Today I was thinking about human variance and how to start seeing people (especially students) as collections of talents and strengths instead of flaws and deviations from the norm. It's something I still struggle with, even in myself.
It's so easy to look at a student and pick up on where their culture takes them away from the longstanding canon of academia. It's easy for me to call my writing style, Southern-influenced and often profane and steeped in working class sensibilities, inappropriate. Easy, also, to say that immigrant students lack the cultural capital needed to understand common source material. What's harder is to see my own writing as a fresh take on intellectual discourse, or to see students as outsider artists, foreign dignitaries, radical theorists of a new school of thought.
This is where I wound up today when I should have been working. Ms. Lea's music, particularly the first song, got me thinking about how human variance creates strengths instead of deficiencies, and her style forced me to see her as non-deficient. Who else but Ms. Lea could sing with that distinctive tone, in that register? Who else can comfortably play a violin tucked crossbody but a little woman seated in a wheelchair?
Deviation creates art, and in the fine arts we have a particularly easy time of seeing where these diversities shine. The hard part, for me, is going to be translating that into everything else.
I'm going to keep coming back to Ms. Lea.
Sorry for the short, slightly awkward post. I'm still mulling through things. More later, hopefully.
<< Previous Next >>