So you think your a genius?

Join us for an informal meeting of the minds on January 22nd at noon in Buchanan E476. The Teaching Brown Bag is an opportunity for faculty, staff and students to come together to eat, talk, and meet other members of the UBC Creative Writing community. This week we will discuss the topic of the romantic artist-genius mythos, and how it finds its way into creative writing programs. Does the mythos of the writer as a divinely inspired being hinder the budding writer? Can creative writing be taught? If we think we're not "geniuses", should we throw in the towel? How can we nurture the process of writing as a craft, without being daunted by the notion of the unattainable masterpiece?

Teaching Brown Bag Lunches meet once a month from noon until 1 pm in Buchanan E476. We look forward to seeing you there! Contact Ray Hsu at ray.hsu@ubc.ca for more information.

Paulo Freire...

...is worth reading.

"It was while in exile that I realized I was truly interested in learning.  What I learned in exile is what I would recommend to all readers of this book: each day be open to the world, be ready to think; each day be ready not to accept what is said just because it is said, be predisposed to reread what is read; each day investigate, question, doubt.  I think it is most necessary to doubt.  I feel it is always necessary not to be sure, that is, to be overly sure of 'certainties'.  My exile was a long time of continuous learning."

pg 181, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation

"Whether it be a raindrop...be it a bird that sings, a bus that runs, a violent person in the street, be it a sentence in the newspaper, a political speech, a lover's rejection, be it anything, we must adopt a critical view, that of the person who questions, who doubts, who investigates, and who wants to illuminate the very life we live.  My suggestion is that we capture our daily alienation, the alienation of our routine, of repeating things bureaucratically, of doing the same thing every day at ten o'clock, for example, because 'it has to be done' and we never question why.  We should take our own lives into our hands and begin to exercise control.  We should try to stand up to, and out from under time."

pg 198, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation

"Let's take our own alienation into our hands and ask, 'Why?' 'Does it have to be this way?'  I do not think so...As active participants and real subjects, we can make history only when we are continually critical of our very lives."

199, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation

"...empowerment should never be limited to what Arnowitz describes as 'the process of appreciating and loving oneself.'  In addition to this process, empowerment should also be a means that enables students to interrogate and selectively appropriate those aspects of the dominant culture that will provide them with the basis for defining and transforming, rather than merely serving, the wider social order."

152, Literacy and Critical Pedagogy (also Freire)