Splintered Subjectivities: Assumptions, the Teacher, and Our Professional Work

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Splintered Subjectivities: Assumptions, the Teacher, and Our Professional Work Author(s): Stephen Ferruci Source: English Education, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Oct., 1997), pp. 183-201Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40172933Accessed: 11-03-2015 17:49 UTC

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Splintered Subjectivities: Assumptions, the Teacher, and Our Professional Work

Stephen Ferruci

Central to a critical pedagogy is the idea that the teacher should be self-reflective about his or her teaching. As someone who would like to call himself a critical teacher, I have tried to do just that, to wonder why I teach what I do and why I teach the way I do. But despite this seemingly constant questioning, it was only when I began teaching a class at the research university where I am pursuing my degree and one at a nearby community college, that I thought to consider how I am (continuously) constructed as a teacher or how that construction affects what and how I teach. In other words, to understand myself as a teacher positioned, that is, situated, within the classroom in rather complex, often contradictory, and certainly shifting, ways. In this paper I would like to explore the complicated subject positions that teachers occupy, subject positions that do not mesh without much struggle with the ways in which we talk about ourselves in the professional literature. I would like to do this first through an exploration of a situation that led me to explore this issue and then through an examination of how the professional literature helped to pro- duce and validate the "splintered" subjectivity I am here trying to describe.

As I moved between the class I was teaching at the research university and the one I was simultaneously teaching at the community college, I realized that there were differences between who a teacher is assumed to be at a community college and who the teacher is assumed to be at a university. These assumptions are in turn complicated by my positions as an adjunct instructor and graduate student. Of course, I already knew that there were differences, having been told this by others - teachers,

Stephen Ferruci is currently completing his doctorate in Writing, Teaching and Criticism at the University at Albany, SCINY.

183 English Education, Vol. 29, No. 3, October 1997



English Education • October 1997

mentors in pre-service classes - and had picked up many cues from colleagues, but my awareness of difference ran deeper than the stereotypes of the supposedly secure college professor versus the overworked community college adjunct teacher1. Those are stereotypes which help to inform the very "splintering" I encountered; that is, my sense of myself as a teacher was based on an idea of a complete teaching persona that was not dependent on a spatial point for its existence: I teach therefore I am. This splintering subjectivity is caused in part by the assumptions concerning who I could be, should be, as a teacher.

Let me illustrate what I mean by this with a situation that arose in the Freshman Composition class at the community college. This course was, I suppose, a fairly traditional "comp class" with the unfortunate focus on the rhetorical modes: argument, persuasion, narration, and so on2. We worked through these papers as a collaborative process, with students brainstorming with their classmates, working through numerous drafts together in groups and in pairs. As part of the coursework, I also assigned a research paper on (just about) any topic of their choosing. I set up the work they would do for this research paper using Ken Macrorie's "I-search" and Peter Stillman's chapter on "Cookieology" in Writing Your Way, in the hopes that they would embrace the process as something other than drudg- ery. We started the research papers a month into the semester, and up to that point, I had been pushing them to look critically both at what they were writing about and at the form that writing took. They were familiar with my mode of questioning and with the assumptions 1 had about the work they should be doing: engaging with the texts they read and the ones they wrote in order to come to some conclusions about their own writing and to ultimately think of literacy as something more complicated that "reading and writing." And needless to say, they were not always in agree- ment with my expectations for them, resisting in various way: the younger students skipping class, and the older students arguing with me, at times falling back on statements like: "When you're older, you'll see things differently." Which is, of course, true.

During one class meeting around mid-semester, 1 gathered the students in small groups,3 asking them to help one another focus their research topics. As I tend to do in my classes, I shadowed each of the groups, drifting from one to another and helping where I could and keeping them on track. 1 was sitting with one of the groups trying to elicit conversation and critique. One of the students, a young man, said that he was going to research the role of a cigarette factory in his town. He mentioned that it was a great place to work for many in his community, that his father worked there now, and he hoped to as well. He then related the following story about the company to the group:

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Ferruci • Splintered Subjectivities

Throughout the workweek, managers wander among the workers and at random stop one of them and ask the employee to sing or recite the company song - if the employee can, he or she is given points toward some prize to be given out at the end of the month, but if the employee cannot, he or she must attend a short class at night to learn "company spirit."

This, the student concluded, was one reason the company was good to work for as it created a sense of community through this process. Obvi- ously, he had a lot at stake in believing in this company as a paternal benefactor; it was, after all, a source of income for his family, quite pos- sibly its only source, and it most likely supported a large percentage of the town in which he lived. After he finished telling his story, I started out by encouraging his choice in topics, noting that I saw a lot of possibilities for his paper. We each spoke briefly about what those possibilities might be (my presence in the group no doubt silencing some of them); I then raised a series of questions intended to push him to see his subject differently, more critically: "I understand that you see the company in your town as filling a helpful, community-building role, but have you thought that there might be another motive? How would you respond to a fellow worker claiming that the company wants to 'control us'? Are there other reasons than 'community-building' for placing such importance on a company song?" I wanted him to problematize the actions and philosophy of the company, as I saw an excellent opportunity for him to consider how he was positioned by the material realities of his family and the company's role/stake in maintaining that position. I wanted him to think beyond "that's just the way things are" to "that's the way things are for particular, though not simple, reasons."

