Michael Apple’s KeyNote introduction – Cathy Benedict
ISPME June 2019 Western University - London, ON
Dear Professor Apple
The bestowing of love comes in moments perhaps not immediately recognized. It is the desire to appear to the world in ways that honour and bequeath recognition; the whisper of a name, the stillness of time as one reads words that speak to who they are, who they want to be. The gift of love is also the hopeless impossibility of letting go of a citation when one has been told to cut 500 words, and love as the silent path one walks, as one stealthily stalks keynote speakers at conferences. (I’ve never done that)
Hannah Arendt reminds us of the need for recognition as a precondition for self-realization (p. 63). Professor Apple, so many, in so many varied disciplines and fields, have felt recognition in your words. We all move in the world of ideas, always sprung from the thinking and words of those who came before. Some of us are content to construct missives hoping our words further freedom from tyrannies of all kinds. Those words, wishful of disruptions, find their way to others through publications and even presentations. You, however, remind us of the lived difference between freedom from and freedom to. You remind us - and live the imperative, of freedom to take action within public spaces. Your truthful dialogue, your work as a public thinker and activist, the lived assumption and commitment of equality between you and all others speaks to the reciprocity embedded in your words and actions. Each time we read your thinking, and now hear you speak, offers us the possibility of new beginnings.
On a personal note – in the early 2000s I took with you a seminar at Teachers College Columbia University, your alma mater and mine (and a handful of gifted others in the room). I had until then been on a trajectory of saving the world through methodolatry systems of control and power. You delivered a much needed and thankful smack up alongside my head. But I get ahead of myself. It all began in a small town in Colorado, START MOVIE well not so small, and yet small enough to beget a girl like me, a girl who strove for the stars, who reached beyond the small town…
(the movie was rolling credits of Apple's accomplishments with orchestral score - mimicking the music that soars over a speaker who has gone on too long at an awards ceremony)
ISPME June 2019 Western University - London, ON
Dear Professor Apple
The bestowing of love comes in moments perhaps not immediately recognized. It is the desire to appear to the world in ways that honour and bequeath recognition; the whisper of a name, the stillness of time as one reads words that speak to who they are, who they want to be. The gift of love is also the hopeless impossibility of letting go of a citation when one has been told to cut 500 words, and love as the silent path one walks, as one stealthily stalks keynote speakers at conferences. (I’ve never done that)
Hannah Arendt reminds us of the need for recognition as a precondition for self-realization (p. 63). Professor Apple, so many, in so many varied disciplines and fields, have felt recognition in your words. We all move in the world of ideas, always sprung from the thinking and words of those who came before. Some of us are content to construct missives hoping our words further freedom from tyrannies of all kinds. Those words, wishful of disruptions, find their way to others through publications and even presentations. You, however, remind us of the lived difference between freedom from and freedom to. You remind us - and live the imperative, of freedom to take action within public spaces. Your truthful dialogue, your work as a public thinker and activist, the lived assumption and commitment of equality between you and all others speaks to the reciprocity embedded in your words and actions. Each time we read your thinking, and now hear you speak, offers us the possibility of new beginnings.
On a personal note – in the early 2000s I took with you a seminar at Teachers College Columbia University, your alma mater and mine (and a handful of gifted others in the room). I had until then been on a trajectory of saving the world through methodolatry systems of control and power. You delivered a much needed and thankful smack up alongside my head. But I get ahead of myself. It all began in a small town in Colorado, START MOVIE well not so small, and yet small enough to beget a girl like me, a girl who strove for the stars, who reached beyond the small town…
(the movie was rolling credits of Apple's accomplishments with orchestral score - mimicking the music that soars over a speaker who has gone on too long at an awards ceremony)
