I’ve found a lot of my time these last few weeks focused quite a bit on reading articles, watching videos, and paying attention to the interactions and conversations of people around me. Under my learning objective to understand the connections between and importance of activism, social justice work, and education, I don’t think that paying attention to the smaller details happening around me is a bad thing.
I love theory and I love making huge connections and putting ideas in context and conversation with each other. But a big critique of mainstream higher education is that it depersonalizes what it teaches, and lessens the ability to apply the big picture theoretical knowledge you gain to the local and personal, to the interactions that happen between people.
You cannot learn everything there is to know from a traditional classroom. You won’t always be able to see the big picture if you only have experience with local affairs and personal interactions. There has to be some kind of balance between the various ways to learn and take action. And that’s what a big part of my studies this quarter have been.
In the last weeks I watched a collection of TED Talks and quite a few videos from the Youtuber Ash Hardell, an educator on topics of gender, sexuality, and expression. I’ve read articles commenting on the actions people are taking, and I’ve paid attention to the conversations that the professors, teachers, and mentors in my life are having.
Watching these videos and articles has been important to me because it’s a practice of making connections, of gaining context and working with frameworks and big ideas and small personalized ideas at the same time. It’s listening to people’s experiences and thinking about how they fit with larger theories, and if they don’t fit, why don’t they? What’s missing in the theory that’s not taken into account?
To me, that is what a really good education should do. It should teach you how to make connections and take any piece of information, media, or material and learn something from it. To add to the way you see the world.
I am really enjoying taking the time and putting in the effort to include smaller pieces of writing, videos, and less formal lectures in my learning method. It’s been really fun to make connections between a discussion between Toni Morrison and Angela Davis that I watched in the first week or two, and a TED Talk discussing the power prosecutors have to create positive change in young lives. To read an article about the misappropriation of MLK’s legacy to take power away from the protestors of the present that connects to so many previous seminar discussions about protests, power, accountability, and respectability politics.
I am also looking forward to taking on some more theory and bigger ideas in the next half of the quarter, and on reading a lot of journal articles for my internship literature review. I think that will become what takes up most of my time over the next several weeks as I look for broader connections, agreements, and disagreements and explore the depth and breadth of research done on trans and queer spaces in higher education.