Classroom Authority and Critical Pedagogy

Classroom Authority and Critical PedagogyAuthor(s): Patricia BizzellSource: American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 847-863Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489894 .

Accessed: 30/06/2014 12:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to AmericanLiterary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 155.223.241.1 on Mon, 30 Jun 2014 12:19:52 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/489894?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Classroom Authority and Critical Pedagogy Patricia Bizzell

The traditional uses of pedagogical power are under attack in literary studies these days. Having problematized what they teach through debates over the literary canon, literary scholars are now reconsidering how they teach, questioning the familiar lecture-and-test classroom format, as for example in Jane Tompkins's recent disavowal of the "performance" model of professorial behavior. Both the whats and the hows of teaching literature have been challenged on similar grounds: the literary canon has been attacked for its privileging of work by white middle- and upper-class men, and the lecture-and-test format has been disrupted on grounds that it institutionalizes patriarchal power in the teacher. Academic feminists have led these attacks on business-as-usual in literary studies, but they have been joined by other critics under the influence of postmoder theories of interpretation and political positionality (e.g., Atkins and Johnson; Henricksen and Morgan). Thus literary scholars are beginning to think not only that their reading lists should include literature by previously excluded groups and previously excluded forms of literature, but also that their classroom behavior should encourage more participation by students and a general debunking of the teacher's master narrative about what literature should be and do. These changes may be viewed with some bemusement by composition scholars, however, for we reviewed the whats and hows of our teaching some time ago.

Indeed, one might read the history of modem composition studies as a series of attacks on classroom uses of power.' The so-called current-traditional paradigm of writing pedagogy has been questioned ever since Daniel Fogarty first defined it in his 1959 book Roots for a New Rhetoric. We composition scholars do not wish to lecture and drill our students on the correct kind of written product to produce and then penalize them with low grades if they fail to produce it. Key books in the modem

Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age By Henry Giroux University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black By bell hooks South End Press, 1989

Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared By Mike Rose The Free Press, 1989



848 Classroom Authority and Critical Pedagogy

Many of us in literature and in composition studies wish to serve politically left-oriented or liberatory goals in our teaching, and yet do not want to commit the theoretically totalizing and pedagogically oppressive sins we have inveighed against in the systems we resist.

formation of the field, such as Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing (1970), Janet Emig's The Composing Processes of Twelfth Grad- ers (1971), and Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers (1973), all call into question the teacher's traditional role as controller of classroom activities. What Maxine Hairston called in 1982 a "revolution" in the teaching of writing offered a new pedagogical paradigm emphasizing students' control of their own writing processes as they generate texts meaningful to themselves. In 1990, Andrea Lunsford describes our field as "non- hierarchical and exploratory, intensely collaborative," "dialogic, multi-voiced, heteroglossic," and "radically democratic" (76).

It seems crucial to the sense composition specialists have of ourselves as professionals that we do not exercise power oppressively in the classroom. Composition studies has shown an affinity for Marxist-influenced critical education theory, particularly its rejection of oppressive pedagogical power. Brazilian literacy educator Paulo Freire is perhaps the best known critical theorist to scholars in composition studies, since Ann Berthoff and Ira Shor began telling us about him over ten years ago. I believe many of us would agree that his concept of "banking education" names what we reject in the "current-traditional" writing pedagogy.

By different routes, then, scholars in literature and in composition studies have arrived at the same impasse. Many of us in literature and in composition studies wish to serve politically left-oriented or liberatory goals in our teaching, and yet do not want to commit the theoretically totalizing and pedagogically oppressive sins we have inveighed against in the systems we resist. Another way to describe this impasse would be to say that we want to serve the common good with the power we possess by virtue of our position as teachers, and yet we are deeply suspicious of any exercise of power in the classroom. This profound suspicion results from a totalized notion of power as a unitary force with uniform effects. Rather, we should dif- ferentiate uses of power under the rubrics of coercion, persuasion, and authority and recognize the positive uses of power- as-authority in resolving our dilemma. I think that there is reason to draw hope for this position from the theoretical analysis provided in critical education theorist Henry Giroux's Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life and from the pedagogical testimony in feminist literary scholar bell hooks's Talk- ing Back, and in composition scholar Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary.



