Quaker Higher Education QHE a Publication of the Friends Association for Higher Education
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Quaker Higher Education QHE A Publication of the Friends Association for Higher Education Volume 12: Issue 1 April 2018 What connections and overlaps are many Friends, in Deconstructing White authentic, Spirit-led, Light-filled, and which Fragility: Nurturing Resilient Anti-Racist are forced, imposed, even violent and Practice in Our Daily Life. He reports on a erasing? This query emerges for us from the FAHE workshop that grappled with Robin five essays and poems gathered for this DiAngelo’s often stark text about the Spring 2018 issue of Quaker Higher arrogance and entitlement of white fragility Education. This will be Don Smith’s last issue as co-editor, and I (Abigail) want to Minette Coleman “drops some knowledge hold up his work and legacy of seven years. on us” about Connections – on Sharing Black and Quaker History, reveling in the Roger Reynolds, Humanities & Technology stories, histories, and realities she has Director at Olney Friends School, opens this unearthed as Historian of the Black Alumni issue with Monster Girls: Nimona and of Guilford College. You can follow Empathic Reading—and great illustrations! Minnette @MinnetteColeman and her novel Roger shows how exploring this action-hero online. graphic novel can encourage students and teachers to risk transgressive, empowering, In Envisioning a Future: FAHE in the Days and truly empathic interactions within the Ahead, C. Wess Daniels and Deborah Shaw classroom and with the text. of Guilford College help us understand some of the work ahead for our organization. Paul Moke, political scientist at Wilmington College, draws us into another imagined We close with two poems by Hugh Ogden, world: the subsistence homesteads (March 11, 1937-December 31, 2006), communities developed for underemployed Professor of English at Trinity College, mining families during the Depression, in Haverford College, ’59. Trinity College Quaker Responses to Poverty. The hosts a poet-in-residence and reading during homesteading, training and support this month, March, his birthday month. programs in Pennsylvania and West Enjoy more of his poems online. Virginia, connected Clarence Pickett of the AFSC, the nostalgic back-to-the-land Submissions: QHE is published twice a movement, and Roosevelt’s New Dealers— year, in the spring and the fall. Articles and also attempted racial integration and submitted for possible publication should be justice, before Pickett moved the self-help sent as Word documents to programs to inner cities. [email protected] or to [email protected]. If you would like to Walter Sullivan, Haverford College’s discuss an article idea, you can call: 336- Director of Quaker Affairs, picks up on the 316-2162 (DS) and 860-832-2616 (AEA). hard anti-racism work left undone by too FAHE ANNUAL CONFERENCE June 14-17, 2018 Hoping to see all of you June 14-17, 2018! FAHE will meet at Wilmington College in Wilmington, OH, to consider the theme of “Keeping Faithful in a Time of Rapid Change.” The call for papers with queries and conference registration is available at the FAHE web site and at this site. 2 Monster Girls: Nimona and Empathic Reading Roger Reynolds Olney Friends School Classrooms can be deeply oppositional around the circle, and especially one girl, places. There's a good reason for that: so who was from Hanoi, and who had been often teaching is about transformation, completely silent during the whole session. I willing or otherwise; our students come to knew that this teacher's aggressive us a certain way, and the teacher's job is to questioning about the war, from a strictly make them something else, to affect some American point of view, had to be deeply change, whether wanted or not. However, troubling to her. There was a moment when this essay presents a complementary the teacher asked this girl where she was approach: teaching a graphic novel as text from, and when she said “Vietnam,” he can encourage transgressive, oppositional, actually rubbed his hands together and said empowering, and truly empathic interactions something like, “This is going to be good.” within the classroom and with the text. In He started recounting facts about the war, particular, I present here an illustration of trying to get her to comment on their how Noelle Stevenson’s graphic novel significance, ending with the assertion that adaptation of her web comic Nimona can be more munitions had been used by the US in used to foster engaged and empathic reading Vietnam than in all of World War II. Then in the classroom. he put her on the spot, and demanded a response. She was silent for a moment, and Oppositional Teaching as Bullying then said, in her