As compositionists attempting to enact a postmodern pedagogy, we arrive with a sedimented history. We emerge from an array of pedagogical paradigms, ranging from current traditional to radically postmodern. As teachers and scholars, we realize that, at this moment in the postmodern pedagogical project, in spite of concerted intellectual resistance to reproduction, any effort to enact a postmodern pedagogy inadvertently draws upon multi-layered, often contradictory perspectives to shape classroom practice.
However, pedagogical practices often do not flow smoothly from one approach to the next; rather they are characterized by discontinuous learning where the teacher’s new knowledges are juxtaposed with routinized classroom performances, producing gaps and contradictions. Unfortunately, the disjunctures that may result from disparate and unselfreflexive pedagogical practices often seriously undermine attempts to create rather than disseminate knowledge in the writing classroom. Movement away from the transmission model of education toward the recognition that the classroom can function as a site for the creation of knowledge makes teaching performance a crucial aspect of the educational process.
As teachers dedicated to reclaiming pedagogy and changing classroom practices, our efforts to develop pedagogical aims grounded in a poststructural, postmodern theoretical context have led us to scrutinize the ways that our own sedimented educational history shapes our classroom performances. The aim of the following discussion is to articulate our resistance to traditional feminist pedagogy as a theoretical and experiential response to problems with implementing a postmodern pedagogy. More generally, it is a response to Patricia Harkin’s charge that “we need to have models of knowledge production—concrete accounts of proposed changes in institutional procedures that tell us what kind of knowledge teachers make, how they make it and why it should count” (yr. 1991 p. 125). This discussion accounts for our particular teaching histories and provides one version of the material and intellectual ground for constructing our resistance to a liberal-humanist feminist pedagogy.
Teacher response to student writing is but one aspect of a larger undertaking that resists the prevailing conception of the classroom as the teacher’s private domain. As Harkin notes “perhaps . . . we think of teaching as a site or moment when we are free, behind closed doors, to be eclectic, to ignore recognized procedure, to do what needs to be done without worrying about being watched, evaluated, tested.” (yr. 1991 p. 138). This perspective not only denies intellectual accountability, but also forecloses possibilities for productively changing classroom practice. Consideration of such activities as the development of syllabi and assignment sequences, class discussion, one-on-one teacher/student conferences, and teacher response to student writing as intellectual work supports and informs the production of knowledge. Thus, while the discussion that follows functions as a local account, it does not deny but rather affirms the crucial role of critical theory in pedagogical practice. Drawing on Jameson, Harkin calls it “cognitive mapping” which “in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential date (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conception of the geographic totality” (yr. 1996 p. 136). The experiences of the writing teacher then intersect with theories to support and inform both.
More specifically, teacher response to student writing operates as a site for the intersection of theoretical constructs. As Richard Straub concludes, our professional talk about teacher response is still dominated by the concept of control (yr. 1996 p. 223). Scholarship in the field, according to Straub, views teacher response as a binary with directive teacher response as misuse (or overuse) of teacher authority and facilitative teacher responses as desirable because they respect the students right to their own texts (yr. 1996 p. 223). This dichotomy strikes a familiar chord with teachers who have attempted to enact feminist pedagogies in the writing classroom. As Straub notes, for many composition scholars, directive teacher responses are perceived as male or patriarchal while facilitative responses are perceived as feminine and nurturing. However, these binary configurations oversimplify examinations of teacher response to student writing and feminist pedagogy alike, and they reduce the complexity of the issues surrounding power, knowledge, and authority. While implementing poststructural and postmodern critical theories to the specific process of teacher response to student writing certainly complicates the situation, this complexity offers possibilities for profitably altering practice. For example, we could consider the possibility that facilitative response is indirectly controlling, even manipulative, because it asks students to guess what the teacher thinks needs revision rather than making what the teacher thinks explicit. If that is true, we then call into question both the way we respond to student writings and the efficacy of a traditional feminist approach. Rethinking response to student writing must, however, continually take into account Gesa E. Kirsch and Joy S. Ritchie’s general warning that a postmodern feminist perspective leads us to continually question our ability to locate ourselves as researchers and to locate the participants in our research. We need to take into account what psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, and postmodern critics have already shown us about the limitations of our ability to fully understand our own motivations and perspectives (yr. 1995 p. 10). Thus, while the feminist, postmodern feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructural, and performative theories considered here function as the ground for transformative pedagogy, their limitations, both those considered and those overlooked, leave vast spaces for further work.
