Ahh, the bittersweet

that this isn't funny at all

A Writing Life? Writing a Life?

My life has been turned topsy turvy in the past couple of years. If you'd told me two and a half years ago that i would be rounding out 2008 with a new born child, two step-children and a brilliant and beloved partner, calling you crazy would have been the merest hint of my skepticism. This year has been one of learning to live with many more people in my life. While yet keeping up with the exigencies of earning a living, continuing to contribute to making a better world and writing. I live through reading and writing. My mind and heart soars through the worlds of text and image and our shared imagination. The coming year now includes adventures in parenting, which i expect i'll be writing a good deal about. And yet, i still see the world largely through the lenses of popular education and storytelling. How these two praxes fit together is something that i am forever sorting out. And this blog is a place that i can test ideas and, hopefully, "be of use" as Marge Piercy writes.When it comes right down to it, the only thing about which i am certain is that i am uncertain about what is popular education and storytelling. This blog is my exploration of that uncertainty. And i have an enduring curiosity that drives me to explore anything and everything. to connect and collage, to seek and create pattern. At times i accumulate such an abundance of information and knowledge and experience and emotion that it gets traffic-jammed. And this year has been one very traffic-y year - a year of remarkable and surprising abundance. Now, on to the sorting of that abundance into useful (and often playful) meaning. Happy New Year and a wonderful season of revels to all!

Well, i'm still on strike

Yup, things aren't looking great for the strike at York University. With the newborn to care for, i'm feeling the pinch like i've never imagined i might. Alas...

i"m reposting this Australian video about unions that i simply adore. It's as funny the 50th time as it was the first. Humour is such a wonderful weapon. and we need to speak truth to power as the Quakers say. As well as being mindful of Oscar Wilde's advice: "If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh, or they will kill you."

Well, the following article is not so funny, but it has much truth in it.
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The Neoliberal University: Looking at the York Strike
(from T h e B u l l e t - A Socialist Project e-bulletin, #165, Dec 5, 2008)

Eric Newstadt

Placed neatly in the middle of a global economic maelstrom, it is near impossible to understand or predict what, if any, consequences the strike by 3500 odd teaching and research assistants and contract faculty at York University in Toronto (represented by Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903) will have for higher education in Ontario and throughout Canada. While there are some early indications that the strike – which began in early November and continues to shut down the university – at York is aiding (at least mildly) in negotiations at the University of Toronto (whose teaching assistants, research assistants and contract faculty are all presently in negotiations), the strike seems also to have engendered the anger and vitriol of the public such that the viability of similar strikes in the sector are in question. And while the tenor of the action was and remains pitched firmly at rolling back the "neoliberal university," it is questionable whether even outright victory at York would or could have such far-reaching consequences across the university sector.

Of course, there is only so much that can be accomplished in a single round of bargaining. Even if it may not yet be possible to outline how history will record the current work action, there are nonetheless some very definitive things that we can say about the particular conditions which have produced the strike of 2008. And we can also weigh and measure the degree to which the strike holds the promise of ameliorating those conditions (at York if not throughout the province), either temporarily or on a more lasting basis.

The Political Economy of the Neoliberal University

It is simply not possible to understand the present labour conflict outside of some consideration of neoliberalism in general: the educative capacity of the state has been deployed in service of a program of accumulation that relies on a highly "flexploitable" and disciplined workforce. Out of the ashes of the Bretton Woods system, through a process of inter-class negotiation and conflict that neither put entirely to rest the practices of the Keynesian state, nor left any aspect of the postwar order entirely intact, a "new world order" built upon the flexibility of labour markets emerged in the 1980s. There is not sufficient space here to go over the details of this historical transition.

What needs to be understood, however, is that the crisis of Keynesianism, which was as much a political as an economic crisis, saw capital, and particularly a re-emergent finance capital, work with the capitalist state to respond to the crisis through a series of efforts that culminated in: (1) the complete transformation of the state apparatus and the state's capacity to do things (i.e. in severe cutbacks to government spending on virtually everything including colleges and universities); (2) the acquiescence to such restructuring by the bulk of the population, and progressively; and (3) the emergence of broad based public support for the logic of "fiscal restraint" as well as for a program of economic growth premised on labour market flexibility, within which the neoliberal university factors very largely.

