The 'Tridicity' of It All!: Musings on Critical Pedagogy

Within the first two-three pages of her work, "Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy," Ann George makes a convicing and alluring introduction into what critical studies is. We find out that critical pedagogy "reinvents the roles of teachers and students in the classroom and the kind of activities they engage in critiquing the "banking" concept of education, thanks to Freire and his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed where he says, "students are seen as "receptacles" waiting to be filled with the teacher's offical knowledge..." (qtd in George 93).

The oppositional forces of these two statements, I thought, while very valid and exciting, did seem to sound like Cultural Pedagogy, to an extent...Then I turned the page, and lo and behold, it seems Critical Pedagogy is the optimistic answer to those doldrumic pessemistic guys in Cult. Pedagogy (something i had to laugh out loud at, since it feels like we were just discussing this very issue in Monday's class)(94).

One clearly optimistic move is in the role of the school. While cultural studies, thanks to Althusser and many others, define schools as "mechanicms that reproduce dominant culture", Aronwitz and Giroux defend schools saying that "while schools are reproductive, they are not MERELY reproductive...schools are arenas characterized by struggle bt ween competing ideologies, discourses and behaviors" (96).

I really like the inclusion of the community college place in all of these matters, and Ira Shor's argument that community colleges are great places for using critical pedagogy, as they are a institution where everyone is somewhat in tune with where they stand socio-economically (96). No longer are community colleges a " warehouse for surplus workers" but instead they are "[places where]people[are] fighting for their humanity without quite realizing how they might reclaim it" (George 96-97).

Further along, George writes about Freire insisting that a critical teacher must never impose topics or politics on students. I felt this was addressed much more in depth in Ann Berthoff's "Is Teaching Still Possible: Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning." One of my favorite lines from this article was "Assigning topics-the essential strategy of the pedagogy of exhortion-is no substitute for instruction" ( Berthoff 341). Im not sure if its just the way she writes or the meaning, but I just thought it was great. In explaning this, Berthoff writes about research that reports students being good at narrative but not with exposition or arguement and hypothesizing that it must be a developmental issue. But what really should be look at in analyzing the issue is what tasks are assigned to the students. Freire ( or is it Berthoff through Freire) finds that students do fine on all different sorts of essays but terrible on the persausive mode--because they were assigned "euthanasia" as their topic.

I feel this fits well into almost all pedagogy we have learned so far, the idea of not writing about things you are passionLESS about. Here it becomes even more important in Critical Pedagogy, because it is all about the leveling of fields between teacher and student, and what would make a student feel more powerful than chosing their own topic? Likewise, what would make them feel more powerless than being told what to do and write about, something they may feel they have been told their whole life long.

As a side note as I end this post, I am curious about the connection between a pedagogy someone told me about years ago: emancipatory pedagogy and critical pedagogy. Are they the same thing, different name? Or are they different nuanced pedagogies?

The

Intersecting Ideas

Reading about Cultural Studies in relation to Composition Studies was especially exciting for me this week. As some of you may know, I am also in a class which is focusing on Stuart Hall and the Cultural Studies phenomenon he created in England. I have been trying to wrap my head around all the readings that I have done in that class, reading and beginning to try to understand the words of Althusser, Williams, Hall and Gramsci, I've been unsure as to how to implement it in any of my other areas of interest.

So naturally, in the Berlin piece last week, the idea of "ideology" piqued my interest in that not only is ideology a terribly confusing mass to navigate sometimes, but I saw the intersection of my two classes really begin.

Reading the George and Trimbur helped established some main connections as to what cultural studies is, but more importantly, how we can connect it to writing. The most pure and basic connection between cultural studies and writing is the "encoder/decoder" relationship, which both as a separate entity engage in. The question that George and Trimbur raise then, is how to mix these encodings and decodings together. It seems that they pointed to Berlin for the answer as he:

designed assignments to help students understand the performative rules that code the production of messages (such as privileged dichotomies, denotation and connotation, underlying narrative, and preferred meanings as well as the variable positions (dominant, negotiated and oppositional) available in decoding at the point of consumption ( qtd in Tate 82).

