Reading Response #3

Intro (next draft)

Powell accentuates the importance of ties and interconnections both within and among regions. He asserts that relationships can lead to social change and progress. His version of Critical Regionalism uses different regions and interconnections to confront and to respond to cultural and political conflicts of our time. Powell celebrates the pedagogy of the classroom settings and the mixing of past, present and future dialogues to create a timeless, or in-flux culture.

His counterpart, Eggener, discourages modernity and Western or outside influence, stressing the importance of local individualism and cultural representation. Eggener believes that collaboration and interconnection leads to a loss of culture and tradition, so therefore the best way to develop and to maintain identity is to deviate from and resist the normative.

The viewpoints of Powell and Eggener often disagree with one another, and much of their Critical Regionalism debate is illustrated in the Hollywood film, The Freedom Writers (2007). The storyline sets in 1994 in the big city of Long  Beach after the death of Rodney King and when gang violence and racial tensions were the highest that they’ve ever been. In the middle of this social turmoil, an integrated high school filled with gang affiliations and racial separatism meets an altruistic English teacher who is ready to unify the divided school. The teacher, played by Hilary Swank, is presented with an English class of generally at-risk, troubled, diverse, urban students. In this classroom, students of varied social regions and backgrounds must work together under the optimism of their new, inexperienced, “privileged”, school teacher. At first, there was immediate division in the class due to gang affiliations and racial tension, as well as communal hate towards their new teacher. There was an immediate resistance to learn from her or from their classmates. Learning was not apart of their normative, nor was being integrated. The principal and other teachers of the school placed low expectations upon the students, saying such things as “half of them will be gone by junior year”, marking them all to the same fate. They marked any one student as representational of the entire class and thus there was always an unknown, lowered image of self worth and of identity. Despite this patterned attitude, the young teacher brings uplifting character to the classroom. She acknowledges each one’s differences and strengths and eventually is able to decrease discrimination in this protected setting by relating several class members to one another. The class eventually becomes a pedagogy where students form what previously seemed to be impossible interconnected relationships that better helped one another to define themselves and their identity and to prove themselves constantly changing for better versions of themselves.

The turning point of this film and of the relationships and the identities of the people within it happens with the presentation of this pedagogy, the academic classroom setting. Much like Powell’s interpretation of CR, the film highlights the ability of relationships to lead to social change and progress. The teacher helps guide this change by initiating mixed seating, and by holding open forums and requiring open journal writing for students to telltale more about their own private lives, or regions. The film captures both the interconnected identities of several students in the classroom, as well as between the relationships of the students and the teacher. She was not by any means like the students nor did she grow up in any impoverished environment like they had. She had come from Newport Beach, a well off region of LA. One day she takes her students on a trip there to visit the Holocaust Museum, opening their minds to the bravery of an impoverished girl of the past while trying to help them discover the strength within their own barren surroundings of the present. With the drive of the students in her mind she raises funds to bring Miep Gies, the last woman to help Anne Frank when she was living, and many of the students’ newfound hero, to LA. They conference and speak with Miep Gies intimately in the final pedagogy of the film. Two years have passed since the beginning of the students’ time in their teacher’s classroom and by the ending of the film the teacher makes students acknowledge the differences among one another and helps students to accept and appreciate their given differences and worth/identity. Two girls that began the course off with severe hatred for one another come to realize they’re vastly different in their regional and cultural identities, but that they are much stronger together in their interconnectedness. The class as a whole realizes by the film’s end that the pedagogies that they were apart of gave them something that they never had–which is perspective, regional/cultural respect/awareness and identity.

The film acknowledges that progress was never achieved in this multicultural school, because false and pejorative generalizations were placed upon the students, creating a divisive and indifferent culture. As mentioned, faculty members and authority of high stature held low expectations for and general readings of the students abilities. The school system had a singular representation and interpretation of the students, which is much like Eggener’s interpretation of CR. He reads that CR is representational and that regions’ identities should be singular. This is problematic, because it is unjust to sum up one group into one image or definition. Overtime though, we see throughout the film the theme shift from Eggner’s version of critical regionalism to Powell’s version of Critical Regionalism. The film shifts from regional identities that are placed upon by authority to regional identities that are created and defined by people from within.