The student is openly angry; his face red and contorted. He approaches my desk with the graded paper I have just handed back. He considers himself a B student and has earned a C on a major essay. He thrusts the paper in my face pointing to my comments. He is not protesting my criteria for evaluation but insisting that I have misread his writing, or maybe he is suggesting that I lack the ability to read. I respond with the observation that he is too angry for discussion at the moment and we will talk during my office hours the next day. The next day, he has veiled his hostility and with forced courtesy asks what he has to do for the remainder of the semester to get a B from the class
The intensity of this student’s anger and his use of physical intimidation during this incident suggest the possibility that gender, or more accurately misogyny, may have been a factor in this interaction. The cognitive rhetoric-based pedagogy of this particular class, however, did not provide a space for publicly addressing larger political issues, such as gender, race and/or class. As the second course in the undergraduate writing sequence, this course centered on the interrogation of the discourse communities of each student’s major field of study, an approach framed by Janice A. Lauer, Gene Montague, Andrea Lunsford, and Janet Emig’s Four Worlds of Writing, a standard text for Cognitivists. My classroom practice, which would have easily won Maxine Hairston’s approval, focused exclusively on the composing process, heuristics, the focus/arrangement/ development/style and mechanics of students’ arguments, and the revision process with group work and peer revisions undertaken solely for the purpose of assisting individual students to generate and revise their texts. This text-centered focus places classroom practice itself outside the bounds of open interrogation so that manifestations of these larger issues in the classroom remained suppressed. Barbara Henning recognizes this lack and judges Four Worlds inadequate on the grounds that it offers “an elaborate, systematized curriculum that progresses from private to public writing, from expressive to referential aims, using specific strategies and classical analyses of audience which assume that students don’t know how to think and that minds are structured like machines that process information”(yr. 1991 p. 677).
Focusing on cognitive processing does not allow for consideration of the socio-political or the psychological aspects of the pedagogical project and leaves teachers ill-equipped to respond to unconventional or even disruptive behaviors, such as this irate student’s outburst. Henning suggests that emphasis on the cognitive processes of the student does not adequately address the needs of students who come from marginalized cultures and working-class communities . . . and find themselves unable to speak the social language of their thinking”(yr. 1991 p. 678). Henning helps us to better understand the frustration of this particular protesting student, a farmer’s son from a small town high school. However, the intensity of his anger leads us to consider the possibility that inarticulation is not his only problem with the class and that perhaps the teacher’s available pedagogical tools for response leaves her ill-prepared to address the students at a larger level.
More precisely, should we consider teaching style as an aspect of this ill preparation? A cognitive rhetoric oversimplifies the student’s learning process and at the same time implicitly encourages the teacher to adapt a nurturing stance, functioning as support for invention and as revision coach in a deliberate move away from the current-traditional model of teacher as arbitrator of correctness. The student-centered classroom of the cognitivist, in fact, shares many of the same characteristics as the of the expressionist who encourages the student to get in touch with the authentic voice that lives within us all, waiting only to be expressed. Susan Jarratt critiques this kind of teacher who, while “creating a supportive climate in the classroom and validating student experience . . . leaves those who adopt it insufficiently prepared to negotiate the oppressive discourses of racism, sexism, and classism surfacing in the composition classroom” (yr. 1991 p. 106). This assessment applies equally to “student-centered courses where the instructor allows students a wide range of choice in writing topics” (yr. 1991 p. 106). Jarratt’s version of the student-centered classroom is expressionistic or subjective, and while the aim of the cognitivist project diverges from that of the expressionist, it places discourse back in the same place. This time, student’s cognitive processes, not their authentic voices, are the center of the student-centered classroom. The developmental model parallels that of the expressionist in its narrow focus on the student and its dismissal of the social and political context. While a cognitivist teacher might protest that taking on the “complexities of social differentiation and inequity in late-twentieth century capitalist society”(yr. 1991 p. 109) is out of her province, the female composition teacher cannot ignore Jarratt’s point that “[b]ecause most high school teachers are women and may be seen as maternal figures, the role of the supportive, nurturing composition teacher repeats that childish pattern and puts the teacher at a disadvantage in any attempt to assert a counterhegemonic authority as a woman”(yr. 1991 p. 111).
