Embedded Files
Our commitment to philosophy is unusual and key. On-going study of philosophy helps us to ask ethical questions of our teaching. In a teaching climate focused on “what works.” the study of philosophy pushes us to commit to the question, “works to what end."
...To grow our philosophical foundation to be more inclusive and to evolve with a new generation of participants, we are launching a two-year inquiry group that will study the philosophical origins of our organization and seek out new more ethnically diverse intellectual influences.
From the Institute on Descriptive Inquiry's request to the Cottonwood Foundation, 2020
This effort to expand the canon of phenomenological thought that grounds descriptive inquiry work has continued beyond the initial two year scope of this proposal. Members of the Institute engage in monthly meetings, reading and exploring ideas relevant to descriptive practice.
Here three participants in the philosphy fellowship - Andy Doan, Bruce Turnquist, and Cecelia Traugh - share reflections on all their readings to date:
We read the 2014 article "What Are We Seeking To Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward" (Django Paris and H. Samy Alim). The article described both a culturally supportive philosophy of educational action and a stance of gentle clear cut self-criticism in the service of furthering these aims.
We read the 2008 book In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Eddie Glaude Jr.). The book both critiques Dewey on his views on race but also draws on him extensively for a political vision of meaningful and effective politics for Black Americans. It embodied the possibility of extending and deepening the thinking of philosophers foundational to IDI work to encompass wider issues such as race.
We read selections from the 2017 book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Resmaa Menakem). A short study by the Philosophy Fellowship following from a book study at IDI Summer Institute, with a months-long follow-up by a white affinity group coming out of the Fellowship. The book deals with racialized trauma and healing work on the self through specific body practices. Menakem starts with self-healing, moving towards healing work in the world. We examined the role of love and trust in descriptive inquiry, with roots in caring. Question: What do we leave out when we describe using the Descriptive Review headings?
We read the 2020 article “Fugitive Pedagogies: Decolonising Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene” (Laura Trafi-Prats). Some of the questions coming out of this study: When we describe, how can we hold space for more than our own perspective and knowledge? How do we decenter our own ways of knowing, especially when these ways are based upon white privilege? How do we make space for children who have a perspective as well as interests and preferences that are different from our own?
We read selections from the 2015 book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer). One essay in particular stands out: 'Council of Pecans'. This essay’s story about collaboration and what happens when the collaborative structure breaks down or is destroyed was particularly important to the group.
We read selections from the 2017 book How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Keenanga-Yamahtta Taylor). Our readings included the Introduction by Taylor, the 1977 “Combahee River Collective Statement” and Taylor’s interview of Barbara Smith. Guiding this study: What would it look like to fully center our schools around the people who are most structurally marginalized? What conditions do our schools need to provide so that people who are most structurally marginalized will thrive? What are the implications from this text for our work as educators and Descriptive Inquiry practitioners? Some themes that emerged: How Black women get free is how we all get free; recognizing and bringing the marginalized person into the center, yet also considering what it means to center and decenter; telling our stories as an important practice in schools; political action that begins within specific areas over which we have control.
We read four essays from the 2003 book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Maria Lugones). The essays we read were: “Introduction,” “Hablano Cara a Cara/Speaking Face to Face,” “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” “Hard to Handle Anger,” and “Purity, Impurity, and Separation.” This book has been a core reading for the group, and the chapter about world traveling described an idea that has great meaning for us and for our work with Descriptive Inquiry. Lugones and the idea of world traveling are cited in the book we are currently reading, Beyond Personhood by Talia Mae Bettcher. The essay on anger was a reading at Summer Institute 2023.
We read “Heart to Heart: Teaching With Love” from the 2003 book Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (bell hooks). This essay contrasted the idea of a pedagogy of love with a pedagogy based on the dominant culture built on hierarchies o power and competition, creatin helplessness and confusion. A pedagogy of love is both more demanding and more liberating as it supports students in a community.
We read the 2022, 20th anniversary edition of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Robin D. G. Kelley). Kelley combines both aspects of his own life experience with a deep look at the history of the role of imagination and dreams as fundamental to the Black freedom struggle. We focused in particular on the chapter, “Keepin’ it (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous,” which seemed to state Kelley’s own vision of freedom dreaming and which connected ideas from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the US in seeing beyond what already exists to what might be possible. The book made clear the necessity of a vision in any real revolution of thought and action.
We read “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” a keynote speech (1981) found in Sister Outsider, Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984); also found on the website BlackPast.org A one-session study combining this essay and Lorde’s essay on poetry (below), coming out of our recent work with Lugones, the chapter “Hard-to-Handle Anger” in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes. Themes: Responding to racism with anger; the role of women in this response. The necessity for constructive, focused anger in the face of racial oppression. Anger, though painful, gives empowerment, making it possible to survive. Other oppressions and moving towards coalition. Acting responsibly and passionately, moving beyond guilt.
We read the essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” first published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, no. 3 (1977). Found in Sister Outsider, Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984) Themes: Poetry as a “revelatory distillation of experience” and its necessity for existence. Poetry as a light projecting hopes and dreams. Living from a place of emotion up next to living from a place of reason. The Black mother “whispers in our dreams” in contrast to the white father who says, “I think, therefore I am.” Possibilities of bringing together our feelings and our ideas. Survival: shining the light in the darkness and the special role for women in this. Connection to our work: that “techno-rational” and “business-oriented” ways of seeing/acting in education squeeze out the hopes and dreams, also the imagination.
We read the essay “Poetry and Knowledge” (Aimé Césaire) originally published in Tropiques, no. 12 (January 1945). This essay followed from our Lorde reading on poetry and connected to the earlier study of Kelley’s Freedom Dreams ('A Poetics of Anticolonialism'). Poetry as a different kind of knowledge from scientific knowledge. Poetry expressing a felt way of knowing. This connects to indigenous ways of knowing and possibilities for poetry being radically anticolonial. The “other side of things” expressed through poetry, the other side from science. Connections to descriptive work: knowing the other side; questions around point of view and encompassing opposites. Ideas about descriptive work and science based in description rather than in numbers and classifying.
Page updated
Report abuse