International Travel
Contents
“Lines” – an essay on travels in
Weblog from Travelers, Steve and Christy, in
Interviews from Abroad (Models for upcoming
Student Interviews)
Book Review on Teachers as Cultural
Workers
Archives
“Lines”—An
Essay on Peru
I had nearly peed up the wall of the lavatory. It wasn’t really my fault
though. Our bus trip from
As Dave (my long-time friend from high school) and I got off the bus tired, disheveled, and discombobulated, we looked out at the up and down the tan, orange, and white block structures that decorated Nazca’s main street.
“Where to?” Dave asked.
I shrugged.
We shared a weary smile, put on our heavy packs, and slogged off down the road to find a box of our own to call home for the next two days.
After checking into a desperately cheap hostel and enjoying fried egg sandwiches at a nearby cafe, Dave and I decided that to sleep all day our first day in Nazca was sacrilegious; we must see the Lines.
The manager of the hostel we were staying at arranged for our transport to the Nazca airport. An old dusty little Ford Escort met us on the way out of the building and the manager motioned for us to get in. The driver of the Escort did not speak to us, but seemed intent on driving extremely fast through dusty back streets to get to the airport.
This was the first time since arriving two weeks before that I considered how
much trust was involved in the way Dave and I had been traveling. For some
reason, I had the sinking feeling that our driver was different. He was silent,
and thus far, everyone in
My line of thinking was incorrect, thankfully. The driver finally got on a paved road that was headed towards an airport. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked at Dave. His head was turned and resting on his arms, which were folded over the travel bag he had in his lap; he was dozing. Apparently, while sleep deprivation made me paranoid, it just made Dave tired.
Time and again on this trip, I had marched over lines I would never dream of
crossing in the
And yet “necessity” was a relative term, wasn’t it? A village we had passed on the way into Nazca was made up of nothing but one-room mud-brick homes that looked like a series of upside-down tan shoe boxes. Trash and debris were piled up on one end of town. No trash bags in sight. Just the horizon, where the cool blue sky met the baked and blistered sands of the Peruvian desert.
Boundaries. Where have they been drawn for us? Do we respect them? When do we decide to draw new ones? My mind was working overtime as our driver stopped to let us out at the airport. I thanked him, while Dave groggily tipped him a couple nuevo soles.
After a brief wait to fill out paperwork for our flight, Dave and I were issued to a small 4-person Cessna. The plane was at least 35 years old and I prayed that I would make it back from this trip to see my wife and cats. They seemed so far away…boxed in by the many lines of life in the States. Perhaps it was the lack of usual lines that made me feel so free and so afraid out here.
The propeller on the front of the plane began to spin and our captain, Martin (pronounced Mar-teen), jumped up and into the pilot’s seat next to me. Within minutes, we were nothing more than a small shadow on the desert floor. I was both excited and tired, frightened and fearless, and I seemed to glide on the edges of these throughout our flight.
Five minutes from the airport, Dave put his hand on my shoulder and motioned to our right and that’s when I saw the Owl-Man, his form carved out on the side of hill. He looked like something out of the X-Files; he had bubbly features everywhere except for the sharp angles that made up his wings. We continued on, flying over the Hummingbird, the Condor, the Monkey, the Hands, and, my favorite, the Spider all carved out in great detail, with the utmost precision, on the desert floor. We saw the “runway” lines and many others too which simply seemed to connect many of the characters on the desert floor with other lines.
Interesting, I thought, it is merely the outline which gives the bodies any substance. Yet, the content of those bodies was always there. It was just up to the Nazca culture to create their boundaries… to carve them up… and out…
As I had read up in my Lonely Planet travel guide just days earlier, the Nazca culture had constructed these lines on the desert floor over the course of 1000 years, from roughly 400 B.C. to 600 A.D., and in four distinct phases. At least two phases saw the construction of the animals, insects, and mythological creatures (many of whom were half-man, half-animal, or “manimal” as Dave and I affectionately referred to them), while another saw the construction of wide straight lines that narrowed in one direction. And yet another phase saw bending, curving lines that united the constructions of earlier phases. All the lines had been made by picking up the reddish-brown rock on the floor of the desert and stacking it up on either side of the yellow sand that was exposed.