A teacher’s refusal to acknowledge the ways in which gendered identity may negatively shape pedagogical interactions, combined with the adaptation of a nurturing role, creates a classroom environment which denies a significant portion of its own functioning. The juxtaposition of the highly structured cognitivist model in a classroom where the teacher attempts to function as a cheerleading nurturer also suppresses the articulation of any conflict. This refusal to embrace authority in other aspects of the classroom intensifies and distorts conflict surrounding grades as that space becomes the only site for the clear articulation of teacher authority. The teacher’s written response to student writing becomes the specific arena for contention since students perceive these comments as justification for grades. An area already fraught with tension then becomes the site for students to act out “childish patterns” of interaction with maternal figures. Further, since grades generally come at the end of projects and are most generally non-negotiable, such conflicts usually end quickly with teacher self-defensiveness and student capitulation. This retreat, however, means that the student grudgingly accedes to rather than grants the teacher’s authority. These skirmishes frustrate teachers who refuse to acknowledge authority as an issue in the classroom and who consider both the necessity for grading and student fixation on grades as impediments to a more nurturing pedagogy.
Grades circumscribe the student-centered classroom. Grades point to the inescapability of teacher authority. Grades position the teacher as the one-who-is-supposed-to-know, if only as the one who is supposed to know how to get the grade. And this bottom-line is often the source of student resistance and teacher avoidance. Susan Stanford Friedman relates her own experience:
As a teacher in a university setting, then, I de-emphasized my authority to establish the course. . . . Attempting to dissolve an assumption of hierarchy in both mine and my students’ heads, I thought of myself as a resource person who would facilitate student development of critical thought. (yr. 1985 p. 204)
Like many feminist pedagogists, Friedman speaks here of developing a woman’s studies course, teaching feminism and relying upon a humanistic feminist perspective for the development of her classroom practices, practices which closely replicate the expressionistic composition classroom which Jarratt critiques. Her efforts to “de-emphasize her authority” and “facilitate student’s development” perpetuate a maternal model. Over the course of the semester, Friedman experiences a “single, stunning insight. . . .
as feminist teachers, we have paradoxically ignored the lens of gender as it operates in classroom dynamics and pedagogy. Both our students and ourselves have been socialized to believe (frequently at a non-conscious level) that any kind of authority is incompatible with the feminine. . . . A man stepping into the role of professor has a certain authority granted to him by his students that operates immediately. Women, on the other hand, must earn that authority and respect, which is in any event often granted with great resentment, even hostility. . . . Thus clashes at grading time. (yr. 1985 p. 206).
Here Friedman conflates issues of authority with traditional feminism and overlooks the possibility that a facilitative stance by a female teacher is perceived as a manifestation of maternal authority rather than no authority at all. A feminist pedagogy that stands in opposition to the patriarchal model denies the maternal as a particular kind of authority. This denial demonstrates, as Jarratt argues, “the deep ambivalence toward and repression of the mother in our culture” (yr. 1991 p. 113). A focus on male configurations of power situates the female always in relation to that male and represses the understanding that within the confines of her own classroom, constructions of female authority dominate. While, for the feminist teacher, attaching negative connotations of authority with the male may valorize a facilitative or nurturing stance, the female teacher “cannot” assume patriarchal authority, so there is no need for renunciation of that role. The presence of a female body in the classroom denies that possibility. Interrogation of configurations of maternal authority, then, more accurately locates the sources of tension in the classroom of the female teacher.
