Teaching Social Justice Workshop Granville (9 December 2005)

Freedom and choice
How free are we?
What choices do we have?
How do we learn and teach choice?
Using emotion in learning
Can we use joy and anger in our teaching and learning?
Can we use love and hate?
How do we focus emotions in our teaching and learning?
Taking action, making moral choices
Can we help ourselves and others make good choices?
Can we help people take the right kinds of action?
How do we teach morality?

Full timetable available for download in pdf format

Rick Turner, The eye of the needle, 1980, p. 8

Human beings can choose. They are not sucked into the future by stimuli to which they have to respond in specific ways. Rather human beings are continually making choices. They can stand back and look at alternatives. Theoretically they can choose about anything. They can choose whether to live or to die; they can choose celibacy or promiscuity, voluntary poverty or the pursuit of wealth, ice cream or jelly.

Rick Turner, The eye of the needle, 1980, p. 8
Mike Newman Workshop 2005

Rick Turner, The eye of the needle, 1980, p. 53

The criterion for freedom cannot be whether or not people limit what I can do, since this occurs in all societies. Rather, we must define a free society as one in which (a) the limits are as wide as possible; (b) all individuals have a say in deciding where it is necessary for those limits to be; and (c) all individuals know how and why they are being limited.

Rick Turner, The eye of the needle, 1980, p. 53
Mike Newman Workshop 2005

Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, 1972, pp.72-73

The Right in its rigidity prefers the dead to the living; the static to the dynamic; the future as a repetition of the past rather than as a creative venture; pathological forms of love rather than real love; frigid schematization rather than the emotion of living; gregariousness rather than authentic living together; organization men rather than men who organize; imposed myths rather than incarnated values; directives rather than creative and communicative language; and slogans rather than challenges.
Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, 1972, pp.72-73
Mike Newman Workshop 2005

William Hazlitt, The pleasure of hating, (1826) 2004, p.105

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.

William Hazlitt, The pleasure of hating, (1826) 2004, p.105
Mike Newman Workshop 2005

Jane Thompson, Learning liberation, 1983, p.54

Growth through anger, focused with precision, can be a powerful source of energy, serving progress and change. Anger expressed and translated into actions in the service of women’s visions and women’s futures can be a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation, that we identify who are our genuine friends and who are our enemies.
Jane Thompson, Learning liberation, 1983, p.54
Mike Newman Workshop 2005

C.Tavris, Anger, 1982. p.45

Anger therefore is as much a political matter as a biological one. The decision to get angry has powerful consequences, whether anger is directed towards one’s spouse or one’s government. Spouses and governments know this. They know that anger is ultimately an emphatic message: Pay attention to me. I don’t like what you are doing. Restore my pride, You’re in my way. Danger. Give me justice
C.Tavris, Anger, 1982. p.45
Mike Newman Workshop 2005

S. A. Diamond, Anger, madness, and the daimonic, 1996, p.15

To feel real rage is to feel life pared down to its purest, simplest state: the rousing, rapturous flush of unfettered vitality, pristine purpose, and unshakeable will. It is at such moments that we are most alive.
S. A. Diamond, Anger, madness, and the daimonic, 1996, p.15
Mike Newman Workshop 2005

A moral force

To love means to value the other for its otherness, to wish to reinforce it in its otherness, to protect the otherness and make it bloom and thrive, and to be ready to sacrifice one’s own comfort, including one’s own mortal existence, if that is what is needed to fulfil that intention.

Zigmunt Bauman, The individualised society, 2001, p. 165

Mike Newman Workshop 2005

Two-way

There is a word in numerous languages which denotes at the same time the act of giving and the act of taking, charity and greed, generosity and covetousness – it is the word ‘love’. Paradoxically, the passionate desire a person has for complete gratification and a selflessness without reserve come together in the same term.

Alain Finkeilkraut, La sagesse d’amour, 1984, p. 11

Mike Newman Workshop 2005

Non-rational

That unfounded, non-rational, unarguable, no-excuses-given and non-calculable urge to stretch towards the other, to caress, to be for, to live for, happen what may.

Zigmunt Bauman, Postmodern ethics, 1993, p. 247

Mike Newman Workshop 2005

Three Types of Action

Conventional action
Voting, taking part in election campaigns as party members or campaign workers, taking part in community activity, making contact with politicians and officials through email, phone, letter writing and meetings, pamphleteering, setting up websites, organising petitions and lobbying, and engaging in consumer boycotts, lawful demonstrations and lawful strikes
Confrontational
Invading a meeting, blockading a road, holding demonstrations which have not been coordinated with the police and the local council, hacking into a web site, picketing, occupying buildings, and going ahead with a strike that has been decreed unlawful by the authorities.
Violent action
Damage to property and injury to people

Mike Newman Workshop 2005

Hate for the hateful

Hate for the hateful should be our motivating force, and love from the people we respect should be our goal, our guide, and our source of moral authority.
Mike Newman Workshop 2005