This paper narratively shares our grappling with doing emancipatory pedagogy on the margins of academe. It represents one of the author's struggles with embodying intellectual honesty, and the other author attempting to nurture this embodying. Integral to both processes is a recognition of the implications and consequences of being intellectually honest and how the dominant pedagogical order in academe continually undercuts this honesty.
This paper emerged out of numerous discussions between the two authors, one a professor and the other a student in a doctoral program, about pedagogy and scholarship. These discussions have origins in the authors’ concerns with the subordinate position accorded to pedagogy in graduate programs, particularly doctoral programs. In many of these programs, scholarship and pedagogy are often treated as mutually exclusive domains (Bochner, 1997; Coles, 1989; Rawlins, 1996; Rose, 1990; Tompkins, 1996). The expectation and focus are for graduates to develop a rigorous research program. We make believe that pedagogy and scholarship are of different epistemological universes, and that pedagogy—even radical pedagogy—is merely an instrument of theory. This fragmentation impoverishes both our scholarship and pedagogy in many significant ways (Rawlins, 1996; Tompkins, 1996). Foremost, it extricates the human component from both processes. The result is that both are de-politicized, that is, reduced to technique rather than ways of being that mutually inform and sustain each other.
Many scholars are increasingly warning us about the dangers of this fragmentation (Bochner, 1997; Mclaren & Leonard, 1993; Mclaren & Lankshear, 1994; Rawlins, 1996; Tompkins, 1996). Rawlins (1996) gives us a way out of this fragmentation by positioning ‘learning’ as a metaphor for research. He draws a reflexive relationship between teaching and research and argues that both must be considered as processes of ‘co-learning.’ He points out that research is learning and especially in “social studies this research is about others and with others. So research is co-learning” (p. 190). About teaching, Rawlins (1996) writes:
On the other hand and closely related, is the learning of teaching, how we learn to teach by engaging in teaching with students and paying attention to their responses, their teachings about our teachings, their learning of our learning. In all these learnings of teaching, our students help us to learn to teach and hopefully teach to learn. Teaching is co-learning (p. 190).
In this paper we acknowledge and struggle with the bifurcation between scholarship and pedagogy. We also acknowledge the bifurcation between the personal and the political in graduate school. As Bochner (1997) notes, “We pay a steep price for producing texts that sustain the illusion of disinterest and neutrality by keeping the personal voice out” (p. 433). Graduate education disciplines us to veil the individual underneath the accepted professional jargon and mannerisms of academe (Coles, 1989). The understanding is that one must master the jargon in order to survive. In this paper, we contest these bifurcations in terms of writing and show how certain forms of writing perpetuate a pedagogical order that blocks the evolution of new and different ways of experiencing the world. We employ an insurgent pedagogical method to challenge this order.
The exchanges between the authors that follow capture our own struggles to embody a different pedagogy—one that promotes teaching as a way of being that celebrates our potentiality to make for a more humane and compassionate world, ends the fragmentation between theory and praxis, and heightens our responsibility to our political and personal selves.
DC: “You must begin again.” These are not words I want to hear about the reaction paper that is due tomorrow evening. I thought my paper was ready to be turned in, so I gave Amardo (a professor who I met in my Ph.D. program, but now consider a friend) a copy to get his feedback. He knows well the academic temperament of the professors who are teaching this class. To hear him tell me to begin again is, in many ways, embarrassing because, after all, I am a doctoral student who should be able to write small papers with no great difficulty. I am embarrassed also because I have struggled through this ‘core’ Ph.D. class for over six months always trying to write in that impersonal style that is most acceptable in the social sciences. I am desperately trying to show mastery of the jargon so I can survive. But, to ‘begin again’ is not the only challenge. Amardo goes on to point out that I am writing in a “language alien to me” and that this is why the paper reads like someone else authored it.
AR: Devika needs to begin again. She ‘has’ to begin again. The paper is intellectually dishonest. I take pains to tell her that I am by no means criticizing her personally. I know how graduate school produces academics. I know its ways of manufacturing its subjects, who, in many cases, are actually quite eager to live in the minds of others. The writing that I am reading on her paper is alien to her. It has no passion, no soul, no humanity. I know she hates this type of writing. She wants to be read. She wants her writing to move people in profound ways. I have seen other writings by her, in a class I taught, and I have found them extremely moving, extremely honest. This paper has none of this honesty.