American Literary History 849

1

What might we do instead of what Freire calls "banking education"? Given the impasse described above, it is now time for us to reexamine our relations to the concept of power. The insufficiently differentiated notion of power may be leading us to believe that all exercise of power is bad. Let me elaborate, instead, on the three-part anatomy of power.2

The kind of power we reject, for example, when we reject "current-traditional" writing pedagogy or patriarchal literary pedagogy is power exercised by A over B for A's best interests and without B's consent. I will call this kind of power "coercion." Of course, few American teachers would characterize their work as benefiting only themselves, and few American students would see themselves as marched at gunpoint into the classroom. Nevertheless, we may feel that coercion is operating when education consists of the teacher's setting up standards congenial to his or her own social group, requiring students to meet these standards regardless of those that prevail in their own social groups, and expelling the students unable or un- willing to meet these standards. We might say that in a situation like this, no matter what the teacher and students think is going on, the teacher is really protecting his or her own social class (and racial, sexual, religious, or ethnic) interests by denying further educational access to those who do not seem willing to embrace these interests. Students who hoped that their person- ally defined aspirations and social class interests would be served by their seeking an education are submitted to a process that forces them to modify these interests significantly in order to stay in school.

To avoid wielding power to promote only the teacher's interests, some of us--for example, some writing teachers and feminist literature teachers--have attempted to espouse a different classroom configuration of power in which teacher and students are freely negotiating equals. Power is indeed operating here, but it is not applied hierarchically, from the teacher down onto the students, as in coercion. Rather-at least in theory-- everyone's power is equal in the sense that each has an equal chance to influence the classroom agenda. Anyone in the classroom, then-teacher or student--may exercise power over the group, but this will have happened only if the person has man- aged to convince the others that everyone's interests will be




served by the proposed course of action. I will call this kind of power "persuasion."

Persuasion is the sort of power that composition specialists would like to think we exercise under the so-called revolutionary composition pedagogy. We do not set standards for good writing that we compel the students to meet. Rather, we simply try to create a classroom climate in which the students can generate their own standards of good writing. We may try to have some say in the standards they generate, but our guidance can only be offered in the form of advice on how the students may best accomplish their own goals. For example, we might recommend a change in a piece of writing, not simply because we require it, but because, as we might say to the student, "This will help you convey to the other students how you really felt when your grandmother died," or "This will help you convince the history professor that you really understand Voltaire's place in the En- lightenment." The corresponding pedagogy of persuasion in literary studies has been identified with what hooks calls "the stereotypical feminist model ... one in which we are all going to be kind and nurturing" (53).

But as Dale Bauer has recently pointed out, since this model treats teacher and students as equal in power relations, it seems to give the teacher no purchase on a situation in which students adamantly oppose adopting the teacher's interpretive viewpoint or classroom organization-for example, one informed by feminist or other left-liberal social values. This problem with feminist pedagogy-as-persuasion is addressed in a recent collection of essays, mostly by literature scholars, edited by Susan L. Ga- briel and Isaiah Smithson, particularly in essays with suggestive titles by Nina Baym, "The Feminist Teacher of Literature: Feminist or Teacher?" -as if feminist and teacher are opposing roles-and by Patrocinio P. Schweickart, "Reading, Teaching, and the Ethic of Care," in which, as Schweickart says, "the vexing issue of power" remains to be clarified (93). Also in- cluded in this volume is composition scholar Elizabeth Flynn's landmark essay "Composing as a Woman," in which we begin to get a glimpse of how the long-time growth of a pedagogy of persuasion in composition studies may owe something to the large numbers of women, and feminist women, in the field. This theme is further explored in a recent collection of essays, mostly by composition scholars, edited by Cynthia Caywood and Gil- lian Overing, in which section headings suggest a preference for promoting students' "authority" while recalling teachers to their "responsibility."

