Week of 4/28

Shor: “Monday Morning Fever: Critical Literacy and the Generative Theme of ‘Work’ ”

I’m quite sympathetic to Shor’s adaptation of Freire’s generative words. I, too, have organized my 101 syllabus around a generative theme. The theme I have chosen is the theme of values. Like Shor’s thematic approach, mine is organized to be “textured, integral, and successively more demanding” and each assignment combines “composing, editing, verbalizing, conceptualizing, and reading” (106). I, too, explain my pedagogy to the class, and we discuss what my responsibilities are and what theirs are. While I aim for transparency, I do not pretend that there is no hierarchy in the classroom. But I do aim for a cooperative tone to our interactions.

I agree that students “possess more language skills than they will display in school,” and I look for ways to allow students to use the skills that they have that the academy doesn’t value to find their way into discourses that it does value.

I have mixed feelings about identifying some writing as “pre-writing,” because I think all writing is writing. I’ve said before that I am wary of giving students the impression that some composing moments are more important and should thus receive more serious attention than others. The dictation method Shor outlines interests me, but I am not sure how they will help students “develop self-confidence” (109). It seems that it might, however, foster cooperation, and it might be useful as a means to developing a sense of the class as a community of learners.

The first paper I assign is an ideal eulogy—that is, each student writes the eulogy s/he would most like to have delivered at his or her own funeral. This develops out of what Shor calls “negation” (110); the freewrite preceding the one that initiates the ideal eulogy sequence is a nightmare eulogy—the eulogies they’d be most horrified to have delivered at their own funerals. The sequence involves a lot more than just the writing, but it’s just too much to include here. Each essay sequence is connected to both the one that precedes it and the one that succeeds it, and we move to increasing levels of abstraction (114). Like Shor, I aim to get students to dig deeper and deeper.

I don’t think Shor is quite correct when he says that students “have grammar in their voices,” though (111). They’ll catch some things by reading aloud, but spoken AE is so different from written SAE, especially academic SAE, that they do need to be shown what will be expected in other classes. One way I deal with this is to model spoken academic SAE a lot of the time. The idea of paired reading aloud is intriguing; I may try it.

Hairston: “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing”

Hairston calls for teachers of composition to “establish our psychological and intellectual independence from the literary critics who are at the center of power in most English departments” (697). Part of the problem with this is, as I have said before, it implies that reading (which is what literary critics after all analyze and consider how to best understand) is not part of writing and that composition has nothing to learn from lit crit. In other words, it’s to shortchange the place of reading in writing in order to facilitate the project of constructing composition studies as an autonomous discipline. Not good.

Hairston seems to equate “putting ideology at the center” with imposing a particular “leftist” ideology on students. But that’s not necessarily the case. Putting ideology at the center could just involve dissecting ideologically charged messages such as commercials or ads, for example.

I’ve got to say that religion is one of the “chief obstacles to” critical thinking, demanding as it does belief without reason or evidence. And, those of us who are atheists get, in the US, the most “hostile reception” of all (710). (Did you know that last year 74% of Americans said they would vote for an adulterer before they’d vote for an atheist? Hmmm. Lying cheater over here . . . reasoning human being over here. I’ll take the untrustworthy cheater, please. Strange.)

As far as the Althusserian analysis of the job application letter, it’s correct
(701). But that doesn’t mean we oughtn’t to teach students how to write effective ones or that we oughtn’t to write them ourselves. Interests can conflict. The trick is to learn how to reason well enough to make decisions about how to resolve such conflicts when we must.

Hairston’s misunderstanding (or deliberate misrepresentation via straw man) of deconstruction is annoying. Although I don’t accept all of deconstruction’s conclusions, I do understand that what it tries to do is to either show the ways that texts undo themselves; while she articulates a pseudo-Foucauldian, pseudo-Marxian analysis of texts and power, she fails to mention that one of the most important things deconstruction does is to examine the tension between rhetoric and grammar, to look at the ways that rhetoric exceeds grammar in texts. Moreover, not all poststructuralists claim that there is no objective reality. Joseph Margolis, for instance, articulates a compelling case for what he calls “cultural realism.” However, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, since Margolis is a philosopher. But he first began publishing on this topic well before Hairston wrote this article. Also, Cixous writes extensively about writing and language, even though she is a feminist (703).