DC: I am telling Amardo that I am tired of the class. This is the only core class I will ever take in my Ph.D. program and all that I want to do is to complete the assignments. I tell him that my narrative style might be unacceptable in such a class. Last semester I took Amardo’s ‘Community and Communication’ class in which I wrote without feeling shackled by a style. I wrote as I believe all writing must be written – from the heart. I wrote two papers on my own conception of community and communication. As I wrote this way I was also required to be rigorous in my reflexivity and to reckon with the implications and consequences of my positions. In fact, the writing required a punishing amount of rigor. I had to identify and explain all the positions that constitute my positionality. Through endless discussions and rewrites, Amardo would push me to grapple with the different positions. Yet the papers were intellectually exhilarating because I understood the power of my own positionality and my ability to construct theory about the human condition. I realized that all writing, any writing, whether theoretical or non-theoretical, must consciously include the author ‘within’ it. Language becomes the author and the author becomes the language. I am trying to convince Amardo that I have to ‘play the game’ and finish no matter how much it tortures me. I urge him to understand that I don’t care if anyone gets ‘moved’ in this class. All I want is completion.
AR: I am trying to convince Devika to begin again. I know she wants out. I know that she just wants to finish the last few pages and be done with the paper. She is having a miserable time in the class. I believe that she is being intellectually and pedagogically abused. I understand only too well. She is still anguishing over my recommendation to rewrite the paper. Her anguish is plain to me. I wish I could give her another way out, but I can’t see any. So, I begin again to explain to her why she needs to begin again. The discussion begins with identity. I reach for an essay by Cornel West (1991) entitled “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” and begin reading to her passages that I have read again and again:
The bourgeois model sets intellectual limits, in that one is prone to adopt uncritically prevailing paradigms predominant in the bourgeois academy because of the pressures of practical tasks and differential emulations. Every intellectual passes through some kind of apprenticeship stage in which s/he learns the language and style of the authorities, but when s/he is already viewed as marginally talented s/he might be either excessively encouraged or misleadingly discouraged to critically examine paradigms deemed marginal by the authorities. This hostile environment results in the suppression of one critical analysis and in the limited use of one skill in a manner considered legitimate and practical. (p. 139)
DC: I want to answer the topic questions for the week as correctly as I possibly can. This time we are writing about neo-marxism, class-conflict and social reproduction in a high-school in England. The book we are reading for the assignment is “Learning to Labor: How working class kids get working class jobs” by Paul Willis (1977). I know what the writer is telling us about the social reproduction of class order. Amardo is telling me to reflect upon my own identity as a teaching assistant and a student and how I might be entrenched in a process of social pedagogical reproduction. I admit that I see some parallels with the readings and my own academic experience in this classroom. But, I have lost all hope and possibility of reflection in this class. I find myself unable to reflect. I want out.
AR: She’s asking me about what do I mean by “intellectual honesty.” How can her work become intellectually honest? How do I measure the intellectual honesty of any work? I tell her about my own relationship with my work because I believe this is the best way I can explain to her what it means to me and how I try to represent it in my work. I tell her that I strive to be an intellectual rather than an academic. I tell her that intellectuals believe that ideas have the power to change the world. For me, this measure is integral to intellectual honesty—you must believe that the ideas that you are negotiating and grappling with have the power to change the world. In other words, there must be a measure of urgency in your work. There must be a sense that time is against you, that regardless of whether the heavens and earths may fall away, this work must be completed.
DC: I think I know what Amardo is telling me, but I don’t know if I want to start this process in this time and place. I ask him if I can let this paper go as is and begin the process some other time. I want to postpone the rediscovery of my ‘intellectual self.’ I want to postpone honesty.
AR: No. The process has to begin now. There is never a correct time or place. The process has to be forged. Why wait? Wait for what? Wait for whom? The process is never going to come without risking life. There are always going to be consequences in trying to do work that is intellectually honest. Such work, as I have said to you again and again, and you understand only too well, is punished in academe, especially in research level one institutions as the one that you are in. To begin now is to begin to accept this reality, to begin now is to declare your potentiality to do work that is intellectually honest. Why would you want to postpone such a sacred occasion? And for what?
DC: I want to be intellectually honest, but I feel that writing with that much honesty will expose a very personal side of me in this class. I have never felt or been allowed to feel involved in this class. I don’t know if I am ready to embrace a language more familiar to me and risk losing all credibility. Yet, I am also aware that I have embodied this other language in which I can’t really house myself. Amardo is right about the ‘alien language,’ but I don’t know if I will ever be ready to take the step in this class.
