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

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