But I was brought up short by the student's almost fragile resistance as I posed this scenario4, and I quickly deflected my own questions by asking the other students in the group if they had suggestions for how he could write his paper - as though writing the paper for these students was divorced from a critical analysis of context. I was troubled by my reaction and my reliance on a functional conception of writing, for in my class at the university I had little reservation in asking my students to think critically about how the material contexts in which they grew up construct their perceptions of the world; questions that lead them (perhaps) to com- plicate both their own and their family's values and their cultural assumptions, not to mention those assumptions implicit in academic discourse. My reluctance to problematize this student's reading of the cigarette company could be similar to the restraints that high school teachers feel in problematizing the assumptions of minors - there is a great deal at stake in doing so. The image I held of myself as a teacher was troubled by this student; I struggled to find a stance where my teaching was the same, where I was the same teacher, in both places, where I matched the unified whole

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of the teacher-myth which claims that I am who I am for the most part because of what I know. What, I wondered, was going on? Was it simply that it was harder to be more "critical" in the community college and easier at the university, because it is harder to problematize the subject positions of community college students who have more to lose and gain at play- ing along with what a teacher wants to hear? Yet this does not account entirely for my reaction to this student; in fact, it contradicts that experience.

My sense that something was afoot was validated when I read Pauline (Jchmanowicz's (1995) article "The $5,000-$25,000 Exchange." She points to contradictions implicit in the assumption of a unified teaching self separate from the position granted to us by the governing institution, whether that institution is a high school or a college, as well as the material conditions of the students. Her argument begins to explain why I wasn't the same teacher in each place. Talking about her day to day existence, (Jchmanowicz notes that "I will 'transport' the individualized politics of particular institutions to their various locations in order to manage the exchange I will share with dozens of personalities" (p. 427). And though she does not necessarily talk about a splintering subjectivity, her account nevertheless resonated with my experiences at the community college; I can remember conversations with other faculty about who these students were and what they needed - their subtle understanding that students need to do more functional "stuff" and my own desire to do more critical work and my sense of rebelliousness reflected in a need to show "them" that these students could think differently. It is not only the politics of the department but also the faculty's perception of who adjunct instructors are that constructs those teachers, just as it is not simply the political makeup of a high school faculty, but also the administration's, the PTA's, and community's perception of the proper role of the teacher. We are different teachers in different places because, in part, of the assumptions of those with whom we work and the systems in which we operate.

(Jchmanowicz's reading does not fully account for the other ways in which we are constructed by factors outside of departmental control. Marian Yee (1991), however, grapples painfully with those factors in her essay "Are You the Teacher?" in which her authority and self-as-teacher are called into question because of her race. She is asked "Are you the teacher?" by one of her students, and she replies by writing her name on the board. She knows however that the student was asking a much more profound question of identity, and she in turns asks herself: "Am I?" (p. 24). The student's question was powerful because it makes apparent the myths we work under as teachers, for there is no way that Yee can meet the stereotype-ideal of the English teacher; as a result, she is "other." Yet if the teacher is constructed by position (adjunct, tenured faculty, etc.), as

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well as gender, class, degree (Master's, Probationary, Ph.D. or candidate, and so on), and by the students that we teach, how, then, are we understanding the teacher and how does that understanding affect what and how we teach? And to what degree do we ignore these considerations in order to get on with our daily work, whether that work is teaching or the "scholarly" or professional pursuits that hopefully win us tenure or pres- tige - whether that work is administrative or advisory - and that gives us financial security, self worth, and/or spiritual renewal?

These were the questions I found myself struggling with after my en- counter with the student whose father worked for the tobacco company. It was not that it was easier or harder to teach critically at the university, but rather that the critical pedagogy 1 was practicing seemed to be more jeopardizing at the community college - there was more at stake in being very clear about who I was and what I was "about," because "what I was about" was in direct conflict with the positions these students occupied in the world. In some ways the type of questioning, of thinking that I engage in and ask my students to engage in is, well, easy for me; that is, despite my relatively tenuous position as an adjunct instructor and teaching assistant, my way of being in the world: critical, overtly political, is ultimately supported by the Academy. This is not the case for my students at the community college: they have no cushion to fall on should this form of engaging with the world get them into trouble. Obviously, then, I was not the teacher I thought I was.

Of course I turned to the professional literature of Composition to see just how we were constructing ourselves as teachers: were we taking these differences and contradictions into account in the pedagogies and practices we were theorizing, and what about the splintering subjectivity I was encountering? Not surprisingly, I found much disagreement as to who we are, both in the classroom and out. The very positions themselves, I think, illustrate the point that I am trying to make here: that teacher subjectivity is a splintering phenomenon that is contingently defined by the spaces within and through which we move. In fact, the professional literature as such is one of those "spaces" that creates the splintered teaching self. I would like to turn, then, to examine these various articulations, beginning first with a discussion that will ground my own position a little more clearly.

