Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author” and Frank Rose’s “The Dyslexic Storyteller” from The Art of Immersion speak of accountability and manipulating information and, how, as an author of the written word or a concept, there are modes of power at work. In his interview, Henry Giroux mentions that “power makes itself invisible” and all three writers speak of distortion of messages in order to educate, inform, and entertain which orchestrate modes of thinking. McCluhan’s “Medium is the Message,” says that it is the methods in which we send and receive information that is “more important than the information itself.” The way an item is used determines its value and without an audience messages & information would not have meaning to it at all. Giroux overlaps with the notion that media/technologies, just as education, must be challenged. Giroux’s interview aligns with Paulo Freire’s “Banking System”, and the idea that education is force-fed to students without acknowledging their individuality, cultural experiences, and agency. The gathered summaries of this week’s readings affect the way I view the development of lesson plans.
While in the role of teacher I become an author of this plan - of which I’m to develop and utilize various types of other media as examples. I tap into YouTube for video excerpts and how-to instructions, scroll through a collection of Google images, and from a variety of websites, read articles written by other educators. My planning has been designed in multiple ways even before it’s implemented. The act of creating a lesson is the engineering of prepackaged and altered output. Understanding this makes me a million times more sensitive to ensuring student agency and the kinds of narratives, ideology, culture, and knowledge used within the lesson in order to ironically encourage free and critical thinking and analysis of the topic of which I’ve chosen.
The most resonant idea for me this week is taken from Giroux when he mentions “Democracy represents an ideal in which the concept is unfinished- it's never fully completed. You always have to work at it.”
Democracy is something one must always actively work towards. When we stop that work, we can get swept up in the easier status-quo and prefabricated neo-liberal design.