AR: It is now many hours after our discussion began. The sun will probably begin to appear any moment now. As always, I am trying to be honest with Devika. To identify with her fears, with the temptation to escape the challenge I am trying to impose on her. I feel a deep obligation not to release her. At this point both of us are now involved in this. So again, I am talking to her about my own struggles to bring intellectual honesty to my teaching. But I am also mindful to tell her about the rewards—about the tremendous meaning that I derive from my work, both my writing and my teaching. I tell her that I feel blessed to do the work that I do. I tell her that for me good pedagogy is inherently revolutionary. Emancipatory pedagogy is about a way of being that nurtures and encourages others to explore and develop new and different possibilities of being in the world. It really has nothing much to do with what and how you teach. I tell her that emancipatory pedagogy demands that you bring all of your humanity to the process. You have to believe in the capacity of others when no one else believes and such believing cannot be found outside of a deep love for them. I am encouraging her to entertain ways of being and ways of writing that already dwell within her. I am also still reading more passages by West to her:
The basic problem with the bourgeois model is that it is existentially and intellectually stultifying for black intellectuals. It is existentially debilitating because it not only generates anxieties of defensiveness on the part of the Black intellectuals; it also thrives on them. The need for hierarchical ranking and the deep-seated racism shot through bourgeois humanistic scholarship cannot provide Black intellectuals with either the proper ethos or conceptual framework to overcome a defensive posture. And charges of intellectual inferiority can never be met upon the opponent’s terrain—to try to do so only intensifies one’s anxieties. Rather the terrain itself must be viewed as part and parcel of an antiquated form of life unworthy of setting the terms of contemporary discourse. (pp. 138-139)
DC: I know that there is no ‘me’ in the paper that I wrote. I didn’t want it to be there. I was protecting myself by making that choice. (Amardo told me that I am an intellectual co-conspirator in the process.) I think that I have resisted Amardo’s recommendations all these hours because I am scared to step out of my safe house. Yet, I have known all along that this safe house is not my home. I know I am cheating and limiting myself by not being honest. I re-read my paper, and finally accept what I already know. This is not my writing. It is revealing no discovery. I have been fooling myself for six months. Six months of feeling physically sick when I write for this class. It can’t go on. It’s wrong. I must write with all of my being. I must, like Amardo insists, bring all of my being to the process. That has always been missing in my papers for this class. I know now that I have been writing what I ‘think’ my instructor wants, not what I feel ‘right’ about. I must take ownership and move myself center-stage in my own process. I begin again.
DC: What is class-conflict? What is neo-marxism? How do these ideas lend themselves to the study of communication? What is resistance? How can we know when our acts of resistance are ineffectual and impotent versus emancipatory and transforming? These are just some of the questions I need to answer for this reaction paper. I have finished Willis’s book. It is a critical ethnographic study of working class kids in a high school in England. These kids, we are told, take the path that their parents take and resist mainstream culture by forming their own counter-culture in school. Willis tells us that the counter-culture is their act of resistance, but the resistance is futile because it aids and abets the reproduction of class order.
. read some of the questions to Amardo and tell him about the book. We speak about the irony of this book being used for a class that in many ways perpetuates and reproduces this dominant pedagogical order. I ask him why such a book is being used in a class which represents and propels such an insidious order. How can we be reading about a resistant counter-culture in a class that disallows any form of resistance and reproduces order through silencing? I tell him about my own process of teaching, of how I, myself, perpetuate the dominant pedagogical order because I am taught how ‘not’ to resist the mainstream in my own graduate classes. We begin to discuss if there is, indeed, any resistance in my process of teaching and learning. I read him the comments I have received on my papers for this class. These comments are in-built expectations that ask me to mirror the order. How can I answer ‘just’ the topic questions for the week?
AR: I am particularly intrigued by the fifth question: “How can we know when our “acts of resistance” are impotent and ineffectual vs. emancipatory and transforming?” I believe that Devika can co-opt this question. She can use this question to examine her own positionality as a teacher who aspires to do emancipatory pedagogy. I want her to salvage her experiences from this class–to use them for her own betterment and hopefully the betterment of others. I believe that it is necessary that she begins the process of examining her own pedagogical positionality. For example, what are its origins? What kind of society does it promote? Whose interests does it serve? Does it foster new realities and possibilities? And, so forth. We begin to discuss how the new paper might look. My suggestions amuse her. She thinks I am being mischievous, that I will get her kicked out of the class.