I would argue that “because standard English is the dialect of the dominant class, writing instruction that tries to help students master that dialect” undermines hegemony by extending the class marker beyond class, rather than “reinforc[ing] the status quo and serv[ing] the interests of the dominant class” (703). So I am a counterexample to her claim about how leftist educators view teaching SAE. But maybe that’s just me. I don’t think so, though.

What does it mean to say that the “humanities are valuable in their own right” (704)?

How can “students gain control over their lives” without at least interrogating the contexts within which those lives take shape (705)?

One can look at politics, economics, and ideologies “without sacrificing” the writing course’s integrity (705). One can be rigorous and focused even if one is looking at the context. Some people might argue that one cannot be rigorous without placing the task at hand in context. I would be one of them. How can students “examine their experiences, their assumptions, their values” if the experiences, assumptions and values are decontextualized (711)?

“Make no mistake—those on the cultural left are not in the least liberal” (706). Ad hominem, anyone? “[I]n fact, they despise liberals as compromising humanists” (706). And here’s hasty generalization. Hopefully, that will conclude our lesson on logical fallacies for the day, folks.

“The real truth about classrooms is that the teacher has all the power” (707). Nope, I was wrong. Here we have another hasty generalization. How much power do PTIs have? GAs? I guess the departmental chairs and committees who decide whether we will be rehired or refunded in part based on our retention numbers, the legislatures that decide how much funding we get, the Regents who decide who will run the school and what many of its major policies will be, and the accreditation folks who decide what content must be offered for the school to be accredited wield no power in the classroom. My mistake.

“[W]e must teach [writing] for the students’ benefit, not in the service of politics or anything else” (712). I guess she means the students’ unexamined benefit, right? A kind of one-size-fits-all benefit, right? “I think it is unprofessional for teachers to bring their ideology into the classroom” (708). So, I guess what’s she’s saying is ideology free. Must be nice to have a handle on the Truth. She’s able to be objective. I wonder how she does that. Not even scientists think they’re doing that anymore.

How is the claim that we ought not to interrogate or challenge the status quo value-free and devoid of political content and ideology again? I can never remember that. What she really means is “not in the service of leftist politics” or “not in the service of politics I disagree with” or “not in the service of the politics of those radical, atheistic, feminist, communists.” The fact is that no decisions about content or method are value-neutral, and thus they all serve some political and ideological agenda(s). The question for me is whether we’re going to admit it and examine which one(s) we’re serving or not. I vote yes. Again, examining and acknowledging is not the same as brainwashing. “Consciousness of” does not equal “imposing on.”

Freire: “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom and Education and Conscientização”

“The analyst will discover in the methods and texts used by educators and students practical value options which betray a philosophy of man, well or poorly outlined, coherent or incoherent” (617). Well, Hairston should have read this. Because Freire is right. Philosophical underpinnings lie at the bottom of all belief systems. Making claims about what we ought to do in the classroom also involves claims about how people learn and what’s worth learning. It involves particular understandings of the relationship between teaching and learning. It involves definitions of terms like “student,” “teacher,” and “literacy.” It involves much more than I can go into here. Sometimes these claims and beliefs are left unsaid, implicit, but they’re always there. These beliefs and claims are philosophical presuppositions that lay out the parameters within which conversations take place and practice is enacted. Even practice involves these presupps. Remember Charlotte Bunch? “The personal is political”? The philosophical underpinnings that enable us to make claims about states of affairs are ideological. Always.

“Unable to grasp contemporary illiteracy as a typical manifestation of a ‘culture of silence’ . . . ” (619). This got me to thinking about the different ways authors have been using the term “illiteracy” and about the kind of literacy I’m most interested in helping students to develop. I guess it has to do with the cultural silence that surrounds our understandings of ideology. Now that doesn’t mean I want to brainwash students. It means that I want to create a space where they can develop the ability to read and write between the lines, not in the margins. I want them to be able to recognize the ways that ideology is encoded in everything they read and write. I wan them to be able to use writing as a tool for problem-solving, including the problems they are set in other classes. That involves really entering into multiple discourse communities and being able to see the ideological and philosophical foundations upon which the conversations in those communities are built. If we can’t do that, we’re just translating, which is perhaps fine. But maybe fine isn’t good enough.