In Education Still Under Siege, Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux (1993) offer a critical evaluation of the teacher and how such a teacher needs to function with a "fully" articulated critical pedagogy. In their argument they define what the teacher needs to be as a "transformative intellectual." For Aronowitz and Giroux the transformative intellectual

is a category which suggests that teachers as intellectuals can emerge from and work with any number of groups, other than and including the

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working class, that advance emancipatory traditions and cultures within and without alternative public spheres, (p. 45)

What they seek to do, then, is remove the teacher and the notion of intellectual from the position traditionally given to teachers, perhaps claimed by them, as above those they teach. Teachers, traditionally, teach from on high; they teach truth and are themselves unaffected by the theories they teach out of, because, it is assumed, those theories are transparent. But for the transformative intellectual, the critical teacher, emancipation - in its broadest sense the goal of all critical pedagogies - can only be brought about by recognizing and engaging in alternate discursive spaces. This means, they add, that "central to the category of transformative intellectuals is the task of making the pedagogical more political and the political more pedagogical" (p. 46). In other words, learning/ teaching is a "struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations" (p. 46). Ul- timately, this pedagogy treats students and teachers as "critical agents," capable of functioning with and against the institutions that define them.

What the concept of the teacher as transformative intellectual does is foreground a critically reflective practice as necessary to the role and understanding of the teacher, not to mention the work we do. Such a practice is mandatory for a critical teacher, because otherwise the teacher occupies a privileged position outside of the discourses in which he or she functions. Thus though the "truths" we teach might be more contingent, when we don't implicate ourselves and the institution in the construction of those truths we reify them as absolutes and ourselves as Masters. Of course, being critically reflective means something different for the high school teacher than it does for the adjunct at the local community college, and thus the articulation of the teacher will differ as well with his or her publicly perceived role. Critically reflective practice is also particularly important for more fully theorizing the subjectivities of the teacher. Aronowitz and Giroux write that

the concept of "intellectual" does more than suggest the political processes that structure the ideological and material conditions that make up what is known as curriculum work, specifically, and schooling in the more gen- eral sense. It also provides a starting point for educators to examine their own histories, that is, their connections to the past and to particular social formations, cultures, and sedimented experiences, which, in part, define who they are and how they assimilate everyday experience. Cen- tral to such a task is having teachers recognize the partiality and historically formed politics of their own location, (p. 138)

If this sort of awareness is what we want our students to develop, it is necessary that we have and practice it ourselves. Without an awareness of how we are historically constructed and how that historical perception

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changes in time and space, we cannot understand how and by what "modes of interpretation" we are being positioned within the classroom.

This sense of shifting definitions that leads to the splintering of subjectivity 1 felt in my own teaching practice is only hinted at by Aronowitz and Giroux, which is again part of the problem: the professional literature's articulation of the critical teacher does/ did not mesh with how I saw myself functioning in the classroom. It did not account for the pedagogical dis- sonance between the two classes I was teaching. In order to account for that splintering, we cannot think about the teacher as someone who car- ries around his or her subjectivity in a satchel next to students' graded papers. These "construction pieces" - what Elizabeth Ellsworth (1991) in her critique of critical pedagogy "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy" describes as our various "-isms:" sexism, racism, fat-ism and so on, those things that collude with socially agreed upon, though not necessarily articulated, definitions to form our identities - are different in different situations. To think of the teacher being constructed once and then never again silences the voices of those who daily experience such splintering, whose very splintering could be said to constitute an identity.

Though Aronowitz and Giroux (1993) do not fully account for the experiences of teachers "on the move," and nor for that matter, as Lil Brannon (1993) points out, do they account for the gendered teacher, they do begin the movement toward this understanding. They postulate in part a theory of resistance that seeks to articulate fully the ways in which students are positioned within systems, how they struggle against those systems, and how that struggle finds a voice. Of their theory of resistance, they write that

it depicts a mode of discourse that rejects traditional explanations of school failure and oppositional behavior and shifts the analysis of oppositional behavior from the theoretical terrains of functionalism and mainstream educational psychology to those of political science and sociology. Re- sistance in this case has redefined the causes and meaning of oppositional behavior by arguing that it has little to do with deviance and learned helplessness, but a great deal to do with moral and political indignation, (p. 99)

And while their reconceptualization of resistance is geared toward understanding the roles of learner that students are placed in and their rejec- tion of those roles, it can also be used to understand the placement and resistance of teachers. Their theory understands the student to be struggling against the ways they have been named by the systems in which they move: elementary school, high school, college, and reductively, how they have been positioned by the groups they have been assigned to: geek,

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nerd, white-trash, trouble-maker, "A" student, jock. Similarly, teachers too struggle against such naming and placement - though admittedly the stakes are different and teachers have greater recourse in the naming game: no matter our oppression, it is a privileged oppression to be sure. If we realize that how we teach and what we teach can also be understood as resistance to a dominant discourse, then we can begin to see how teacher- subjectivity becomes contingent on the space(s) in which that resistance takes place, and begin to see how the teacher becomes something other than a static figure: described once and for all as some part or all of "other." Aronowitz and Giroux continue:

resistance adds a new depth to the notion that power is exercised on and by people within different contexts that structure interacting relations of dominance and autonomy. Thus, power is never unidimensional; it is exercised not only as a mode of domination, but also as an act of resistance, (p. 99)