When I first walked into the class on that blistering summer day, Rob was seated second from the front in the center row. He seemed intense and somewhat restless. Rob didn’t look at a soul the entire class period, his eyes dating from a point just above my head to the ringed binder sitting open on his desk. Every now and then Rob would start, as though a thought had just struck him, and he would then furiously jot something down in his notebook.
Throughout the beginning of the semester, Rob showed passive-aggressive tendencies, rolling or snorting when someone made a point with which he didn’t agree or closing his books and stacking them on the desk as though ready to leave. However, Rob refused to participate in class discussions, preferring instead to show his opinions through his actions. It wasn’t until a student began discussing the pay gap between men and women that his usually constrained anger came out. Without waiting to hear anything she had to say on the subject, Rob burst into a tirade about working women. He stated that his grandfather died because of working women, explaining that the company was forced to hire women but they couldn’t perform the required duties, so his grandfather had to do his job as well as the women’s. His tone was belligerent and angry. After he finished, a full three or four minutes later, the silence in the classroom was deafening. He looked around the room, slammed his book shut and stormed out of the room muttering, “I don’t have time for this feminist shit; I need a real professor who wants to teach something.” After he left the class continued to discuss the issue, albeit with more restraint than usual, and neither Rob nor his outburst were ever mentioned again.
Implicit in my interaction with Rob is my tendency to ignore the politics of the classroom environment. By moving on with the class, I ignored the politics of the classroom, preferring instead to see that environment as politically neutral, just as I preferred to see myself as gender neutral, because to do anything else would destroy my delicately balanced resistance to the polarized paradigms present to me. Rob, however, made me rethink my place as a female teacher in the classroom. As a result of my rejection of both traditional and feminist pedagogical stances, as well as my frustration with being left no alternative, I had come to the point at which I ignored my own implication in a confrontational pedagogy and instead encouraged students to be self-reflexive while I concocted a smoke-screen in order to obscure my own political manifestation in the classroom.
Rob made me think more about the ways my female body impacts classroom dynamics, but it was easy to dismiss Rob as “unusual.” Ultimately, however I had to rethink my stance and acknowledge my body as a political signifier. In a freshman/sophomore composition class I asked students to respond to the class in ways similar to the peer responses we had worked on all semester. As expected, adjectives used to describe my teaching included demanding, fair, tough, assertive. However, when asked to choose a metaphor that best describes the teacher, many students chose the gendered teacher-as-mother. Instead of nurturing mother, which they couldn’t reconcile with my teaching style, these students instead chose the closest thing they could come to; [the metaphors] remained gendered and even motherly, but they positioned me as bitch-mother, as nag.
That these freshman students insisted upon equating gender with reproduction in spite of her best efforts to deny a maternal role cannot be dismissed as the naivete of young students who still dwell in the realm of the familial. A feminist scholar, Margo Culley takes the same stance when she speaks of “academics who are female [who] (in an effort to deny that they are born without legitimate claims to authority) cling to exaggerated forms of arbitrary power” and “become the sexless terrors who inhabit our myths about teaching spinsters” (yr. 1985 p. 214-5). An avowed feminist who encourages the exercise of authority in the classroom through the expression of her own anger, Culley does not question her own assumption that female authority must be configured through a maternal model. If we are not maternal, we are then “spinsters” and thus “sexless terrors.” Gendered identification is oversimplified and inextricably linked to reproduction and thus heterosexuality, a binary that denies the possibility for disrupting familial patterns of interaction.
While this teacher recognizes that she cannot escape the conflation of female and maternal in the classroom, the perspective that a nonthreatening, natural nurturing pedagogy provides the most favorable classroom environment can also be critiqued. In Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education, Redding Sugg, Jr. denounces the “motherteacher” and declares that her origins are in “the pedagogy of love” which through “personal manipulation” keeps students “bottled up more or less quietly in the classroom”(yr. 1978 p. 27). This attack on the smother-mother classroom and of the teacher “personal manipulation” certainly characterizes the teacher’s soft-spoken, repressive response to the uncorked, aggressive student in the first classroom scenerio. Ultimately, the teaching style seems primarily aimed toward conflict avoidance in an effort to shape a congenial classroom environment, one which the teacher views as a necessity for developing the confidence necessary for novice writers to perform. While Sugg’s masculinist attack could be dismissed as just that, masculinist, he finds support in Sandra Lee Bartky’s Marxist interrogation of women’s emotional labor. Although Bartky’s examination focuses upon personal or domestic relationships, her description is familiar to many female writing teachers:
To give [emotional] support is to tend to a person’s state of mind in such a way to make his sinking less likely; it is to offer him comfort, typically by the bandaging up of his emotional wounds or to offer him sustenance, typically by the feeding of his self-esteem. (yr. 1990 p. 102).
