Friday, February 16, 2007

The Berlin Wall

I promise that will be my last bad Berlin joke, at least today. I'm weaning myself off of them slowly, and appreciate your guys's patience. If I remember right, Kevin talked in class about trying to connect Berlin's revolutionary ideas with a pedagogy, so it's been interesting to read his plans for a postmodern rhetoric class in part III. In chapter 6, I summarized what seemed like the primary recommendations, and am listing them below. If anyone saw anything else there that I'm leaving out, I'd love to learn it, since Berlin is a brilliant fella, and I get lost in said brilliance.

Here's my summary of his elements of a pomo classroom, as defined in chapter 6:
1) dialogic: student diversity is merged into the discourse.
2) heuristic: students follow heuristics that direct them toward structuralist and postructuralist understandings of rhetoric.
3) authority: the teacher sets the agenda, but lets the students play it out with some degree of independence.
4) rules: students make the rules to govern how cultural codes and other controversial aspects of the class are covered.
5) awareness of diversity: the teacher tries to reach students, as much as possible, on their own terms.
6) diversity in material: cross-cultural texts and diverse writing practices are embraced.

One interesting thing for me to see was that some of these elements were highlighted in the classroom--primarily 2 and 6. He doesn't map out how to implement the others in terms of his own classroom models, and is that because he's already detailed their implementation earlier, and assumes that we'll be able to abstract the rules into his suggested classrooms?

No comments: