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We're Back to Transform Dominant Discourse
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: September 20, 2004
Latest Update: September 20, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Introduction to Model for Transformation of The model is actively functioning with over 200 students at California State University, Dominguez Hills and the University of Wisconsin, Parkside. Open access resources include a teaching web site, Dear Habermas. Habermas is the 20th Century German thinker who vowed "Never Again" and has focused his career as the modern leader of the Frankfurt School in critical sociology and philosophy on guaranteeing that promise. Our teaching site is named Dear Habermas, kind of like Dear Abby, because so many of our students asked "What would Habermas say?," as though we should somehow know. (We have absolutely no contact with him. We're teachers in four-year state colleges, not elite members of the manuscript groups of the Ivy League. And we understand that he disdains the new technology, anyway.)We developed the TRANSFORM model to bring working class and minority communities to an awareness of social, economic, and political issues that would permit them a genuine voice in governance discourse in deciding what should never happen again. To do that we had to teach the skills of discourse, which even Habermas laments may have been lost in the last century. We wonder, frankly, to what extent they ever really existed for most of us, but we're willing to push for bringing them into play now as a means to a genuinely open society in which all have a voice.
The web site contains templates that will enable you to create your own versions of our materials. Our creative commons license means that you are welcome to use the templates and the site, change it, build on it for your own and your community's use, free of charge, with only the caviat that you not use it for profit, and that you acknowledge its source and authors.
Our experience over the last seven years has taught us that when working with less sophisticated (non-computer-literate) communities, the tradtional technological tools of power point slides and videos and laptops and projectors interfere with the shared governance and illocutionary discourse more than they help it. So we have incorporated visual sociology and ethnology into our model by using actual paintings, drawings, sculptures, photos, etc. that we display as in a small gallery. We call that gallery Naked Space, alluding to the spiritual center around which we gather, and in which we seek primarily to understand one another (the illocutionary component) and then to understand our perspectives on social, economic, and political issues affecting our lives, and what we might, as a community, be able to do about those issues.
At this conference we have brought a small portion of such works as we might use for a gallery backdrop and handouts that we might use for community participants. One of the handouts we chose to share was written in response to a 9th grader from who knows where who wrote to ask us for information that she could use in an essay on respect. We chose that as an illustration of the extent to which our model goes beyond the academy, yet maintains links with the learning and resources the academy can provide if it is willing to look beyond itself.
We publish a weekly journal on transforming dominant dicourse that encompasses our classes as well as our community work. We have prepared a handout of the weekly issue for the Week of September 19, 2004, and of the homepage of our web site. We have also included a guide to the handouts we brought, with links to the web site, in case we run out of hardcopy.
We invite you to join us in forming a network of such models throughout the world, in which each of us can experience once again the illocutionary and governance skills that seem to have been swallowed up in the rush to global commodification.