To understand how these things function in the world, especially in media studies, can really help a writing student understand how their voice can CHANGE the world. If they understand how the social world constructs this meaning, then they can change those meanings in their writing. So naturally, it would seem, that cultural pedagogy can go hand in hand with expressivist pedagogy, especially in terms of voice. This is why the idea of voice was so important for me to understand and probe in last week's discussion.

Mike Rose's article "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University" delved more into the semantics or structuralist side of Cultural Studies. By applying specific words such as "Developmental" or "remedial" to certain writing students, there is a certain stigma attached with is. I think it shows just how powerful word choice can be, because as we saw many times throughout the article, so many word choices can marginalize all sorts of different people, with regards not only to race, ethnicity, gender, etc, but how their writing skills are judged.

I especially liked how he broke down "English as a Skill" and linked the value of skill "but it is valuable as the ability to multiply or titrate a solution or use an index or draw a map is valuable" to English as a "skill" thereby coming to this conclusion: "So to reduce writing to second class intellectual status is to influence the way faculty, students, and society view the teaching of writing" (qdt in Villanueva 554-555).

I think this whole passage fit well into our discourse of just how difficult it is to teach writing, when we now know how many perceive the teaching of writing to be "so easy" and that "anyone can do it." mentality.

Furthermore, I just want to plug Mike Rose a little more. I was first exposed to him in my Advanced Writing Course at Millersville (see now even looking into that course name is making me wonder....) when we read Lives on the Boundaries: A Moving Account of America's Educationally Unprepared. I credit this book as one of the factors in making me interested in teaching writing.Im not sure how well known Rose is (to me before this particular class, I had never heard of him) but this book is just a great read on so many levels! I would highly recommend it to everyone in our (English 507 class)
(Again, I tried to upload the image, but I just must be doing something wrong...)

Thoughts On Process Theory

Murray's short but sweet article, "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" was really refreshing. I know we have mentioned this idea before, especially in last week's class, but this article refined those ideas. The first quote that drew me in was:


Our students knew it wasnt ltierature when they passed it in, and our attack usually does little more than confirm their lack of self respect for their work....the product doesnt improve, and so, blaming the student--who else?--we pass him along to the next teacher, who is trained, too often, the same way we are...(qtd in Villanueva 3).


I liked this quote because I am already seeing much of its relevance, and it is one of my largest concerns as a future teacher of writing. As many of you many know, I am a English/ESL tutor at HACC, a job which i love for its challenging work and the amazing diversified student population I meet. What frusterates me is that I do see this first hand, students (especially ones with ESL problems) literally passed through English courses (normally with C's) only to find themselves in a more advanced writing course when they realize what they are producing isnt "good enough" for the teacher. Of course, this is a larger problem at whole, but the idea here is, how can we fix this? Can it be fixed?


I enjoyed the fact that Murray gave a list of implications of teaching process. For me, this seemed like a list where I may not have agreed 100% with every method, it was a practical starting ground for me to take into the classroom. Now my new think quest, so to speak, is how am I going to take some of these ideas and use them? Moreover, how to you apply the teaching of "process" w/ limitations and pressure to conform to a more standard approach (especially in an adjunct world) I'm certainly not trying to be pessimistic here, just again, trying to find that illusive middle ground.



Lad Tobin's article also provided an excellent foray into the world of process theory. I enjoyed that he looked at both sides of the matter, what he calls the "binary opposition, the distinction between content and non content" (of course, that was in reference to the conference that he attended proclaiming "process is dead")

(Tobin 14). He wasnt afraid to acknowledge the issues and problems he had with process theory, "criticizing process theorists for idealizing their results" (Tobin 13). At the same time, he wasnt afraid to say he hadnt completely abandoned process writing, just that we have entered a new era of process writing.

Towards the end, I really appreciated the thoughts posed by Tobin.."Should a writing course be organized around production or consumption? It is around this very basic question that (at least) two paths diverge, and how a teacher chooses usually makes all the difference" (Tobin 15)

For this is really at the center of the debates, our heart strings tugging at us in two different ways. How do we cope as teachers? In his closing paragraphs, Tobin suggests that it is a balance of the two: he hasnt abandoned his belief in process theory, but he also uses some current traditional methods and "post process" methods. (as a side note, I really liked his idea of weekly conferences... this was actually something I was thinking about long before I read this essay!)


Lastly, I just wanted to send wishes of good luck to Justin and Melanie as our first
Discussion Leaders tonight!