Introduction to my first blog
Welcome to my first blog entry on The Paulo and Nita Freire site! Thank you, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, David Smith, Freire Bloggers, and McGill University for providing me the opportunity to contribute to this project! I have thoroughly enjoyed reading everyone’s blogs on the site as well as the wonderful dialogue. I have also enjoyed reading the articles and journals posted on the site.

Back state-side after a week in Vancouver at the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Congress, which was a very enjoyable gathering of roughly 8,000 folks. The education part of the conference contained a number of excellent sessions, including one dealing with empire, in which Joe and Shirley provided some insightful analysis along with the other participants. Joe’s metaphor of the “zombies of positivism” is still swishing around the frontal-lobal-neuronic cavern generally reserved for sur(reality) shows. I almost feel for the poor zombies when I think of how we need numbers to justify not problematizing social justice and democracy in education because… so they say, it just can’t be measured (do we really want to measure the need for human rights?).

Why Haiti? – April 25, 2008

This past week there have been sporadic reports on the famine taking place in Haiti. Granted, these reports have ranged from a twenty-second clip showing how “out of the control” Haitians are to more elaborate pieces that discuss how we are now experiencing a world-wide food shortage. There has been no sustained reporting, and, more importantly, no significant analysis on the “story”. The reports almost always leave the impression that it “their” fault and not “ours”.