From Sharon-on critical pedagogy

I wanted to start copying some thoughtful insights here, to organize and keep them together and then to respond and keep thinking about some of these things. If you are on the listserve, than you've probably read these already. I'll create some new posts of my own later.

Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 02:06:23 -0400
From: Sharon Schnurr
Subject: pedagogy, critical and otherwise
To: 6010@LISTS.WAYNE.EDU

No, no!' said the Queen. `Sentence first--verdict

afterwards.'

`Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. `The idea of having

the sentence first!'

`Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.

`I won't!' said Alice.

In response to what other people are saying about resisting

the temptation of framing their teaching in the form of one

of these “pedagogical boxes,” I can say that I tend to think

about critical pedagogy and all of the other pedagogical

approaches presented in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies as

practices that can inform teaching, not as prescriptive

approaches that provide the last word on how teaching gets

done in the classroom.   So I am more interested (for now)

in finding what is useful to me in an approach than in

finding fault with it.

        A useful goal of critical pedagogy is to provide

students with an opportunity to think about the effect of

institutional power on individual lives and human

relationships. Ann George writes that “critical pedagogy

engages students in analyses of unequal power relations that

produce and are produced by cultural practices and

institutions” (92).  The approach does more than provide

content for student essays; it makes available a time and

place for students to bring to a conscious level the

everyday social practices that they tend to accept as

normative and to question them.  George quotes from Kozol

who contends that one of the effects of mass education is

that it trains students to passively comply with authority

figures (94).  That is, students become so used to equating

being good students and good citizens with “following the

rules” that there is always the possibility that they may

adopt an unconscious habit of compliance, conforming with

the practices that are put forward by anyone or any group

that they perceive as an authority figure--even when such

practice is nonsensical or unjust.  It seems that when

people are in the practice of taking orders, when they

seldom have the opportunity to think in ways that may be

oppositional to the status quo or to make decisions for

themselves, they can become habituated to feeling that being

powerless is normal.  Falling into a habit of non-critical

engagement with the world in this way may make people feel

powerless, even if only on an unconscious level, or it may

lead them to believe that the only way to have power is to

comply with those who are already in power.  Critical

pedagogy can give students an opportunity to participate in

and practice a discourse of resistance (to unjust or

unethical social norms) that can be useful to them in their

everyday lives.  This is not to say that educational systems

are inherently bad or corrupt.  Giroux claims that it might

be more productive to think of schools as “arenas

characterized by struggle between competing ideologies,

discourses and behaviors” [. . .] “which include spaces of

resistance and agency,” so that “cultural institutions

produce varying degrees of accommodation and resistance”

(96). So we don’t all have to be “dupes of ideology” (Shor),

but we can be “people fighting for humanity” (96).

Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:29:11 -0400
From: Sharon Schnurr
Subject: Re: Critical Theory Meets Rhetoric
To: 6010@LISTS.WAYNE.EDU

In fairness to Ben, he does point out that to pose the

question this way--transformative intellectuals or exegetes--

really sets up a false dichotomy.

He points out that every reading of a theorist retheorizes.

He says that this is a meager payoff,though, compared to

what could be learned and said.

But what is the goal? The transformation of the current

social conditions into a new order. Agger writes that "This

type of political education differs from earlier forms in

that it relates lifeworld struggle to the evident prospect

of a qualitatively different society.  Who has tried to put

this into action?  I can think of several intellectuals who

really tried to put these ideas into play in the world--

Jesus, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur--

it's interesting that all of these people suffered a similar

fate.

One thing that is interesting about these individuals is

that all of them employed a rhetoric as a vehicle through

which they endeavored to produce social change. Terry

Eagleton's account of rhetoric seems applicable here:

Rhetoric saw speaking and writing not merely as textual

objects, to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly

deconstructed, butu as forms of activity inseparable from

the wider social relations between writers and readers,

orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible outside

the social purposes in which they were embedded.