Foster Dickson's Blog, page 73

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #142

It is thus useless to set off in quest of this voice that has been simultaneous colonized and mythified by recent Western history. There is, moreover, no such pure “voice,” because it is always determined by a system (whether social, familial, or other) and codified by a way of receiving it. Even if the voices of each group composed a sonic landscape – a site of sounds – that was easily recognizable, a dialect – an accent – can be discerned by the mark is leaves on a language, like a delicate perfume; even if a particular voice can be distinguished among countless others by the way it caresses or irritates the body that hears it, like a musical instrument played by an invisible hand, there is no unique unity among the sounds of presence that the enunciatory act gives a language in speaking it. Thus we must give up the fiction that collects all these sounds under the sign of a “Voice,” or a “Culture” of its own— or of the great Other’s. Rather, orality insinuates itself, like one of the threads of which it is composed, into the network – an endless tapestry – of a scriptural economy.

– from the chapter, “The Scriptural Economy” in The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau, translated by Steven Rendell (1984)

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Multiculturalism, Race, Reading, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing

Alabama Votes

In eighteen days, we will go to the polls. I know that many of us are transfixed by the Trump-Clinton debacle that we see on the TV and on social media, but in Alabama we have other important matters to consider, too. In addition to the presidential race, Alabamians have a whole plethora of offices and amendments to vote on. There are fourteen statewide amendments, as well as twenty amendments pertaining to specific counties.

First and foremost, if you are not registered to vote, you have four days to get registered. The deadline is October 24, if you want to vote in the November election.

Second, please read the amendments that will be on the ballot before you walk into the polling place. Subjects range from Auburn University’s Board of Trustees to funding for State Parks. Two especially important amendments are numbers eleven and fourteen, which deal with the powers of local government. Montgomery’s and Huntsville’s mayors have both endorsed voting Yes on number eleven. Also, number two will prevent the state legislature from shifting money from State Parks to other items in the General Fund, effectively saving many parks that are sources of local revenue . . . and local pride.

Sadly, this ballot has a lot of candidates running unopposed: statewide, three Supreme Court justices and the Public Service Commission president, and in Montgomery, four circuit court judges and five county commissioners— all facing no more opposition than a write-in blank. However, one of those running unopposed in Montgomery is our DA, Daryl Bailey, who does an excellent job, and I truly am glad to know he’ll return to that office.

For other information related to specific matters, like polling places and sample ballots, the Secretary of State’s Alabama Votes website is very helpful and easy to use. Our tax dollars are spent in creating this resource so we can go to the polls informed. It’s a damn shame not to use it!

I realize that studying constitutional amendments proposals is far less entertaining than listening to arguments over Donald Trump’s sexual exploits, but it is far more meaningful. In the long run, Trump’s shenanigans won’t move Alabama one inch forward, but some of these candidates and amendments might.

Filed under: Alabama, Critical Thinking, Social Justice, The Deep South, Voting

NPR, economic expansion, and the Business Cycle Dating Committee

Yesterday, as I drove to the nursery to pick up plants for our School Garden, I was listening to a mid-day news story on NPR, which discussed the Business Cycle Dating Committee, a little known group that charts, records, and forecasts economic expansions and recessions. One of the ladies speaking in the story explained that we are currently in an 87-month long economic expansion – quite a long one, she said, since expansions last 58 months on average – after the worst economic recession since World War II.

As I was listening, I couldn’t help but put that economic news in terms of the presidency, since we’re inundated right now with ideas about who should be the next person to run the country. The way I see it, that 87-month economic expansion has to be viewed in terms of Barack Obama, who has been our president for the last 93 months, and in terms of his predecessor, George W. Bush, about whom few Republicans have spoken during the campaign. It was Bush who presided over the downturn, when the economy crashed during the final months of his administration, and it has been Obama who has brought us out of it. (I’d also like to point out that the Affordable Care Act, whose opponents claim it hurts the economy, was signed into law in March 2010— 79 months ago.)

Unfortunately, the Business Cycle Dating Committee is predicting that a recession is probably in our near future, since this expansion/recovery has lasted so long, about two-and-a-half years longer than average. Of course, the committee predicts that this next one won’t be as severe as the Great Recession, but a recession is never good for ordinary folks. The main point of yesterday’s NPR story was: our next president will be in office for the next 48 months – 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 – and will likely face that oncoming recession. The only way that won’t happen is if this current expansion lasts for a whopping 150 months or more.

So, who we choose on November 8 will not only face down Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un and ISIS, but also another economic downturn here at home. As a public school teacher, a married father of two, and a man whose financial well-being has already been assaulted once, I hope we make the right choice.

Filed under: Critical Thinking

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #141

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere— no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite moments on our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula would be true.

– from “What Pragmatism Means” by William James, in Pragmatism, A Reader (1997), edited with introduction by Louis Menand. The essay was originally published in 1907.

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

Kentuck and the Boogie

This weekend, folks in Alabama have a huge and very important choice to make: do I go to the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, or do I go to the Fall Boogie in Waverly? Technically, it would be possible to go to Waverly on Saturday and Kentuck on Sunday, but that’d mean some serious driving. The Auburn Tigers are off this weekend, and that other team has an away game against somebody or other, so we won’t be missing out on any tailgating.

Me, I’ll be at Kentuck with my students on Saturday, so the Boogie will be a no-go. I’ve taken a group every year since 2009, to interview some of the artists there and write articles for our newsprung website. While they’re working, I meander around, look at the art, and listen to some music. (Although I’m glad to go to Kentuck, I am sorry to be missing Corey Harris over in Waverly.)

