learning against the grain


LEARNING AGAINST THE GRAIN

As a sponsored ministry of the Congregation of St. Joseph, People Program in New Orleans is an opportunity for senior citizens to participate in learning communities during  fall, spring, and summer sessions. The absence of a winter session may be a psychological advantage: the elderly and near elderly can enjoy leaves, flowers, and one another's company and give scant attention to ice or nude branches.  They can experience again what many of them took for granted in childhood and youth ----unfettered joy in acquiring knowledge.  Offering an eclectic range of courses  ---Lost Gospels,  Reading and Playing Music: Beginners,  Ukrainian Egg Design,  Zumba Gold, Bridge, and so forth,  People Program is a site for fun.

 Many of the participants are retired teachers, and they value the life of the mind. On August 20, 2018, I amplified the simple  email message I'd sent to "students" who signed up for M402: Five African American Writers":  M402 is a forum for  (1) reading  novels which represent how five writers chose to deal with vital 20th century topics  and (2) discussing why the issues they addressed have relevance in our 21st century practice of everyday life.  One prime objective is consideration of what actually happens as we have transactions with fiction.  Thus, all participants are expected to share questions and insights generated by  reading the novels.   In this forum, the instructor and the participants have "shared authority" in determining why reading matters.

 Reading matters in M402 because participants can sharpen cognitive skills and make good use of the emotional responses which occur in the act of reading.  We can have fun as we share the insights, prejudices, and values acquired from many years of living and suffering beneath the stars.  Reading matters because it allows us, among other things, to think about (1) history as narratives about human conditions in space and time and (2) our shaping of histories by way of micro-histories that are most often passed on in oral traditions rather than in the dead alphabets of a printed text.  Reading matters because our AARP-certified lives matter.  We can have fun in learning against the grain.  In the People Program we are not constricted by the dread of needing to be "correct."



Reading and Discussion Schedule for the Required Texts



Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) ----20 and 27 Aug; 10 and  17 Sep



James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) ---24 Sep; 1 and 8 Oct.



Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)---15, 22 and 29 Oct



Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970) ----5 and 12 Nov



Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (1993) ---26 Nov and 3 Dec



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            August 24, 2018

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

Tell Them We Are Rising

TELL THEM WE ARE RISING TAKE ONE/ 16 February 2018                                                                                       Scene: Ash é Power House, 1731 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA Act:   PBS/Indie Lens Film Screening: "Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities" Purpose:   To view a short version of Stanley Nelson's most recent documentary, a visual narrative of many narratives, designed "to tell the dynamic story of Americans who refused to be denied a higher education and ---in their resistance --- created a set of institutions that would influence and shape the landscape of the country for centuries to come." (quoted from Ash é Cultural Arts Center newsletter, February 2018) Brief report on TAKE ONE                 My impressions of this documentary were prejudiced by (1) the advertising of the film, (2) my intimate knowledge of HBCUs from having been on the faculty of two of them fo
Read more