Modern teacher training programs:
- We made BLM friendship bracelets in our capstone course
- I was told to make my students activists
- Many of our readings dealt with CRT in schools
- Instead of papers, many graduate students wrote acrostic poems
- If we read a classic work with students, we were told to do so through a Marxist lens
- In a circle, we passed around a popsicle stick with googly eyes while discussing our feelings
- I had to affirm "everyone has their truth.
The one professor who pushed against this and actually taught us the nuts-and-bolts of teaching was slandered to students by other professors
This was a graduate school. This isn't education.
And if you care about social justice, you should care about this!
Friendship bracelets do nothing to improve reading scores. Teach teachers to teach, not posture uselessly
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Let's be honest, though. If we're doing this, then they become units/classes about post-colonial theory, feminism, or psychoanalysis--not literature--which is fine but let's at least be honest about it.
It's an approach to literature that affirms one worldview
I could teach my students a Calvinist Christian "lens" but I doubt many would be happy about it. Read character motivations, themes, and author's contentions against my faith through the idea of "total human depravity" but then I'm just self-affirming my beliefs.
@MsJasmineMN was right. I should have not used "no intellectual challenge." It's a poor use of words on my part. There's intellectual challenge reading as such but not ideological contention.
I could read an atheist narrative and still affirm my own theology.
So my biggest problem with the whole #DisruptTexts thing isn't their treatment of "the canon" (whatever that means) but their literary theory.
It turns every book into an echo chamber.
Traditional literary theory sees a book carrying a certain purpose, a message, engagement with certain themes and ideas.
T.S. Eliot believed that great authors introduced readers to ideas themselves, and we as readers are to engage with those ideas.
#DisruptTexts, however, relies upon what we'd call "critical" literary theory.
In this case, a book becomes an artifact and we read to interrogate and learn about the time/culture in which it was written. As Foucault would have it, reading becomes more like archeology.