many different senses, and in many different ways. Sociodrama provides a different learning approach in which we already have some grasp of the concepts under discussion, and we try out different argument and persuasion techniques. In trying them out, in making up our impromptu scripts as we go, in testing each others' reactions to our arguments and issues, we bring them to a higher state of awareness and provide the practice that will eventually result in better understanding of and more sensitivity to the "other."

Last week, in enacting several scenarios based on Jean-Michel Basquiat's life, we came to understand that solutions weren't so easy to come by. After a half hour discussion, we discovered that we had not managed to be of any real help to Jean-Michel or his father. But we had begun to identify some of the issues.

In sociodrama, you are not working with the database assimilation of new material, you are working with the process of learning to use the material you have already encountered.

The following scenarios are suggested to help us solidify some of the issues we have discussed this semester:

George Herbert Mead and W.E.B. Du Bois: pp. 158-190 in Farganis.

George Herbert Mead speaks of the "I" and the "me:"

"The 'I' is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others, the 'me' is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitudes of the others constitute the organized 'me,' and then one reacts toward that as an 'I.' " (at p. 172)

W.E.B. Du Bois speaks of double consciousness:

"Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mahap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down hat veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows." (at. p. 187)

Mead describes the complexity through which the self is formed. DuBois describes the complexity through which a part of identity is severed. Let us have a discussion with two traditionalists, who see postmodernism as "hooey" and two postcolonialists who see the oppression of a self in which some identities are closed off. In considering the traditionalist argument, bear in mind that someone like Nozick would stress that we must provide the means to let those grow and create who can do so, not establish a corresponding "fair" amount of resources to all.