They lay the groundwork for a reconception of the teacher based on the ways in which power and authority (the right to speak and be heard) functions within social systems (school, department, teacher's lounge). This is important to an understanding of our teaching selves as splintered: for if indeed notions of those things that make up our selves (race, class, weight and so on) change from context to context, thus changing who we are perceived to be, they also change based on our sense of authority and power within that governing institution. In terms of my own situation as a teacher at two different institutions, I was empowered as a graduate Teach- ing Assistant (it helps too that I am male) to critically engage with my students, asking them to question their assumptions as well as my own. However, as an adjunct instructor at the community college, I was expected to function in different ways: I was expected simply to teach students how to write. The assumptions there were layered: teaching students to write is separate from teaching them to think critically; since they are primarily working class students or older returning students, their primary need is to "get a job," and so on. Returning to Aronowitz and Giroux, what they provide in the second part of their understanding of power is the necessary agency. Because power does not rest solely within an institution or person, but with the spaces between and among the "bodies" involved, the teacher, if critically reflective, can indeed begin to define herself within the systems she works. Let me turn now to show how different pedagogical theories in Composition inform and construct different, often competing, contradictory, and certainly complex teacher subjectivities. These different and competing articulations of the teacher have informed and rein- forced my sense of splintering: after all, we turn to professional literature to help us sort out the difficulties we daily experience as teachers.

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In my exploration of the literature of Composition studies, I found rather strong disagreements among scholars concerning who the college Com- position teacher is and who he or she should be. Three dominant threads emerged, all of them woven in some way around the tacit assumption of teacher as nurturer. The three threads break down roughly into the following categories: 1) the nurturer, or the teacher as humanist agent of change; 2) the teacher as "unarticulated other" in opposition to/ contention with the nurturer; and, 3) the teacher as political, as a construction of the discourses she inhabits. Of the three, only the last articulates a position that could account for the splintering that took place between the two classes I taught, as this position begins to articulate a plurality of subjectivities5. However, even this position defines by metaphor and thus necessarily excludes and glosses difference.

The first thread is the teacher as humanist agent of change, and it is where most "second-generation" compositionists began our work, by reading teachers such as Peter Elbow and Don Murray. Those who teach writing as a means toward understanding and articulating an already present, if as yet to be discovered, self are working to retain a particular understanding of themselves as teachers rather than trying to redefine it. In many ways, this thread has transformed into a reaction against the "politiciz- ing" of literacy instruction6. In Composition this position has been best illustrated by Maxine Hairston's (1992) vehement critique of critical pedagogies in her article "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing." The gist of this position is an emphasis on writing as existing outside of the educational discourse that the other two positions seek to question. Hairston writes that critical pedagogy is

a model that puts dogma before diversity, politics before craft, ideology before critical thinking, and the social goals of the teacher before the educational needs of the student. It's a regressive model that undermines the progress we've made in teaching writing, one that threatens to silence student voices and jeopardize the process-oriented, low-risk, student- centered classrooms we've worked so hard to establish as the norm. (p. 180)

In this short passage, Hairston makes a clear distinction between the goals of critical teachers and those who see expressivist7, student-centered teaching as the unproblematic basis for Composition studies. In the introduc- tory paragraphs to her article, Hairston reminds us of her chair's address at the 1985 Conference on College Composition and Communication which emphasized the need to continue the creation of "a new paradigm for the teaching of writing, one that focused on process and on writing as a way of learning" and later she reminds us that she "warned that if we hoped to flourish as a profession, we would have to establish our psychological and

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intellectual independence from the literary critics who are at the center of power in most English departments" (p. 179). In short, the profession of the teaching of writing and of the teacher of writing must be separate(d) from the teachers of literature and, currently, of "cultural studies." She writes: "the topics used to be literary; now they're political" (p. 180). In the classroom the teacher that Hairston imagines is able to separate "literacy" from socio-political concerns (something, admittedly, that I at- tempted to do when I backed away from asking my student to critique the cigarette company's role in his community). Hairston fears that Compo- sition studies is once more turning to the Big Men on Campus, this time the critical and postmodern theorists, for the validation and defining theoretical bases it needs/wants.

Hairston's objections to the critical pedagogies of the "radical left" are rather straight-forward. She writes: "I vigorously object to the contention that they have a right - even a duty - to use their classrooms as platforms for their political views" (p. 188). In response to the argument that the classroom is political, she writes that "the real political truth about classrooms is that the teacher has all the power; she sets the agenda, she con- trols the discussion, and she gives the grades" (p. 188). For Hairston, the teacher seeks to remove herself from any political discussions or critique of the dominant educational discourse that gives her authority to begin with. In short, the teacher sidesteps the issue by employing student-centered pedagogies.

Hairston's conclusion is to claim that we can make any writing course "a truly multi-cultural course that gives students the opportunity to develop their critical and creative abilities and do it in an intellectually and ethically responsible context that preserves the heart of what we have learned about teaching writing in the past two decades" (p. 190). The way to do this is to construct courses that give "students the opportunity to write something unique to them as individuals yet something that will resonate with others in their writing community" (p. 191). For Hairston, such a course would focus on the process of writing as a means toward making knowledge and claiming experience in order to bring the students to a conclusion about themselves as individuals in a society, rather than as individuals whose construction is contingent on involvement in a system of competing discourse communities. Writing and the writing teacher are separate from the issues and dilemmas that identity politics raises. Thus the teacher in this thread and for Hairston is "a midwife, an agent for change rather than a transmitter of knowledge" (p. 192), which serves to place the Composition teacher into a role of nurturer, a traditionally feminine position of powerlessness and silence, despite her claim that such a conception will serve to bring more authority and recognition to Composition studies and teachers.

