The choice of when, where, how, and whether to maladjust is both moral and strategic, and though it has social and educational consequences, it is fundamentally personal and private.
This needs to be expressed more in conversations. I feel like a lot of people put the pressure on maladjusted people to operate and do things at a certain time or always work under a maladjusted lenses when there are times where that is not possible.
You might find yourself under pressure at and at home to stop making trouble and feel like giving in to the temptation to readjust and become silent.
know this all to well
This means seeing oneself as a worker in a large system run amok and giving up the need to defend the system to yourself or in public.
THIS! Often times when something is held in close proximity to a person whether it be a job or a person they look up, acknowledging flaws or failures of such cause defense and I think people's first inclination is to defend it without knowing you can love something while still critique it.
It means that teachers have to become sophisticated pattern detectives and sleuth out ways in which the practices they have been taught--or have inherited-- inhibit learning.
If you are operating as part of the oppressive system even if you do not mean to act as an oppressor it's your job to look for the adjustment in the education system and do the inverse essentially.
was that once deaf adults understood themselves as victims of a dysfunctional system and became convinced of the intelligence they obviously had, the hearing would no longer be able to control their education and their lives.
the oppressors always want oppression to feel invisible to those who suffer from it such cognitive realizations cause for the toppling of such power.
Instead, often out of anxiety over their children’s futures, they chose to turn their children over to educators who promised to get their children to speak.
So you really have to take up the work to be maladjusted up for the liberation of others that aren't you and really know what that means.
They wanted their children to talk, to be “normal,’' and educators tried to give them what they wanted even though it was impossible.
Can this need to be "normal" be perceived as the need to survive? Is it a privilege to focus or concern oneself with maladjustment?
The system stayed in adjustment, and the children became abnormalized.
THIS IS A QUOTE. This rings true for a lot of injustices in our world.
Something was wrong, not with her but with the educational regime she was living under. It was a situation that begged for maladjustment, that reminded me of the frustration I felt at being told not to speak Spanish in my classroom.
The blame again, is to never be put on the oppressed but oppressive systems. It's interesting how easy this is to be forgotten or maybe that just goes along with how oppression works.
Each student faces the simultaneous task of winning the acceptance of each of these audiences while maintaining personal and moral integrity
again seeing or interpreting this cord of double conciousness.
normal and the students were problems if they did not adjust.
Like capitalism and any other oppressive system, it is not the problem of the oppressed group to change but the designers of the system to be changed.
but, through knowing him and several other youngsters in the class outside of and becoming friends with their parents, I came to understand that children in act in ways that are shaped by the institution; therefore it is essential never to judge a child by her or his behavior.
This highlights how part of the work to transform a system is to understand the group being oppressed by it. To understand what their reality is and what they need in order to advocate on behalf of them.
New York City Board of Education forbade Spanish to be spoken in the classroom.
hmmm language biases and essentially coded discriminatory practices.
However, as a beginning teacher I found myself with too much to learn, too little support, and an inflated sense of how much reform I could accomplish by myself without having experience or friends and allies within the community or the district
THIS THIS THIS. The feeling of being fully supported in order to do the work properly. Obviously the context is different in this scenario but sentiment still the same.
creatively maladjust
This term is being used frequently in the text. Is this to suggest there is a way to strategically challenge systems from within them and against them?
how to speak out about the violence that thoughtless adjustment can cause or perpetuate.
Personal journey of maladjustment is the road to understanding societal "adjustments"/ oppression and then advocating against such.
faith that people can be wonderful,
Is there a line between faith in people as well as toxic positivity?
It also means searching for ways of not being alone in a society where the mythology of individualism negates integrity and leads to isolation and selfmutilation.
Also in conversation with lang and I think gets at the main point of social justice to make such choices are not easy and come with a level of discomfort.
Adjustment is not an end in itself; rather, it is a description of the relation between an individual and...(his or her)...environment.
This is where I think Lang would be in conversation because to be "adjusted" and be from a marginalized group is to therefore continue to be hindered from transforming your world and the collective world around you. Lang pg. 182
The “good’’ students at the were white and upper middle class and identified as “gifted.’
Essentially, not to adhere to respectability politics.