Comments by Nick Van Kley:

Workshop Draft:

Critical Regionalism of the LA Streets

Critical Regionalism surpasses borders, interconnecting regions in a timeless manner, therefore deeming “region” as a relational term. Powell accentuates the importance of ties and interconnections both within and among regions. He asserts that relationships can lead to social change and progress. His version of Critical Regionalism uses different regions and interconnections to confront and to respond to cultural and political conflicts of our time. Powell celebrates the pedagogy of the classroom settings and the mixing of past, present and future dialogues to create a timeless, or in-flux culture. His counterpart, Eggener, discourages modernity and Western or outside influence, stressing the importance of local individualism and cultural representation. Eggener believes that collaboration and interconnection leads to a loss of culture and tradition, so therefore the best way to develop and to maintain identity is to deviate from and resist the normative.  The viewpoints of Powell and Eggener often counter one another. The Hollywood Film, The Freedom Writers (2007) illustrates an ample portion of their varied interpretations and positions on Critical Regionalism. The film dramatizes an outsider’s attempt to understand regional identity. Although at first it seems like the film speaks positively and solely to the interconnectedness of neighboring regions, in actuality it exposes the understanding of social patterns that exist across regions and time.

The storyline sets in 1994 in the big city of Long Beach, Los Angeles after the death of Rodney King when gang violence and racial tension were at the highest that they’d ever been. This period in time marked the survival of social turmoil in the LA streets and its furtherance within the integrated school systems of the city. In one particular local high school where gang affiliation and racial separatism thrived, a young and devoted English teacher is ready to make her mark. She is ready to unify this divided school, but first she must begin with her racially parted classroom. The teacher, played by Hilary Swank, is presented with an English class of generally at-risk, troubled, diverse, urban students. In this classroom, students of varied Los Angeles regions and of different ethnic and social backgrounds must work together under the optimism of their new, inexperienced, “privileged”, school teacher. At first, there was immediate division in the class due to gang affiliations and racial tension, as well as communal hate towards their new teacher. Students immediately resisted learning from her and from their classmates. Learning was not apart of their normative, nor was being integrated. In an environment where long time authority figures and teachers belittle and generalize their students, learning or even the act of being taught was not a familiar territory for them. The new teacher broadens the minds of her students by primarily holding open forums of discussion and requiring writing journals of them about their personal battles; secondarily, she invites them into the world of a renowned historical figure using The Diary of Anne Frank to open a more emotional and familial forum for students to connect upon. Hilary Swank’s character plays a pivotal role in these students’ academic and social lives, transforming these seemingly socially isolated, underdeveloped students into integrated and more accepting, definite people.

The school represents the diversity of the city. In terms of CR, in other words, students bring their lifestyles and experiences from their respective Los Angeles neighborhoods into the classroom each day. The students, as well as the teachers are placed into this mixed learning setting, a blended pedagogy. Powell asserts, “The self-conscious demands an awareness of the fact that critical regionalism is an academic project…the impact of the attenuated cosmopolitanism that is such a powerful force in academic placemaking constraints this project in ways significant enough to deal with at some length. Whatever forces act to isolate academia from the local scene, however, colleges and universities offer one very powerful  opportunity for social change: access to students, and to the opportunity to teach them ways to invent their own descriptions of the world. So critical regionalism must be, ultimately, a pedagogy, one that teaches students how to draw their own regional maps connecting their experience to that of others near and far, not like and unlike themselves” (Powell 8) In the film, the student’s’ regions have a natural and powerful effect on them. They naturally maintain their region’s way of life. Despite of this fact, their diverse, educational setting bound together by their new English teacher puts them on the brink of social development. Much like Powell’s interpretation of CR, the film highlights the ability of relationships to lead to social change and progress. The teacher helps guide this change by initiating mixed seating, and by holding open forums and requiring open journal writing for students to telltale more about their own private lives, or regions. The film captures both the interconnected identities of several students in the classroom, as well as the student-teacher relationships. Much like the representational identities of the students and their English teacher coexisting together, regions exist alongside one another. The Freedom Writers (2007) melodramatizes an outsider’s effort to understand regional identity.

