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