Filed under: Alabama, Arts, Music, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #140

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

cannot bear very much reality.

– from the poem “Burnt Norton” in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets

Filed under: Poetry, Teaching, Writing and Editing

“Teach Partisan Resistance”

Filed under: Alabama, Critical Thinking, Education, Multiculturalism, Social Justice, Teaching

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #139

Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the “thing” which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.

In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well known words: “the last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful

– from Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

Last Call, re: Whitehurst

More than three years ago, in the summer of 2013, I began work on a book about the Whitehurst Case, a police-shooting controversy in Montgomery, Alabama in 1975, 1976, and 1977. The project was brought to me by the youngest son and namesake of the victim Bernard Whitehurst, Jr., and fairly soon I was also meeting with his mother Florence and his brother Stacy. Though Bernard III asked me to help them tell their family’s story, all three family members told me that uncovering information was going to be particularly difficult. They were right.

Next month, I will turn in a nearly 80,000-word manuscript to NewSouth Books, who will publish the book. The content is based on and backed up by hundreds of sources that include police reports, newspaper articles, and personal interviews. I’m confident in the veracity and the fairness of what I’ve written, despite these facts: documents have gone missing, other documents cannot legally be shared, and interview requests have gone unanswered.

This is my last call to anyone who may be aware of my work, but who may not have come forth yet to tell their side of this story. I learned, after my book on Clark Walker was published, how people can appear after the publication, after the book is already on shelves and say, You never talked to ME . . . I learned then that some silent people expect a writer to find them, to find out about them, to magically know that they are out there waiting to be found. While I may be a good researcher who asks tough questions, I’m not telepathic.

Over the last few years, I’ve mailed out interview requests that have gone unanswered, and I’ve searched fruitlessly for addresses and whereabouts— but what I don’t want is for someone to appear after the fact and tell me about some nugget, some tidbit, some detail that only they knew. History and posterity deserve for the story of the Whitehurst Case to be told as fully as it possibly can be.

I’m making my final revisions now, cross-checking my sources, and making sure that my citations are accurate. The research and the fact-finding are over, so if there’s someone out there, waiting to be found, it’s time for you to come to me, and let’s talk.

Filed under: Alabama, Civil Rights, Forthcoming, Local Issues, Race, Social Justice, The Deep South

The Arts Schools Network Conference, 2016

Below is last week’s press release for the 2016 Arts Schools Network Conference in Dallas, Texas. I will be presenting at the conference, a talk called “Start by Listening: Ethnographic Experiential Learning through Community Partnerships.” I originally created it as a thirty-minute presentation for the Community Legacy Project grant program, through the Center for Arts Education at the Boston Arts Academy. This one will be slightly expanded hour-long talk.

For Immediate Release:

National Arts Education Leaders Gather in Dallas
for Arts Schools Network Conference


Key West, FL (September 22, 2016)

More than 300 Arts Schools Network (ASN) members and other leaders in arts and education will convene in Dallas, Texas, October 25-28, for ASN’s 36th Annual Conference.


Attendees representing more than 200 institutions from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia, will learn about Dallas’s dynamic arts education ecosystem in the Dallas Arts District, the largest contiguous arts district in the United States. They will also explore the conference theme: the power of arts partnerships and their impact on arts education.

The conference offers educational presentations, panels, and workshops by school administrators, teachers, and other experts in arts education. Representatives from the conference hosts, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and the Dallas Arts District, have had key roles in planning this exciting professional development experience. There will be student performances, tours of local schools, and events at other cultural venues, including the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Meyerson Symphony Center, Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, Dallas Children’s Theater, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (BTWHSPVA), which was one of the charter members of ASN. Principal, Dr. Scott Rudes, said, “Over the years, our school has thrived through the best practices shared by ASN. Now, we’re excited to introduce other ASN members to the dynamic programs and partnerships that inspire our students, faculty, and community to reach for their artistic and educational dreams.”

Local speakers include Gigi Antoni, Executive Director and CEO, Big Thought Institute; Joshua King, Co-founder and Executive Director of The Aurora Project; Lily Cabatu Weiss, Executive Director of the Dallas Arts District; Robyn Flatt, Executive Artistic Director of Dallas Children’s Theater; Kevin Moriarty, Artistic Director, Dallas Theater Center; Anne Graham, Executive Director, Texans for the Arts; and Ann Williams, Founder/Artistic Director, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, among others. Special workshops will feature Chris Sampson, Vice Dean, Division of Contemporary Music at University of Southern California Thornton School of Music; Francisco Moreno, Multi Media Visual Artist; Chris Vo, Broadway Dancer/Actor, Concert Dancer, Fitness Professional; and other nationally recognized artists in music, dance, visual arts and theater.

More about the ASN National Conference in Dallas, including registration, schedule, and accommodations, is available at artsschoolsnetwork.org.

About ASN 

For 35 years, ASN, a non-profit, international network of arts education leaders and innovators, has provided resources and support for excellence in arts education for elementary, middle, and high schools; colleges and conservatories; individuals; and organizations. Learn more…


About BTWHSPVA  
BTWHSPVA is internationally renowned for excellence in arts and academics, and has earned more than 500 awards through the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, 22 Presidential Scholars in the Arts, and over 245 music DeeBee awards from Downbeat Magazine. Learn more…



Filed under: Arts, Author Appearances, Education, Forthcoming, Schools, Teaching