In the process of trying to understand an unfamiliar regional identity, there are those that fail to thoroughly consider multiple conditions and aspects of a region. Instead, many decide to pay attention to a singular trademark and use it to define an entire region. The film captures the consistent theme of violence trauma, especially those related to gangs and race. These violent patterns have defined the school and worsened its reputation. The issue with the constancy of this theme of violence is that it might create too narrow of a representation, which is a claim complementary to that of Powell’s. Powell experienced a similar, singular misrepresentation of his own home region when he noticed the trend of storytelling of one particular story: Murderous Mary. The story of Murderous Mary was a popular story in Johnson City, Tennessee seeing as it telltales a series of unfortunate events of one  particular day when the catastrophic circus came a small, uneventful town. In short, the circus’s main attraction, a famous elephant by the name of Mary, haphazardly walked on her itinerant laborer. The tow, upset, and shocked by the traumatic scene  of events maintained the story in the public discourse for years, tying the town’s identity to that day’s excitement. Powell asserts, “The story of Murderous Mary shows how a community, a region and its constituents can gain definition that is singular to the point of being bizarre and even, in this case, rather brutal”(Powell 10). Singular representation can either be beneficial or harming to a region’s identity, but it never really is accurate. The problem is that singular embodiment no matter how hard it tries can not capture all aspects of a group or place. This means that defining a place by one characteristic is not reliable, nor is it fair. This point opposes Eggener’s interpretation of Critical Regionalism. He believed in regional isolation to create distinguished culture and in the idea that architecture should be indicative of the region’s “current conditions of culture ” (Eggener 228). This means that it is the architect’s responsibility to design an all-encompassing design in order to, “Cultivate a contemporary place-oriented culture” (Eggener 228). The issue here is that, again singular representation is limited. In The Freedom Writers (2007), the students live steadily in the shadows that partial singular representation has placed upon them. The principal, teachers, and other faculty of the school placed low expectations upon the students, saying such things as “half of them will be gone by junior year”, marking them all to the same fate. They marked any one student as representational or indicative of the entire class and thus there was always an unknown, lowered image of self worth and of identity. Despite this patterned attitude, the young teacher brings uplifting character to the classroom. She acknowledges each one’s differences and strengths, and eventually is able to decrease discrimination in her classroom’s protected setting by relating several class members to one another. The class eventually becomes a functioning pedagogy where students formed from what was previously deemed to be an impossible, integrated setting ; the forum better helped one another to define themselves and their identity and to prove themselves constantly changing for better versions of themselves. As a result of this, the film critiques generalities made about the students.

The film acknowledges that progress was never achieved in this multicultural school prior to Swank’s character entering the new school, because false and pejorative generalizations were placed upon the students, creating a divisive and indifferent social culture. Faculty members and authority of high status positions held low expectations for, and general readings of the students’ abilities. The school system had a singular representation and interpretation of the students, which is much like Eggener’s interpretation of CR. As stated before, he reads that CR is representational and that regions’ identities should be singular. Singularity or regional individualism by Eggener’s standards means resistance from the “center”, or the authority figures in society. Overtime though, we see throughout the film the theme shift from Eggner’s version of critical regionalism to Powell’s version of Critical Regionalism. The film shifts from regional identities that are placed upon by authority to regional identities that are created and defined by people from within them. The students and their English teacher use resistance as the immediate force to create this shift.

The student’s resistance of the teacher is a kind of regionalist resistance of the “metropolitan center”. The student’s english teacher was not by any means like them, nor did she grow up in any impoverished environment like they had. She was from Newport Beach, a well-off city or region in Los Angeles. In several ways she represents the authority, or the Western regions. The western regions are considered to hold the most power due to their past and present imperial tendencies. According to Eggener’s interpretation of Critical Regionalism,  it was said to mark a form of resistance-a decided reaction to normative, universal standards, practices, forms, and technological and economic conditions” (Eggener 228) Swank’s character holding the power in the classroom, coming from a “privileged”, authoritative position is similar to the power regions of the world that Eggener refers to and tries to refrain from being influenced by. The students resisting her is their way of resisting the Western influence, the power. Eventually, the students lessen their resistance, willing themselves to learn from one another,  as well as from their persistent and cultured English teacher.

The young English teacher, eager to integrate her students together and to bring the best out of them, she insists on broadening their pedagogical atmosphere. Each day in class, she required personal journal entries of students. In addition, she introduced her class to The Diary of Anne Frank, a book to which they deeply related to on emotional levels. Concurrently, they began to open up to her and became vulnerable in their realities and empathetic towards Anne Frank’s reality. The interconnectedness of the teacher, her students and the story told throughout the novel become a prominent gateway towards social connectivity. One day she takes her students on a trip there to visit the Holocaust Museum, opening their minds to the bravery of an impoverished girl of the past while trying to help them discover the strength within their own barren surroundings of the present. With the drive of the students in her mind she raises funds to bring Miep Gies, the last woman to help Anne Frank when she was living, and many of the students’ newfound hero, to LA. The students grow fond of Miep Gies and create and emotional attachment to Anne Frank. Powell concludes that, “critical regionalism must be, ultimately, a pedagogy, one that teaches students how to draw their own regional maps connecting their experience to that of others near and far, not like and unlike themselves” (Powell 8). The experiences of the students in LA differ tremendously from the experiences of Anne Frank in Germany, yet they still connect with her. Being victims of poverty, violence and oppression also, the students identity with her emotionally and admire her bravery. The two parties are interconnected even through different time periods, showing that cultural regionalism is timeless, and in-flux like Powell’s interpretation suggests. The student’s affinity with Anne Frank demonstrates non-regionalist recognition that there are social patterns that exist across regions.

Conclusion (next draft)

Comments: 

Nicholas Van Kley: OK, the title gets at a couple of features of your subject (LA and Critical Regionalism). Ideally, it will connect more clearly to the actual text (the film that is) or even hint at your key question or claim.