If we reject returning to coercion, what recourse do we




have when persuasion fails? I want to try to answer this question by defining a third sort of power, which I will call "authority." Authority is exercised by A over B instrumentally in the sense that sometimes B must do what A requires without seeing how B's best interests will be served thereby. But for authority to be legitimate, A cannot take this power for granted, but must obtain it by the consent of B. This means that authority is exercised through a two-stage process. The beginning lies in persuasion: A must persuade B that if B grants A authority over B, B's best interests ultimately will be served. But once B has been persuaded to grant authority to A, their relationship changes to a less dialogic one. B empowers A to direct their course of action without A's having to exercise persuasion at every step taken. In an English class, this might mean that once the student B has granted authority to the teacher A, A can require B to try to argue in a certain way, to enter into a particular point of view, or to give credit to another writer's reasoning, even if these activities seem very uncongenial to the student at the time. The student's initial reluctance to undertake these activities is not allowed to prevent their practice or to delay it while a lengthy process of persuasion is undertaken. The student agrees to at- tempt these activities while they still seem quite uncongenial because the student has decided to trust the teacher's assurance that some good for the student ultimately will come out of it.

Thus, for example, the feminist teacher who wields authority need not be silenced by a recalcitrant class because she has not promised to treat teacher and students as equal in power relations. The teacher wielding authority can insist, however gently or dialogically, that she controls the classroom agenda. This stance, indeed, may more accurately describe the state of affairs in classrooms where the teachers like to think they are exercising persuasion. For teachers cannot voluntarily give up all their power in the classroom: the institution surrounding the classroom establishes their power even if they try to relinquish it, and students, well aware of this, often are suspicious of offers of seemingly persuasive power relations and resist entering into them. In other words, there is a kind of pedagogical bad faith in offering students persuasive power relations that is avoided by the teacher who forthrightly claims authority.

But is authority really any different from coercion, then? Or have I made the exercise of persuasion a precondition of the exercise of authority and then announced that the exercise of persuasion is impossible? I repeat that persuasion must pre- cede authority, and this is what distinguishes authority in a crucial way from coercion. But individual teachers cannot hope




If we wish to exercise authority in the classroom, we have a moral obligation to see to it that these claims are indeed legitimate, that is, that students' best interests will indeed be served by responding to them.

to exercise persuasion in isolated classrooms, cannot hope to negotiate a separate peace for themselves and their students with the surrounding institution. Rather, the persuasion that precedes authority must be understood as firmly situated in the institutional and larger social contexts.

This means that I do not imagine the teacher persuading students to grant him or her authority by saying, "Trust me, because I love each and every one of you." In other words, I do not imagine the persuasion resting on merely personal-that is, universal-grounds. Rather, persuasion in the teacher-student relationship should begin much earlier. Our culture prom- ulgates ideologies of education that claim it is in a person's best interests to go to college, to attend a particular institution, and to take courses in a particular academic department. By the time students get into our classrooms, they have already re- sponded to all these claims on their self-interest. If we wish to exercise authority in the classroom, we have a moral obligation to see to it that these claims are indeed legitimate, that is, that students' best interests will indeed be served by responding to them. Acting on this obligation will require us to undertake a new kind of preparation for teaching or, more precisely, to regard certain professional and extra-professional activities as actually part of "preparing for class."

Moreover, once students and teacher are together in the classroom, it might be appropriate for the teacher to undertake further persuasion. In coercion, the teacher takes all power from the institution, saying, in effect, "If I am here in front of you, then I must be qualified to teach, so you must obey me." The teacher who wishes to exercise authority on behalf of egalitarian political values, however, may not wish to take all power from an institution he or she may regard as only partially serving students' best interests (despite all his or her efforts), an institution that is still in some ways oppressive. Hence the teacher may want to discuss the problematic nature of his or her relation as liberatory teacher to an oppressive system. From this discussion, the teacher could perhaps demonstrate links between his or her own historical circumstances and those of the students, to suggest that their joining together in a liberatory educational project will serve all of their best interests.

2

In Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life, Giroux grasps the nettlesome question of who will set the moral agenda for




education. He contends that the New Right's version of patriotism uses the emotional appeal of the concept to mask the absence of democratic content in New Right political practices and the actual New Right project of protecting the privileges of wealth and militarism. The New Right has been able to perpetrate this sham because people have forgotten, or been denied access to, stories from American history that show how democracy has been and could be practiced here. Hence, people lack historical images of authentic communal life against which to test and expose what the New Right is offering. Moreover, given the New Right's oppressive political practices, people lack present-day experiences of community which could serve similarly as counterexamples.

