While I agree with the egalitarian and emancipatory ends of critical pedagogy, I’ve lately been wondering more and more about its methods, especially as they’re constructed in my discipline, for which critical pedagogy as filtered through a cultural studies perspective seems to have become the dominant or “default” pedagogy. The methods I’m particularly concerned about are those that seem to rely almost exclusively on a hermeneutic approach: the teacher helps the student to realize how the conventional or accepted or surface meanings of the world are really a sham and a front for the “true” relations of domination and exploitation that constitute contemporary society. Once the student acknowledges these “truths”, or so the story seems to go, they will somehow have the power to change the world. As much of a political liberal as I consider myself to be, this strikes me as a completely uncritical form of indoctrination into left-liberal politics. It posits a veil, behind which lies Truth.
I don’t believe this sort of so-called “demystification” is at all helpful to students; it asks them to uncritically accept the teacher’s version of the world, rather than asking them to work out the beginnings of a complex understanding of a world fraught with contradication. What, then, are the alternatives to the hermeneutic approach to critical pedagogy? Has critical pedagogy become so monolithic and institutionalized that working within its context is ultimately limiting and bounded?
Yeah, so, if you can’t tell, I’ve been working on my syllabus. The Writing Program reoriented things a bit this year, easing off on the pace, for which the students will be grateful. I’ve taught a few literature and creative writing courses; why is it that first-year composition courses are the only ones that feel like they move at a hundred miles an hour? One of the nice results of slowing down the pace is that we take a little longer to ease into that first essay, giving us some room to do a little more generative writing. I’ve come to be a pretty strong believer in setting up the first essay to involve at least some degree of descriptive personal narrative: the skills such an essay requires, while basic, can produce some really engaging writing that — when published for the class — students are really into reading in order to get to know one another via their writing. And things like description and transitions and focus scaffold well, and we can use the first class publication to start talking the relationships between audience and style.
But the general consensus of critical pedagogues is that such writing also demands a hermeneutic approach; demands that students attempt to see the ideological constructs that stand behind the veils of their quotidian commonplaces. In that sense, I feel that critical pedagogy in some ways is ultimately contemptuous of students. This isn’t Paulo Freire’s version, of course, but more the way critical pedagogy has been constructed by the discipline of composition. It almost demands conversion narratives.
I got some really good ideas from some of the teachers in the Writing Program, though, that I’m hoping might help me work around the whole hermeneutic thing. So I’ll introduce the first essay as partly a way for us all to start getting to know one another by writing what could loosely be termed personal essays; as a way into that, we’d do some generative writing to get down some material that inquires into “the personal.” So the first step would be to put a bunch of prompts up on the board that ask students to lay out some assumptions about cultural binaries. I’d put up a list I stole from my friend Jen, a list like this:
women are ( ); men are ( )
men like ( ); women like ( )
women own ( ); men own ( )
men are ( ); women are ( )
women hope ( ); men hope ( )
men believe ( ); women believe ( )
and so on, maybe 15 items in all, and ask students to call out paired answers that fill in the blanks. Someone would transcribe. Then I’d ask students to pick one male characteristic that fits them and one female characteristic that fits them, and ask them to write a couple paragraphs talking about that apparent contradiction. Then the next step would be to find another characteristic from their own genders that they wish didn’t fit them, and ask them to write a couple paragraphs about where they got this characteristic from. All of this, obviously, is a way into thinking about how we represent ourselves, and might be usefully connected with some interesting narrative moments.
Okay, so it’s pretty cultural-studiesy, and the obvious immediate complaint is that I’m not teaching a course about gender, I’m teaching a course about writing. So we take another ten minutes and do another list of binaries like the one above, only we’d do it maybe with democrats and republicans or liberals and conservatives. And then again maybe with more wealthy and less wealthy people. And then again with Big State U students and students at Little Exclusive Liberal Arts College just down the street. All to get down some characteristics that they can use narrative to develop into an essay that engages Burkean ideas of identification and division. And helps us to get to know one another, too.
Time for bed.
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