Lucas Valdes: Good job in accommodating audience with a solid background in the argument behind what regionalism is/should be

Albert Austin: Introduce Critical Regionalism, who the authors are, what their claims are/ what your claims are

Albert Austin: You state the claims very well here-just change order in paper

Albert Austin: Good job of explaining to a novice audience how the film relates to critical regionalism

Lucas Valdes: It feels like these two ideas that are supposed to contrast are too similar, and therefore need clarification

Albert Austin: Motive: The film focuses on the positive interconnectedness among reasons but in actuality it really exposes the way social patterns are viewed in different regions

Albert Austin: Maybe: seems like focuses on just immediate region, actually focuses on broader and interconnectedness among many regions

Lucas Valdes: Another example of accommodating a novice audience that may have not seen this film

Lucas Valdes: This gigantic quote, while it does give the novice reader a lot of information, is watering down your writing with too much of your source’s writing. Try to extract the parts of the quote holding the main ideas, and integrate them into your own writing.

Albert Austin: Very good job of analyzing how the film connects to scholar’s arguments on C.R.

Lucas Valdes: Local Claim: The school administration’s appropriation of the place of the school reduced it to nothing more than a troubled place, paying no mind to the vibrant individuality beneath

Albert Austin: The claim of this paragraph is to state that the film is a representation of critical regionalism and that it is at first used as resistance like Eggener says but throughout the movie shifts to Powell’s idea of creating one’s on regionalist culture and traditions.

Lucas Valdes: Concrete evidence of the teacher partaking in Powell’s “pedagogy” of regional learning

Lucas Valdes: Unnecessary repetition of quote–just reference Powell’s idea of the pedagogy without the quote, because you have already established the idea through the quote earlier.

Conference Draft:

The Uncontrolled Variables of Critical Regionalism: Time and Space

In the 15th century, Europeans invaded the shores of already settled terrains with imperialistic behavior, assimilating the lifestyles and cultures of indigenous people to be closer in uniform to theirs. This homogenizing effect overtime has led regions to lose their identity and in turn, seek to reinvent themselves and to serve their local culture. The process by which they use to accomplish this individuality is called Critical Regionalism. Critical Regionalism is a conscious method used by many regions to resist globalism and to deviate from “the Center”. Critical Regionalism surpasses borders, interconnecting regions in a timeless manner, therefore deeming “region” as a relational term. Today, historians attempt to understand how Critical Regionalism works to affect cultural relationships both within regions and among different regions. Two historians, Keith Eggener and Douglas Powell, critique the phenomena of Critical Regionalism through open dialogue. The viewpoints of Powell and Eggener often counter one another. The first of the two, Powell, accentuates the importance of ties and interconnections both within and among regions. He asserts that relationships can lead to social change and progress. His version of Critical Regionalism uses different regions and interconnections to confront and to respond to cultural and political conflicts of our time. Powell celebrates the pedagogy of classroom settings and the mixing of past, present, and future dialogues to create a timeless, or in-flux culture. His counterpart, Eggener, discourages modernity and Western or outside influence, stressing the importance of local individualism and cultural representation. Eggener believes that collaboration and interconnection leads to a loss of culture and tradition, so therefore the best way to develop and to maintain identity is to deviate from and resist the normative. The Hollywood Film, The Freedom Writers (2007), illustrates an ample portion of their two varied interpretations and positions on Critical Regionalism; diversity, resistance, generalities and interconnectedness are four facets of Critical Regionalism that are revealed in the film. The film dramatizes an outsider’s attempt to understand regional identity. Although at first it seems like the film spotlights the positive interconnectedness of regions at an instantaneous period in time, in actuality, it exposes how social patterns can exist at different times and in different places.

The storyline sets in 1994 in the big city of Long Beach, Los Angeles after the death of Rodney King when gang violence and racial tension were at the highest that they’d ever been. This period in time marked the survival of social turmoil in the LA streets and its furtherance within the integrated school systems of the city. In one particular local high school where gang affiliation and racial separatism thrived, a young and devoted English teacher is ready to make her mark. She is ready to unify this divided school, but first she must begin with her racially parted classroom. The teacher, played by Hilary Swank, is presented with an English class of generally at-risk, troubled, diverse, urban students. In this classroom, students of varied Los Angeles regions and of different ethnic and social backgrounds must work together under the optimism of their new, inexperienced, “privileged”, school teacher. At first, there was immediate division in the class due to gang affiliations and racial tension, as well as communal hate towards their new teacher. Students immediately resisted learning from her and from their classmates. Learning was not apart of their normative, nor was being integrated. In an environment where long time authority figures and teachers belittle and generalize their students, learning or even the act of being taught was not a familiar territory for them. The new teacher broadens the minds of her students by primarily holding open forums of discussion and requiring writing journals of them about their personal battles; secondarily, she invites them into the world of a renowned historical figure using The Diary of Anne Frank to open a more emotional and familial forum for students to connect upon. Hilary Swank’s character plays a pivotal role in these students’ academic and social lives, transforming these seemingly socially isolated, underdeveloped students into integrated and more accepting, definite people.

