feministyczna
You @ the board...
Reading "Goblin Market" as a Feminist Text
Reading “Goblin Market” as a Feminist Text
With its rhyming cadence and fable-like narrative, “Goblin Market” might easily be interpreted as a children’s poem. However, it is also the tension between these two elements—form and content—that evokes the question of whether or not “Goblin Market” might be considered a feminist text. Despite the cadence and use of a tone often found in children’s literature, “Come buy, come buy: /…Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, /Swart-headed mulberries, /Wild free-born cranberries,” (4-11) the protagonists in this fable-like narrative encounter mature and sexually suggestive situations. When Laura and Lizzie encounter the goblin men and their fruit, the language of the poem maintains its child-like tone but the words are also sensual and mirror the sexuality that emerges as a reaction to the fruit. It is this sexuality that is at stake throughout “Goblin Market”. By choosing to create tension between form and content, Christina Rossetti highlights female sexuality and desire in her poem. Doing so in a form so closely resembling a fable allows Rossetti to discuss female sexuality and desire in a public forum, which her position as an English female writer in the 1800s would not have allowed her to do more explicitly. Subsequently, “Goblin Market” functions as a feminist text through its acknowledgement of female sexuality and desire.
Resources on NGO Impacts in Ghana
I was recently asked to post about assessing the impact of NGOs in Ghana. Here are some resources that I found:
Be sure to check out the Institutes, Think Tanks and Reports section of your course guide. It lists several websites that will have reports from major non-profits in West Africa.
In addition to the general social science article resources (e.g. JSTOR, ProQuest, Google Scholar, etc.) two databases that will have international NGO reports would be:
Search these databases for keywords like (NGO or non-governmental organization or intergovernmental organization) and (accountab* or monitor* or evaluat*). Here are links to two productive searches I ran in Google Scholar's Advanced Search screen:
The Low Representation of Women in Math and Science
The Low Representation of Women in Math and Science
As a math major, I have almost always been in male-dominated math classes since the beginning of my high school years. Eventually, I have accepted the unbalanced ratio between males and females in my math classes as a norm because I did not find it problematic. However, the disparity between the number of male and female students in math and science classes poses social and economic concerns, such as the difference between the average income, social status and possible careers of men and women. To challenge the social norm that I have been drawing upon my own experiences and feminist observations I have made from them, I have chosen to research on the low representation of women in Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) fields. According to research, facts show that men and women inherently and biologically have differently developed brains which filter women out of STEM field. Perhaps then, it is inevitable that women and men show their academic strengths in different fields.
Literacies in Different Contexts and Technologies
For this week, we read about the literacy and development from Street as well as Freire's piece, Cultural Action for Freedom. Street discussed the use of different languages in different contexts in Ghana such as a different language for religious versus economic settings. I was amazed by this information, coming from a homogeneous culture where most people only speak one language or possibly two if their parents speak a different language. I was fascinated that despite multiple languages, people are still able to understand one another and communicate. Using Freire's piece to examine Street's, it also makes me think about the different values that languages and cultures have. Most people in Europe speak multiple languages and yet this is celebrated, there is no pressure to use an universal language. On the other hand, many colonizers forced African countries to try and have "one language", devaluing their languages. It also makes one consider the value placed on oral versus written language and how in most academic settings, we are taught only to write in a language with much less emphasis on speaking.
A Betrayal by Definition: Black Feminism Manifests Itself (Or Doesn’t) in the American Experience
To purpose the ambiguous wanderings of my forming identity, I must first name myself. By associating with resolute terms I mean to say I commit to them, taking both the burden and the pride of my self-claimed appellations, determinately thrusting myself under the weight of them. Inextricable from these things, they are a part of me. I take on their responsibility, actively challenging the connotations of those labels as I perceive them while also bearing in mind how I am perceived by outside of myself. I name myself a woman, resolutely. I name myself a feminist, resolutely. I name myself my mother’s daughter, resolutely. While I have been able to immerse myself in struggling with these few realms of self-discovery, troublingly, what I struggle most with is to claim my name as a Black woman.
