i agreed about mike's piece and asked him if he'd let us publish in the pulp culture zine!
i never taught college level courses, beth, but i did teach high school equivalency courses so i'm going to contact a mentor from my undergrad uni who used to work in this area --i'm from that end of the world! she's based in ithaca, but as you know that's close enough and often overlaps in terms of these sorts of programs.
to mike perelman: yes, i very much think that the kinds of experiences mike had are much more common in 'non-trad' student populations --for all sorts of reasons, but because they are pissed off *and* they care. something's at stake for them in a way it's not for "traditional" students.
i guess, having been one of those students i should say that, at least for me, there is an acute sense that you're lacking something, that somehow this knowledge will help you understand the world around you, that something's wrong with what you've generally been told. and yes, this is a deeply ambivalent impulse. that's where we come in.
don't any of you who teach ever let it get you down. or rather, when you do, then i hope you'll remember that i wouldn't be typing away were it not for people like mike y, jim c, mike p, beth and others. i could see the passion and care and commitment in their eyes, their behavior. i could hear it in their voice. and, of course, i experienced it in their attentiveness to my intellectual and political development, in their willingness to go out of their way. i knew people who actually tutored me for free, who let me into their classes without paying so i could learn on my own when i couldn't go to college. these were people who would write pages and pages in response to what i'd written. when i had a question they suggested books to read, typed up bibliographies, heck they gave me their books!
all of them were principled, left leaning; none of them were correct. that is, they never treated ideas as if they were fixed, fast, frozen solid but they did take them seriously. and, in turn, they took me seriously, even as they often raised a brow in response to my latest trip down some intellectual bye lane that they didn't much abide by. i had male professors that were sure that feminist thought didn't have much to offer the left and yet they challenged me, rather than corrected me. some of them have gone on to read feminist thought! [not just coz of me, of course] and i had feminist teachers who were sure the dead white guys had nothing to offer or that my love of marxist thought was surely a dead end, but they didn't correct me. they trusted me and my capacity to get it right and learn.
i could introduce you to many, many other people like me who wouldn't be involved in leftist organizations at all were it not for one or two or five teachers who changed their life in important ways. i'm a bit sentimental here because i'm watching my high school drop out sister go through the experience right now. my sister never gave a hoot about politics and rolled her eyes every time i started in. well... you should see her now! she's majoring in early childhood education, too. not exactly a hotbed of political activism, in my experience. she's turning political, and leftward in her thinking because she's encountering teachers like you guys.
when 50% of the US population attends college [though still only 25% graduate] what we do and how we do in the classroom matters.
as i said a while back, i think that the correctness thread shows just how easily we forget what it took for us to get here. somehow i doubt that a pedagogy based on "correctness" did the trick.
and i'd love to help you out with the sociology, social theory, political theory beth. and i have some great exercises for teaching the diff b/t equity and equality and about affirmative action. oh just a ton of stuff that i'll be happy to send along.
if you can tolerate another list [low noise signal ratio though] teaching sociology can be very helpful in terms of suggestions, tips, advice, and so forth.