The school represents the diversity of the city. In terms of CR, in other words, students bring their lifestyles and experiences from their respective Los Angeles neighborhoods into the classroom each day. The students, as well as the teachers are placed into this mixed learning setting, a blended pedagogy. Powell asserts, “The self-conscious demands an awareness of the fact that critical regionalism is an academic project…colleges and universities offer one very powerful  opportunity for social change: access to students, and to the opportunity to teach them ways to invent their own descriptions of the world. So critical regionalism must be, ultimately, a pedagogy, one that teaches students how to draw their own regional maps connecting their experience to that of others near and far, not like and unlike themselves” (Powell 8) In the film, the student’s’ regions have a natural and powerful effect on them. They naturally maintain their region’s way of life. In despite of this fact, their diverse, educational setting, bound together by their new English teacher, puts them on the brink of social development. Much like Powell’s interpretation of CR, the film highlights the ability of relationships to lead to social change and progress. The teacher helps guide this change by initiating mixed seating, and by holding open forums and requiring journal writing for students to telltale more about their own private lives, or “regions”. The film captures both the interconnected identities of several students in the classroom, as well as the student-teacher relationships. Much like the representational identities of the students and of their English teacher coexisting together, regions exist alongside one another. The Freedom Writers (2007) melodramatizes an outsider’s effort to understand regional identity.

In the process of trying to understand an unfamiliar regional identity, there are those that fail to thoroughly consider multiple conditions and aspects of a region. Instead, many decide to pay attention to a singular trademark and use it to define an entire region. The film captures the consistent theme of violence trauma, especially those related to gangs and race. These violent patterns have defined the school and worsened its reputation. The issue with the constancy of this theme of violence is that it might create too narrow of a representation, which is a claim complementary to that of Powell’s. Powell experienced a similar, singular misrepresentation of his own home region when he noticed the recurrent  narration of one particular story: Murderous Mary. The story of Murderous Mary was a popular story in Johnson City, Tennessee seeing as it telltales a series of unfortunate events of one  particular day when a catastrophic circus came to a small, uneventful town. In short, the circus’s main attraction, a famous elephant by the name of Mary, haphazardly walked on and killed her itinerant laborer. The town, upset, and shocked by the traumatic scene of events maintained the story in the public discourse for years, tying the town’s identity to that day’s excitement. Powell asserts, “The story of Murderous Mary shows how a community, a region and its constituents can gain definition that is singular to the point of being bizarre and even, in this case, rather brutal”(Powell 10). Singular representation can either be beneficial or harming to a region’s identity, but it never really is accurate. The problem is that singular embodiment no matter how hard it tries can not capture all aspects of a group or place. This means that defining a place by one characteristic is not reliable, nor is it fair. This point opposes Eggener’s interpretation of Critical Regionalism. He believed in regional isolation to create distinguished culture and in the idea that architecture should be indicative of the region’s “current conditions of culture ” (Eggener 228). This means that it is the architect’s responsibility to design an all-encompassing design in order to, “Cultivate a contemporary place-oriented culture” (Eggener 228). The issue here is that, again singular representation is limited. In The Freedom Writers (2007), the students live steadily in the shadows that partial singular representation has placed upon them. The principal, teachers, and other faculty of the school continuously placed low expectations upon the students, saying such things as “half of them will be gone by junior year”, marking them all to the same fate. They marked any one student as representational or indicative of the entire class and thus there was always an unknown, lowered image of self worth and of identity. Despite this patterned attitude, the young teacher brings uplifting character to the classroom. She acknowledges each one’s differences and strengths, and eventually is able to decrease discrimination in her classroom’s protected setting by relating several class members to one another. The class eventually becomes a functioning pedagogy where students formed from what was previously deemed to be an impossible, integrated setting; the forum better helped the students to define themselves and their identities and to prove themselves constantly changing for better versions of themselves. As a result of this, the film critiques generalities made about the students.

