All posts by Diana Zea

Please care for us today

Creating Classroom Community

“Our students’ behavior will begin to reflect these positive assumptions. What shifts is the how-the manner in which we communicate”.

We recite little empty sentences to ourselves and repeat them to our kids everyday: “you can do anything you want to do”, “you can be who you want to be”, “search your goal and seize it”, “you can change the world”, “all it takes is perseverance (grit)”. These are like the no-words: important, difficult, thing, some, …. little fillers we like to fabricate to stop voids from expanding and lies to unfold. The movement from the ethereal of these words and expressions toward the hands on dough mixing deal, now that’s tough. The strategies in this reading do exactly that. They fill the void with yummy Nutella, meaning actual meaning, actual doing, actual actions. These practical guidelines as well as the focal learner project, are exactly what teachers need to see and live in their process of learning and becoming school community builders. This is me looking at their humanity and therefore mine in the face, accepting that we have a purpose that shares the same space and we should therefore care for each other every second until dismissal and beyond. That’s the life skill that should be modeled, concluded and practiced daily.

Second Class Citizens

Reaching Adolescents and How to Respond

“…,political leaders and the mass media have succeeded in publicly denigrating poor Black mothers as the undeserving, criminal poor.” (Goodman, 2018. P.117)

And we have bought it. They both (politicians and the media) keep selling us alienation of “the other” and we keep buying it. I come from a passionate country that sees no gray scales in its passion: passionate hate or passionate love. It wouldn’t be so terrible if it didn’t come with an uneducated crowd that keeps voting with the hatred side of their passion (and the prop$ that come with it). In 2002 that unconscious crowd elected a dictator under a disguised democracy. He corruptly got himself re-elected in 2006 and decades later keeps placing puppets in power to do the dirty job and pay for it to, while he remains untouched and immaculate, sitting as a congressman moving pieces into the most convenient ladders and pushing the useless down the snakes.
Among his many sins, the called “falsos positivos” in army slang, is to my eyes by far the worst. He decided to put a price on every guerrilla rebel’s head, the way Pablo Escobar put a price on police officers’ heads back in the dark 90’s. Soldiers from the Colombian army went to the poorest possible neighborhoods in the forgotten barrios of Bogota (among other cities), where they lured teenagers at risk with the promise of work to other cities that were miles away. The soldiers filled trucks with these “second class citizens” that would be missed by no one (because who can miss the poor), drove them for hours to where they were bound to have a war encounter, murdered them, dressed their corps with guerrilla uniforms and declared them rebel fighters in order to boost their stats in the war against leftist insurgents.The suspiciously inflated numbers, wrongly called “false positives”, got the officers and troops who carried out the executions rewards in the shape of money, promotions or vacation time. They also justified United States aid military packages, which have been helping keep the business of war alive for so long. It was the mothers of these children (because most of them were still on their teens) who made this visible and stood for their sons to say that they were not undeserving, nor were their criminals, even if they were poor. These extrajudicial executions made me feel the hopelessness that was woken again by this painful chapter 5 in the book “It’s not about Grit”. How much longer can we take?

“Marica” in Colombia: A feeler, NOT a Filler

Urban Adolescents

“Almost all of LGBTQ students (98.1%)
heard “gay” used in a negative way
(e.g., “that’s so gay”) at school; 67.4%
heard these remarks frequently or
often, and 93.4% reported that they felt
distressed because of this language.
• 95.8% of LGBTQ students heard other
types of homophobic remarks (e.g.,
“dyke” or “faggot”); 58.8% heard this
type of language frequently or often.” (GLSEN, 2015 page 5)

In an atmosphere of questioning it all, from guilt to shoe taste, from desire to excess, it is only fair to question language as well. Colombians use the word “marica” as a conversation filler, almost in the same frequency as Americans use “like”. The difference is the literal meaning of the word. It can be translated as an adjective used negatively, into the words “gay” or “fag”, and it can also be used with this intention. It can be the replacement of “dude” to refer to anyone (someone you know, someone you barely know, someone you don’t know, someone you like, someone you do not like) or it can be used as “fool” or “gullible”. There are rules to use it pragmatically so that they can fit a particular register or situation. A native Colombian would know perfectly when, how, where and who to use it with. It is such part of the “evolution” or “involution” of language, such a result of the innovation of words, that even if it bothers some older generations, most of us are used to it. We’ve normalized it.
Shouldn’t we question this too? The normalization of a word that refers to men that perform in feminine manners, says something deeper about our language. Language is a changing entity, a live creature that collides, merges, pullulates. The structure of language is an opportunity to reflect upon our reality. We cannot speak without thinking because we may reject those questions and reflections we have asked ourselves through out existence. When we use the word “marica” in a particular context, it is not just a normalized use of a former unpleasant word, but it is rather informing me of something that has happened to my language. Carolina Sanín, a brilliant Colombian writer, described it as a “problem that she has posed (SHE refers to the tongue which is feminine in Spanish). She is informing of an idea about the being in my language who has become sayable, audible and ordinary”. Sanín continues: “Grammatical warning does not limit me, it reminds me that I am within language and it gives me mobility inside it… it is mine but not only mine… it is the bond between speakers… in a shared vehicle.” So what’s the reason behind the use of this word? Is it offensive to the LGBTQ community back home as in the survey? What is it telling about Colombian social structures? How did it permeate so many conversations without people noticing? Do we notice?

Perpetual molds

Gender Socialization & Identities

“We need to consider theoretical frameworks and methodologies that can examine the differential effects of discourses around gender, bullying and violence for girls and boys in schools and thus the social, cultural and subjective dimensions of how such discourses constitute, regulate, discipline and pathologize particular sets of institutional behaviors” (J. Ringrose and E. Renold, 2010, p. 592)
Questioning personal molds and phrases you’ve been hearing your entire life, from people you love and even from people who raised you, has to be the hardest thing about realizing the effects of discourses mentioned in this MVP. Why am I expected to replicate behaviors that clearly perpetuate oppression of women? Does being born in a traditional city in the heart of a Latin American country excuse the fact that I’m too tired to do everything that is expected from me? Why am I putting myself through expectations hell, just for being my mother’s daughter? Just for being my grandmother’s granddaughter? Why do I keep smiling at the nasty mysoginist comments of my uncle, who was clearly raised by his mother? Why does his wife put up with them being the woman she is in public? What is their agreement? What is THE agreement? What type of woman did my father in law expect his son to marry, that he cannot accept me for being me? What about my baby girl? what am I doing for her? Am I saying too much? How much is too much for a woman like me? What does “woman like me” mean?

Just keep questioning. It makes it real and eventually
change
.

“I’m not from here, but neither are you”

Newcomers & Perpetual Foreigners

This title corresponds to a translation from a line in song by Uruguayan song writer Jorge Drexler, an artist who has kept the absurd of the word “immigrant” floating swiftly on his marvelous and intelligent verses: “Yo no soy de aquí, pero tu tampoco”. I’m leaving the link to the video, hoping that you can find the subtitles in your native language and follow his inspiring music along with the poetry of his truthful words about the human nature to be nomads, far away from the undocumented veil they placed upon it. Continue reading “I’m not from here, but neither are you” →