A large sheet of blank paper hung on the chalk board in my middle school art room. On top of the paper, in front of my quietly puzzled 8th graders, I wrote ISLAM/ISLAMIC ART. When I asked them what words came to mind when they read the paper, they barely paused before calling out in torrents, ‘Suicide bomber! Twin Towers! … Read More
Professor Geer
It was Bill Geer who launched me on my “life of unlearning.” In fact, Professor Geer (as we insisted upon calling him no matter how often he said ‘call me Bill’), challenged us to live just such a life, taking the term from Lincoln Steffens’ essay. It was, he would bellow from the front of the class room, “a damn … Read More
"The Color Line"
One of the most powerful learning experiences of my life is a recent one where, pursuing a personal goal to develop my “will, knowledge, skill and capacity” for interrupting social inequities, I signed up for a two-day training. The most significant learning took place around an exercise called “The Color Line.” After filling out a self-report questionnaire and scoring myself … Read More