Giroux calls for people who do support egalitarian social practices to reclaim the notion of patriotism from the New Right and restore what he asserts to be its traditional American democratic content, "a tradition that puts equality and the value of human life at the center of its discourse and social practices" (7). Giroux acknowledges that a reclaimed notion of patriotism or citizenship, although authorized by American democratic traditions, cannot be regarded as possessing some unitary and foundational content, some fixed meaning that merely needs to be conveyed. Rather, he sees the reinvigoration of a concept of American citizenship as an ongoing struggle that will have to be pursued on many fronts-including in the schools, with which he as an education theorist is most concerned.

Giroux argues that students today are taught "a version of American life and history that suggests a conflict-free and ideal cultural narrative," a history that conceals "the social contra- dictions born of racist, class-specific and gender-oriented forms of discrimination," while denying any "interpretation of history in which trade union struggles, civil rights struggles, or feminist struggles had any impact on changing the course of human history" (15-16). Patriotism then comes to mean deference to the technocrats and bureaucrats who have made and preserved this "conflict-free" America and adjustment of one's desires to their demands. Giroux wishes to supplant this New Right "patriotism" with a "critical citizenship" that asserts the right to participate in all public spheres, establishes ties across group boundaries, offers a utopian vision of the future as well as a radical critique of the present, and legitimates education for this kind of citizenship as an appropriate task for public schooling.

Giroux recognizes that this concept of critical citizenship must be linked with a positive or utopian vision of the future




to appeal to people's desires. Teaching a utopian vision of the future will require the teaching of virtue, or what Giroux calls a "radical provisional morality" (40). Adhering to this morality means holding views firmly enough to be able to articulate in class in an unequivocal way that the suffering caused by the Gulag, the Nazi Holocaust, or the Pol Pot regime is horribly wrong (to give Giroux's examples). But firm conviction here is not based on any presumed access to "an essentialist, a priori set of moral principles" (40). Rather, these ethics are authorized by the historical traditions to which their professor belongs or with which he or she has aligned, namely history "from the point of view of the victims," which is "steeped in a commitment to democracy, justice, and equality" (40).

Giroux sharply contrasts this "radical provisional morality" with New Right "character building," which simply seeks to deposit a reified set of values into each student, a practice that limits social possibility to what is already known and thus fatally cramps the development of new and uniquely egalitarian social forms. Giroux also rejects liberal ethical theorizing because it begins from the notion that "the individual as a rights- bearing citizen can be addressed and understood outside the lived, connected complex of human relations," a view that therefore fails to acknowledge the historical circumstances creating power differentials in those human relations such that many individuals are not able to perform as "rights-bearing" citizens (58). No theory that rules out existing contexts can hope to formulate a viable new order.

Moreover, Giroux warns that postmodern philosophy dis- solves ethical concerns. Radical skepticism prevents the artic- ulation of values both because foundationalism is rejected and because even if some other source of values (such as history) could be located, it seems that one must despair of the adequacy of language to communicate values (or anything else) securely. The postmodern critique of existing social relations is valuable, but without ethics, postmodernism cannot move on to the project of constructing a new and better social order. In other words, "the flight from foundationalism is at the same time often a flight from politics" (61).

In advocating the teaching of ethics, however, Giroux recognizes that the error of replicating oppressive pedagogies must be avoided. Giroux attempts to delimit a progressive notion of authority for the teaching of ethics. He argues that liberal educators have been overly influenced by Marxist education the- orists' critiques of schools as sites for reproducing oppressive social practices. Because these critiques often cast teachers in




the role of oppressor or petty tyrant, some educators now feel that almost any exercise of power by the teacher will be oppressive. This sentiment exemplifies the mood in English studies I described above. Giroux contests this conclusion. In place of this image of oppressive authority, he proposes a concept of "dialectical authority." Teachers who embody dialectical authority do not abdicate power in the classroom, but rather use it to insist on conditions in which students are invited to question and share not only teacherly authority but also the authority of others in positions of power. Giroux suggests that in teaching the history of successful political protest in this country, teachers can emphasize the models it provides for dialectical authority relations within and beyond the classroom.