The neoliberal university began to take shape in the early 1970s, when hiring was frozen while tuition-fee and support generating enrollments were grown, as short-term stop-gaps to what were perceived as temporary fiscal cutbacks. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, the neoliberal university began to take on more definitive dimensions, not because fiscal restrain had "hardened," but because what amounted to a form of structural adjustment, drew increasing support from university administrators, an ever larger portion of the professoriate, and a good number of students as well. Thus, the neoliberal university has come to rapidly and rabidly pursue a closer articulation with industry and an educational methodology that focuses more on training than on educating.

Neoliberalism has involved "belt-tightening" and "fiscal restraint." But its unfolding has also been underwritten by a more expansive logic than mere fiscal restraint could possibly entail. The university is now seen as a useful tool in the reproduction of a pliant working class and as a huge, publicly subsidized, research complex that can be deployed to further socialize the research costs of private capital accumulation and thus economic growth in its neoliberal form. In other words, through various forms of public-private partnerships, particularly at "research intensive" universities, private corporations can have taxpayers pick-up 90% of the costs associated with R&D, while they can maintain ownership over the bulk of whatever profits such research generates.

This kind of extensive logic is precisely why the neoliberal university is a massive and expansive morass of highly specialized departments, programs, research centres, laboratories and administrative offices, a huge and immensely diversified corporation with arms in almost every field of study. It is also why the fields of study themselves have become more cut-off from one another, even as we've seen the emergence of so many cross and sub-disciplines, like physical biology, or cultural studies, or urban and environmental planning (such growth makes meaningful forms of "interdisciplinarity" difficult to undertake).

This logic is also why the ideological scope within the neoliberal university is more limited than in previous eras. The space for critical scholarship has shrunk enormously in the social sciences. In part, this is a result of concerted efforts to purge so-called radicals (mainly from the right but also from the post-structural left), but in the main it is a result of state policies that either openly or tacitly endorse such an ideological closing, through conditional forms of finance. The neoliberal logic is also why much the same kind of ideological closing has happened in the natural sciences – there is increasingly less room devoted to basic and curiosity driven research because the drive to "research and innovate" favours the production of commercializable research and of intellectual and property rights.

The extensive logic of neoliberalism is even writ large spatially across the university, as university administrators, ever in search of new revenue-streams, offer-up any useful space to the signs and symbols of corporate accumulation. Buildings and classrooms are named after capitalists (and corporations) who have nothing whatever to do with scholarship, and even the bathroom stalls of the neoliberal university have become advertising opportunities.

Neoliberalism has also seen universities vie for precious market-share in large and growing national and international markets for higher-education. Each university is a competitor firm in the race to seize valuable customers from emerging economies ahead of competitor institutions. All of this has meant that the neoliberal university works hard to cultivate a brand, a particular kind of reputation, an orientation that potential customers understand will help them generate returns on their investments. The neoliberal university is also internally classed: a small cadre of elite academic "stars," who are nonetheless terrifically over-worked, are offered high levels of academic and financial support, they enjoy relatively smaller teaching loads, social-status, and an ability to access some level of control within the institution. A much larger cadre of part-time and/or contract faculty are denied even basic – or any – perks, even as they undertake a terrific – and increasing – proportion of undergraduate teaching.

Not surprisingly, these changes have in turn required that the university become an expansive administrative bulwark with a large and growing cadre of career bureaucrats and administrators, many of whom move from university to university. There are also new kinds of offices opening up all the time, or old ones being re-branded as it were – from technology transfer offices to offices of research and innovation, to registrar cum customer-service departments, to in-house legal departments. The growth of this section of the university has been spectacular (squeezing down academic budgets while expanding general administration budgets). Students are en masse taking from the neoliberal university a general familiarity with the rigours of life under contemporary capitalism: an ability to understand and negotiate a large and expansive corporate environment, a sense of how to work the "system," in the most instrumental way possible, as precisely that is what employers are looking for.

read the rest of the article here: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet165.html#continue

Jack Black Rules - Prop 8 Should Die

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

I was deeply disturbed to hear of the success of Prop 8 in California this past election cycle. It amazes me to hear that homophobic society is as strong in California as it seems to be. With the film about Harvey Milk coming out soon i am reminded of how deeply moved and influenced i was by the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. I am anxious for the new film to be great. We'll see. Meanwhile, this video of Jack Black, John C. Reilly and others is a wonderful humorous fight back against hate and fear.

Why we fight

Michael Franti is a god!

On strike - Keeping the union strong

Collective Murals

I've extracted some descriptions of collective mural activities from a 'zine i'm working on about art and popular education. You can download the murals descriptions here. You can use this document to guide your production of any one of a variety of mural methods. They are good both for popular education work as well as political action.

