Making change, registering change, feeling oneself change

===

http://www.thenation.com/blog/191921/not-protest-it-uprising#  

===
Making, noticing and registering, feeling it all out: where we find ourselves in change, where we place ourselves to change, how we know change as we participate in it....

===
What people were talking about in Sweden while I was there for conference and Gender Studies workshops. Note the overlaps across countries with issues about how to create systems of justice and the changes we all variously inhabit today.... 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/sweden-coalition-far-right-threatens-block-budget-immigration?CMP=share_btn_fb   

===
Welcome to the last week of class! Our time to analyze learning, social change, and how it all works together!

Today we share with each other our experiences of the class and our understanding of what has changed. This is our time capsule to ourselves: we see how things looked to us at different moments during the semester, at different times in the story of the course. 

===
We begin for everyone with some exercises, to help us focus and make it a bit easier to share what we have done in the learning analysis. Each person will speak for only 4 minutes!! (we want to hear everyone!) and offer their own unique sense of  traveling through the argument or story of the course. Our personal feelings are, of course, a special part of this. But do think of this primarily as an intellectual sharing of analysis as well as of any careful personal details. Celebrating each others' work and our own, and especially thinking together today about the knowledge we each bring into being is the collective project here. So listen as carefully as you speak, because active listening is as necessary to collective thought. 

If someone else says something you intended to say, then -- thinking on your feet -- find another something to say that is a unique bit of your own work instead. 

Focusing exercises for presenting:  
EVERYONE: 
1) find your favorite paragraph in the learning analysis. Put a star next to it. 
2) write down what you are most proud of in this paper. 
3) put an arrow next to the place you think best describes the argument of the course. 
4) write down your favorite reading and be prepared to say what element of its ANALYSIS made it special for you. 

PICK ONE OF THESE TOO:
=write about a moment in the course where everything seemed to come together for you. 
=write about a moment outside the course where you realized you were using something you had learned in the class. 
=write about a moment when you discovered something new about how you were included in the argument of the class.  

WHEN IT IS YOUR TURN TO SPEAK: 
pick out two of these to share during your four minutes. (Have at least two others as mental backups, so that you don't say the same thing someone else says.) Focus on analysis -- of the course, readings, experiences, realizations -- especially, although feelings and politics have important places too. 

Give some real details: don't be too general. Do show off the hard thinking you are capable of. Make sure what you say is special and unique. 

And may we keep running into each other, over and over, in friendship and connection and intellectual community and joyful living!


===