Translated to classroom practice, similar efforts to function in the capacity of facilitator or coach rely upon rescue and support and may also be subject to Bartky’s charge that “many feminist thinkers overestimate the efficacy of female nurturance” (yr. 1990 p. 105). The notion that denial of traditional patterns of authority and the offer of support in a “feeling of out-flowing personal power” simply represses that authority, invites the reproduction of familial dynamics in the classroom, and, in fact, may disempower both student and teacher as the student is infantilized, and the teacher mistakes the “feeling of power”“ in place of the effective power we have every right to exercise in the world (yr. 1990 p. 116). Locating the emotive as the source of female power is but an illusion of power and discounts any ability to disrupt a familial dynamic in the classroom.
The nature of “effective power” becomes the crucial issue for the female teacher. If the female teacher cannot assume traditionally respected male or paternal authority and the authority of the feminine is relegated to a denigrated configuration of the maternal, there seems little space for articulation of a productive female pedagogy. However, the notion that the classroom replicates the familial drama functions as a foundational, if not often deeply interrogated, understanding of the educational dynamic. This familial dynamic, particularly as it is configured through the teacher’s female body, can be productively interrogated through post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory. More precisely, as Jane Gallop observes, “psychoanalysis in its technique if not its theory offers an alternative to coherent, unified representation” (yr. 1991 p. 414). The impossibility of such unified representation is vividly demonstrated in psychoanalytic terms through Jacques Lacan’s articulation of the mirror-stage, the point at which the individual recognizes the gap between fragmented, serial perceptions and the unified image presented in the mirror. This literal and/or metaphoric stage of development then functions as the basis for the familial dynamic. Lacan views the mirror stage as
a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial-identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality . . . and lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (yr. 1977 p. 506)
The drive to totality marks the initiation of desire that seeks completion through the Other, that which is perceived as capable of filling the void, which creates the gap.
Shoshona Felman draws upon the work of Lacan to articulate a dynamic of learning and teaching which denies representation and reproduction:
Knowledge, in other words, is not a substance but a structural dynamic: it is not “contained” by any individual but comes about out of mutual apprenticeship between two partially unconscious speeches which both say more than they know. Dialogue is thus the radical condition of learning and knowledge, the analytically constitutive condition through which ignorance becomes structurally informative, knowledge is essentially, irreducibly dialogic. “No knowledge,” writes Lacan, “can be supported or transported by one alone” (Scilet I, 59). (yr. 1982 p. 33)
Thus, in Felman’s view, the willingness to enter into dialogue and the understanding that both we and our students “say more than we know” provides the grounds for the production of knowledge instead of the teacher serving as container for the dispensation of knowledge. In her analysis of Luce Irigaray’s
Questions, Jane Gallop describes the function of the dialectic and moves the pedagogical project to the overtly sexual:
The process of questioning is a specific dialectic shattering stable assumptions and producing textual associations. To bring in ready-made definitions as answers to questions is not really to allow one’s discourse or authority to be called into question. Such prepared answers are not part of a specific dialogue, but simply immutable truth that is unaffected by dialogue. That sort of relation that mocked-up artificial, Socratic dialogue of pedagogy with the “answer” prior to and independent of the question and the questioning denies any possibility for unsettling contact with the questioner’s otherness, one that might affect definition. Good pedagogic definition remains aloof from the situation, free from the desire of student and teacher, free from desire, sexually indifferent. (yr. 1991 p. 419).