Smith: “Students’ Goals, Gatekeeping, and Ethics”

I have so much to say in response to this article that I’m probably just going to quote stuff and then respond to what’s said in the quotation. This is a really long one. You may not believe it, but I did rein myself in. And if you can get past the ranting, I eventually get to where I think he makes some valuable points. I think my problems are with the way he gets there.

“[T]o resist [“corporate powers’ oppressive, elitist . . . white Euro-male”] agenda presumably includes refusing to gate-keep” (300). No. I don’t think so. But resistance does involve providing a framework in which that agenda can become visible instead of being unquestioningly accepted as the way things are. The problem isn’t that the gates lead to “the land of the powers-that-be” (300). The problem is that they don’t. They lead, for most of us, only to a kind of midpoint between the powers-that-be (for real power is wielded in this country by men and a few women whose names we don’t know, who are never in the news, and who in a kind of metaphoric incestuousness intermarry and keep real power in the hands of less than 4%of the world’s population.) To think that a middle-management position is a position of real power is naïve. To think that even CEOs wield real power is naïve. Real economic power is wielded by boards of directors, not by the CEOs they hire and fire. Power is relative. It may be that CEOs have a lot of power relative to the person behind the cash register at “World O’Bargains Discount” (303), but CEOs are hired and fired just like the rest of us. While their social class may be different from the rest of us, economically, they’re working class, just like everybody else who receives a paycheck signed by someone else. And that’s just a fact.

The idea that the gate leading to the “professional-managerial occupations” is the gate to the “overclass” is a naïve illusion (302). College might be the gate to the professional-managerial occupations, but it’s not the gate to the real overclass. It’s the gate to positions between the real ruling class and the rest of us. It’s the gate to a space where we can look out for the interests of the ruling class and perhaps be well-paid for doing so. It’s the gate to a space where we can fool ourselves into thinking we have power and wealth. But it’s not a gate to real power. It’s not a gate to real wealth. Don’t we have an obligation to pass on to our students the kind of critical thinking tools that might help them to understand the real conditions of their lives? I’m not saying that we should propagandize students. I’m not saying we should tell them this stuff. But if we do not provide spaces where they can learn to question the organization of their lives and their places in society, we’re not doing our jobs. Whether or not they choose to exercise the critical thinking skills they can acquire in our classes in order to examine these issues is up to them. But if we don’t teach them how to use writing to think critically, we aren’t preparing them to succeed in their writing assignments in other classes. All we’re doing is showing them how to enter into our discourse community.

Furthermore, to say that “for the most part” we aren’t dealing with “ ‘those who are excluded,’ ” who are more likely to be found “in our ghettos and barrios” involves a much narrower understanding of “exclusion” than mine (302). First, the truth of this claim depends on where one teaches. Realistically, most of us can expect to end up teaching at community colleges. Community colleges increasingly are open-enrollment institutions. So, many students never encounter the pre-composition gate of admission requirements. Most of the first-year college students in the US are enrolled in community colleges. These students do encounter pre-Composition 101 gates, but I’ve never heard of anyone being kept out of an open-enrollment institution because s/he did abominably on an English Placement Test (EPT). In fact, many of these students do come from the “ghettos and barrios.” Take a trip to CSN’s Cheyenne or Charleston campuses, for goodness’ sake.