Added to this historical perspective on motives and ca- pacities for struggle against nonegalitarian social practices can be the legitimation that comes from one's own experiences with such struggles. Giroux finds affinities with feminist ethics and liberation theology in articulating the importance of the personal. By revealing not only the historical precedents of struggle but also their own personal participation in struggle, teachers will act dialectically by "clarify[ing] the political and moral referents for the authority they assume in teaching particular forms of knowledge [those that disrupt the "conflict-free" version of American history and culture], taking a stand against forms of oppression, and treating students as if they ought also to be concerned about the issues of social justice and political action" (91). Personal feelings and knowledge experienced through our gendered and racially constructed bodies become legitimate elements in the moral discourse protected by dialectical authority.

Thus Giroux constructs a theoretical argument for education in critical citizenship, a kind of patriotic, democratic practice that will be guided by a radical provisional morality committed to equality and communal life, taught by teachers wielding dialectical authority. One may be tempted to convey the historical content Giroux calls for in a reified, oppressive way, to present it as a fixed canon after the manner of Mortimer J. Adler, Allan Bloom, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr. This Giroux rejects, even when it comes clad in the liberal guise of rectifying students' deficits. On the other hand, Giroux cautions that pedagogies seeking simply to keep students happy abdicate the responsibility to teach what students need to know to improve the social order and so are actually quietistic.3

In Mikhail Bakhtin, Giroux finds reassurance that neither of these approaches can prevail for long. Bakhtin suggests that




all discourse is polyphonic; although one point of view may dominate in a particular discourse, accrued historical meanings and idiosyncratic personal associations still cling to the words of the discourse, setting up softer or louder dissonances with what the dominant voice is trying to say and thereby preventing it from ever enforcing its point of view totally. Giroux links the Bakhtinian view of discourse with the pedagogical theory of Freire. In effect, Giroux suggests that what Freire does is to exploit the dissonances that Bakhtin assures us are present in discourse. More specifically, Freire seeks to turn up the volume on those dissonances that connect most closely with his students' lived experiences of oppression, so as to awaken them to the possibility that they can challenge the dominant voice's efforts to explain their oppression away.

To work like Freire at encouraging the dissonances pre- dicted by Bakhtin, Giroux suggests that educators make the material conditions of classroom and school an object for study. Also, what Giroux calls the students' "lived cultures" can be studied, in opposition to the dominant practice of simply ex- tirpating those cultures that differ from official norms. Giroux imagines a pedagogical space in which students tell their own stories in their own voices, realizing Bakhtinian polyphony. But Giroux would oblige students not only to leave their stories silently side by side, but also to allow the stories to be "interrogated for the various social, intellectual, ethical, and political interests they represent" (166). Such classroom discussions will reveal differences to which people hold firmly as giving meaning to their lives. But Giroux also hopes the discussions can oscillate between interrogating difference and celebrating similarities in the stories' "efforts to identify and recall moments of human suffering and in their attempts to overcome the conditions that perpetuate such suffering" (166). Presumably this is how students and teacher together construct the radical provisional morality that will inspire and direct collective political projects beyond the classroom.

Giroux attacks educators' tendency to focus only on their own experiences and to fall into despair about the utopian potential of critical education if their own classroom efforts do not meet with success. Although throughout his argument Gi- roux insists on the legitimacy of personal experience as a form of knowledge, he also insists that one must bring one's experience, one's own stories, to be interrogated and enriched by the stories of others both present and past. Without stories from the past, it can be fatally difficult to imagine life under other historical circumstances than those that enmesh us now, other




circumstances that might be more conducive to egalitarian social arrangements. Seeking encouraging stories from the present, we must turn to the work of hooks and Rose.

3

In her recent collection of essays on feminist theory and critical pedagogy, Talking Back, bell hooks speaks positively about black women teachers she had as a child, who used their directive classroom authority both to acquaint her with a wide range of accomplished black and white writers and to encourage her to explore their styles and develop an accomplished literary repertoire herself. These teachers reminded hooks of the demanding kind of support she got from her own strong female relatives, who themselves argued, cajoled, and "talked back" with great vigor but fostered her development of a similarly strong voice by denying her the privilege of speaking until she was strong enough to demand it. hooks describes her dismay upon encountering a version of the new composition pedagogy in her college writing class, where she was urged to employ a so-called authentic voice that the teacher and other students assumed would be some form of black dialect (16). hooks felt she was capable of speaking in many voices, and she refused, as she says, to speak "as 'other,' speaking to difference as it is constructed in the white-supremacist imagination" (16).