Murals have a long and respected history in social justice struggle. Producing them collectively can be an important means of engaging in dialogue as well as a means of documenting our struggles. The photo in this post is from a bankelsang production i did with some friends many years ago. We simply took a passage from Eduardo Galeano's Walking Words (Norton, 1997) and created a series of panels that illustrated the words. A bankelsang is a form of street theatre practiced in medieval Germany. Literally meaning "singing banner" it's a means of sharing a short narrative with a sequence of images to focus people's attention. It's a great thing for guerilla art, being very portable.

Popular Education Toolkit - Jobology

Some years ago we developed a popular economics course. It's about 40 hours of activities over about ten sessions (of three hours each). And it barely scratches the surface of the topic. We developed a number of tools for that course including this one here which we call JOBOLOGY. I used it a couple of weeks ago in the popular education class i teach at the Faculty of Environmental Studies and i was once again amazed at how well it works to share information about the history of work across the generations. It's also a tool that can be used to begin a discussion of class - what people think it is, what a marxist notion of class is, where people feel they might fit in a class structure. I'm hoping to develop this tool further so that it can be used in the context of the theory of diverse economies that J.K. Gibson-Graham are working on and which includes conceptualizing class as something akin to a verb rather than the noun (or thing) it is characteristically seen to be (i.e. class is more dynamic than it is normally thought to be). Meanwhile, if you have a context for using this exercise, i highly recommend trying it out. You can use it as a simple discussion provoking tool or you could use it to guide a discussion about class and the history of the changing world of work. You can download activity descriptions here: MSWord or PDF.

Art that makes you want to do art!

Here's a couple of videos from Old Crow Medicine Show (whom i have Matt to thank for introducing me). While i have an expansive love of all music, i have a special place for the those types of music that catch the bittersweet of life: acadian fiddle, cajun zydeco, bluegrass and bagpipes. A cajun or bluegrass waltz can transport me. And a lament played on bagpipes will often bring tears to my eyes. The stuff of music legend, OCMS have gone from busking to the Grand Ole Opry. Their music makes me happy. And there's also that about it that inspires my own urge to create. It's one of the mysteries of art, whether painting, writing, music, theatre, that some works reach into your soul and light a fire (or perhaps fan flames already alight). And that fire is only satisfied when it pours out as your own art. I recall seeing an exhibit of Van Gogh's work at the Met in New York - It was the Van Gogh at Arles exhibit that my friend Carey brought me to as a birthday present. I'd seen pictures of Van Gogh's haystacks before but i had never imagined i could be so moved by the massive canvasses that confronted me. I was surprised by their size as well as by the subtleties of light that seemed miraculously caught in the the two dimensions of canvas and pigment. I recall returning home and filling two sketchbooks with stuff. OMCS's punky old-timey bluegrass does the same thing to me. I want to learn (and sometimes relearn) all these songs and i want to be in a bluegrass band. But, that being unlikely, i'll just sing to myself. And now i have the opportunity to learn these songs to sing to this new wee critter that is in our lives and who is teaching me that lullabies are a wonderfully effectgive technology. Who knew?

I'm feeling Churchillian about democracy these days

Check out www.voteforenvironment.com (see below for explanation).

Okay, Stephen Harper scares me. But it is less anything that he says that scares me than what appears absent, i.e. some humanity, a bit of doubt, perhaps. While U.S. vice-presidential Sarah Palin performs a blithe, arrogant and contemptuous certainty about her conservative values with a winking (vapid) vim and vigour, Harper performs a similar certainty about similar values but with a lack of emotional affect that makes me think Body Snatchers. And as i caught one of his campaign ads this afternoon in which he says we "need certainty" and not "risk" i remembered these words from Eduardo Galeano (from an interview he did in NACLA-Report on the Americas many years ago):

...I do not have a bad opinion of doubt. I think doubt has been a factor in the movement of history. I have grown to appreciate doubt more and more and, at the same time, to distrust those compañeros who only offer certainty. They seem too much like the wooden men which the Popul Vuh in Mayan mythology describes as one of the mistakes the gods made when they attempted to create man and didn't know how to construct him and finally they made him out of corn and he came out alright. But one of those attempts consisted of creating him out of wood.