DC: He tells me that I need to take all the comments that have been made on my papers in this class and use them to speak of resistance, penetration, expectations, and emancipation. (Jokingly, he also suggests that I get the comments of other students who are suffering as much as I am, especially those who have been getting low grades and threatening to go postal) How can I do that? Isn’t that wrong? Can I address this very class in my paper? I tell him that I need an “A” in the class and I can’t take these risks. Yet, I am very tempted. He telIs me that I need to become the voice of the ‘order,’ in this case, the instructor, and deconstruct how I propagate the dominant pedagogical order in my own teaching. I am intrigued by the strategy and the challenge that it presents to me. We decide to use my own papers, the comments, and the syllabus as artifacts to discuss the social reproduction of the dominant pedagogical order. I am anxious to begin. I feel the sentences forming themselves.
DC: The paper is written. I call Amardo and begin reading.
When do we know that our “acts of resistance are ineffectual and impotent versus emancipatory and transforming? As I began reading the topic questions for the week, I began to ponder upon the notion of emancipation? What does it mean to emancipate and be emancipated? How can we be transformed? And, can we be transformed? What are “acts of resistance” and when do they become impotent and/or ineffectual? I engaged Willis’s Learning to Labor: How working class kids get working class jobs, with the hope of finding answers to some of these questions.
As I began to understand Willis’s claims, I began look inward and around me. As a teaching assistant, I am entrenched in the institution of academe where I find myself, to some extent, reproducing a pedagogical order that is as hard to resist as class reproduction. In this paper, I hope to explore, in brief, some characteristics of this form of reproduction of the pedagogical order as I myself perpetuate it. I try to understand the “acts of resistance” that I, as an instructor, engage in and how this resistance is perhaps no match for the formal structure. Finally, I hope with the aid of Paulo Freire’s ideas about education, to support a model that can perhaps foster greater emancipation than our current pedagogical models. My goals in this paper could perhaps be considered too “grand,” yet, I am ‘beginning’ a process of reflection that presents one ‘micro’ way at looking at pedagogical order.
Willis offers a compelling argument for the social reproduction of the working class in a case study of “the lads” of Hammertown school. The study shows us how these kids through “their own activity and ideological development, reproduce themselves as a working class” (1977, p. xi). Their “act of resistance” is their aiding and participation in a counter-school culture which, through its informality, pushes against the formal institutional structure. A key characteristic of this resistance is “having a laff” which exhibits their approach to work. In other words, these kids are able to look through, understand and name the nature of the knowledge they receive in school as ‘useless.’ Issues of masculinity, sexuality and race also aid and abet this counter-culture, and contribute to the view of institutional knowledge as worthless. This resistance entails their partial penetration, that is, their ability to deem the knowledge they receive in that institution will not to them any good into the system. Their resistance lies in an “agentic” recognition, yet this resistance is futile because eventually through these very acts of agency “the lads” socially reproduce their working class status. Penetration becomes a mechanism of order because although the lads believe that they are resisting, they are getting sucked into the order. Their oppression lies in resistance.
As I read Willis, I was well aware that he had made the decision to study the school from the point of view of “the lads.” Yet, as I read further, I became intrigued by the notion of pedagogy as a hegemonic order. This notion interested me because it was an area of silence in the book. This area of silence helped me to investigate my own role in the reproduction of a pedagogical order. The question that I wanted to explore from my own positionality became—How do dominant pedagogical practices reproduce subordination and marginalization? Is there an interplay of class and culture in this reproduction? What are the acts of resistance in this form of reproduction? What is the penetration, if any? Does this system foster acts of agency and can it be transformed?
I began by interrogating the syllabus which I have crafted for the interpersonal communication class that I teach. Stylistically and semantically this syllabus resembles (consciously or subconsciously) what I have been given as syllabi in all of my own classes. It begins with a discussion of the objectives of the course, which, in many ways, are an outline of a political (academic/mine) agenda. It looks and reads like other syllabi. For example, my syllabus contains a course description, an outline of assignments, a course schedule, assigned readings, a break down of grade percentages, and written (and oral) assignment guidelines. On the surface level it is a socially produced cultural artifact, yet it functions at a deeper level to shape expectations.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes these expectations through the banking concept of education in which, “the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it” (p. 54). The vocational counselors at Hammertown propagate this banking concept as one of them is quoted saying, “Some of you think you can just walk in ... I don’t have the right to a good job myself, despite all the training, I don’t have the right to a promotion ... I’ve got to work towards to, work to deserve it” (p.91). The cost of a “good” job is hard work and the cost of a good education for students is to internalize the expectations imposed upon by the instructors.