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The movement away from this conception of the writing teacher is the primary characteristic of the second, admittedly ambiguous, thread: the teacher as something other than nurturer, a position in opposition to the role of nurturer. This thread represents a critical distancing from the humanist subjectivity of the composition teacher: the midwife who enables his or her students to become better writers by "actualizing" their selves, selves which are transcendent and not dependent on construction by discursive encounters. However, while there is struggle implicit in this position, there is not yet a clear idea of what is being struggled toward. And because scholars and teachers in this thread seek to retain what is good about the nurturing role of the teacher, they often end up reinscribing the position they seek to problematize.

A good illustration of this is Sherrie L. Gradin's (1995) book Romancing Rhetorics, an involved and insightful critique of some of our assumptions about what the term "romantic" means and how those assumptions have colored our conception of expressivist pedagogies. However, writing that "current critics of expressivism envision an expressivist subject who both refuses to participate in the social world altogether and who is somehow internally constructed separately from social influence" (p. xv), her movement away from expressivist notions of the nurturing teacher is one of accusation: critics have misread the romantic tradition in which expressivism is enmeshed. Gradin both distances her position from expressivism and reclaims it for her own. She continues: "A social-expressivism, however, with roots already embedded in the tradition from which expressivism arises, suggests that all subjects negotiate within the system; they act and are acted upon by their environment" (p. xv). Social-expressivism, then, is the theory of how individuals struggle to define themselves and act within their particular environment, and as a theory it seeks to illuminate the tensions between acting and acted upon and to articulate a more individu- ally coherent conception of agency.

Her position is echoed somewhat differently by Stephen M. Fishman and Lucille Parkinson-McCarthy (1995) in their article "Community in the Expressivist Classroom: Juggling Liberal and Communitarian Visions." The article is written in sections and in the section that Fishman writes, he claims that

expressivism has proven to be a pedagogy with complex social consequences. Its liberal tendency, which led me to treat myself as just another student, had the welcome consequence of promoting the communitarian ideal of organic solidarity. However, it also had the undesirable consequence of undermining my capacity to function as a communitarian leader, that is, as disciplinary-initiator, (p. 64)

He is right in pointing out that expressivism itself is a deeply problematic pedagogy, as it ignores the issues of authority and grading; though these

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certainly exist in an expressivist pedagogy, they are often left unarticulated and serve as a deep contradiction to the tenets of the pedagogy. Fishman notes: "1 found that as it became easier to reach equality and self-discovery, it became harder to get students to read classic philosophical texts, students often skipping assignments or protesting that such reading was too difficult" (p. 65). Though he touches on central issues in any pedagogy, he also continues to think about students as "selves" that are somehow separate from the context of their lives, even though the theories he will later discuss position the students as accountable to the community. Fishman is able to promote self-discovery, yet this discovery is itself only supplemented by the learning and knowledge (re) production the students are engaged in. They find themselves within themselves and not within or as a result of the reading and thinking that they are doing, or, as Aronowitz and Giroux would like, within their resistance. For Fishman and McCarthy, students learn within the negotiation of teacher/learner, not in the resistance to how that pedagogy situates them as learners.

Absent, or perhaps not fully articulated, in both of these texts is an understanding of the teacher that is different from that associated with expressivism. For Fishman and McCarthy the teacher remains the teacher- as-equal to the students, and the issues of who that teacher really is, how he is being positioned by the community in which he teaches, are safely squirreled away. This has consequences for the teacher who tries to en- act this pedagogy: there are two competing theories of learning/ teaching going on here. And this is similar to the position 1 found myself in as I tried to both nurture the student's self and get him to critically engage the material conditions of his life.

In Gradin's (1995) case, the teacher seems to remain unchanged, and instead it is the intent and process of learning that is altered. Gradin does critique the "romantic" myth of the male hero as teacher - popularly rep- resented by Robin Williams in the movie Dead Poets Society - yet does not seem to offer an alternate conception to this. That there is no alternative given to the teacher is endemic, I think, to her construction of social- expressivism. Her theory of social-expressivism hinges first on the notion that those who critique expressivism have understood it (for the most part) incorrectly, and she spends a great deal of energy recasting those writers who have been labeled as Romantic. Her second notion follows from the first that because we have misunderstood expressivism, expressivism can be seen as social-expressivism, at which point she brings together social- epistemic theory with expressivist theory. Yet 1 remain unconvinced that she has done anything other than patch the two together, and, despite her recasting of expressivism, I see the two positions as contradictory. Returning to the situation I found myself in as an adjunct and teaching assistant, and the splintering I encountered as a result, this patch-work theory of learn-

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ing implies that I am separate from the pedagogy I practice; that is, who I am as a teacher is located solely in what I know. Were that really the case, as I have been arguing, there would then be no conflict between my experiences in the two different classes.