For me, being excluded means being a person whose existence and experience is largely invisible, held to be “deviant,” or marginalized in mainstream culture. Let’s see. That means the handicapped, including the blind, deaf, and wheelchair bound among others; the middle-aged; the poor; manual laborers and their offspring; the elderly; gays, lesbians, and bisexuals; first-generation immigrants; the working poor; those on welfare; the chronically ill; transsexuals and transvestites; and so on. For me, a person is excluded if s/he is a member of an identity group that is the target of institutional (not necessarily the academy, but social institutions) oppression and/or discrimination. That includes women of all races; the working poor of all sexes; Native Americans; people of Asian, Hispanic, Chicano, and Latino descent; people of Italian and Sicilian descent (Did you know that of all people of European descent, Italians and Sicilians face the highest degree of discrimination and prejudice? They have rarely been elected to public office and rarely rise to positions of economic authority unless they Anglicize their names!); and many of the groups included in my first list.

Okay, so who are we left with given that most of us will not teach in the institutions to which the ruling class sends its children? Oh. I’ve got it. Middle-class white guys who are not gay, handicapped in any way, effeminate, Italian or Sicilian, middle-aged, elderly, bisexual, immigrants, chronically ill, transvestites, or transsexual and for whom English is the first language. I wonder what percentage of our students fit that description. Especially since more than 50% of the people in college are female.

Seems to me that if we consider what “excluded” really means in America, most of our students are among them. Even if we teach at institutions few of us are likely to end up in. Like Columbia. Like Harvard. Like Wells or William and Mary or Hobart or Cornell. Get the idea? So, then, the idea that “our students . . . are not randomly chosen members of the US population at large or of their particular race, class, gender, and sexual-preference communities” is precisely the problem. What defines them is not just that they “have chosen to attend college and . . . been admitted” (302). They can also afford to pay. Since the lovely change of financial aid requirements, fewer of the poor may be able to choose to enter college (Did you see David Brancaccio yesterday?). I know two young people who weren’t romantically involved who married each other just to be able to qualify for financial aid so that they could go to school.

Now, it might be that one of the “shared goals” our students have is to join what Smith calls the “overclass,” and that I would call the “managerial/professional class.” It may be that they would rather have jobs that they believe “offer . . . some scope for creative thinking and decision-making” (303). How many managerial jobs actually offer these work dimensions? Not many, I can tell you. Has this guy ever looked at what managers do? I don’t mean CEOs, who are relatively free to engage creatively and decisively. But I mean, say, a store manager or even a district manager for Home Depot or Pizza Hut. They have virtually no freedom to be creative or to make significant decisions. Nearly everything about day-to-day operations is directed from corporate headquarters. There are manuals, forms, and policies. There are federal and state labor laws, insurance parameters, and immediate supervisors. Compliance and SOP, yes. Creativity—no. Home Depot’s district managers and store managers are unable even to override the returns counter cash register computers for goodness sake! Smith evinces a kind of naiveté that makes me doubt that he has ever worked in the business world. This position involves unquestioning acceptance of the same myth of the powerful manager that our students have.

What about the possibility of students examining WHY they “some form of ‘being successful’ ” (303)? What about examining what they mean by “being successful”? What about examining how they’ve come define “being successful” as they do? The fact is that when we ask students whether they’d rather have a job they love at which they made little money and had little prestige, or a job that confers prestige and money but that they hated going to every day, their answers demonstrate that this particular conflict never even occurs to most of them! I ask this question as part of guest lectures I do about being a woman in the business world. When I tell them that I spent a good portion of my adult life doing just that, they’re appalled. So what about providing opportunities for students to develop the critical thinking skills they need even to consider these possibilities as they try to decide what it is that they want out of classes?

I’m not one of those teachers who “deny outright that students come to college looking to join the dominant class” (304). I’m sure they do. I think nearly all of them do. I think that virtually none of them come to college for any other reason, unless it’s to remain on their parents’ health insurance. I also think that very few of them ever examine what that means and whether or not it’s possible. Nor do I believe that we ought to be “devoting our writing classes to attacking [dominant] mystifications and biases” (304). Attacking the dominant ideologies that most likely comprise their world views in order to free students “from false consciousness” neither acknowledges nor respects their autonomy. It is more likely to alienate them and make them feel belittled than to win them to a particular “replacement” ideology. No matter what one calls it, it’s not Freirean if it doesn’t respect students as subjects (305). It’s one things to provide students with opportunities to develop critical thinking through writing. It’s another thing to dictate how the tools should be used and still another thing to dictate what should be built with them. I’d like to provide those opportunities. I don’t want to brainwash.

