Throwing Voices

This book is a search for the promises of public education and the places wherethese are broken by critics feeding at the academic and professional trough. This book is aventure in critical auto-ethnography, exploring critique through this ethnographic techniquehas allowed me to bring stories to the reader that work to illuminate the personal nature ofeducational ethics. It works to fill the gap in education critique where self-examination ismissing. It is a cultural study of five different educational environments. Research incultural studies attempts to account for cultural objects under conditions constrained bypower and defined by contestation, conflict, and change. Cultural Studies grapples with thevolatility of cultural happenings. Throwing Voices emphasizes self-reflexivity; an awarenessthat scholars and their scholarship are themselves caught up in the social currents and in theglobal circulation of meanings being studied. In taking up questions from this perspective,cultural studies both draws on and develops key strands of contemporary cultural theory: semiotics, deconstruction andpoststructuralism, dialogics, subaltern and postcolonial studies . The field also draws on and develops a number of innovativemethodologies: autoethnography, blurred genres of writing, and other new forms of critical research.Within, I pay homage to satirist Lenny Bruce, and it earned me a one way ticket to scholarly palookaville. I hadactually, not virtually transgressed, in a conference forum where virtual radicalism trumps reality routinely.I sold cars and write and the intersection between values in education and in this pinnacle of American commerce.Here is a chronicle of time spent as evaluator in a small Native American school, with an effort to draw attention to the worldof social class, yet catalogue my own complicity in the evaluation game.And here are my decisions as a state education department bureaucrat, set against the moral universe of the Chicagopoetry slam. Finally, is work to find the truth in a critical race theory, and hopes for solidarity in art, in jazz and in the world ofNew Orleans music. All follow the breadcrumbs back through a career to find the source of compassion for working peopleand their children, and potential solidarity through a clearer more honest language than the language of higher education andadministration.