It seems that for Gradin, the teacher approaches the stance of "critical warrior" (see Brannon, 1993), a masculine heroic tradition, but Gradin contradicts this when she claims that "as teachers of writing, we can cul- tivate both analytical and imaginative ability in our students; we can model what Coleridge has called reflection and a 'mind self-consciously aware of its own imaginative potential'"(p. 164). While I recognize that her intent is not to re-inscribe a notion of the "romantic" teacher-hero, one who is able to actualize his or her students through sheer force of will, the language she uses to describe the process of teaching certainly points in that direction, because, she writes "from this position of subjectivity, students can begin to become personally invested as critical and 'effective' demo- cratic citizens" (p. 164). Thus, as teachers we enable the students as "selves" aware of their "imaginative potential" and then we enable them as critical thinkers. For students from middle-class, liberal backgrounds much of this will be familiar: you are an individual, but you need to give something back to the community, to society. Student are, in other words, unique individuals who happen to come from a particular milieu which has only residual effects on their thinking. A little later, she emphasizes the teacher's role as enabler: "a personal definition of self aids, and is indeed necessary in, the development of an awareness of one's socially defined interactions with other" (166). Thus the teacher's role is agent of awareness of a transcendent self which only after it is realized as such can be called into question by looking at how that realization is constructed socially.

What Fishman and McCarthy and Gradin do, then, is redefine and then combine the social with the personal without changing who the teacher is in the process. Given my experiences as a teacher struggling with identity, this strikes me as problematic. How could the teacher who in the expressivist tradition is seen as a nurturer of individual souls, be the same as the teacher in the (in Gradin's terms) social-expressivist classroom? These pedagogical theories must fully articulate and account for a teacher- subjectivity if they are to successfully keep from re-inscribing the myth of the complete, unified Teacher, a myth that is equally perpetuated by traditional pedagogies as well as expressivist ones. It is not that expressivist pedagogies ignore the teacher, but that by placing the emphasis on the teacher as humanist agent of change they displace any critique of who that teacher "really" is. The language of expressivism does not allow for a critical understanding of the teacher (or for that matter of students), for

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in order to function, expressivism, and the expressivist teacher, needs to ignore the material realities of both students and teachers. Because the teacher remains unarticulated critically, the voices of those who fall under the rubric of "other" - the very people who are actually practicing the nurturing pedagogies - are silenced.

It is this lack of critical attentiveness to the material realities of students and teachers and a growing awareness of the gendered and political nature of learning that led those that fall into the next group to begin to re-think the idea(l) of the teacher. In this third thread, the teacher is an ideological entity, becoming as much a product of and participant in discourse systems as the students he or she teaches. My own sympathies lie within this position, as I experienced the splintered subjectivity of a teacher teaching in different, perhaps oppositional, spaces. Yet, this thread too makes assumptions about who the teacher should be that end up re- inforcing the teacher's subjectivity as a splintered one.

Linda Brodkey (1989) provides a basis for understanding teacher subjectivity in her article "On the Subject of Class and Gender in The Literacy Letters'": "We are at once constituted and unified as subjects in language and discourse" (p. 125). Brodkey 's construction of the teacher works against the role of teacher as unbiased, a political agent of change. Change exists within a complex series of exchanges among individuals and institutions occupying multiple subject positions. Brodkey further problematizes the position of teacher by writing that "those who occupy the best subject positions a discourse has to offer would have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of speaking rather than being spoken by discourse" (p. 126). Implicit in this statement is the role of the teacher - who we think we are as teachers - and that even critical pedagogies are invested in certain ways of thinking and of viewing the world. Teaching itself has always been about both reproduction and production of knowledge, often generated in the form of resistance to dominating structures; what matters most, for scholars in this thread, is the recognition that ideology functions to create or validate knowledge in the classroom in the first place. Knowledge is not apolitical or neutral, and neither is learning, as Aronowitz and Giroux point out. So that even when teachers are being critical, they are still engaged in a particular (re) production of knowledge, albeit a decidedly political and "overt" one. This is not to say, however, that there is no room within this space of teaching and learning for the making of meaning or for the production of knowledges. For Brodkey, a post-structuralist critique does not claim that all learning is reproduction, but only that institutions have a vested interest in (re) production because it ensures that their particular ways of being and perceiving are perpetuated. Brodkey's position returns us to Aronowitz and Giroux's conception

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of power as both a force of domination and a form of resistance, though Brodkey recognizes, where Aronowitz and Giroux do not, the role that gender plays in relation to that authority.

Brodkey's article chronicles and critiques a series of letters exchanged between members of an ABE class and graduate students and teachers taking a course on the teaching of Basic English. Part of her conclusion in this study was that subjectivities tend to reassert themselves into their "default modes" (reductively: socially agreed upon norms) even in different, or questionable positions, that is, in this case, for teacher authority to rear its head in the non-academic setting of written correspondence. The educational discourse, that of teacher authority, reasserted itself in the dia- logue between ABE students and the teachers. She writes, "Educational discourse grants teachers authority over the organization of language in the classroom, which includes such commonplace privileges as allocat- ing turns, setting topics, and asking questions" (p. 129). So that even in non-academic settings the tendency is for teachers to act in teacherly ways, such is the power of the controlling discourse.