I don’t decline to gate-keep. In fact, one can be the most dogmatic of Marxists, one who takes his word as Gospel (and I’m not one of them—by any means), and still understand that some gatekeeping has to happen. After all, Marx did say, “From each according to his ability; to each according to need.” That stuff about ability sure sounds like a form of gatekeeping to me. I’ve said in class that I think that there are people who don’t belong in college. I think there are people who don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to do the coursework. I just think that we have to understand whose gates we’re keeping and why those who are locked out are those who are locked out. That’s part of our job as instructors as I see it. Nonetheless, it’s not necessary that the students see it. It is necessary that they develop the skills necessary to critically analyze their own lives, even if they never choose to do so.

I agree that “asking students what they think” is a crucial part of doing the job, even of gatekeeping (301). But we don’t think that eighteen-year-olds have the intellectual and emotional sophistication to handle decisions about whether or not to drink. Why would we allow them to dictate what and how and why we teach as we do? Still, those of us who embrace a liberatory pedagogy are committed to student-centered teaching, aren’t we? We’re committed to taking our cues from our students, aren’t we? But as we ask students what they want, shouldn’t they develop the skills necessary to examine some foundational presuppositions?

Unless FYC either becomes technical/business writing or focuses on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills, it’s completely irrelevant to students’ “class and career aspirations” anyway (305). Because the kinds of essays usually taught in FYC are completely unrelated to any forms students will utilize anywhere except in other classes, FYC is only related to career insofar as it enables them to write for other classes so that they can complete the degrees that will facilitate their entry into the managerial/professional class. In other words, FYC is already (at least indirectly) related to “class and career aspirations.” I think that we serve students best by providing opportunities for them to develop the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that will enable them to succeed in their writing for other classes and to prep for “board and bar exams” (306). In fact, ETS hires critical thinking instructors and logicians to write those exams! As Smith says, we need to look at FYC in the larger contexts of the entire educational experience and the future career experience. And he’s exactly right about that. That doesn’t mean we have to teach students how to write as members of each and every academic discourse community. It means that we have to provide opportunities for them to see different ways into language and discourse communities, to offer them practice entering unfamiliar discursive and conceptual territory. What could be more “useful” to learn from those whose discipline centers on language (319)?

That gatekeeping is unavoidable is not a reason to avoid interrogating it, to avoid providing students the opportunity to interrogate it, to avoid developing the tools to examine what might lie on the other side of the gate, to avoid asking who we’re keeping the gates for, to avoid questioning whether one wants to move through the gate, to avoid examining for oneself what lies on both sides of the gate in order to make an informed decision about where one wants to be and whether one wants to accept or work toward transforming what lies on either side. Most people will accept it and decide to move through the gate. Others will never examine anything at all and will just do what they believe is the next thing to be done. Still others will decide that what lies on the other side of the gate is not worth its price. Many, like me, will spend time on the other side of the gate because they must eat and/or provide for families even though they find little fulfillment or challenge on the other side, even though they realize that what’s there is not what they want.

The “true learning” Smith talks about does not have to come from teachers at all (308). And the analogy between organic chemistry and composition just really doesn’t work unless someone wants to claim that there’s only one kind of “true learning” or one path by which one might truly learn. And if organic chemistry is the model we are to embrace, then it seems that memorization and experimentation may the paths to true learning. I’m pretty sure that won’t work out at all for comp. Thus, Smith’s claim that we’d have to “remove organic chemistry from consideration” of what’s truly taught expresses what logicians call a false dilemma. That is, it presents two possibilities as though they’re the only two possibilities, when in fact other possibilities (such as there being more than one route to true learning or the claim that different sorts of learning work better for different sorts of subjects) exist. The humanities might think differently about teaching than scientists because what they’re teaching is different than what scientists teach. Perhaps our goals are different, and perhaps that’s inherent to the disciplines, and not just an expression of “certain methods those in our field happen to like” (308). Maybe learning empirically verifiable stuff is different from learning stuff that’s not empirical.

