Reflections+on+Seminar+1

My one section of seminar was on Thursday before the juggernaut of soccer claimed most of the school. We began our discussion by comparing the definitions of the five kinds of "othering." (Note - I wish we could find a better verb that encompasses all of these things). What the students started to discover, and what proved to be the most fruitful discussion, was that one student chose the word //marginalized// for SSDP while another student chose the same word for PACTT. They started comparing and discussing how very different populations can be ignored or pushed out of the mainstream. We spent some time looking at the words that they defined and the differnent populations that fit their definitions. This made for some lively conversation and connections. They struggled with the close text connection (finding an actual quotation to support their definition) to //the Scarlet Letter// (the letter was red, you might remember) but not with the idea connection. They could all see parallels between the communities they are working with and the characters in TSL, and I wonder what would happen if we explicitly opened up the discussion to include Dimmesdale (although silent by choice he is a powerful example of the majority who choose to think "not me," "not my problem," or NIMBY) and the poor that Hester serves that others in the community do not. Further discussion was about our work days. I have a lot of SSDP students who were creeped out by the needle exchange and wanted to talk about it. OBTW, they did not see the rat that walked behind the head of the guy who was speaking that first work day. Where JPB thought they handled the appearance of vermin well, actually - many were oblivious.
 * Section F - Tabor**

These were very different seminars, in part because A period fell on Friday, and only seven juniors were present - maybe the only seven juniors in the school by that time. In Section E, half of the students had been on the Ghetto Bus Tour, and while the tour may have been cut short due to missed connections, it had a powerful effect. In both classes, I organized the discussion around the definitions of "other." Each student explored the meaning of the term, then applied it to specific encounters and experiences. The best parts of the conversation came at the junctures of different experiences with similar definitions. I haven't read the papers yet, but based on the conversations, the students really got the concept here. These were far more gratifying conversations than I recall having last year in the first seminar, perhaps because this year's class seems to have welcomed the program, while last year's classes expended a lot of energy in resisting and complaining. In the A period discussion, we talked a lot about marginalization - and here there was even a spontaneous discussion of Hester. Students shared with each other the sense of marginalizing as a centrifugal energy that pushes the undesirable out to the edges, or as one student suggested, off the table.
 * Section E - Kaplan Section A - Kaplan**


 * Section F-- Collins**

The best discussion about the concepts happened when the students begain to realize how much overlap exists among the terms; a student made a powerful & evocative comment about his experience at PAACT- that there was no real difference between trying to educate the children and leaving them in a corner "with a chew toy," which got us talking about the level of committment that the PAACT teachers have AND the level of responsibility that the community has to not leave anyone behind or uncared for. It was, as the kids like to say, "Intense." We talked abotu how some grops get more care and how some get less because of who they are perceived to be.

The bulk of our discussion, however, centered around the kids perceptions of what it is they are supposed to be doing with our half day experiences. Is it service or action? Are they building meaningful and lasting relationshiops, or are they just coming in for a half day? Are they supposed to be making visible change in the locations that they are traveling to? to what extent are they supposed to plan events and experiences and reflect on them? They are also confused about the placement and meaning of the papers-- they felt pushed to make connections between their experiences and the novel that didn't really exist for them. They wonder how we're evaluating their experience as a whole-- what does it take for them to pass community connections, and why are the papers included in the classroom grade rather than in the community connections grade?