In my own syllabus, there are inbuilt expectations of hard work and they come in the form of assigned readings, guides for questions to papers, and the grading system as a whole. For example, for the first assignment, I ask my students to write an autobiography and the assignment guide contains lines such as these, “ For the purpose of this assignment, attempt to write a short story about yourself. While you do so, keep in mind the first two chapters of the textbook...” (autobiography assignment). This guideline imposes a certain expectation and limitation upon the assignment, which is internalized by the students as their own expectation. If the students deliver the goods they are rewarded with “my” grade scale, otherwise they are punished within that scale.
These expectations serve to function as penetrations from Willis’s stance. These inbuilt expectations first seem to be internalized by the students and are then scoffed upon by them as they learn to “play the game” of banking education. Students begin to understand that the knowledge that they are ‘receiving’ in a classroom is based on a reward and cost model of education. As Freire points out, “the teacher acts and the student has the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher” (p. 94). While the Hammertown lads recognize this and act upon it through their counter-culture, my own students, not possessing a counter-culture (to my knowledge), either learn to play the game, learn to lose, or are forced to lose. In all ways they are subordinated and marginalized because in each case they have a false notion of agency—resistance that is, perhaps, futile. Agency is contingent upon the whims of the instructor.
As students begin writing papers and taking exams in class, I present their efforts with a barrage of feedback. The feedback itself can be viewed as a social reproduction. Some of these are:
(My own comments from graded papers)
As I write these comments, they sound awfully familiar to me as comments which I, myself, have received on my own graduate papers, in my M.A. as well as Ph.D. program. I have also noticed the comments that some of my own peers make in their student papers. One of these is particularly dehumanizing and can be paraphrased such as, “Show this sentence to ten people and see if they can understand it.” These comments are continuously reproduced in university classrooms reinforcing a mode of learning which the students have no hand in co-constructing.
This leads then to a level of resentment among students who, if they are not receiving competent grades, begin to question the system. In the introductory public speaking class where students are mostly freshman and have not yet penetrated the system, resentment shows up in the form of questions such as, “But, I don’t really agree with this grade. I did all that the assignment required.” This ‘act of resistance’ exhibits an understanding of the knowledge claims of the system, and a helplessness at the inability to completely penetrate it. Other resentful comments include questions such as, “How is it that I am doing ok in my Physics class, but I keep getting these terrible grades in yours?” Other examples of oppression follow such as this:
At first students try to penetrate the system with face-to-face aggressive questions, when these don’t work they reconcile with it and learn how to play the game. Playing the game means choosing topics for speeches that have been done over and over again because it will ensure them a good grade, knowing that the instructor will be terribly bored listening to the speech and if not a C, a B is definitely guaranteed.
These voices are, in many ways, the voices of Willis’s “lads” some of whom begin school by being “ear’oles,” but as they realize the “worthless” knowledge structure (penetration), they begin a futile resistance. As I have already mentioned, this resistance is physically realized in the “laff,” in equating manual labor with positive masculinity, and mental labor with feminine and static qualities. Both the forms of resistance (among my students and the lads) are futile and become a mere artifact that cannot shake the system.
Back in the contemporary college classroom, many back and forth comments by students and instructors deal with a specific style of writing. As these students write their papers they are told that their writing has ‘stylistic problems’ and that they need help in the writing lab. To say that there is a stylistic problem means taking a particular cultural stance. Notions of an accepted ‘style’ of college writing present a form of cultural reproduction. What constitutes style becomes a hierarchical structural issue. Who and what is to say that this stylistic ‘problem’ is not a ‘difference?’ To place upon style the value of problem reinforces a particular hierarchical order.
Other impositions of the hierarchical order include expectations for ‘lively’ discussions in the classrooms. This comes in the form of placing a grade on the level of participation in the class. In my syllabus, I state under policies, “The success of this class is largely dependent upon our critical engagement with the material at hand. Each person’s meaningful participation is intrinsic and will be welcomed.” This is, in itself an expectation that the students are expected to embody as the semester progresses. It holds within it a limitation by suggesting a particular ‘critical’ way of engaging with the material. While, on the one hand, participation is welcomed, on the other hand limits are placed upon this very participation.