Brodkey's conclusions are supported by a similar study done by Gail Stygall (1994) and discussed in "Resisting Privilege: Basic Writing and Foucault's Author Function." Stygall conducted a similar "experiment," only in this one both she and her graduate students (who would be corre- sponding with the basic writers) had read and discussed Brodkey's article - they knew from Brodkey's research and conclusions that those subject positions supported by dominant discourses tend to assert themselves even in supposedly non-academic arenas. Stygall draws our attention to this: "I thought that my students and 1 could resist reconstructing our corre- spondents as 'basic writers' by becoming conscious of the discursive practices involved in doing so" (p. 322). However, she adds, this proved difficult. She attributes this response to Foucault's "Author Function," which states that we read according to a set of criteria that is specific to the audience we imagine8. We allow for "transgressions" when we read essays by our colleagues whom we assume know the rules of correct language use, but we do not allow for these same transgressions when it is our students who are doing the writing, because we do not assume they know the rules; on a more sinister level, we may not assume that they are capable of inten- tionally breaking, therefore questioning, those rules. Thus, even in spaces that are not traditional "academic" classroom situations, teachers tend to fall into the default position of Master.

The ramifications of this are best illustrated in the simple statement that for the teacher not-acting is the same thing as acting; a non-response is in and of itself a response which signals something to the student, and which constructs them in a particular way. Brodkey (1989) goes on to write

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that "there are . . . times in the letters when it certainly looks as if by ig- noring rather than contesting the authority of educational discourse, they retained control over such discursive privileges as determining what is and what is not an appropriate topic" (p. 130). This was particularly the case when all of the teachers showed a deep aversion or at least unwillingness to talk about issues of class: a teacher, thus, is not interested or should not be interested in the material conditions of the student. Yet many teachers are in fact interested in and committed to changing underlying ideological structures that dictate mobility within social and economic systems; instead I should say that the educational discourse mandates a certain separation from those issues of material condition: race, class, gender, because, so the dominant myth claims, those things do not matter.

For Stygall this is another reflection of the Author function, and though she is here speaking about the labels we apply to particular groups of students, it can also refer to the actions and choices we make in any of our teacher-functions. She writes that "I would argue that this [labeling] occurs because our discursive practice is a master discourse and it assumes that we have an unconstrained right to divide and stratify our students as writers, dividing authors from non-authors" (p. 326). We exist, then, in systems that function to control the ways in which we view the work we do; this has an impact on tenure decisions as well as hiring practices, but for the purpose of this paper, it directly affects who we think we are as teachers and how the system(s) we occupy and struggle in function to name us. Discussing the stance that her students took toward the basic writers, Stygall points out that her students had a number of choices; they "could choose a role in these letters and several were available to them: learner, student, pen pal, or teacher. Nonetheless, she [one of her students], and all the others, chose the role of teacher" (p. 329). This complicates greatly any idea we might have of who the teacher is - we see "the teacher" as an amalgam maybe of personality, style, and knowledge, yet for Stygall and Brodkey it is a function less of anything innately interior, and more a function of the internalized role of the teacher and where we are teaching and whatv/e are teaching: within a department those who teach composition are constructed, and consequently treated, differently than those who teach Literature or Critical Theory.

Brodkey and Stygall both support a position of teacher that seeks to illuminate and struggle against the educational discourse that mandates traditional teacherly practices and makes those the defaults upon which conversation and learning fall when contra -traditional forces come into play. This position is echoed and further problematized by Lil Brannon (1993) in her essay "M[other]: Lives on the Outside." Her critique underscores the gendered notion of who the teacher is and how he and the romantic

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tradition of teacher as hero (of which Foucault's Author Function is a part) function to usurp the voice of women who teach, despite working in a traditionally feminine role:

Our work as teachers is not found within the narratives of schooling that fill the popular imagination or construct the professional literature. Our stories are absent partly because they are set against the male quest plot that is as old as King Lear's suffering and as popular as Huck Finn's ride down the Mississippl. We are working against the traditional male Romantic hero, the one recently played out in the Dead Poets Society, (p. 458-459)

Brannon's "gendering" of the teaching space(s) and act(s) directly ties into the critique that Brodkey raised four years earlier, for in Brodkey's (and StygalPs) article as in Brannon's the romantic hero tradition of the male teacher is complicit in the educational discourse that denies any student or teacher subjectivity outside of that defined by the dominant discourse. Brannon goes on to critique the evolving roles of teachers as established and discussed in the works of Ira Shor, Paulo Freire, and Henry Giroux as being little more than a reinscription of the masculine paradigm of teacher, for without the position of authority allowed by the educational discourse, understood to be masculine, the teacher could not function as "critical warrior" (to be sure, he or she could also not function as a "nurturer"). The values implicit in this position are, as Brannon points out, "commitment and student-centeredness" but are masculinized "by em- phasizing intellectual rigor and political aggression rather than empathy or affective consciousness raising" (p. 460). Brannon's call for "new im- ages of 'teaching' and 'teacher'" (p. 461) is a call for a critique of the dominating paradigm of educational discourse, which excludes or renders dumb, and thus powerless, the voices and actions of those who fall outside of its construction. Thus this thread of "teacher construction" seeks to redefine the teacher by first calling into question the educational discourse that is the crux of our understanding of who the teacher is. Yet this position too is not complete: scholars in this thread articulate a way of understanding the teacher but assume a static point from which to understand that teacher. Thus, Brodkey can name her students and the positions they occupy without recognizing that her presence as an authority mitigates for and against certain subject positions.

