Join us at this week's meeting of the Philosophy Club virtually (join the meeting online here) or in-person (Auerbach 320) this Wednesday, April 22 from 1 p.m.–2 p.m. as Bethsaida Nieves presents her latest work on the history of the distorting effects of American colonialism on Education in Puerto Rico at the turn of the twentieth century and its lasting impact on our lives.
Between 1900 and 1903, the United States was in the process of reforming Puerto Rico’s education system. In this article, I examine the conditions that make possible the cultural constructions of difference as it relates to the fabrication of the ‘civil self’ in Puerto Rico’s curricula. First, I analyze how discourses and calculations of difference became part of the rationalization and implementation of the new educational curricula in Puerto Rico’s public schools. Second, I consider how the student lessons that children wrote in Puerto Rico between 1901 and 1903 reflect the epistemological and ontological shifts evident in the new curricula, which determined what type of knowledge was valuable and what counted as ‘truth’. In considering how the Puerto Rican child became the object of reflection and action, I examine how assemblages of discourses of difference became part of the institutional practices used to identify and organize Puerto Rico’s education at the turn of the twentieth century. These discourses and practices were part of a larger matrix of ideas used to create knowledge about the Puerto Rican child, and to construct the need for intervention and reform in Puerto Rico’s education system and society. Read the article here.
Bethsaida Nieves received her PhD in Curriculum Theory and Research with a PhD minor in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Nieves studies how constructions of difference are transmogrified into scientific facts and mobilized as mainstream ideologies. In her scholarship, she draws on the historical, scientific, philosophical, and legal construction of difference to analyze the systems of reason(ing) and intersectionalities that produce knowledge, power, and difference in education and society. For more information, please visit the ORCiD page for Dr. Nieves.
The University of Hartford Philosophy Club has an informal, jovial atmosphere. It is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses.
Come and go as you wish. Bring friends. Suggest topics and activities. Take over the club! It belongs to you! Just show up!
Questions? Contact Brian Skelly at bskelly@hartford.edu ; 413.273.2273