Spent some quality downtime with the team last night. Despite deep fatigue and occasional waves of frustration, the mood overall was positive and like usual we couldn’t help but get to work, dreaming up possible futures over cheese tray and dark chocolates.
Below is a kind of draft mission or prospectus for a new blog dedicated specifically to radical education research and writing:
Teach 4 Democracy (dot net) [working title]
Some of us have had enough and are ready to start blogging! The proposed site will do many things — report out, analyze, catalog, document, clarify, unravel, situate, record, summarize, interpret, explain, consolidate, review and respond (among other things).
The main focus (if I understood right) will be community college education in the context of larger historical and institutional forces.
The rationale (mood) informing the effort goes roughly like this: We stand witness to some pretty bad times in higher education, and there are forces at work whose scientific value (see quote upper right) remains to be seen. The goal for T4D (tentative domain) is to document those forces and report on the action, as we see it, while also pointing the way forward for educators committed (despite the odds) to teaching for democracy.
Audience: We will research and write for interested readers (in education and beyond) and for ourselves. The site will function as news source, research center, information clearinghouse, but also as a channel for venting frustrations, unraveling ideas and exploring the dark complexities of today’s reformist agenda.
Caveat: We understand that community college education is not one thing but many different things (institution, culture, labor environment, industry, political arena, academic setting, social space, and much more). It is also a place where much good can happen, particularly where learning is taken seriously as critical democratic practice and transformative process and not just (or merely) a means to some other end.
We also recognize that what’s bad here is a lot worse elsewhere, and some evil in our world has no scientific value. It’s important to know one’s place and be real about what the real threats are and who, really, stands to suffer most when bad things happen to real people. That tension will also inform the reports in this blog.
Should it ever happen.