There is a notion in our current pedagogical order which echoes Freire’s belief that the banking concept of education looks upon human beings as manageable entities who are adaptable. There is a dichotomy between teacher as subject and student as object. It is this dichotomy that becomes the basis for the reinforcement of the pedagogical order. This dichotomy makes the instructor as well as the student into the oppressed.
So, in this ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressive’ system are there possibilities of resistance and can this resistance bring about transformation? What are my acts of resistance? And are they futile? I think my own acts of resistance can be found in my syllabus where I refer to myself as a “facilitator” instead of an instructor. I use the word “we” instead of “I” as I outline policies. For example, in the attendance section I write, “The success of this class is largely dependent upon the presence of each one of us.” I believe that I try, on one level, to break the subject/object dichotomy. However, as the syllabus progresses I have to bow down to the reward and cost banking model, because to make a complete break from it will mean pushing too hard against the status quo, and therefore being exposed to the system’s wrath. In many ways, I feel like the “lads” in that my resistance, although present, is a semantic resistance. I understand the oppressive knowledge the system generates, and I resist, but not enough to transform.
As I re-read my essay, I feel that there seems to be no ‘hope’ out of this repressive social reproductive system. Yet, the only possibility seems to be still present in Freire’s concept of the “conscientizacao,” a term that refers to “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (preface to Pedagogy of the Oppressed). Freire offers a model of problem-solving education which is rooted in a dialogic (which Freire understands as revolutionary) way of looking at the world. Unlike the banking model which fails to acknowledge men and women as historical beings, Freire’s model takes people’s historicity as a starting point. Its fundamental position is that “people subjected to domination must fight for their own emancipation” (p. 67). Freire propagates a model of education as a practice of freedom rather than a practice of domination. Under this model teachers and students become “subjects” of the educational process by “overcoming authoritarianism and an oppressive intellectualism” (p. 67). It enables people “through dialogue” to overcome their false perception of reality. This model bases itself on creativity, reflection and action upon reality.
In many ways, “the lads” through their partial penetration achieve a level of reflection, but this reflection is futile. So, how then can Freire’s model help? This is an old model, a model that perhaps did not see into the future the extent that a banking concept of education would take. Yet, this model offers hope by offering a dialogic way of looking at the world, by looking at education as something that is not complete, but “constantly remade in praxis” (p. 65), by not accepting a “well-behaved” present or a pre-determined future, but roots itself in a dynamic present. This makes the model revolutionary and, perhaps, evergreen.
While I admit that this paper makes some grand claims about the nature of the pedagogical order in which I find myself entrenched, I find that it offers through its reflexivity the possibility of reflection. Reading Willis opened my eyes to my own experience of being a perpetuator of the dominant pedagogical order. I find solace in reading Freire’s model as a model that offers hope and possibility because it is rooted in dialogic negotiation and negates the subject/object split that is perpetuated by the banking model of pedagogy. To completely unpack this model in the light of the current system is beyond the scope of this paper. I only hope that by offering these reflections and the model, I have begun a small transformation.
AR: I like the paper. It reads well. It is honest and more than adequately fulfils the requirement for the reaction paper. I am by no means surprised by the grade. But, I am still troubled as to why grades still matter to her and why she is still allowing others to dictate how she should feel about her work. Of course, I find the notion of grades in pedagogy ridiculous, especially at the graduate level. But then again, academics now run the place.
DC: I call Amardo a few hours after class. I have received an A- on the paper. I am relieved that the paper met acceptability. As I have done in the past, after looking at the grade, I begin reading the comments. There aren’t too many because the paper has passed muster. But I am always curious to know what it is that makes a paper cross over from an A- to an A and then an A+. This time the comments are less harsh, yet some patterns remain the same.
. am told that I need to correct my ‘sloppy’ editing mistakes. In addressing my comments about ‘writing style as a particular cultural stance,’ the instructor asks me or tells me that there are of course some styles that are better than others and value judgments can certainly be made about writing style. I am clearly being told that certain writing styles are favored over others. In the paper I have broken out of a particular style into a narrative one, yet that ‘break’ is not addressed. The break is not acknowledged, perhaps, because my instructor is limited to merely a theoretical understanding of narrative and not narrative as praxis. I don’t think he understands that I am coming into being through this writing. My ‘break’ is an act of resistance, an act of affirmation of my being, which appears to have been recognized as such, but neutralized and deemed ineffectual through comments made about the ‘superiority’ of certain styles of writing.