Even granting Smith’s premises doesn’t necessarily mean that “ethics will differ depending on the goal” (309). As I said above, perhaps it’s the nature or content of the discipline that differs. Teleology without deontology is just math. Smith admits as much when he says that it’s “unethical in the extreme simply to collapse means into ends” (309). But I would argue that what he calls the “ ‘means-ends equivalence’ ” may enact the straw man fallacy (310), and I suggest that he read Audre Lord’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

I agree with Smith (surprise!) that we ought not to completely eliminate hierarchy from the classroom. In fact, I hold that we cannot. Ultimately, we fill out the grade sheets. Moreover, as instructors, we bear certain responsibilities toward our students. If we are to fulfill those responsibilities, we must require students to do things that they don’t want to, and we must enforce policies with which we might disagree. But it is fair to bring these realities into the light for interrogation with and by the students.

Smith is also right when he says that what happens in the classroom has ramifications that reverberate in the lives of people we will never meet. If Felicia wants to be a doctor, I do have an obligation to treat her as someone who wants to be a doctor (312). So what, then, do I do with Jeff, who wants to be a mechanic, when he and Felicia are in the same class? Do I teach to Felicia or to Jeff? Or, do I try to understand what those disciplines and vocations have in common? What could that be? Critical thinking! Problem-solving! What I’m trying to say here is that students’ aims and goals are not incompatible with a student-centered, nurturing classroom. In fact, as part of the nurturing process, my parents disciplined me. Often. Believe me, I needed it. They often structured my life in ways that I resented at the time and have come to appreciate now as well as in ways that I still think were crazy. So did many of my teachers. And I don’t think we do students any favors when we make excuses for them or allow them to avoid responsibility for the choices they make about attending class or completing assignments.

Here’s where I think Smith makes an important contribution to Freirean pedagogy: Structure, discipline, and hierarchy are not antithetical to liberatory teaching. In fact, they are crucial parts of the development of the critical thinking that liberatory pedagogy aims toward. Critical thinking is itself structured, disciplined, and involves imposing hierarchy on concepts. And, I think he’s right—students who earn Fs or Ds ought to receive Fs or Ds. Respecting students as subjects involves respecting their bad decisions as well, allowing them to face the consequences of those decisions as learning experiences. Smith is correct in saying that students have the right not to be there, not to do the work, and to decide for themselves whether to accept or reject what’s offered to them in classrooms, including the FYC classroom. And we have the obligation to ensure that they face the consequences of those choices. To do any less is to patronize them, to behave paternalistically toward them. It is not to treat them as subjects in the way that Freire advocates.

We cannot simply replace students’ “false consciousness” with our own interpretation of reality, for to do so is to treat them as objects to be transformed by us. That’s not at all liberatory. What we can do is to provide writing opportunities that encourage the development of critical thinking, writing opportunities that encourage students to critically examine the society into which they are born, within which they exist, and out of which they emerge as subjects. Critical examination sometimes leads to a desire to transform; it more often leads to an assessment of how best to achieve one’s ends within the given context. In a truly liberatory education, the choice is theirs and can be based on a critical assessment of available relevant information. The choice, in other words, can be an informed decision rather than a knee-jerk reaction. Isn’t that at least part of what education is about?

I guess I’ll stop here. I could go on, but I do have three papers to work on, and another article to read for this class, and other classes to read for, and a blog to post, and a website to fix and an exam to study for, and . . . Well, you get the idea.

Berlin: “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”

Even though the dialectic is “grounded in language,” it is not identical with language (731). For me, this is an important distinction that too often gets glossed over by critical theorists. I don’t have a whole lot to say about Berlin because I agree so strongly with so much of what he says. I do think, however, that like most social constructionists, he needs to be very careful about the way he expresses himself and to watch the tendency to equivocate with certain key terms. I very much like that he acknowledges that language mediates reality, for instance, although he at points seems to move from that perspective and to embrace the more radical Derrididean notion that language constructs reality. I wish these guys would get that straight. I’m so tired. You’re just gonna have to trust me. I read it. I’ll show you my annotations.

Good night. Peace to all.