11/19/14 Reflection Ivette

The past couple of weeks have been invigorating, personally, emotionally and intellectually.  Attending the ASIST conference, returning to the home of my childhood and revisiting so many places that shaped my formation and then wisking off to the island of Puerto Rico to attend the National Women Studies conference.  Ideas of community, collaboration and connection take very different forms in each of those spaces, but I am at ease knowing that at the center of the work we do is love.

As I was preparing for our roundtable, on Hormigas y Hormigueros: Resisting assimilation, silencing and erasure the questions that we were posed with reflecting on were the following:  How do we envision nation state? What are our processes of dialogue, collective?  How do we weave in new ways of imaging the nation?

With this my colleague, Miriam Valdovinos set the stage for the conversation, one in community, in circle, with ancestral knowledges of healing at the center.

When it came my time, I was at first speaking Freire and the 6 elements he refers to as essential to dialogue across differences: love, humility, hope, faith in human kind, and critical thinking.  The same ones that are at the center of the framework we are using with our work in the Empezando Donde Estamos/ Starting Where We are project.

Sharing stories, creating spaces for our counter stories, on the individual, family, institutional and academic identities is the way we can embody envisioning a different nation-state.  Hooks reminds us that "love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust." 

In this work, as we prepare for our first workshop today, we bring with us this kind of love that creates a space for dialogue.  One that, as Tiffany reminds us in her reflections, and in the readings include and embody a constructivist learning/assessment atmosphere and one that is rooted in the lived experiences and shared community already established and the new one we are creating. 

In the foreword to the 1990 edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaull writes "our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system.  To the degree which this happens we are also becoming submerges in a 'new culture of silence'."

His words resonate because as scholars, educators and information professionals, we need to be aware of socio-technical systems and how our work is in dialogue with these systems which can and often are oppressive and exploitative. 

"Being oppressed is the absence of choices" hooks says, so as we move forward with the women's workshops, let's keep that notion, front and center.  Our goals are multiple but all rooted in the idea that we are creating spaces for choices, opportunities, expanding of information networks and people as resources. 

I am working on today's lesson plans for the women, and given Emily's email regarding the technology, the last few weeks, each of your reflections and my own, I am leaning towards a lesson plan that allows us to enter in dialogue with the women, engage in storytelling, lay the foundation for how and whats we are trying to do, share resources about FemTechNet as a way of thinking about technology, and create a space for allies and partners in this journey that we know so well, we cannot do alone.  We will let them know that for each of our lessons, we need a volunteer leader, to sign up and partner with us on the topic.  I believe if we want this to be a space for dialogue, it is essential that we start by making that space, by demonstrating the importance of that dialogue and being willing to share our stories and be vulnerable in the process.  

With love,

~Ivette