Return-Path: <nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id f55Lief25762; Tue, 5 Jun 2001 17:44:40 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 17:44:40 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <001001c0ee08$89b71500$dda92a3f@computer> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "gdemetrion" <gdemetrion@msn.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-POVRACELIT:502] Re: Scholarly Articles Research Alerting (SARA) X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; Status: O Content-Length: 7626 Lines: 151 > Taylor & Francis currently publishes over 540 academic peer-reviewed > journals across a variety of disciplines. In response to the changing needs > of the academic community, we are using the Internet actively to disseminate > information about journals in advance of publication One such article from Taylor and Francis is Educational Philosophy and Theory that includes my article, "Reading Giroux Througha Deweyan Lens: Pushing Utopia to the outer Edge." Volume 33, No 1, Feb 2001, pp 57-76. Henry A. Giroux is a protegee of Freire who greatly extended Freire's insights for a North American context, which included an analysis of critical pedagogy through the selective postmodernist ,feminist, and modernist (a la Habermas) lenses. While I am empathetic to Giroux's project, I take a more reformist perspective, drawing on the insights of John Dewey. I believe the article raises significant issues for adult literacy praxis related to the political culture which informs our practice, theory and policy that I believe are worth exploring. I include a few paragraphs in an effort to share something of the essence of the essay. If the formatting of this post comes out funny, I will know that there is a technical problem related to my subsceription to this list. There are 566 words in the quoted Materials George Demetrion Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford ____________________________________________________________________________ ___________ Reading Giroux Through A Deweyan Lens: Pushing Utopia to the Outer Edge George Demetrion It is the argument of this essay that Giroux's radical project serves as an ultimate utopian boundary grounded in the furthermost ideals of freedom, liberty, and inclusiveness embodied within the American political tradition, which is severely constrained in our contemporary political culture. Considerable scaffolding from the historically given to the emancipatory vision is required to move, however minimally and ambiguously so, toward anything approximating Giroux's ideal in "real time" social milieus of the present and foreseeable future. Dewey's concept of democracy as "full and free communication," leading to "the fullest possible realization of human potentialities" (Dewey, 1989, p. 100) represents a nearer term utopian project that could push trajectories toward Giroux's ideal, however piecemeal and episodic. Simultaneously, Giroux's emancipatory pedagogy serves as a perpetual yardstick to critique the Deweyan vision and goad it toward the fuller implications of a democratic culture even though the reality likely will fall considerably short of both Dewey's and Giroux's vision of democracy and education. Giroux's more conservative tendency, moreover, to seek space for human agency largely within mainstream social structures and institutions, somewhere between domination and resistance, could add significant force to a Deweyan cultural vision with its tendency to minimize ideological conflict in the quest for "reconstructive" growth. There is no easy synthesis between Giroux's critical pedagogy and Dewey's pragmatic philosophy. The former starts from a utopian premise of emancipation within a postmodern, multicultural social context while the latter sought to expand potential tendencies resident within the given society, grounded in the modernistic sensibilities of the early twentieth century in the hope that a consenual liberal culture might prevail. This essay is clearly Deweyan in its emphasis on pragmatic opportunities to open up certain avenues for human enhancement at the center and at the periphery of mainstream social experience. However, it adheres to a postmodern sensibility against any foundational-like assumptions that progress toward such aspirations is inevitable or even likely. Although modest in scope, this space for limited reform within capitalism, that at least has the capacity to profoundly matter to those potentially affected, should not be lightly ignored. However limited from the perspective of critical pedagogy, it well may represent the "limit-situation" of what is feasible within the given American political culture, one that might be described as postmodern and multicultural that has no single point of reference. With such a limitation in mind, I draw on Giroux's vision as a pragmatic strategy to keep maximally open the plausibility for greater democratization than would otherwise be available from only a Deweyan reconstructive angle. Giroux's vision serves as a heuristic, then, not only of critical analysis, but also as possessing a certain ontological force in changing reality, however small. Whether Giroux would accept this I am unsure. As a Deweyan, I seek to appropriate the force of his critique and the passion of his vision to extend what in the final analysis would only be interpreted as modest reform within capitalism. While far from the more radical aspects of Giroux's utopian vision, this tempered space is still significant for an open social universe undergoing continuous reconstruction even within the context of historically conditioned constraints within capitalism. Any such impact of this Dewyan "middle ground" (Demetrion, 1997, 1998) may prove rather minimal on a socially statistical basis. Yet it very well could open up creative space for "humanization" within individual and local contexts that proves highly significant to historical actors. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mary Ann Corley" <macorley1@earthlink.net> To: "Multiple recipients of list" <nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov> Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 10:58 AM Subject: [NIFL-POVRACELIT:501] Scholarly Articles Research Alerting (SARA) > The following may be of interest to you. > --Mary Ann Corley > ********************************************** > > Taylor & Francis currently publishes over 540 academic peer-reviewed > journals across a variety of disciplines. In response to the changing needs > of the academic community, we are using the Internet actively to disseminate > information about journals in advance of publication. > > SARA - Scholarly Articles Research Alerting, is a special email service > designed to deliver tables of contents, for any Taylor & Francis, Carfax, > Routledge, Spon Press, Martin Dunitz or Psychology Press journal, to anyone > who has requested the information. This service is completely free of > charge. > > All you need to do is register, and you will be sent contents pages of the > journal(s) of your choice from that point onwards, in advance of the printed > edition. You can request contents pages either for any number of individual > titles, or for one or more of our sub-categories or a main category, and you > may unsubscribe at any time. For each of your choices, you will receive the > relevant bibliographic information: journal title, volume/issue number and > the ISSN. You will also receive full contents details, names of authors and > the appropriate page numbers from the printed version. > > This will give you advance notice of what is being published, making it > easier for you to retrieve the exact information you require from the hard > copy once it arrives in your library. > > Titles that may be of interest are: > > Race, Ethnicity & Education > Intercultural Education > > To register for this complimentary service, please visit: > http://www.tandf.co.uk/sara and click on the SARA button. > > For further information on the above titles, please visit: > http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals > > If you have any questions regarding this service, please email: > SARA@tandf.co.uk > > >
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