The film acknowledges that progress was never achieved in this multicultural school prior to Swank’s character entering the new school, because false and pejorative generalizations were placed upon the students, creating a divisive and indifferent social culture. Faculty members and authority of high status positions held low expectations for, and general readings of the students’ abilities. The school system had a singular representation and interpretation of the students, which is much like Eggener’s interpretation of CR. As stated before, he reads that CR is representational and that regions’ identities should be singular. Singularity or regional individualism by Eggener’s standards means resistance from the “center”, or the authority figures in society. Overtime though, we see throughout the film the theme shift from Eggner’s version of critical regionalism to Powell’s version of Critical Regionalism. The film shifts from regional identities that are placed upon by authority to regional identities that are created and defined by people from within them. The students and their English teacher use resistance as the immediate force to create this shift.

The student’s resistance of the teacher is a kind of regionalist resistance of the “metropolitan center”. The student’s english teacher was not by any means like them, nor did she grow up in any impoverished environment like they had. She was from Newport Beach, a well-off city, or region, in Los Angeles. In several ways she represents the authority, or the Western regions. The western regions are considered to hold the most power due to their past and present imperial tendencies. According to Eggener’s interpretation of Critical Regionalism,  it was said to mark a form of resistance-a decided reaction to normative, universal standards, practices, forms, and technological and economic conditions” (Eggener 228) Swank’s character holding the power in the classroom, coming from a “privileged”, authoritative position is similar to the power regions of the world that Eggener refers to and tries to refrain from being influenced by. The students resisting her is their way of resisting the Western influence, the power. Eventually, the students lessen their resistance, willing themselves to learn from one another,  as well as from their persistent and cultured English teacher.

The young English teacher, eager to integrate her students together and to bring the best out of them, she insists on broadening their pedagogical atmosphere. Each day in class, she required personal journal entries of students. In addition, she introduced her class to The Diary of Anne Frank, a book to which they deeply related to on emotional levels. Concurrently, they began to open up to her and became vulnerable in their realities and empathetic towards Anne Frank’s reality. The interconnectedness of the teacher, her students and the story told throughout the novel become a prominent gateway towards social connectivity. One day she takes her students on a trip there to visit the Holocaust Museum, opening their minds to the bravery of an impoverished girl of the past while trying to help them discover the strength within their own barren surroundings of the present. With the drive of the students in her mind she raises funds to bring Miep Gies, the last woman to help Anne Frank when she was living, and many of the students’ newfound hero, to LA. The students grow fond of Miep Gies and create and emotional attachment to Anne Frank. This evidence revives Powell’s claim previously stated about inclusive pedagogical, or roundtable, experiences and how it allows for students to design their own regional borders. The experiences of the students in LA differ tremendously from the experiences of Anne Frank in Germany, yet they still connect with her. Being victims of poverty, violence and oppression also, the students identity with her emotionally and admire her bravery. The two parties are interconnected even through different time periods, showing that cultural regionalism is timeless, and in-flux like Powell’s interpretation suggests. The student’s affinity with Anne Frank demonstrates non-regionalist recognition that there are social patterns that exist across regions.

Although the film’s presentation of cultural relationships seems stagnant, in actuality, there is higher significance in the timelessness of social connectedness. Historians, Eggener and Powell examine the interrelatedness, variance, deviation, and singular representation that Critical Regional entails. These same angles are taken and observed in the film The Freedom Writers (2007). (Lastly need a “so what” sentence).

Comments:

Final Draft:

In the 15th century, Europeans invaded the shores of already settled terrains with imperialistic behavior, assimilating the lifestyles and cultures of indigenous people to be identical to theirs. This homogenizing effect over time has led regions to lose their identity and in turn, seek to reinvent themselves and to serve their local culture. The process by which they use to accomplish this individuality and selfhood is called Critical Regionalism. Critical Regionalism is a conscious method used by many regions to resist globalism and to deviate from “the Center”. It is a philosophy that aims to mediate the contemporary and the traditional; it attempts to strengthen traditional values and culture in a modernized era. Today, historians often question what role the regenerative past plays in the move towards modernization and also attempt to understand how Critical Regionalism works to affect cultural relationships. Two historians, Keith Eggener and Douglas Powell, critique and debate about the phenomena of Critical Regionalism through open dialogue. The Hollywood Film, The Freedom Writers (2007), illustrates an ample portion of their two varied interpretations and positions on Critical Regionalism and presents the social effects of regional differences. This piece dramatizes an outsider’s attempt to understand regional identity. The film wants us to see the larger social patterns that connect us, shape our lives, and help us to better understand our lives. In full effect though, the film showcases that in order to change the patterns–not just understand them–we need social invention.