So for the half hour that Dave and I spent looking over the lines, I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s all that makes us human. If that’s all that humans do, from the Nazca, to Peruvians, to Americans—we draw lines to make life manageable. It’s what defines us…where we draw our lines… the kinds of lines we follow, use, and emphasize. Whether its architectural lines, signing on the dotted line, the lines of a page, writing, or art, or the celebration (or disgust) of bloodlines and lineage, we seem obsessed with lines that bind. So while the Nazca may have built their lines to have multiple meanings and significance, they weren’t doing anything new, just something that was, and still is, a unique combination of lines for living.
The Nazca lines, like the lines in the angles of the Pyramids at
At first, up there in that little Cessna, I thought he was asking me to follow him, along these lines—like Spider Woman of the Navajo, he was weaving a story. But what was it? As Martin turned the plane back to the airport, Dave and I sat quietly, our thoughts nearly drowned out by the hum of the plane engine. On second thought, maybe the Spider didn’t want me to follow a story; maybe he wanted me to see that many more stories exist than we pay attention to. Its lines, my lines, the lines we weave are universal. They speak to our connections, our boundaries always being blurred, and, at the same time, they hold us fast…giving us the outline, the appearance of something unique, something that looks like it could stand on its own. Whether it’s sand, or canvas, paper, block, rock, skin, or space, we draw, sign, and weave lines of inspiration and of celebration, lines of worry, lines of longitude and latitude...
As soon as we had landed and the little-engine-that-could had been silenced, Dave looked at me, shaking his head in awe—“It’s amazing that no one never knew these lines were here until some guy in a plane flew over them in 1930’s…can you imagine his reaction?”
And it was true, the pilot must have been absolutely flabbergasted to see those lines stretching out before him. Modern society is so caught up lines that move their heads from side to side, or down, as they walk straight ahead in their daily routines. In fact, many people still can’t believe that the Nazca culture built these lines—“why would you build something you can’t even see? …It’s not like they had airplanes.” Maybe it’s what comes from looking up… and out…
That night, as I sat in bed, writing in my travel journal, I realized how much I’d already marked up past entries. Cramming new phrases, thoughts, and ideas, next to my previous observations on the page, I was something of a margineer. New stories were emerging and new connections. Lines that bind, and bleed, and splatter...
By the Margineer
Steve and Christy’s Online Travel Log from New Zealand
Link to it at www.geocities.com/ragg_stephen/
Interviews
Meet the Press: Tim Russert Interviews Bono About Africa
(This can be found at http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8332675/)
Veterans’ stories from
their experiences abroad
(http://www.loc.gov/vets//vets-home.html and
sample interview questions can be found at http://www.loc.gov/vets//questions.html)
Book Review on Teachers as Cultural Workers by Brazilian Author, Paulo Freire
Where Language and Democracy Meet in Education
Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach
Freire, Paulo.
Reviewed by Mark Kohan
For years, Paulo Freire’s ideas of education have been termed revolutionary. That statement is, perhaps, the best way to introduce Freire because it can be used to illustrate the underlying premise of Teachers as Cultural Workers. In reading that first sentence, what word caught your eye, either out of enthusiasm or disgust? I would hazard a guess that it was the word, ‘revolutionary’. This is a word that signifies socio-political change—and depending on how you have come to know and think about revolutions and revolutionary thought, this will indeed influence how you read the word in this context. This idea, that in reading a word and its relationship to other words we are reading the world, is Freire’s point exactly. In other words, he is asserting that language does not exist without a social construction and context. For it is through literacy that people are given the chance to read their world, reflect on its construction (by locating themselves), and then, reconstruct it to the best of their abilities. Thus, Freire believes that language, learning, and action are inseparable when it comes to educating people properly.
