Tag: education

530: “Things Were Not As They Are Now” (Dayton Edmonds & Darcie Little Badger)

                “When the Mother Earth was extremely young, things were not as they are now. Just as things are not now as they will be, for growth and change are constant. One night […]”
                -Dayton Edmonds (Caddo Nation), “Coyote and the Pebbles,” in Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection vol. 1

                “Yes, there will be a future. There are gonna be generations beyond ours. The question is how these futures will happen.”
                -Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache), “A Conversation with Darcie Little Badger,” hosted by the Urbana Free Library. March 12, 2025

                I was seventeen when a need-based scholarship to need-blind Amherst College made it possible for me to fly across the country and start studying in a place I’d never been. (Need-blind meant that Amherst considered my application without factoring in my family’s finances; by admitting me, they agreed to offer as much need-based scholarship as I needed). I thought that was How School Worked. Not all schools, certainly, but some, and I’d set out to apply to need-blind institutions. Later I learned how my grandfathers went to school through the GI Bill. So that was part of How School Worked. Later I tried to support my students as they figured out how to go to school, and if they wanted to, and what kind. I read graphic novels and other texts by Indigenous people telling their family stories of Indian boarding school systems designed to rip children from their parents, siblings, languages, sometimes lives. I learned about the Sixties Scoop, so much more recent than its name suggests. I wasn’t alive in the 1960s but I was alive for part of the Scoop. What I’d thought was far away was close. And the context of my life was close to so many things that were (by some descriptions) far away.
                There is a lot to talk about here, but what I’m walking towards just now is the way stories can ground us into how transitory this particular moment is. There are so many ways that school has been made to work as a horrifying weapon and a wonderful support and sometimes, strangely, both at once, and other things too. As I read the news lately, I think about that famous description (often attributed to Philip Graham) of journalism as the ‘first rough draft of history.’ In that description, for me, history feels almost stable. Written. The dust clears, and we see what’s happened. In contrast, in the writing and reading of so many stories, I feel history as more oceany: with channels and currents, certainly, but always flowing. A wave in choppy seas. I turn to that, now, because Dayton Edmonds and Darcie Little Badger recall me to a practice of hope. There will be a future. Things will be different than they are now. I and my moment will be distant ancestors to another time as How Things Work keeps growing and changing. So, Little Badger asks one evening at the library, the question is how those futures will happen, and how our work interacts with changing waves.

by Azlan

496: “A Dimly Felt Sense” (Aviva Freedman)

                “People learn to write in discipline-specific ways through a “dimly felt sense,” a complicated, lived, sensory, largely un-verbal and un-rational awareness of how things like this are supposed to sound and be presented and be shaped. This dimly felt sense helps generate the text, but it also generated by their ongoing attempt to create the text: it pushes their writing and is pushed by their experience of reading, talking, writing (and having feedback on their writing).”
                -Aviva Freedman, “Learning to Write Again: Discipline-Specific Writing at University” (p. 96)

                I find something soothing—and powerful—in Aviva Freedman’s language of learning through a dimly felt sense. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to learn a lot every day. Trying, in these last six months, to learn to be married—a wonderful, delightful learning, and something I’ve never done before. Trying to learn to work inside (or to resist, reimagine, remake) all of the flawed and broken systems through which my society organizes everything from education to healthcare to road maintenance. Trying to learn the dances of hope and horror.
                So many of the models I’ve been taught for learning are rational, verbal, directional, disembodied, abstract, simplified. In the face of all that Aviva Freedman goes back to the complicated, lived, sensory, un-verbal, un-rational, aware, and I would add, relational. We walk and rest in the ways we are learning, dimly, to walk and rest. In the ways we see and feel something like this done. Which leaves space for not knowing. For fumbling with it. Maybe more like this. Maybe less like this. Maybe here. Maybe not. And in the attempt we’re learning.

by Azlan

463: “Research is my saving grace” (Shelby Criswell)

                “Research is my saving grace, and it led me to every person who inspires me in this book.” -Shelby Criswell, Queer as all Get Out: 10 People Who’ve Inspired Me

                Sometimes I think about the many different things research can be.
                Most of the undergraduate students I teach don’t like “it.” Research papers feel like a threat. Or maybe I’m projecting, because for me, “research papers” often felt like a threat. There was a right way to do it, though people wouldn’t tell you—they’d just tell you what you did wrong. There was a place you were supposed to find in the pile of encyclopedias, library books, search engines, online journal databases. It was like trying to find the right grain of sand on the beach.
                In my classes I’ve started playing two games. The first is a common wikipedia game, the one where you start with some page (this one, for instance) and try to get to a common page (this one, for instance) in as few clicks as possible. (Or as quickly as possible). Then you can play around by talking to people about the different “paths” people took through information. The second is starting with some random page and then clicking along until you find your way to something that interests you. I like hearing people describe their experiences with these two games. Some people say the first is fun, because someone wins: there’s a goal, a finish line, and in a group someone does it the fastest. That gives the game momentum. Some people say the second is fun because there isn’t a goal, a finish line, and in a group no one has to do it the fastest. I get both. And I wonder about what I mean by research, or rather, the many things I could mean, and all the different ways to walk into or excavate or link or challenge or weave together or build with or sing along to the so many ideas washing around us. 
                So it’s fun to stumble across perspectives like Shelby Criswell’s. There are plenty of times I still don’t like “research.” Times I feel intimidated by it, or frustrated by what voices the research-assigner counts as “legitimate” or not, or realize I’m more interested in some question besides the one I’m “supposed” to be focused on. And sometimes I love it. Or even find my way to love through it.

by Azlan