Kathleen Weiler
Chair of the Department of Education at Tufts University.

"Pedagogy in the Ruins"

Lecture: Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Communications 226
5:30 pm

Workshop: Thursday, January 27, 2005
Communications 202
1:00 pm

In a recent book, Bill Readings uses the trope of ruin to describe the
contemporary university: the ruin of the 19th and 20th century university imagined as a site for seeking truth. In its place is the university of “excellence,” an institution focused on the mastery of skills aligned with the needs of the global corporate state system. Ruin can also be a way of looking at the collapse of modernist beliefs in universal truth and human liberation, beliefs which underlie the pedagogy of Paulo Freire. In her talk, Professor Weiler interrogates what it means for teachers to seek the possibility of freedom for themselves and their students in the ruined university. Is it possible to use the institutionally-sanctioned authority of the teacher to create pedagogical spaces where students might claim their own freedom to speak and learn? Can freedom be conferred? And what is the relation of academic claims of freedom to the shrinking realms of freedom in an increasingly paranoid and repressive state?

Kathleen Weiler’s research focuses on the social, historical, and
political context of education in relation to questions of gender, and
includes ethnographic studies of classroom teaching, feminist theory and pedagogy, and historical studies of women educators in the American West. Her teaching and scholarship is concerned with issues of social
justice and democratic education. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. Her many publications include Feminist Engagements (2001), Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California 1850-1950 (1998), and Women Teaching for Change (1988).

To register and pick up readings for the workshop, please call 206.543.3920 or email afahale@u.washington.edu.

This lecture is the second in the Practical Pedagogy Speaker Series:
“Liberating Pedagogies: Locating Freedom in the Classroom.”

The series was put on with the support of the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Graduate School Fund for Excellence and Innovation, in addition to support from the Departments of English, Comparative Literature and Women Studies.

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