AR: Devika’s observations are on the mark. The matter is not about what writing styles are superior and others less so, but one of negotiation, that is, the opportunity of the ‘other’ to contest and challenge the writing style of the status quo. To claim as the instructor does in this case that some writing styles are simply superior to other writing styles is politically and theoretically naïve. It shows a lack of understanding of the power machinations that make certain ways of being superior, certain ways of writing privileged, and other ways of being, other ways of writing, less so. Ultimately, this naiveté makes for bad pedagogy. I want Devika to understand the kind of harm this kind of pedagogy inflicts on the human condition, and how it undercuts the evolution of new ways of being and understanding the world. At the same time, I want her to understand why I hope for her to resist this pedagogical colonization and her moral obligation to do so.
DC: I am beginning to understand, albeit peripherally, the extent of my own entrenchment in a pedagogical and institutional order. An order that only harms me. I am, however, as stated in my paper, more concerned with being an instrument in the perpetuation of this order and thereby inflicting this kind of harm on other human beings. I have deepened my resolve to continue the project that is emerging out of my discussion with Amardo.
. find, as I often heard Amardo say, that academics live in the minds of other theorists. The process of academization is essentially a process of revising, re-labeling, repackaging, and regurgitating arguments that have long been around. The process thrives on keeping us afraid.
AR: I am always revealing my positionality to my students and my advisees. I have my own ambitions and tribulations. I believe that this practice of openness is integral to good pedagogy. My students and advisees need to know that I am a political being. I am of the world and the condition of the world bears upon my humanity and my family. I have as much stake in the condition of the world as any other person. I also want my students and advisees to know that I come to them as a full human being. In being inherently political, emancipatory pedagogy foregrounds the deep moral responsibility that comes with pedagogy. Being open about my positionality also allows me to account for the origins and implications of my different positions. It allows me to foster an environment where students can explore and discuss the origins and implications of their own positionality. As such, an emancipatory pedagogy allows us to locate ourselves in the world, to explore other locations, and to identify ways of reaching such locations. It fosters responsibility–responsibility to the world, each other, and to ourselves. Just as much I push my students and advisees to use writing to come into being, just as much I use pedagogy to come into my own being. We are deeply intertwined.
For me, the challenge of doing emancipatory pedagogy is stretching my humanity to give courage and hope to my students and advisees in a world that attempts to keep them afraid and suspicious. After all, such a pedagogy assumes that good pedagogy is foremost about a way of being and much less about a method of teaching.
DC: I am continuing to read the comments and to understand how the fear and suspicion is socially reproduced. In my paper, I have also addressed the notion of prescribed readings and how these readings are treated as grand narratives in classrooms. I discuss my own experiences in some graduate classes where certain books come to be given privileged status. I suggest that oftentimes students do not have ‘choices.’ To this, I receive an admonishing response. I am told, “Why did you choose to attend such a university and matriculate in such a program? Is there any agency here or just social structure?”
AR: This instructor’s comment puts the burden on Devika to act. In other words, she is being told that if she is discontented with the dominant pedagogical order, her only supposed option is to leave. The instructor is masking the possibility of other options so as to release himself of any responsibility. He wants to deny any interrogation of his role in the propagation of the hegemonic order. But there are many other options. One option is for Devika to stay, to resist, to acknowledge the discontent, to help expose the nature of this dominant order, and to help germinate a more emancipatory pedagogical order. A next option is for the instructor to come clean about his own positionality and interrogate the implications of this positionality. I would have preferred that Devika’s discontent be empathically acknowledged rather than admonished. The masking of the instructor’s positionality puts no burden on him to forge a different way of being in the world, specifically a more compassionate way of being. The instructor’s supposed apolitical response works to mask the ideological forces that are determining and legitimizing this dominant pedagogical order. He is making believe that there is really no opportunity to undercut the status quo. This pedagogy diminishes students. It gives them no courage, no hope, no affirmation, no support.
DC: Yet, while I encounter the dominant pedagogical order, I have been fortunate to encounter spaces that promote a different kind of pedagogy. While one diminishes me, the other elevates my humanity. While one imprisons with its academic dishonesty, the other sets me free by helping me nurture my intellectual honesty. I have obviously taken sides in this matter. I am, as Amardo says, a political being. I have a stake in this. I have chosen the side that enriches my humanity and the human condition. I am choosing honest freedom.