The wooden man was just like a man except that no blood ran through his veins; he had no spirit or courage and didn't speak a word. I believe he had nothing to say because he had no courage and therefore was never discouraged. The proof that one has courage lies in the fact that one can be discouraged. And the proof that one can arrive at certainties that are truly capable of transforming reality lies in the ability to entertain fertile doubts before arriving at certainty; doubts that buzz around in one's head, one's conscience, one's heart, in the imagination, like tenacious flies. We need neither fear doubt nor discouragement: they are proof that our endeavors are human. And we are fortunate that these endeavors are human. Otherwise, these would be the endeavors of false men, men of wood, that is to say bureaucrats, dogmatic men, people who choose models over reality. Discouragement and doubt indicate that one sees reality as it really is.

Well, Harper is as much a poster-boy for the Popul Vuh's "wooden man" as i've ever seen. And this "certainty" he speaks of is as treacherous a disposition as i've seen in Canadian politics. And i think we could use some of this ancient Mayan wisdom about doubt and uncertainty. How else do we learn anything? H.G. Wells once said, "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." When i watched Harper in the debates this week (and Palin as well, for that matter) i felt that he was not a person open to learning anything new. And to hear him speak of his "certainty" makes me feel like "catastrophe" is not far off.

As for feeling Churchillian about all this: after the leaders debates this week i couldn't help but feel underwhelmed by the whole thing. While I'll vote NDP, i do not feel like they will avert the catastrophes that lie before us, nor the Greens who are just too neoliberal for me. And the Liberals are less-bad Tories. So as Churchill said in 1947:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

So, i received a forwarded e-mail from friends (thanks, Lorne) from Bob Bossin of Stringband fame in which he appeals for some strategic voting. And as i was listening to the news this evening i was thinking how bloody annoying our voting system is - that a party can form a government with as little as 30% of the populace voting for them. And if the Liberals, Greens and NDP split the vote and let the Tories ride up the middle to a majority, i will be very sad (and mad). So here's Bob's e-mail in which he recommends a website that is tracking ridings and predicting which are the ones most vulnerable to vote-splitting. You know, they could be right.

Dear Fellow Canadian:

This letter is blatantly political, but it is also personal. And urgent. I've been watching the federal election campaign with something bordering on despair. In all my 63 years, I have never known a government less in tune with my values than this one - and that is going some. By the polls, most of us feel kinda the same way. But we are divided among four parties, and that may allow Harper and his cronies to waltz back into power.

Skip to the next paragraph if you like, but I gotta get this 100-word rant off my chest: "In two years under Harper, Canada has become one of the worst heel-draggers on global warming. Our military has shifted from peace keeping to war making. Where we once welcomed war resistors, we now turn them away. In April, the Conservatives de-regulated and privatized food inspection, and we know what happened in August. They plan to do the same for the airline industry. Prisons, they say 'are for punishment.' And
for 14 year olds. They don't much like the arts and they don't get the internet. I could go on. If Harper wins his majority, I shudder to think how, well, American, Canada will become." End of rant.

What - as William Bendix used to say - a revolting development this is!

And yet, something is afoot. I don't know about you, but I have been receiving dozens of messages from friends and strangers talking about what amounts to do-it-yourself proportional representation. I can't say I've become optimistic, but I do believe there are two effective things we can do.

The first is to make our votes count. We may not have rep by prop (we are one of the world's most backwards democracies in this regard) but we can fake it. If I lived in Central Nova, I would vote for Elizabeth May in a heartbeat. But here in Nanaimo-Cowichan, to vote Green (or for that matter to vote Liberal), is, de facto, to vote Conservative. Lucky for me, our local MP, Jean Crowder, is good people, and anti-Harper through and through. I don't have to hold my nose when I vote. (I just have to roll my eyes at Jack's car-salesman style.) But if the best way to stop the Conservatives was to vote Liberal, this time I would. With glowing heart. (Registered trademark, 2010 Olympics, all rights reserved.)

Fortunately, voting strategically has just gotten a whole lot easier. There is now an amazing website, www.voteforenvironment.com, that is tracking every riding in the
country and making up-to-the-minute suggestions on how best to fight Harper. It is the coolest example of Canadian grassroots democracy since the Free Trade comic book.

So that is the first thing to do: check out www.voteforenvironment.com

And there is another thing just as important. This happens to be a time when our ability to communicate with one another has never been greater. To contact you with this message, I just had to overcome my reticence about doing it. (I'm Canadian, after all.) The rest, nowadays, is easy. If you do it too, if you contact your friends and colleagues, acquaintances and list-mates, and let them know what you are thinking, we could actually affect the results in some key ridings and, who knows, we might even affect more than that. It's worth a try.

bb

Bob Bossin - Old folksinger - Old folksinger's homepage: www.bossin.com

Whiner alert: who knew Harper was right?

