beingblog:

Tuesday Evening Melody: “Detroit Summer” by Invincible

by Susan Leem, associate producer

Invincible on stage at center. (photo: David Smith/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

One of the stars in the constellation of Grace Lee Boggs’ world of change is hip-hop artist Invincible, whom the Village Voice calls Detroit’s “femme-emcee extraordinaire.” Invincible (aka Ilana Weaver) is a rapper and spoken word artist who leads workshops through the Boggs Center’s Detroit Summer project.  

 In one of these workshops, she leads kids in collecting and studying interviews with community members. They use these conversations as the source for their own hip-hop pieces and brainstorm alternative solutions to the problems raised by their interviewees. She says this about her friendship with Grace Lee Boggs (whom you’ll hear in our podcast this Thursday):

“Grace doesn’t talk down to you; she doesn’t come like that to young people. She comes to you with questions rather than lecture to find out what’s relevant to you and tries to relate to it… My whole life has been transformed by my work with Detroit Summer. First of all as an artist I ground all my art in a larger purpose and vision for community change that’s led by the community.”

Enjoy the tune inspired by Invincible’s transformative work with Detroit Summer, and look for a Grace Lee Boggs cameo in the video.

utnereader:

Graduating from Standardized Tests: Forward-thinking education reformers are trying to kill the standardized test in American public schools. Unfortunately, there are a few roadblocks. Keep reading …

“Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.

Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning.”

Not a good sign that education is in the latter list…

In addition to academic journals, books and conferences, over the last two decades, scholarly knowledge has also increasingly been represented through/located on websites, b/vlogs, facebook postings, Twitter feeds, and multimodal online journals (for example, Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular; Southern Spaces). Drawing on readings related to the politics, challenges and possibilities of producing/representing scholarship within and outside of traditional academic modes of publishing, please provide an organized discussion of:

1) The philosophical and conceptual issues salient to communicating academic knowledge in nontraditional spaces, especially as these issues relate to civic engagement and community-based/ engagement/publically engaged scholarship. What does it mean to write about academic endeavors for a “non-academic” audience and what implications does this have for publically engaged scholarship?

2) Ways in which the integration of text, photography and video can inform and complicate our representation and understanding of publically engaged scholarship.

Using answers to the questions above as a context, discuss how you see your professional identity as expressed through complementary and/or disconnected selves (photographer, program administrator, researcher, educator). Articulate the conceptual framework and infrastructure for a blog that would represent your professional identity in a coherent and multilayered way.

23 pages, 22 sources and 53 citations later I’ve gotten the 2nd question written and turned in…..only one more week! now it’s time to relax and enjoy the weekend…

Generally, this question asks you to situate issues of validity within an historical and theoretical lineage, to link discussions of validity with larger philosophical assertions of the nature of qualitative research, and to consider its impact on your own research with 100 Lenses.

(a)     Specifically, please explicate concerns regarding validity within an historical debate about what can be known and how we might access such knowledge.  Pay close attention to the way in which differing theoretical orientations (e.g. positivism, poststructuralism) offer (often-competing) assertions of the goals for qualitative inquiry.

(b)     Strive to examine the many ways in which qualitative researchers have historically attempted to answer the charge of validity by speaking to/against particular worldviews.

(c)     End with consideration for how you might engage with issues of methodological validity in your own work.  What might it mean to construct a ‘valid’ study engaging with 100 Lenses?  What methodological practices might you employ in the name of validity?