distinctive, tiny voice, “I know about that. But I don't want to think Many times the nature of the classroom about that.” interaction follows the Socratic model. As teachers, we bring to the classroom a There was a small gasp. And I admit, I felt a particular truth, or right answer; our job is to sudden surge of admiration for this student, tease this answer out of students by asking for this small act of contrariness, for them probing questions. By doing so we asserting the value of her truth in the face of hope to teach them the kinds of thinking that the teacher's relentless rhetoric. Everyone will enable them to find other right answers. else in that class (myself included) had been However, this confrontational approach can cowed by this teacher's aggressive style. cross over into bullying. Now, when I remember that day, I realize that the reason it stands out is because she I remember sitting in on a particularly was speaking truth to power: she was distressing sample lesson taught by a man affirming that learning is a shared who was a very experienced teacher. For the experience that we all should participate in lesson, he gathered a dozen or so students equally. Her opposition was the real lesson together and began quizzing them on the of that class—and it was a missed Vietnam War, asking questions of the “I opportunity. Instead of asking her to explain know the right answer let's see if you can herself, the teacher saw this as a chance to guess it” kind. This sort of closed-off argue. discussion was deeply agitating for me; I had the benefit of knowing every student 3 Reading, empathy, and pedagogy There is plenty of opposition in teaching literature, and I want to suggest that this opposition is often the real source of learning. Teaching anyone, but particularly high school seniors, how to read literary texts is a complex and daunting task. Getting students to crack a book, even an engaging and fun one, can be a challenge. This is a problem I'm sure we all have faced: the student who “doesn't care” or who seems impassive or disengaged. Their disengagement is not so much an academic problem as a loss of potential or opportunity—opportunity for self-discovery, of course, but also the lost chance at contributing to the collective understanding of the class through their reading. Positing a different relationship between reader and text might help. What I call “empathic reading” offers, among other things, an understanding of reading as a dialog Figure 1: Nimona and Blackheart play a board game (p. 84). between reader and text, based on © 2015 Stevenson/HarperCollins questioning and active exploration rather than passive reading and answering exam Stevenson has called “monk punk.” The questions. town is nominally ruled by a king, but the real power is a shadowy secret intelligence Nimona bureau called the Institution. Part of Nimona's story is about Blackheart's quest Nimona is a web comic about the for revenge against his one-time lover relationship between a older arch-villain Goldenloin, who Blackheart thinks cheated named Blackheart and his young, him out of a chance to be a hero. shapeshifting, sidekick, Nimona. It is a great text to use for engaging teaching, since But Nimona is really about genre. And by on the surface it is appears to be a fun genre, I don't mean that it is about being a graphic novel/web comic, while in fact it comic, but rather that it is about what genres discusses themes connected to identity and are: how they are defined, who gets to self-knowledge that parallel the work define them, how texts either adhere to or readers do in understanding the text. violate those conventions. I mean genre in the largest sense; ultimately it is about what It’s set in a quasi-medieval town that is a we are as people, biological and sexual and bizarre mash up of medieval and science emotional genres. fiction elements: there are sword fights and armor and dragons, but also ray guns and Another way of thinking about genre is as a telescreens and bionic arms, an aesthetic game. Bernard Suits' definition of a game (from his book The Grasshopper) is 4 “voluntarily agreeing to overcome unnecessary obstacles using inefficient means to have a specific experience” (Suits 34). Suits' example, one of them, is the game of golf; one could hardly come up with a more inefficient method for putting small balls into holes in the ground than by hitting them from hundreds of yards away with sticks, but the point of the game is the (absurd) challenge. Similarly, the point of genres is to establish a set of conventions or rules that will guarantee the consumer of the text a certain experience. If we understand Nimona as a game in this sense, then we have to ask what experience we are after by reading the comic -- where the fun of it is.