When she discusses her own practices as a teacher, hooks often invokes Freire, and clearly her educational project aligns with his version of critical pedagogy. hooks's theories are also in line with Giroux's, since she is similarly alert to the historical contexts of pedagogy and to the ways pedagogical power must be exercised in a transformative project. hooks explicitly rejects not only "traditional ways of teaching that reinforce domination" but also a simple inversion of this position whereby the students' personal experiences become the sole topic of discussion while the teacher sits passively by (52). hooks seeks a form of legitimate power in the classroom, and it seems that she persuades her students to surrender authority to her:

My classroom style is very confrontational. It is based on the assumption that many students will take courses from me who are afraid to assert themselves as critical thinkers, who are afraid to speak (especially students from oppressed and exploited groups). The revolutionary hope that I bring to the classroom is that it will become a space where they




can come to voice. Unlike the stereotypical feminist model that suggests women best come to voice in an atmosphere of safety (one in which we are all going to be kind and nurturing), I encourage students to work at coming to voice in an atmosphere where they may be afraid or see themselves at risk. The goal is to enable all students, not just an assertive few, to feel empowered in a rigorous, critical discussion. Many students find this pedagogy difficult, frightening, and very demanding. They do not usually come away from my class talking about how much they enjoyed the experience. (53)

I hear echoes of how hooks herself learned to "talk back" as a girl. She is exercising authority as I have defined it in that she is asking students to continue with practices they find uncongenial, even painful, in hopes that the eventual outcome will benefit them. hooks argues that it is a mistake to view all painful experiences as negative-when her students talked openly "about the way in which learning to see the world critically was causing pain," hooks wanted to present "the possibility that this pain could be a constructive sign of growth" (102, 103). Although she says she is often hurt by students' initial negative responses to her pedagogy, hooks is willing to persevere in the face of their discomfort. She testifies that "students who often felt they hated a class with me would return later to say how much they learned.... I began to see that courses that work to shift par- adigms, to change consciousness, cannot necessarily be experienced immediately as fun or positive or safe and this was not a worthwhile criteria to use in evaluation" (53).

Like the strong black women who educated her, hooks is able to win authority from her students because she persuades them that she has their best interests at heart-this is the conviction that keeps them working in a painful class. Moreover, I suspect that hooks persuades her students because she links her interests to theirs through open avowal of her own moral agenda. She can assure her students that it is very important for her to feel that she is fighting sexism, white-supremacist racism, and other unjust social hierarchies in her pedagogy- hence, reimposing an oppressive hierarchy in her own classroom would damage her interests by hurting her sense of her own self-worth. Her desire to serve the common good through the vocation of teaching is validated by her evocation of common historical circumstances among her and her students. Once hooks has persuaded her students to grant her authority, she can use her power to take them through a course of study that fosters




education for critical consciousness, even if this goal is apparent only from the pedagogy's cumulative effect.

I do not want to box myself into an essentialist position here, however, suggesting that students of color can trust only teachers of color. Rather, I want to focus on how any teacher gains a legitimate form of power over students by serving their interests. For further illustration of this authority, I turn to Rose's autobiographical Lives on the Boundary. Rose, born to immigrant Italian parents, grew up in severe urban poverty; his experience in the American educational system, as he shows in his book, typifies the struggles of his own students from dis- enfranchised groups. What strikes me most about Rose's account is how important to his success were people who exercised authority-people who were willing to be pedagogically prag- matic, even directive, in order to keep him learning, but who at the same time projected the kind of care for him that enabled him to trust them, a trust he now sees as well placed.

Rose is eloquent and precise about the damage done to him by poverty. He felt marked not so much by violence or instability as by absence of hope. He says:

I developed a picture of human existence that rendered it short and brutish or sad and aimless or long and quiet with rewards like afternoon naps.... When, years later, I was introduced to ... Freud with his sober dictum of love and work, it all sounded like a glorious fairy tale, a magical account of a world full of possibility, full of hope and empowerment. Sinbad and Cinderella couldn't have been more fanciful. (18)

His negative picture of existence was confirmed by the low ex- pectations set for Rose and other young people in his high school "vocational education" track. He understood from the inside the protective attitude expressed in his phrase, "I just wanna be average" (11). Unfortunately, to employ this defense against the confusion and frustration induced by "voc. ed.," one must, as Rose says, "twist the knife in your own gray matter" and "convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world" (29).

