Final Paper

I have put a bit more thought into the final paper and have pretty much come to a decision about my topic. We have spent a fairly large amount of time in this class on the concept of literacy introduced by James Gee. I feel like Gee's writing on literacy has been the backbone of much of our discussions and writings. So I have decided to hit upon Gee's idea of conflict between discourses and focus not on conflicts that might occur due to socio-economic conditions or language barriers, but rather on conflicts that might occur due to a learning disability. There are many students who possess average or above average intelligence but have difficulty in the school environment because of various learning disabilities, dyslexia for instance. How can we as future educators recognize this and what can we do to facilitate the acquisition of the discourse? Look for these questions to be ultimately and definitively answered in my paper, or at least addressed in a semi-thorough manner.

Final Paper

Since we have gotten a little off schedule and no one else has posted yet, I am not sure if we are still supposed to blog about our final paper topics tonight. Additionally, the final paper topic options have not been made available to us yet, but I am planning to write about the idea I last blogged about, discussing functional literacy and the contemporary focus in US schools on drilling kids on reading skills in relationship to more Freireian ideas about educating for social justice and specific quotes and ideas perpetuated from the Bush administration, for ex. Karl Rove saying openly that there can be too much of a good thing, since people of a certain level of education begin to vote democractically, in addition to contrasting Bush II's approach to "hearts and minds" with that of Myles Horton--the former aiming to change people's hearts, the latter respecting people's hearts and finding them to be in the right place, and moving their formation (education) from that point of understanding. And things. :D

Ideas for final paper- Lucia Torres

After everything we have read about literacy and writing' my only thoughts for a final paper would be to write about what we plan to do with all the information we've learned from the course text. I guess I could see myself write about how my view of literacy has changed or grown stronger, and what i plan on doing to implement my ideologies as a future educator? probably even comparing the pros and cons of both sides, and how my ideologies could effect the mass population of students.

Final Paper

For my final paper i plan i using what i wrote for my last paper. I really like the subject that I discussed and i think that i will be able to use outside information to defend my points. Also i think that i will bring in other essays that we have read to express different positions.

Functional Literacy and Its Discontents: How Limiting Literacy Disturbs Democracy

Basing my paper around The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I want to talk about undereducation and the idea of 'functional literacy' as a way those in power educate people just enough to be workers and soldiers, perpetuating the current economic and social practices as well as defending them militarily, but not enough to participate in metadiscourse, to critique the dominant culture-- ultimately because it is easier to mobilize citizens to fight other nations or see one another or irrelevent external peoples as enemies if you can convince them, through supposition, that there is not a war going on within their own nation, if you make them believe most of them are not on the front lines of it every day. This argument will be centered of Freire's theories of banking education as a pedagogy of domination that works towards imprinting the oppressed majority with the idoelogy of the people in power. I want to center my paper on Karl Rove's quote that: "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." Furthermore, I want to discuss the instructional methods and methods of assessment (particularly standardized testing) which produce a complacent population rather than inciting a critically engaged one.

Writings from the class that I would consider in order to Freire would be Gee, Gere, and perhaps a little something from Bartholomae. Other texts I have been reading or plan to read in the next week that I might bring into my writing-thinking process for this would be We Make the Road By Walking: A Conversation (between Myles Horton and Paulo Freire) of Education and Social Change, some of James A. Berlin's thoughts on rhetoric, writing, and culture (especially as it relates to literature and composition studies) and as many of bell hooks' books on Teaching to Transgress, Teaching Community, and Teaching Critical Thinking as I can get through in the next week or so that school is slowed down to celebrate genocide. I hope this paper is required to be substantially longer than the others because I perceive my brain exploding with ideas.

Final Paper hmmm

I'm just going to ramble here as it might help me think. Literacy and education are the primary topics for the course. We all know this by now of course. James Gee's definition of literacy has kind of been a cornerpiece of the course I feel, so I think I would like to use him again. Eubanks and Schaeffer and Bartholomae I've pretty much moved past. The topics of education, socio-economic status (class and race), and literacy are interesting to me so maybe I can get into that a little bit more. For external sources I really have no clue where to start, but I'm sure I'll figure something out, something local perhaps since this is where I plan to work as an educator. I think that's a start of an idea: Education, socio-economic status, literacy or even illiteracy, and good ol' Milwaukee. I need a question to answer though.

I would be interested in using topics similar to the last paper. I think they were all very interesting and I would be happy to write one of the one's I did not yet choose. It will be expanded too since we will be using an outside source.