The Veil (as told by the girl who bought a copy of The Complete Persepolis for $15 on Amazon.com)
Is this working? #IrefusetosayTweet
In case anyone missed what my face looks like when we discuss Twitter in class just picture a child in a sauna who keeps going outside to get ice cream, bringing it in, and watching sadly as it melts for the seventh time in a row. I go through these phases with Twitter, I think I vaguely get it, I get a little excited because I (kind of) know what's happening, and then I log on and see a massive jumble of tiny snippets of conversations I can never catch up on with a thousand links that send me all over the place and I'm back at square one. I think part of the reason I am so bad with Twitter is that I don't like it. That is my main point and already I would have used about three or more Twitter posts to say it, unless I simply wrote "I dislike Twitter and suspect it is mutual". I grew up in a house with more books than furniture, I've always read the book before the movie, and I still prefer to thumb through giant reference books for information. I am not built to sum things up succintly (as you have probably guessed by now).
world travel/ perspective
This image is from an episode of West Wing, where people bring in a map of the world that is upside-down and explain why it changes everything. The initial reaction, of course, is to laugh because it's such an odd idea and seems so trivial. However, once I began actually looking into this after our class discussion of "world travel" and perceptions, I realized there is actually something to it. For one thing, the continents are re-sized more acurately, but also it does make you think about the relationship between North and South and Top and Bottom. Even if you don't realize it, I certaintly didn't, constantly seeing the US as near the top of the world, or at least above other countries on the map has an implication of power and importance. Imagine if we were no longer North America, but South? Besides the fact that it sounds weird, are there any other reasons we would object?
Single Story
While listening to the TED talk I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with this idea of a "single story". Initially I agreed because frequently there are single stories or party lines that get fed to us and when you actually research the topic you find out that there were a million other voices that got ignored in favor of one idea. However, it was that thought that made me question the conclusion even as I came to it. Is an idea a "single story" of sorts? When you hear an idea or story don't you automatically internalize it in one way or another and make it different? Even if it's just the difference between laughing at something or not, or agreeing with a statement or remaining silent--doesn't that change the way other people see it (or hear it, read it, etc.)?
Silence and Good Intentions
On Thursday I worked with a student on her college essay. She asked me to read it over and provide feedback. After reading the first paragraph and skimming the rest I immediately thought this won’t do. Her story was not compelling enough and did not highlight her agency. In addition to the missing “wow” factor it lacked an inviting introduction and presented no hard-hitting obstacle she overcame that communicated her resiliency and strength. It failed to do what I was told a “winning” essay would do, which was, captivate an audience by telling a story. In trying to help improve her essay I immediately went to my email and began sifting through my inbox to find samples of college essays given to me during my junior year as well as my own “mission statement” for her to use as a guide. As soon as I opened up that document for her I regretted how I was handling the situation.
Silence and Good Intentions
On Thursday I worked with a student on her college essay. She asked me to read it over and provide feedback. After reading the first paragraph and skimming the rest I immediately thought this won’t do. Her story was not compelling enough and did not highlight her agency. In addition to the missing “wow” factor it lacked an inviting introduction and presented no hard-hitting obstacle she overcame that communicated her resiliency and strength. It failed to do what I was told a “winning” essay would do, which was, captivate an audience by telling a story. In trying to help improve her essay I immediately went to my email and began sifting through my inbox to find samples of college essays given to me during my junior year as well as my own “mission statement” for her to use as a guide. As soon as I opened up that document for her I regretted how I was handling the situation.
Silence and Good Intentions
On Thursday I worked with a student on her college essay. She asked me to read it over and provide feedback. After reading the first paragraph and skimming the rest I immediately thought this won’t do. Her story was not compelling enough and did not highlight her agency. In addition to the missing “wow” factor it lacked an inviting introduction and presented no hard-hitting obstacle she overcame that communicated her resiliency and strength. It failed to do what I was told a “winning” essay would do, which was, captivate an audience by telling a story. In trying to help improve her essay I immediately went to my email and began sifting through my inbox to find samples of college essays given to me during my junior year as well as my own “mission statement” for her to use as a guide. As soon as I opened up that document for her I regretted how I was handling the situation.
Literacies - Post 3
When Freire discusses how learning becomes “techniques, naively considered to be neutral, by means of which the educational process is standardized in a sterile and bureaucratic operation” I step back to analyze what goals public education has and how these goals have been sterilized. I question what the intent is for public education today. Pressure to perform on standardized tests are causing the classroom to be centered around the test. But what are the goals of the test? One could argue, such as myself, that tests funnel students into reproduction of socio-economic class status. Tests do seek to also gauge whether a student has mastered certain material. To use standardized tests to judge whether a student knows how to read then makes literacy a standardized and sterile activity. Centering a classroom around the assessment tool does not provide in-depth experiential education on a topic. As educators I believe we should focus on the goals of the tests not on the tests themselves. How can we shift the focus off high-stakes testing when salaries, school funding, and schools remaining open depends on test results? How can our students be successful on tests without us teaching to the test?