Rose describes himself as being helped by teachers who had no hesitation about being directive. They told him what to read and what to write about, instead of inviting him to formulate projects meaningful to himself, and they corrected his writing in detail. Rose's favorite high school English teacher, Jack MacFarland, lectured on Western intellectual history.




When, with MacFarland's help, Rose went on to Loyola Mar- ymount University in Los Angeles, the teachers he describes as helping him were again directive in approach. For example, he praises his philosophy teacher, Don Johnson, for insisting on close reading to sort out the meaning of difficult texts. Rose praises the traditional literature survey he took with Dr. Frank Carothers, which "drew for us a giant conceptual blueprint onto which we could place other courses, other books" (52). He praises Dr. Ted Erlandson for working over his writing:

He always began by reading the sentence out loud. "Camus ascented to a richer vision of life that was to characterize the entirety of his work." Then he would fiddle with the sentence, talking and looking up at me intermittently to comment or ask questions: "'Ascent.' That sounds like 'assent,' I know, but look it up, Mike." He'd wait while I fluttered the dictionary. "Now, 'the entirety of his work' ... try this instead: 'his entire work.' Let's read it. 'Camus assented to a richer vision of life that would characterize his entire work.' Sounds better, doesn't it?" (55)

These teachers seem to be doing exactly what the current wisdom in our field condemns. How can Rose praise them? I think it is because the personal relationship these men had with their students generated well-founded trust in their directive- ness. Rose says of MacFarland: "He gave me a way to feel special by using my mind. And he provided a role model that wasn't shaped on physical prowess alone" (34). Johnson and Carothers spent much time outside of class with Rose, dis- cussing not only his academic work but also many other life concerns: "We would go on until way past sunset, talking to Dr. Carothers and to each other about books and sports and currently despised professors" (53). Of his writing teacher, Er- landson, Rose says:

Perhaps he was more directive than some would like, but, to be truthful, direction was what I needed.... When teachers would write 'no' or 'awkward' or 'rewrite' along- side the sentences I had worked so hard to produce, I would be peeved and disappointed.... So Ted Erlandson's lin- guistic parenting felt just right: a modelling of grace until it all slowly, slowly began to work its way into the way I shaped language. (58)

Rose eloquently describes the personal and intellectual gains he reaped from these teachers. Becoming, in his phrase, a "fledg-




ling literati" (35) under MacFarland's tutelage in high school "provided a critical perspective on society" (37). When Rose describes what he gained from the teachers at Loyola, he says:

To live your early life on the streets of South L.A.... and to journey up through the top levels of the American educational system will call for support and guidance at many, many points along the way. You'll need people to guide you into conversations that seem foreign and threatening. You'll need models, lots of them, to show you how to get at what you don't know. You'll need people to help you center yourself in your own developing ideas. (47-48)

Rose theorizes his own life to arrive at a notion of legitimate pedagogical power, in which the concept of "modelling" plays an important part. Following the models offered by his teachers involved both affective and cognitive dimensions for Rose. That is, he had to change his ways of reading, writing, even thinking, to match their patterns, but he was motivated to make the changes by his conviction that the teachers cared. What interests me particularly here is the way Rose had to place himself under the teachers' authority in order to get the benefits of their modelling. He had to begin trying to do what they wanted while it was still painful, before he could be sure that his efforts would in fact lead to benefits for himself. He did not wait to act until he had been persuaded of the wisdom of this course of action; indeed, his "I just wanna be average" persona would have shrugged off any earnest attempts to win his full prior consent. What this secretly hopeless persona did respond to was the teachers' ability to convey a conviction that they did indeed have Rose's best interests at heart, that they had hope for him even if he did not.