I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see ... a bunch of people, you know, at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren't high enough when they know those subsidies have actually gone up -- I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people. Ordinary people understand we have to live within a budget.

Well, Alon Nashman, a Toronto-based actor, has added his two cents. And what a two cents they are.

It's the Questions that Bring us Together

Well, i'm well into a new season of teaching and work and, of course, baby-raising (Oy!). And this year, in addition to the Popular Education for Social Change graduate class that i teach at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University i am also teaching an undergraduate class called Perspectives in Environmental Studies. It's a very popular class that my colleague Peter Timmerman has been teaching for several years and is currently on what i'm sure is a well-earned sabbatical (thus the contract work for me).

I design and write and/or c0-write a syllabus every year that i produce as a 'zine. This year i collaborated on the syllabuzine with Tina Lopes, an educator with whom i worked in the Doris Marshall Institue for Education and Action. Unfortunately, the enrollment numbers were unusually low this year and FES had to cancel the section that Tina would have taught. Alas. Tina and i decided that this year's theme would be "The Arts of the Self in Culture, Classroom and Community" and i had looked forward to exploring the many meanings that this could have with Tina. Now i'm on my own with it - albeit accompanied by 22 graduate students. You can download of PDF (2.6 megs) of the syllabus here: http://www.web.net/~story/RC/syllabuzine6150-2008.pdf (send it to your printer for double-sided copying and you should end up with a foldable booklet.veb

As for the undergrad class, one huge challenge for me is how to practice some of the ideals of popular education in an environment that is designed both in form (line-of-sight lecture hall, 500 students, one weekly two-hour lecture plus a one-hour tutorial) and expectation (of the 500 learners) to practice authoritarian pedagogy. Ouch! Not that i haven't got a lot to say that is worth listening to. But i wonder skeptically about the quality of learning in such circumstances. Thus i have discussed with the TAs how we can design an asignment that pushes students to learn to think critically, creatively and transformatively. We've come up with an assignment based on questioning. Not unlike this wee tale that i posted her a while back.

One of the course TAs found this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet:

Try to love the questions themselves, as if they were lock rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don´t search for the answer, which couldn´t be given to you now, because you wouldn´t be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer

Ahhhh....

And i found a translated edition of Letters to a Young Poet here. I highly recommend this work - one of the great (and modest) 20th Century works on creativity and writing.

Manuals on Human Rights and Facilitation

I just learned about more on-line manuals for human rights and facilitation:

• Action for the Rights of Children (ARC) Reach Out Training Kit: Facilitator's Toolkit (also available here as Word docs and in Spanish, French and Arabic)
  

• People's Watch in India - a great collection of curricula
  

Elections, elections everywhere and democracy is still hard to find

"You know, I think when ordinary, working people come home, turn on the TV and see … a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren't high enough when they know the subsidies have actually gone up, I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people." Of course, what counts as an "ordinary" Canadian to Harper and his ilk is a rather disturbing, if fictional. Mind you, as this video implies, perhaps Harper and the Tories will be successful in creating the very "ordinariness" they seem to crave.

A new life for the world

A few things have changed in my life. A new life in this house. Meet our wee mister.

The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy

There are some excellent articles in this publication from the McGill University-based Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy. A couple of the articles i'll be reading include: "But What Can I Do?": Fifteen Things Education Students Can Do to Transform Themselves In/Through/With Education by Paul R. Carr and Notes from a Fan: Paulo Freire Comes to Idaho by Dale T. Graden

Making the Connections

Brett Dennen's song and video (in preceding post) reminded me of two other similar productions. One is this rather elusive video called Drop the Debt. I believe it was first produced by Comic Relief in Britain but it has since been hosted on an Australian World Vision site. It looks like it's been on YouTube a couple of years now. It's a wickedly clever production with numerous layers of irony. The music is Michael Franti and Spearhead and you can see their video of the song here.