That way, she wouldn’t get in trouble. In effect, she gave me a way to resist adjusting to unreasonable demands and initiated me into the subversion of the system that most good teachers practice all the time.
Essentially, taught all the ways to not be maladjusted instead of challenging the whole thing. I honestly believe this method of conforming to the status quo requires more effort than it does to challenge it.
The response was that “those’’ students read above grade level and therefore deserved an advanced art medium, whereas my students read below grade level and therefore weren’t qualified for pastels.
What is the correlation between reading level and capability to use pastels as an art medium because I am not seeing one.
ogy of the Heart , we must remove the blinders and see capitalism as the gen- erat
does capitalism tap into fear or makes us cling unto fear?
do the most critical reflection. Such job separation reduces the capac- ity of work
Ties back the notion on why capitalism in the realm of education is important to denounce and how it overall ties to the main point which is if the education system or the way we educate others remains as the status quo it only further perpetuates oppression for already disenfranchised groups.
plained to us: "I cannot perceive in my mind how Blacks in America can be liberated without Chícanos being liberated, or how Chícanos can be liberated without Native Americans being liberated, or Native Americans liber- ated without Whites be
While I believe that all liberation is linked, is there an order that it must be done or I guess an emphasis on whose liberation acts as the catalyst for the domino effect that must occur?
Is division always a bad thing?
e world. This is to say that he firmly believed that the phenomenon of cultural invasion worldwide was fundamentally driven by the profit motives of capita
YES
c theoretical argument a
is one necessary?
- a dimension of his work that often has been negated or simply ignored by many liberals and progressives who embraced his pedagogical ide
This is still happening amongst generations of liberals and progressives today.
Is there such thing as internalized capital/capitalism? Because at least in America, historically has always been a resistance to communism and socialism and has been reflected in our higher institutions.
stice. But such an announcement required a total denouncement of fatalism, which would unleash our power to push against the limits, create new spaces, and begin redefinin
The author uses "our" which I'm assuming is to imply that this is a collective movement. However, as individuals it might be easy to agree on the same goal but harbor differing opinions on how to achieve such or have different methodology.
progressive teachers could fall prey to fatalism - a condition that negates passion and destroys the capacity to dream - making them each day more politically vulnerable
Author Definition
ey are at one and the same time them- selves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. T
Is this talking about double consciousness and if so the consequences of living with such?
rm that fear into courage. Moreover, we could come to recognize our fear as a signal that we are engaged in critical opposition to the sta- tus quo and in transformative work toward the manifestation of our revolution- ary dreams
This is a form of self-awareness. Essentially, taking the fear one has and making it work for you as an indicator that you are moving in the right direction.
this century about their fears! But all of them felt fear, to the extent that
This strikes a cord with me because fear in this sense being such an intangible concept, yet at comes all consuming is hard to face. I too, would like to know what those fears were and what was the turning point in which revolutionaries chose dreams over fear?
im, Freire exposed how even well-meaning teachers, through their lack of critical moral leadership, actually par- ticipate in disabling the heart, minds, and bodies of their students - an act that disconnects these students from the personal and social motivation required to transform their world and themselv
This highlights intentions versus impact and that without acknowledging the different aspects of social beings in particularly of marginalized communities, a disservice will always be done that has such severe consequences.
I wonder in what ways have well intentioned teachers hindered my journey in transforming my world?
s not merely some simplistic or psychologized notion of "having pos- itive self-esteem, * but rather a deeply reflective interpretation of the dialectical relationship between our cultural existence as individuals and our political and economic existence as social bei
Is this to say that such self-centered notions of humanity that don't include the economic or political aspects of it, education will always do not only ourself but those of oppressed communities harm as well?
Instead, it is a love that I experienced as unconstricted, rooted in a committed will- ingness to struggle persistently with purpose in our life and to intimately connect that purpose with what he called
Main crux/purpose of what this text is to be centered around I'm assuming.
42). A love that could be lively, forceful, and inspiring, while at the same time, critical, challenging, and in
I think it's so important that this distinction is being made. A lot of what I've encountered from people who aren't involved in social justice is that those who do this work are only complaining or never satisfied. I think to display love as something that isn't absolved from critiques really does the job of explaining that social justice work is done out of love even if it doesn't represent itself in the traditional sense.