Classrooms: Resistance, Hybrid Discourse, and Working-Class Classed Literacies
  Brian Nudelman

Within the last few decades there has been significant debate between diverging fields of linguistics and literacy theory on just how to go about defining the term literacy. Is literacy, as one side of the aisle would argue, the isolated individualized skill of successfully translating texts, symbols, and images (i.e. reading and writing) to one's own system of understanding? Or, as the still-developing field commonly referred to as "New Literacy Studies" argues, should we understand the idea of literacy first within its plural form, as a body of human activities an individual utilizes to not only understand his or her social space (Bourdieu), but to also inscribe oneself within said social space, as an ontological set of tools through which one defines being? The conflict, thus, could be seen as that of between the modern and the postmodern, between an image of the lone seeker of knowledge on the road towards fulfilling a self-empowering definition of self, and a picture of being meshed within a multicultural pluralized sense of world continually manifested and re-manifested in both evolving and communal ways.    full text >>>

Religion in the Classroom: A Confessional Narrative
  David S. Olsen

In spring 1998, I taught a course with performance artist Tim Miller entitled "Freedom of Speech: Censorship and the Arts" at California State University, Los Angeles. Cross-listed between Communication Studies and Theater Arts and Dance, the course was an experimental merging of disciplines, departments, students and faculty.[Note 1] Tim, the University's 1997-98 guest artist, taught courses in performance, dance movement and history. As a professor of rhetoric, my research areas concerned the intersection of rhetoric and aesthetics, performance, and religion. The course we constructed centered on numerous "free speech" controversies that had occurred in the 1990s. The syllabus read, in part: "... the struggle between curtailment and expansion is more than just a struggle over particular expressions, rather it is reflective of broad tensions within contemporary American society between the private and public, the individual and community, the church and state, and the sacred and the secular." It is these last two couplets, the church/state and the sacred/secular that would provide one of the most provocative sites of the course. After briefly reviewing the work of Stephen L. Carter and bell hooks, I will analyze a class dedicated to the "tensions" mentioned above, tensions reflected during the class period, in student journals and most fundamentally, in myself.   full text >>>