I wonder perpetually how we can better see our interconnection with everything that happens such that we just might choose to do something positive about it? And not something that just helps us cope better with feelings of guilt? That our wealth and privilege (says a white boy sitting here in downtown Toronto) is causally linked to the deprivation of the many is something i have believed for a long time and, having lived abroad and studied and researched, i know that this is so. And thus i have devoted myself to popular education both to support those struggling against oppression as well as to offer to the curious and the willing some avenue of understanding of the history of oppression and resistance as well as how we connect to it and can choose to act against it. I was particularly struck in Dennen's video, with the woman who finds a loose thread in her red sweater only to see that it is linked to three asian-looking women working in a sweatshop. This immediately reminded me of Sweet Honey in the Rock's song Are My Hands Clean? - a poignant tale of the journey that cotton (made into shirts) makes from "blood-soaked fields" to North American bargain basement bins. Here's the lyrics:

I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world
35% cotton, 65% polyester, the journey begins in Central America
In the cotton fields of El Salvador
In a province soaked in blood, pesticide-sprayed workers toil in the broiling sun
Pulling cotton for two dollars a day

Then we move on up to another rung - Cargill
A top-forty trading conglomerate, takes the cotton through the Panama Canal
Up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the U.S. of A. for the first time

In South Carolina
At the Burlington mills
Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of
Dupont

Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela
Where oil riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day
Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world
Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago
Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas
To the factories of Dupont
On the way to the Burlington mills

In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador

In South Carolina
Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric for Sears
Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea
Headed for Haiti this time
May she be one day soon free

Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications
For three dollars a day

My sisters make my blouse

It leaves the third world for the last time
Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me

This third world sister
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse
On sale for 20% discount

Are my hands clean?

(Composed for Winterfest, Institute for Policy Studies. The lyrics are based on an article by Institute fellow John Cavanagh [no relation -c], "The Journey of the Blouse: A Global Assembly." Lyrics and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon, 1985.)

I wish that this art could swing hearts to the side of compassion, solidarity and action. But, of course, social change is never so easy. I was startled (pleaasantly) when i saw Alice Walker on the cover of the May 2007 Shambhala Sun beside the headline "This is the best of all times to be alive." A counterintuitive thought if i ever heard one. In the interveiw which you can read here <We Live in the Best of All Times> Alice Walker explains this sentiment by saying:

There’s so much to do! (Laughs) We are so lucky. There’s no shortage of work to do! (Laughs) There’s no excuse for anyone, in my opinion, to complain that they can’t change anything. For instance, there are millions and millions and millions of hungry children, people who don’t have clothing, people who don’t have housing, trees that are begging us to let them live, rivers that are crying out to be clean, skies that are shouting at us to let the ozone layer live. There is no end to the ways we can have full self-realization. That’s what has to happen, and that’s what this time is pointing out. This is the time to have full self-realization as an earthling. It’s time to be responsible and take charge of that. It’s also a great time because if we fail, we lose the earth.

I plan to convey this message to the 500 undergrads to whom i'll be lecturing weekly starting in a couple of weeks. I'm teaching Perspectives on Environmental Studies this Fall and Winter. I'm still figuring out what to teach - this will be a new adventure for me - not my favourite form of pedagogy; but i'll make the best of it. I plan to tell a lot of stories. Any advice is welcome.

Life, the Bittersweet

New DVDs of and about Paulo Freire

Remembering Freire/Reinventing Freire is a two DVD set that has long been needed by popular educators. The occasion of this production was the "Conference and Dialogue on the 10th Anniversary of the Death of Paulo Freire" held on May 2, 2007 at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto (and coordinated by the Ontario Region of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education). One DVD has footage of various presenters and panel discussions. The second DVD has the, until now, rare footage of Staring from Nina: The Politics of Learning made by the Development Education Centre in Toronto in 1977. This includes rare video of Freire speaking in English. As D'Arcy Martin, one of the producers explains, Freire urged that they solve their problem of production funds by offering this film (for a price) to the many people and institutions who were desperate for footage of Freire speaking in English. Needless to say, Friere said he would refer all such requests to the filmmakers. It's a charming film and it still carries relevant messages to todays educators. In addition to this film are three filmed dialogues between Freire and J. Roby Kidd and Alan Thomas: "Becoming a Christian", "Guns and Pencils", and "Letters in the Earth". This DVD set is beautifully produced by Bill McQueen of Fireweed Media Productions and they're only $20 (plus delivery costs). I highly recommend adding these to your collections. You can order copies by e-mailing Fireweed Media: fmp [ at] netrover [dot] com. (You can click on the graphic to see a larger version if you'd like to read the contents description.)

My Favourite Bluegrass Kung Fu Mashup Ever