Teaching
Philosophy
If anything characterizes my
teaching it is a belief that pedagogy can, in its best forms, awaken us to
ideology, and offer meaningful alternative possibilities for social life. Teaching can, in its best moments, facilitate
the ability to think rigorously and differently. I see radical pedagogy, or border or
confrontational pedagogy as it has been called, as those modes of teaching that
foreground the classroom as a site of contested power, that attend to the
social forces that sanction what is read, how it is read, how one writes, and
how identities are formed or re-imagined in the academic space. In my classroom, like many of my colleagues,
these issues are read as much as any single text or freshman paper. I see this capacity to critique power and
re-imagine possibilities as indicative of the democratic potential of the
university, with its tendency to open access to knowledge, to provoke agency in
students, and to nurture progressive thinking that resists all those social
mechanisms that silence oppositional voices, that promote dominant ideologies
as the most obvious way to live, and that privilege consumption and
anti-intellectualism over thoughtfulness.
As a form of this, I try, in varying
degrees and manifestations, to take up the three roles of archivist,
convener, and adversary that a former mentor of mine, Ronald
Strickland, proposed in his essay, “Confrontational Pedagogy and the
Introductory Literature Course” (1990).
As one of the first essays I read in graduate school, Strickland’s essay
forged much of my thinking as I was coming through an English Studies program
that was so attentive to theoretical and practical teaching, and I have been
committed to it and critical of it throughout my teaching career. In his essay, Strickland argues, via Shoshana
Felman, for the “radical impossibility of teaching” (qtd. in Strickland 116),
due particularly to the imbedded problems in any teaching model predicated on
an ignorant student and an all-knowing teacher.
Rather than an apprenticeship model, in which prepackaged knowledge is
distributed to students via the objective teacher, the radical, or
confrontational model resists teaching as indoctrination. The archivist, by exposing students to
disciplinary disputes and ongoing conversations, as well as predominant issues,
encourages students to make carefully situated and critical responses to
material rather than restatements of well-tread readings. The convener represents but demystifies
institutional authority, especially the intersections between disciplines, by
drawing from and problematizing the expectations of the course itself,
selecting texts and activities while foregrounding the issues behind such
selections. The adversary resists
teaching as mentoring and instead confronts student ideologies manifested in
interpretations, and even in the resistance to interpretations.
Critical of intellectual exercises like
close-reading and interpretive essays that do more to situate the student in
proper relationship to intellectual and social authority than it does to create
literary appreciation, Strickland calls for a sort of pedagogy that I have long
tried to practice: a pedagogy that treats students as qualified, conscientious intellectuals;
a pedagogy that reads texts ideologically and politically; a pedagogy that
treats reading and writing as social practices imbedded in social
networks. In my children’s literature
course, for instance, I structure the class around investigations into
culturally held beliefs about childhood innocence and adult power. We wrestle with deeply held cultural desires
to see children’s texts as inherently innocent, free of politics. As an adversary, I set out, via our readings,
to push ideas to their limits, to challenge their seeming naturalness. By confronting those ideologies as
ideologies, cultural assumptions masquerading as obvious truths, it is my hope
to free up thinking, to provoke new ways of reading, to reimagine that
hegemonic relationship between adult and child, and to envision moments of resistance. I try to foreground an important difference
between close readings, which often re-emphasize the self-obvious
greatness or cuteness of the texts we study, and resisting readings,
which seek to problematize ideal reader positions that many students find
comforting and natural. It is important
to me as an archivist to cover different narrative positions, stylistic
conventions, and professional terms via an extensive glossary that I have developed
over several semesters in order to emphasize to students that texts are not
didactic messages from self-aware authors, and that we cannot always resort to
authorial intention. Rather, texts are
constructions that employ persuasive techniques that encourage our
participation in producing the world.
Our job as readers is to decode those processes, to resist their work on
us, to imagine other possibilities, to consider what a piece of art is trying
to do, and what material conditions produced it, etc. Although much of what I speak about here is
abstract and theoretical, I believe profoundly that these are important
abilities and processes for students to develop, particularly for future
teachers, and they form much of the thrust of my teaching interests.
I often center readings in the class
around a binary (however limited) of conservative and progressive,
political tendencies in literature characterized by desires to maintain the
world as it, or the drive to change those conditions. I extrapolate the wrestling for power
analyzed in different modes of Cultural Studies to the domains of adult and
child, author and reader, teacher and student.
To take an example, I nearly always teach Mildred Taylor’s Roll of
Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) for the moment when Cassie Logan looks over her
newly-distributed but certainly not new History book, and describes what she
sees: "Girls with blond braids and boys with blue eyes stared up at me. I
found a story about a boy and his dog lost in a cave and began reading while
Miss Crocker’s voice droned on monotonously" (22). In the context of the
larger novel, we learn not only that Cassie lives a violently racist culture,
evidenced by numerous lynchings and burnings, but that she is surrounded by
whites who cannot see their own racism, whites who have been so thoroughly
interpellated into racist ideologies that one of the characters later tells the
family, "This is a fine community. Got fine folks in it - both white and
colored" (167).
I use detective fiction, especially
children’s detective fiction that showcases probing children that challenge
adult hegemony or recognize their situatedness in ideology, to foreground these
issues. Texts such as Edward Bloor’s Tangerine,
read as a hard-boiled narrative of investigation into the personal and
social repressed, is a strong representative example of this. However, I feel it is important to note that
I recognize the limits of radical pedagogy, for its potential to shut down more
conversations than it opens up, to be inapplicable and rarely practiced in its
most ideal form. I also recognize the
limits of theoretical models that can only see children as victims and adults
as oppressors. Aware of those problems,
I have tried to work through a pedagogy that is open, malleable, self-critical,
and friendly, a pedagogy that balances my thrill at reading children’s texts,
especially those are most popular, with the need to challenge students who will
eventually express their own power over children in whatever form. I have learned about childhood and its
nuances through many wonderful conversations with students, and I have often
had students say that they view reading in entirely different ways after taking
the course. I see my greatest joy as
such engagement with students in carefully thinking through how we represent
the world, and how the world is represented to us, particularly as childhood is
constructed in its various forms. I
envision a pedagogy that challenges the hegemony of texts upon our thinking,
that privileges experimental and playful texts as much as it does the most
mass-marketed, a pedagogy that, in whatever form, confronts ideologies and
imagines new possibilities for everyday life.
Work Cited
Strickland,
Ronald. “Confrontational Pedagogy and
the Introductory Literature Course.”
Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature
Courses. Ed. James M. Cahalan
and David B.
Browning.
Taylor,
Mildred. Roll of Thunder, Hear My
Cry.