It is quite clear by this point, I imagine, that I find this third position to be the most helpful in complexly situating the teacher within the classroom. The first two threads rely too heavily on notions that seek to keep unarticulated and out of the classroom the various realities of teaching: money, gender, class, race, position, and as such are not particularly helpful. To think that these aspects of who we are can be sufficiently locked out of the space in which we work does more damage than good; for in- stance, how can the fact that 1 am an Adjunct who is also a graduate

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Teaching Assistant not affect the teaching I do and the teacher I am? Brodkey, Brannon, and Stygall push at the sense of pedagogical enclo- sure and separation that is the tradition of the heroic teacher. All the traditional masculine traits support such a pedagogy: distant, reserved, rational, and controlling. But by revering these traits as the ideal teacher, not only do we close the door on and silence many other voices, we also misrepresent who we are and what we are doing, thereby casting doubt on what we teach and want our students to learn. As teachers, we are products (producers, too) of the dominant discourses in which we function, and these discourses inform our assumption in spaces not traditionally academic. In most situations, then, we are acting as teachers defined by the governing institution, but this does not imply a static construction. We change as teachers depending on where we teach as well as what the conditions of our work are. This accounts for and illuminates the splintered subjectivity of the teacher. Because different discourses have different understandings of gender, race, class, position and so on, in those different spaces we are different teachers. When we talk about the gendered notion of teacher, we cannot assume that we are always gendered in the same way in different places. As teachers we should be aware that though we are constructed by the dominant discourse in ways that are troubling, this construction changes as we move from space to space - and that one space necessarily overlaps and alters another.

Which brings me back to the classroom situation that precipitated this examination of teacher subjectivity in the first place. There are many things that I could have done differently with the student doing the research on the tobacco company had I recognized the issues of "subjectivity" and "identity" earlier on as professional ones. It is important, I think, that we understand how our own work and pedagogical theories situate us, how our own field assumes a complicated, contradictory subjectivity for us, in order to enable ourselves to work more effectively with our students. During a campus interview for an position at a mid-sized North-Eastern university, I conducted a workshop for the English faculty on designing syllabi for their classes. In that workshop we focused on how the language and arrangement of the information and assignments assumes particular subjectivities both for us and our students. This led to a rather heated, and I hope profitable, conversation about both the nature of writing and of the teacher that I won't recount here. However, such a discussion, and such a focus in a writing class, could have helped me and my students to negotiate the various, variable identities we were being asked to enter into. If we want our students to be critically engaged citizens, we should help them to understand the complex and shifting assumption about who they are as learners and individuals, and we need to begin with our own fields to examine how professional discourse situates and defines us.

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Notes

1 . These assumptions, of course, perpetuate the myths we have about who teachers at different "levels" should be and how they should act.

2. My point here is not to demonize my colleagues at the community college; I was not explicitly told to teach in any particular way. But I was a graduate student, 1 was an adjunct, and I needed the money. These things too affect how and what we can teach.

3. 1 had assigned them, randomly, to groups in the previous class, and they were to come to this class with ideas or thoughts on what they might like to explore. The class itself was fairly balanced along gender lines, and had a good mix of non-traditional students (older students, students returning after years in the workforce). To the best of my knowledge, and that of my supervisor, these students were primarily working class.

4. To be sure, the student was probably scared by my questions, and it may be as well that he wasn't entirely sure what 1 was asking of him. I think, too, that this student's response raises ethical questions about the work we do: critical pedagogies can so easily place the teacher in a role of Moral Compass that is just as hurtful as the position of authority occupied by the teacher in more traditional pedagogies.

5. These categories are rough, and 1 hesitate to break down the work that is being done into limiting categories, for they are not clearly delineated. After all, categories are what I am struggling against in this paper - however, time and space as well as convention re- quire that I set up some sort of system from which to argue and critique. I ask that you keep in mind as you read this that like the categories of gender, race and class, these categories splinter depending on the context from which you read them.

6. One hears the same voice in the teachers' lounges - "we" should not be political. And the position is fully articulated in the work of Nancie Atwell, Donald Graves, and Lucy Calkins.

7. See James Berlin's text Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Col- leges, 1900-1985 and Lester Faigley's article "Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal" (College English 48) for discussions of expressivism.

8. See also Joseph Williams's article "The Phenomenology of Error," College Com- position and Communication 32 (May 1981): 152-168.

Works Cited

Aronowitz, S. & Giroux, H. (1993). Education still under siege (2nd ed.). Westport: Bergin & Garvey.

Brodkey, L. (1989). On the subjects of class and gender in "The Literacy Letters." College English, 51, 125-141.

Brannon, L. (1993). Mlotherl: Lives on the outside. Written Communication, 10, 457-465. Ellsworth, E. (1992). Why doesn't this feel empowering? Working through the repressive

myths of critical pedagogy. In Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy. New York: Routledge.

Fishman, S. M. & Parkinson-McCarthy, L. (1995). Community in the expressivist classroom: Juggling liberal and communitarian visions. College English, 57, 62-81.

Gradin, S. L. (1995). Romancing rhetorics. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook. Hairston, M. (1992). Diversity, ideology, and teaching writing. CCC, 43, 179-193. Stygall, G. (1994). Resisting privilege: Basic writing and Foucault's author function. CCC,

45,320-341. Gchmanowicz, P. (1995). The $5,000 - $25,000 Exchange. College English, 57, 426-447. Yee, M. (1991 ). Are You the Teacher? In C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz (Eds.), Compo-

sition and Resistance (pp. 24-30). Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook. 201



Splintered Subjectivities: Assumptions, the Teacher, and Our Professional Work

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