The film captures the impact that social invention has on relationships and identities. Regional identity in this movie is initially defined by authority, then from within the region itself and finally by the the interconnected relationships created through social reform.  The storyline sets in 1994 in the big city of Long Beach, Los Angeles after the death of Rodney King when gang violence and racial tension were at the highest that they’d ever been. This period in time marked the survival of social turmoil in the LA streets and its furtherance within the integrated school systems of the city. In one particular local high school where gang affiliation and racial separatism thrived, a young and devoted English teacher is ready to make her mark. She is ready to unify this divided school, but first she must begin with her racially parted classroom. The teacher, played by Hilary Swank, is presented with an English class of generally at-risk, troubled, diverse, urban students. In this classroom, students of varied Los Angeles regions and of different ethnic and social backgrounds must work together under the optimism of their new, inexperienced, “privileged”, school teacher. At first, there was immediate division in the class due to gang affiliations and racial tension, as well as communal hate towards their new teacher. Students immediately resisted learning from her and from their classmates. Learning was not apart of their everyday life, nor was being integrated. In an environment where long time authority figures and teachers belittle and generalize their students, learning or even the act of being taught was not a familiar territory for them. The new teacher broadens the minds of her students by primarily holding open forums of discussion and requiring writing journals of them about their personal battles; secondarily, she invites them into the world of a renowned historical figure using The Diary of Anne Frank to open a more emotional and familial forum for students to connect upon. Hilary Swank’s character plays a pivotal role in these students’ academic and social lives, transforming these seemingly socially isolated, underdeveloped students into integrated and more accepting, definite people.

The viewpoints of both Powell and Eggener are showcased throughout the storyline of the film and often counter one another. The first of the two, Powell, accentuates the importance of ties and interconnections both within and among regions. He asserts that relationships can lead to social change and progress. His version of Critical Regionalism uses different regions and interconnections to confront and to respond to cultural and political conflicts of our time. Powell celebrates the pedagogy of classroom settings and the mixing of past, present, and future dialogues to create an in-flux culture. His counterpart, Eggener, discourages modernity and Western or outside influence, stressing the importance of local individualism and cultural representation. Eggener believes that collaboration and interconnection leads to a loss of culture and tradition, so therefore the best way to develop and to maintain identity is to deviate from and resist the normative.

The school represents the diversity of the city. In terms of CR, in other words, students bring their lifestyles and experiences from their respective Los Angeles neighborhoods into the classroom each day. The students, as well as the teachers are placed into this mixed learning setting, a blended pedagogy. Powell asserts, “The self-conscious demands an awareness of the fact that critical regionalism is an academic project…colleges and universities offer one very powerful  opportunity for social change: access to students, and to the opportunity to teach them ways to invent their own descriptions of the world. So critical regionalism must be, ultimately, a pedagogy, one that teaches students how to draw their own regional maps connecting their experience to that of others near and far, not like and unlike themselves” (Powell 8) In the film, the student’s’ regions have a natural and powerful effect on them. They naturally maintain their region’s way of life. Despite this fact, their diverse, educational setting, bound together by their new English teacher, puts them on the brink of social development. Much like Powell’s interpretation of CR, the film highlights the ability of relationships to lead to social change and progress. The teacher helps guide this change by initiating mixed seating, and by holding open forums and requiring journal writing for students to tell more about their own private lives, or “regions”. The film captures both the interconnected identities of several students in the classroom, as well as the student-teacher relationships. Much like the representational identities of the students and of their English teacher coexisting together, regions exist alongside one another. The Freedom Writers (2007) melodramatizes this coexistence and the singular representation that occurs within it.

In the process of trying to understand an unfamiliar regional identity, there are those who fail to thoroughly consider multiple conditions and aspects of a region and thus create singular interpretations of them. Instead, many decide to pay attention to a singular trademark and use it to define an entire region. The film captures the consistent theme of violence trauma, especially those related to gangs and race. These violent patterns have defined the school and worsened its reputation. The issue with the constancy of this theme of violence is that it might create too narrow of a representation, which is a claim complementary to that of Powell’s. Powell experienced a similar, singular misrepresentation of his own home region when he noticed the recurrent  narration of one particular story: Murderous Mary. The story of Murderous Mary was a popular story in Johnson City, Tennessee seeing as it tell a series of unfortunate events of one  particular day when a catastrophic circus came to a small, uneventful town. In short, the circus’s main attraction, a famous elephant by the name of Mary, haphazardly walked on and killed her itinerant laborer. The town, upset, and shocked by the traumatic scene of events maintained the story in the public discourse for years, tying the town’s identity to that day’s excitement. Powell asserts, “The story of Murderous Mary shows how a community, a region and its constituents can gain definition that is singular to the point of being bizarre and even, in this case, rather brutal”(Powell 10). Singular representation can either be beneficial or harming to a region’s identity, but it never really is accurate. The problem is that singular embodiment no matter how hard it tries can not capture all aspects of a group or place. This means that defining a place by one characteristic is not reliable, nor is it fair. This point opposes Eggener’s interpretation of Critical Regionalism. He believed in regional isolation to create distinguished culture and in the idea that architecture should be indicative of the region’s “current conditions of culture ” (Eggener 228). This means that it is the architect’s responsibility to design an all-encompassing design in order to, “Cultivate a contemporary place-oriented culture” (Eggener 228). The issue here is that, again singular representation is limited.