4

My earlier discussion of Giroux should suggest that I am not trying to use hooks and Rose as proof-texts for a return to the patriarchal or "banking" styles of pedagogy. But I am trying to persuade my readers that discarding patriarchal authority and traditional canons does not necessitate, on either moral or practical grounds, discarding all authority or all initiatives by teachers to set study agendas. Teachers can exercise legitimate authority to set progressive educational agendas, and they have a moral right to do so insofar as their efforts serve the interests




of their students. This service is perhaps best insured by teachers' identification with the students' interests.

The progressive classroom should not be dominated ex- clusively by politically "correct" discourses. Giroux's analysis of sharing and interrogating stories is directed precisely to bring- ing diverse viewpoints into the classroom, but also creating the possibility for them to be influenced by the teacher's moral authority.4 As John Trimbur has suggested in his analysis of collaborative learning, dissensus would be treated as the normal state of affairs in the progressive classroom, providing an ongoing check that all stories were indeed being told. Trimbur suggests, following Habermas, that the progressive teacher can train students to think of consensus as a name for their utopian commitment to engage in polyvocal conversations as free from relations of domination as possible.

But at the same time, we need to entertain more seriously the possibility that these conversations can issue in shared com- mitments to acting on behalf of social justice-that we can give students a taste of "utopia now." This does not seem to be a particularly fashionable emotion at the moment. It may seem odd to teachers who are already progressively oriented that my recommendation to them boils down to an adjustment of affect. They might argue that we persuade our students to trust us because we appeal to their intellects, we argue and present ev- idence on behalf of our analysis of the common predicament and our approaches to changing it. But I contend that we also persuade our students because we convey our feelings about this predicament, our subjective experiences of it, and our care that they join us in the work to change it. And I do not see how we are to convince them that we wish them well if we project no faith that there is a "well" to be achieved, a common good to come.

Notes

1. Scholars in literary studies seeking an introduction to the field of composition studies should consult Berlin; Bizzell and Herzberg; and North.

2. My thinking about power here has been influenced by the work of Patricia Roberts on Hannah Arendt (unpublished) and by our correspon- dence about it.

3. For a similar argument directed specifically to literary scholars' attacks on the cultural literacy work of Hirsch, see my "Beyond Anti-Foundation- alism."




4. For a profound analysis of how these agendas might work out in the feminist classroom, see Weiler.

Works Cited

Atkins, G. Douglas, and Michael L. Johnson, eds. Writing and Reading Differently. Lawrence: UP of Kan- sas, 1985.

Bauer, Dale M. "The Other 'F Word: The Feminist in the Classroom." College English 52 (1990): 385-96.

Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Berthoff, Ann E. The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing Teachers. Montclair, NJ: Boynton Cook, 1981.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Beyond Anti- Foundationalism to Rhetorical Au- thority: Problems Defining 'Cultural Literacy.'" College English 52 (1990): 661-75.

Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herz- berg. The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing. 3rd ed. Boston: St. Martin's P, 1991.

Caywood, Cynthia L., and Gillian R. Overing, eds. Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity. Al- bany: State U of New York P, 1987.

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Emig, Janet. The Composing Pro- cesses of Twelfth Graders. Urbana: NCTE, 1971.

Fogarty, Daniel, S.J. Rootsfor a New Rhetoric. 1959. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Op- pressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ra- mos. New York: Seabury, 1970.

Gabriel, Susan L., and Isaiah Smith- son, eds. Gender in the Classroom. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Hairston, Maxine. "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Rev- olution in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Commu- nication 32 (1982): 76-88.

Henricksen, Bruce, and Thais E. Morgan, eds. Reorientations. Ur- bana: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Lunsford, Andrea. "Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing." Col- lege Composition and Communica- tion 41 (1990): 71-82.

Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Ro- chelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1970.

North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Mont- clair, NJ: Boynton-Cook, 1987.

Shor, Ira. Critical Teaching and Ev- eryday Life. Boston: South End, 1980.

Tompkins, Jane. "Pedagogy of the Distressed." College English 52 (1990): 653-60.

Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Dif- ference in Collaborative Learning." College English 51 (1989): 602-16.

Weiler, Kathleen. Women Teaching for Change: Gender, Class, and Pow- er. New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1988.



Classroom Authority and Critical Pedagogy

Documents

Transcript of Classroom Authority and Critical Pedagogy