Literacies in Different Contexts and Technologies
For this week, we read about the literacy and development from Street as well as Freire's piece, Cultural Action for Freedom. Street discussed the use of different languages in different contexts in Ghana such as a different language for religious versus economic settings. I was amazed by this information, coming from a homogeneous culture where most people only speak one language or possibly two if their parents speak a different language. I was fascinated that despite multiple languages, people are still able to understand one another and communicate. Using Freire's piece to examine Street's, it also makes me think about the different values that languages and cultures have. Most people in Europe speak multiple languages and yet this is celebrated, there is no pressure to use an universal language. On the other hand, many colonizers forced African countries to try and have "one language", devaluing their languages. It also makes one consider the value placed on oral versus written language and how in most academic settings, we are taught only to write in a language with much less emphasis on speaking.
Impacting Young Lives through Literacy
One of my biggest questions for many years of my life has been, “what grade do I want to teach?” It has never been a question of IF I’m going to teach, but rather where I will be along the education spectrum. Throughout middle and high school I desired to be a Pre-K teacher, then moving up to include Pre-K through first grade. Upon coming to Bryn Mawr, the question arose all over again and I thought I had settled on third grade and had been complacent about that decision for about half a year, but have recently been questioning and re-evaluating things again. My recent thoughts had been that I wanted to have an impact in a place in the students’ life where it was more content-based, as the toddler years tend to be more about teaching social skills.
I’ve been working at Thorne School (the pre-school on campus) for the past two years and have loved my interactions with the children. Last year I was thinking that while I like working there, I wanted to have a different impact on children. But this year, I seem to be going back to my previous choice. This past week while reading books to children at the school, I was noticing how their vocabulary repertoire was building through those simple interactions as they continually asked for clarification on the meaning of words that they were unfamiliar with. It got me thinking that I love that, helping build their understanding and witnessing their desire to understand, and how important that can be at that very young and tender age.
Returns on Education
This week I wanted to focus my blog post on the value of education. I am currently taking an economics class at Haverford entitled Microfinance. The first segment of the course is on poverty and this past week we have been focusing on education. I think most people in the developed world would argue that education has value but what about the people on the other side of the world whose children have been in school through fifth grade but still cannot read a simple paragraph? Literacy is a difficult tool to develop but some progress should be made in five years. The majority of families around the world are educating their children but how much are they actually getting in return? How can families below the poverty line in developing countries measure this value? How do parents decide whether or not they should send one of their 4 children to school for 15 years, or send all of their children to school but only through basic primary education? In this class we have been looking at how literacy is defined and its cultural value.
ASL
I was having a conversation with one of my friends who is currently taking an ASL (American Sign Language) class at UPenn. She was telling me about a talk she has to go to and our discussion really got me thinking about some of the themes in this class.
First, she introduced me to the word "co-equality" which according to Webster's online dictionary means "the state of being equal." However when she was referring to it in relation to her ASL class it was a bit more specific to context. This is something we've been talking about a lot in expanding our definitions of literacy; the idea that one can be literate (or equal) in one context does not mean they are literate (or equal) in all contexts and situations. My friend pointed out to me that the deaf community is one of the few disability communities which is expected to almost completely assimlate into "normal" society. I say community because the deaf community has their own language and in many ways culture (whereas most other disabilities do not) but it is widely ignored by the hearing community as a whole. I'm not trying to make a statment about whether this is good or bad, it is simply reality. It is relevant to this class because as we're thinking about different kinds of literacies and different contexts, I think it is a really good example of how language goes beyond the ability to read and write.
If anyone is interested in going to the talk at UPenn, here is a link to the description and such:http://bit.ly/wdFcoi
Practicing Tech
This post was written on an iPad. I tried to correct all typos, but some of them might still remain... My fingers aren't quite as sure about here they go without physical keys.
I'm pretty sure I referenced this article for Alice's Ed Tech class, but it's a good one, so I'm going to pull it out again: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/two-step-tech-integration-elementary-mary-beth-hertz
I've been thinking a lot about how we're using tech in this class, both with iPads and with twitter. I've seen quite a few comments on twitter especially, but also here on Serendip, that the tech is in some ways lowering the depth of connection we have with each other as we engage with the material. That has looked like playing with the iPads instead of listening to the entire iPad introduction, as well as occasionally forced conversations or overwhelming conversations on twitter. I can write this blog post on my iPad, but I can't yet use it seamlessly when I'm interacting with someone. At this point, I really don't know enough about the iPad for it to work quite as well for me as my computer. I've been using it in as many different situations as possible--passing it around to sign up for snacks for my a cappella group, bringing it along any time I might want to use Internet, and trying to push past some of the initial slowness of learning the tech. To be fair, I have an iPhone, so I'm already familiar with multitouch gestures and the way I-devices work.
