Our discussion of bell hooks Tuesday was an important realization that politics and education will always be inevitably linked. Women like bell hooks strive to change the ways in which we see education and more importantly, the ways in which we educate. She is in good company when trying to escape the white-supremist, patriachial hierarchy in which we see the classroom.
Cynthia Selfe is attempting to escape this same paradigm in her article "The Politics of the Interface," in which she warns of the ways computers can marginalize certain populations of students based on class and socio-economic background and education.
Tim McGee and Patricia Ericsson visit politics again in their article "Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisble Grammarian." They quote Selfe's article as well as an article by Joel Haefner to begin their article about the politics of MS Word: "English instructors in computer-supported classrooms need to know something about the context and the necromancers of the code," Haefner says in resonse to Theodor Nelson's claim that "a computer language is a system for casting spells." (308-09)
The authors talk about politics in writing in terms of what issues are priveleged over others while students are drafting in MS Word. Their claim is that Word makes grammar seem like the most important part of writing because its default setting, "Check grammar as you type", "makes grammar a primary concern by foregrounding correctness even while writers are in the drafting stage."
McGee and Ericsson suggest changing the default settings of MS Word so as not to discourage students from writing by concerning them too much with grammatical correctness, thus escaping the politics of "the invisible grammarian." bell hooks suggests changing the way we teach to include students and their experiences in their own learning process to escape the politics of the classroom and "the academy". We cannot escape the politics of any aspect of teaching. That is something we will inevitably face when exploring our own pedagogies.
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I thought about the McGee and Ericsson article a lot this week and its potential in pedagogy. It does make the arguement that "Microsoft gets more 'teachable moments' than teachers do" (310). However, as I agree with this statement, we have to be careful, as educators that we don't allow our students to make mistakes they don't know they are making. This is the biggest danger. I am not sure that with the moments that Microsoft has, that they are teaching anything as opposed to instantly correcting problems that users don't know are problems.
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