Nino's Classroom
 
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Villa with American and British writers
What better way, I thought, to make Creative Writing students locate themselves in Philippine literature than to choose a side in the Villa-Lopez controversy.

The exercise was basically to make the students recall what they had read and discussed in CL 150 (The Literature of the Philippines in English I) last semester. By asking students to take a side in the Villa-Lopez debate, perhaps the students would also recall the developments in Philippine writing from the pre-Spanish to the Spanish eras and up to the 1940s.

So before the class would engage itself this semester in discussions on Philippine literature in English from the 1940s to the present, I thought it would be enlightening to see how students saw themselves in either the tradition of Villa's aesthetic formulation or in the tradition of Lopez and other socially-committed writers.

And what a discussion it turned out to be, with more questions being asked than answered. Implicated in the exchange were such issues as:
  • the preeminence of artistic production over social responsibility
  • the writer as visionary
  • the writer as revolutionary
  • the idea of a "universal" literature
  • the discourse of art vs. propaganda
  • the colonialist project
  • the nationalist project
And so many other questions we hope to answer in a semester of CL 151 (The Literature of the Philippines in English II).

 
Classes again 11/12/2009
 
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It's back to the classroom now. I'm teaching two sections of an Intro to Communication Theories class, a Media: History, Development and Theories class, and a Contemporary Philippine Literature in English class this semester. I also have six Communication Arts Thesis advisees and one Creative Writing Thesis advisee. Looks like this will be a busy semester for me.
 
The Cure 11/11/2009
 
Before the hair and the makeup, Robert Smith of The Cure looked like this?
 
Aztec Camera 11/10/2009
 
From Echo to Aztec Camera, another New Wave band from the '80s.
 
 
Tripping on '80s music, one of my favorite new wave/post-punk bands is Echo & the Bunnymen (click on link to go to their official site, seems like they're still going strong). Here's one of their popular song, "The Killing Moon." 
 
More Brian Eno 11/08/2009
 
And David Byrne of Talking Heads. Two of the contemporary musical geniuses, and when they collaborate you're sure to get the best compositions.
 
Brian Eno 11/07/2009
 
Talking about Talking Heads, just around the corner would be Brian Eno. Still on that nostalgic trip.
 
 
After "Psycho Killer," I searched for more You Tube videos of the Talking Heads. And did I get a minefield, some of the videos I haven't even watched before. Quite a treat.

 
Psycho Killer 11/05/2009
 
Came across this video of one of my favorite bands, The Talking Heads, on YouTube. And so I remembered those good old days in the '80s, hair spiked and torn T-shirt artfully safety-pinned together. 


 
Learning 11/04/2009
 
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Winslow Homer's 'The Country School'
We got to talking about the business of learning that C (now on the student side of the classroom, after getting a study grant) and I are into, our online chat veering into this subject as she recounted an incident when a friend asked her a simple question, "But how do you understand (place your favorite critical theory here)?" And she was tongue-tied for an answer.

And she found herself laughing for this sudden inadequacy to explain in equally simple terms, terms that would indicate how she owned her knowledge of a theory that she has read and written about or used in a scholarly work and perhaps taught in the classroom.

Which led us to a shared observation of how we have been taught ourselves, and how that education -- speaking now about the Philippine education system -- has molded us into "parrots," to some degree or other, of what we study in school.

Because it's true. We have inherited a system from our colonial masters (now I understand why the UP seal has a parrot in it) that drills us in concepts and theories that we have to regurgitate during oral and written examinations. We learn the skill of footnoting our ideas to showcase the scholarly aptitude and bibliographic fortitude we went through in our research.

But we come to a point, when we're asked or we ask ourselves, in simple terms: How do you understand so-and-so?

This is something that John Dewey, in Democracy and Education (1916), himself pointed out:

"There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience. The permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy."

And we ask ourselves, do we contribute to this kind of communication that has become separate from how we actually constitute our lives? Education for the sake of literacy?

Or do we participate in the dynamic production of new knowledge? This requires us to question what we learn, and to own what we learn in the process of questioning knowledge.

(This entry was posted last 30 August 2009 in my previous blog.)