Composition Pedagogy

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.
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I feel like there’s been an odd intersection among my Gibson-Graham readings about feminism and capitalism and what I’ve been reading online about grading and about the intersection of feminism, family, and academia and about the gendered nature of agonistic discourse that’s lately become a little more clear. Via Cindy at Making Contact comes a link to conservative UPenn English professor Erin O’Connor’s multi–part tale of what happened to Brooklyn College professor Frederick Lang.

There’s so much going on in Lang’s story, so many things going so many different ways, it’s an academic minefield. My first reaction, on encountering the story at Cindy’s, was irritation at the familiar construction of teaching composition as “punishment” or, at the least, undesirable work. Things are more complex than that, though.
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