"Enlightenment is emergence from self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!"
Immanuel Kant, 1784
“Something different evolves when we stop talking about teaching as bounded by the skin, the class, the home, the neighborhood and begin talking about teaching as the confluence of places and people mutually constituted. Literacy would then be predicated on the health of the entire complement of elements. Such a stance commits us to situations, to partiality, to networks, to reciprocal actions. Such is the gift and the burden of a poetics of teaching.”
Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Embodied Literacies : Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching
“None But Our Words” describes a ‘pedagogy against the grain’ occurring within classrooms, and the kind of learning that can go on under such conditions. At the same time it describes what can happen to people, to learning, to schools and to entire communities, when those whose interests lie ‘with the grain’ have their comfort unsettled, disrupted. This is an unsettling book. It challenges us at every point to own up to where we stand, to decide what we believe about and want for education, and how far we are prepared to struggle for our ideals. How much of the world are we prepared to admit into our classrooms? How far are we prepared to extend our classroom learning out into the world beyond, and to allow the learners in our charge to locate and name the issues that properly concern active citizens in search of a just and peaceful world, citizens who understand that one is a precondition of the other?”
None But Our Words: Critical Literacy in Classroom and Community, by Chris Searle
"The refusal of understanding, then, is also a fundamentally creative act. It is precisely in this struggle to make sense of this refusal that the possibility of a truly pedagogical encounter emerges."
Cathy Caruth
"Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so."
Doris Lessing
“Art is not a luxury. It’s a mind altering possibility.”
Jeanette Winterson
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1 comment:
I'm very interested in these quotations and how they inflect the possible directions we might take ourselves as teachers. I'm especially intrigued by the anthology blurb: it's magnetizing to hear in the realm of teaching the ring of a manifesto.
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