Unfortunately, as detailed in the foreword of Teachers as Cultural Workers (written by Donaldo Macedo and Ana Maria Araújo Freire), many politicians, businessmen, and educators, who have been corrupted by power, money, and pride, have set up a capitalist “banking model” of education, which oppresses the masses by divorcing the learning of language from the learning of social, cultural, and political environments. This causes language to be looked at and used in a strictly informational sense, where teachers are the dispensers of all knowledge and the students are the accounts (or receptacles) waiting to be filled. While Freire’s seminal philosophical text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), more clearly articulates these concepts and details how education has been used to exploit the poor, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach addresses teachers specifically, asking them to make education a practice of freedom, democracy, and social change. According to Freire, this means that “the task of the teacher, who is also a learner, is both joyful and rigorous. It demands seriousness and scientific, physical, emotional, and affective preparation” and “it is (also) impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love” (3).
Before a thorough discussion of Teachers as Cultural Workers continues
further, however, it is important to define the context Freire was living and
writing in. That context was
So, how then can Freire’s ideas best be brought into an American context? As he
states “deep down, this must be every author’s true dream—to be read,
discussed, critiqued, improved, and reinvented by his/her readers” (31). Since
Freire was anything but traditional, and he
encouraged his work to be recontextualized when used outside of
Beginning with some of the earliest educational theorists, namely Plato and Socrates, Teachers as Cultural Workers reawakens the importance of using dialogue (and the dialectic) in school classrooms. Freire defines these processes as something which helps students to understand new ideas. Also reminiscent of Georg Hegel’s ideas of the dialectic, Freire stresses the need for students and teachers to challenge each other through conversation, so that they might discover new knowledge, growth, and understanding together.
Freire believes that this type of dialogue, both spoken and written, is so integral to learning because it is a method which acknowledges how “thinking, doing, writing, reading, thought, language, and reality” are “impossible to separate and dichotomize” (1). In other words, Freire is echoing John Dewey’s pragmatist thought: students learn by doing, a process which encompasses cognition, emotion, and action. Freire goes on to warn against the use of prepackaged lessons and compartmentalized dialogues because it hinders teachers and students from becoming “critical, daring, and creative” (8). Instead, Freire, like Dewey, advocates problem posing education and, like Lev Vygotsky, who is mentioned specifically, he praises the merits of discovery learning
Freire’s parallels with Dewey do not end here, however. Freire, like his American counterpart, believes that teaching and teaching practices should always, at their core, set forth values of democracy. He goes on to say that this means that teachers need to concern themselves with becoming authoritative (to act as a resource or guide in class) rather than authoritarian (which is consistent with banking approaches to education).
In fact, as Freire defines how learning is best conceptualized, he brings Louise Roseblatt into the conversation by stating, “the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between reader and writer” (30). This idea of learning as being transactional was first coined by Rosenblatt and, later, used by Dewey. Also reminiscent of these two American pedagogues, Freire asserts that learning exercises should always begin with a student’s feelings and reactions toward a particular topic before they move out into more analytical or theoretical discourse.
Lastly, Freire both adds to, and echoes, the work of many contemporary American theorists in Teachers as Cultural Workers. For instance, just like Henry Giroux, Freire argues for teachers to become ethnographers so that they may reflect and transform their discipline into a more respected profession. Also like Giroux, Freire discusses the importance of “permanent and ongoing teacher preparation” (7). Ultimately, like Giroux and other social reconstructionists, such as bell hooks, Maxine Greene, and Neil Postman, Freire is arguing for teachers to become reflective practitioners, or cultural workers, who dare to take on the responsibility of fostering democratic communities in the face of dehumanizing educational agendas.
In sum, Teachers as Cultural Workers provides a nice synthesis of humanist theory and practice for school teachers looking to achieve more effective, dynamic, and meaningful careers in education. More specific to English/language arts teachers, the book relates ways of conceptualizing the teaching and learning of language and literacy through reading the word, and the world, critically and creatively. How else can a democracy survive?
Archives (Being Updated)