In The Freedom Writers (2007), the students live steadily in the shadows that partial singular representation has placed upon them. The principal, teachers, and other faculty of the school continuously placed low expectations upon the students, saying such things as “half of them will be gone by junior year”, marking them all to the same fate. They marked any one student as representational or indicative of the entire class and thus there was always an unknown, lowered image of self worth and of identity. Despite this patterned attitude, the young teacher brings uplifting character to the classroom. She acknowledges each one’s differences and strengths, and eventually is able to decrease discrimination in her classroom’s protected setting by relating several class members to one another. The class eventually becomes a functioning pedagogy where students formed from what was previously deemed to be an impossible, integrated setting; the forum better helped the students to define themselves and their identities and to prove themselves constantly changing for better versions of themselves. As a result of this, the film critiques generalities made about the students.

The film acknowledges that progress was never achieved in this multicultural school prior to Swank’s character entering the new school, because false and pejorative generalizations were placed upon the students, creating a divisive and indifferent social culture. This disempowerment caused them to create slanted visions of themselves. Faculty members and authority of high status positions held low expectations for, and general readings of the students’ abilities. The school system had a singular representation and interpretation of the students, which is much like Eggener’s interpretation of CR. As stated before, he reads that CR is representational and that regions’ identities should be singular. Singularity or regional individualism by Eggener’s standards means resistance from the “center”, or the authority figures in society. Overtime though, we see throughout the film the theme shift from Eggner’s version of critical regionalism to Powell’s version of Critical Regionalism. The film shifts from regional identities that are placed upon by authority to regional identities that are created and defined by people from within them. The students and their English teacher use resistance as the immediate force to create this shift.

The student’s resistance of the teacher is a kind of regionalist resistance of the “metropolitan center”. The student’s english teacher was not by any means like them, nor did she grow up in any impoverished environment like they had. She was from Newport Beach, a well-off city, or region, in Los Angeles. In several ways she represents the authority, or the Western regions. The western regions are considered to hold the most power due to their past and present imperial tendencies. According to Eggener’s interpretation of Critical Regionalism,  it was said to mark a form of resistance-a decided reaction to normative, universal standards, practices, forms, and technological and economic conditions” (Eggener 228) Swank’s character holding the power in the classroom, coming from a “privileged”, authoritative position is similar to the power regions of the world that Eggener refers to and tries to refrain from being influenced by. The students resisting her is their way of resisting the Western influence, the power. Their initial rejection is a demand for autonomy. Eventually, the students lessen their resistance, willing themselves to learn from one another,  as well as from their persistent and cultured English teacher.

The young English teacher, eager to integrate her students together and to bring the best out of them, she insists on broadening their pedagogical atmosphere. Each day in class, she required personal journal entries of students. In addition, she introduced her class to The Diary of Anne Frank, a book to which they deeply related to on emotional levels. Concurrently, they began to open up to her and became vulnerable in their realities and empathetic towards Anne Frank’s reality. The interconnectedness of the teacher, her students and the story told throughout the novel become a prominent gateway towards social connectivity. One day she takes her students on a trip there to visit the Holocaust Museum, opening their minds to the bravery of an impoverished girl of the past while trying to help them discover the strength within their own barren surroundings of the present. With the drive of the students in her mind she raises funds to bring Miep Gies, the last woman to help Anne Frank when she was living, and many of the students’ newfound hero, to LA. The students grow fond of Miep Gies and create and emotional attachment to Anne Frank. This evidence revives Powell’s claim previously stated about inclusive pedagogical, or roundtable, experiences and how it allows for students to design their own regional borders. The experiences of the students in LA differ tremendously from the experiences of Anne Frank in Germany, yet they still connect with her. Being victims of poverty, violence and oppression also, the students identity with her emotionally and admire her bravery. The two parties are interconnected even through different time periods, showing that cultural and critical regionalism is in-flux and dependent on relationships like Powell’s interpretation suggests. The student’s affinity with Anne Frank demonstrates non-regionalist recognition that there are social patterns that exist across regions.

Although the film highlights the social constellations that connect and shape our lives, the film further exhibits the role that social invention has on changing them. Critical Regionalism is a mediator between the regenerative past and the contemporary. Historians, Eggener and Powell examine the interrelatedness, variance, deviation, and singular representation that Critical Regional entails. These same angles are taken and observed in the film The Freedom Writers (2007). Social invention is the catalyst needed to promote awareness and to initiate change.