The discursive politics of consumer socialization

The work that I intend to do in the classroom represents an attempt to bring children away from consumer culture, and to present them with an opportunity to act as producers. Of course, I realize that we are using commercially produced, imported glass beads, thread and beading needles, but I see these materials as media for the students to use to create their own original art. So far, I have seen an interesting mix of influences on students’ artwork. Many works contain students’ original design ideas, while a few works contain elements of popular culture icons, like the New York Yankees’ logo. Another student has a plan to make a beaded hacky sack by weaving beads into a warp of embroidery floss, because he wants to have his own hacky sack. I have yet to see fully (if there is ever a possibility to see anything fully!) how consumption of advertised products affects students’ creativity in production.
What does discretionary consumption, or teaching children to want something that parents or teachers want for them, have to do with my work? How are the tasks that I am asking students to do affecting their autonomy over their own ideas for their projects? How does the presentation of materials affect what ideas they conceive? How does this project facilitate, or not facilitate learning, socialization, self-expression or natural pleasure in the classroom?

Beats, bad girls and rock and roll

I found myself relating to the ideas presented in the Breines article, The other fifties: Beats, bad girls and rock and roll. The women in my family had consistently bought into the quintessential stay-at-home-mom role, and those who went on to higher education worked for a short time as teachers, and later, as substitute teachers or paraprofessional teachers. The male influences in my family worked mainly in the military in some capacity, and my dad dabbled in art, which was always one of my intense interests. Rock music, particularly alternative rock music, was a major influence beginning in my pre-teen and teenage years. Breines highlighted many reasons why music with “black” R&B influences impacted young beatnik women’s choices in music, fashion and romantic interests. These girls’ interests and choices seem to parallel my own music and fashion preferences as a young teen. Alternative rock music offered access to important issues affecting humanity that I craved, illustrated with such a range of emotion that I identified with. The musicians behind the music represented potentials dangerous, grown men, who actually posed no threat to me in reality. These musicians, however, represented the kinds of men that my father rejected, especially as the sorts of men that I should look toward as examples. Breines identifies the complicated reasons why teens of the 1950s looked up to musicians of their time for reasons of independence, rebellion, and to learn about serious issues, and these reasons do not seem so different from the reasons why I had such an insatiable thirst for alternative rock of the 1990s.

Spatial practices in “the century of the child”

The integration of outdoor school seemed to diminish over time, from my public school experience, and even more into my public school teaching experiences. In Elementary school, I remember visiting “Camp Schmidt,” an outdoor school owned and run by Prince George’s County Public Schools in mid/southern Maryland. In fifth grade, all PG County students looked forward to an extended stay at Camp Schmidt for about a week of ecological education, team building, and most of all, running through the “Confidence Course,” a challenging obstacle course that ended in a zipline. Boys and girls stayed overnight for several nights in separate lodgings. In high school, my older brother’s freshman class visited Camp Schmidt in 1996 for an overnight stay, but after some of the boys snuck over to the girls’ bunks, our school cancelled all further trips to Camp Schmidt. Was this decision due to behavior that had never happened before? In the history of Camp Schmidt, had no campers ever tried to visit campers of the opposite gender? Was it due in part to race, as students from our high school were generally non-white?
This year, the PG County school system has closed Camp Schmidt, allegedly due to budgetary constraints, however, I wonder if this decision was politically driven. In the last 30-40 years, PG county has undergone “white flight,” moving from a generally white population to 90% non-white today. Do the privileges or expectations of/for non-white students, particularly males, differ from those expectations for whites? Why was it important for students to experience outdoor, camp-like education 30 years ago, but today it is so unimportant that it has to be cut from a school’s budget? Is the current school culture so different from past school cultures, that outdoor school is no longer for these students?