In many ways I am like the lads in Willis’s study because I have chosen to be honest. But unlike them, my ‘break’ is not futile. It is not futile because my break is about more than just resistance. My break is now sustained by my commitment to find a different reality by constantly interrogating my own positionality and exploring the realities of others who seem to have successfully broken with the dominant pedagogical order. As Rawlins (1996) and Tompkins (1996) suggest, this commitment itself is a form of resistance, but it is a transformative resistance. The lads, unfortunately, have not been exposed to a pedagogy that pushes them to interrogate their positionality. Consequently, their resistance is reactionary.
My commitment, on the other hand, is transformative because it assumes that radically different realities are possible, plausible, and sustainable; specifically, realities that make for a more humane and compassionate world. My commitment is also transformative because I espouse a kind of social world described by Bochner (1997) as a “world of connection, contact, and relationship” (p. 435). It is a world of communication rather than representation where “consequences, values, politics, and moral dilemmas are abundant and central” (Bochner, p. 435). While representation gives the illusion of “transcendental observation,” communication favors “the possibilities of dialogue and collaboration” (Bochner, 1997, p. 435). The transformative potential of my own resistance lies in the commitment to a relational and dialogical world.
Bochner(1997), Rawlins (2000) and Tompkins (1996) suggest various levels of academic, pedagogical and scholarly transformation. Rawlins (2000) argues for a pedagogy that has originss in academic friendships between the student and teacher. Bochner (1997) tells us to break the bifurcation between the personal and academic, and turn to narrative in order to challenge the dominant pedagogical and academic order. Tompkins (1996) too offers a pedagogy that closes the gap between the academic and personal.
As I commit myself to honesty, I find myself re-reading Bochner, Rawlins, Tompkins, and others. Although, I have no intent on modeling myself on them, as my life experiences are different, I realize the transformative potential of their worldviews. As a start, I have embraced a narrative world, a world that is not only relational, but also moral, political, ethical, and ideological. Narrative helps me to stay committed to and acknowledge my various positionalities. By narrative, I mean not only a method of writing, but a way of being through which I embrace and question every moral and political position that I hold. As I continue to write in my doctoral career, I open up my personal life into the classes I teach, the classes I take, and the papers I write. Narrative releases me from the bifurcation of research and pedagogy, personal and academic, teacher and learner. It embeds my full humanity in the world. The process of representing our dialogue in this paper exhibits the transformative potential of the ontology that I have begun to embrace and explore.
AR: I am always mindful of imposing my pedagogical stance on Devika. Our life experiences are different. We have different origins, different journeys, and probably even different destinations. She has to develop her own pedagogical vision. However, I would never encourage her to simply resist as she already knows the reactionary nature of any stance that is premised purely on resistance. I want her to believe that other realities and possibilities exist, and that she has the potentiality to forge a different reality, hopefully one that is more humane and compassionate. As Bochner (1997) observes:
We need to face up to the ways we use orthodox academic practices to discipline, control, and perpetuate ourselves and our traditions, stifling innovative practices, discouraging creativity, inhibiting criticism of our own institutional conventions, making it difficult to take risks, and severing academic life from emotional and spiritual life. No matter how much change may threaten us, we need to consider alternatives—different goals, different styles of research and writing, different ways of bringing the academic and the personal into conversation with each other. (p. 433)
. constantly push my students to interrogate their ontological, epistemological and axiological positionality. This practice is at the center of my pedagogical stance. I believe that it forces students to better understand their humanity and to recognize their responsibility for the condition of the world by exposing the different forces that constitute their humanity and relation to the world. In my view, it is a pedagogical stance that empowers and humanizes us. It softens our stridency and lessons the threats of our different truths. It also coaxes us to be more dialogical. Most of all, I believe that it ends the false divides–e.g. theory versus praxis, political versus personal, quantitative versus qualitative–that block us from realizing and reckoning with how deeply we are actually embedded within the world and each other. For me, acknowledging this embeddedness is integral to the evolution of new realities and possibilities.
Bochner, A. P. (1997). It’s about time: Narrative and the divided self. Qualitative Inquiry, 3 (4), 418-438.
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Rawlins, W. K. (2000). Teaching as a mode of friendship. Communication Theory, 10 (1), 5-26.
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