As we begin to teach “through” overdetermined roles, such as that of mother-teacher, by engaging in the dialectic, we can begin the process of subverting those roles to move toward the production of knowledge. These classroom narratives, for example, provide the impetus for self-reflexivity for both teachers who chose to ignore the tensions created in the classroom by their female bodies. As a result of his problematization of feminist models, a classroom approach that seems transparent or natural becomes an issue for serious intellectual consideration. These confrontations with students shatter stable assumptions of self and provided a space for the creation of knowledge.
The convergence of theory and practice in the dynamics of social relations in the classroom demonstrates the value of a postmodern pedagogical perspective where previous articulations had failed. Before we began to see the function of gender politics in our own classrooms, textual accounts of postmodern and/or feminist pedagogies seemed to be primarily located in the problematic sites of the object of study and teaching objectives. For many feminist teachers, for example, the how and the what of practice focus almost exclusively on the what, so that gender becomes the object of study in the writing classroom. One problem with such an approach is that students frequently misread these teaching strategies through the fractured lens of identity politics. Student perception of the teacher’s intellectual stance as an instance of the teacher’s “personal opinion” may complicate classroom practice for electives such as women’s studies or literature. However, this resistance is even greater in freshman writing classes which are often required and which students expect either to be based on the literary model or “content-free.”
Our students frequently recount their experiences in previous writing classes in which they wrote about political issues, usually gender, as nightmare experiences where they struggled to learn to write what the teacher wants to hear: “I am an English 101 survivor, and the horror of it is still fresh in my mind”; or “I am happy to hear that we are not writing about gender in this class” are typical kinds of responses. In a recent discussion of the first course in the writing sequence, a student offers a somewhat more telling assessment of his previous writing instructor; “it was almost like [the teacher] compared our papers with what he would have written and graded accordingly.” Although this critique could apply to any student writing, student perception of imposition locates questions of the possibilities for learning in such an approach. Student reaction to controversial issues upon which the teacher articulates her position undermines efforts to inculcate a postmodern understanding that “the subject” [is] contradictory and multilayered, and [which] rejects the notion that individual consciousness and reason are the most important determinants in shaping human history” (yr. 1991 p. 116). In fact, such an approach inadvertently reifies the notion of the unified personal. A feminist stance is perceived as a personal choice, the result of an autonomous individual’s unique experience rather than the articulation of an intellectual position. Even if a feminist stance is carefully presented as socially constructed, students’ own social construction will still likely configure even that articulation in terms of liberal feminism. Karen Powers-Stubbs notes:
any argument I could offer from the feminist perspective was predestined to be dismissed as disqualified knowledge. Ironically, although my position as teacher granted me the authority to present my view through readings and discussion, my students’ nearly unanimous rejection of both my experiential knowledge and my scholarly knowledge worked, in effect, to silence me. (yr. 1992 p. 313)
Stubb’s insistence upon articulating an intellectual position as connected with her body is, after all, “her view” and she tacitly positions her pedagogical choices as personal, no matter how intellectually rigorous her defense of these choices may be. While students acknowledge a teacher’s authority to assign readings, that authority does not reach to embrace readings deemed as choices designed to impose personal choices. Perhaps students assume that in the writing classroom, the teacher’s “personal opinion” becomes the primary component of criteria for evaluation of their writings, a misuse of authority to coerce agreement. As bell hooks describes,
focusing on the personal in a framework that does not compel acknowledgment of the complexity of structures of domination could easily lead to misnaming, to the creation of yet another sophisticated level of non- or distorted awareness. ( yr. 1989 p. 32)
The “distorted awareness” that students (and teachers) often bring from their experience in an overtly politicized classroom calls into question the “complexities of the structures of domination” at that site.
Classroom practice is commonly judged on perceptions of individual rights: the teacher’s right to articulate a stance and the students’ right to their “own opinion” are frequently the same argument from a different location in the classroom. The postmodern teacher for whom critique of the notion of the individual guides pedagogical assumptions seeks, instead, to alter the terms of the teaching project. Perhaps the most salient aspect of postmodern critical theories is the conviction that knowledge of the self is always partial and always contingent. Paul Smith’s working definitions of the individual and the postmodern subject in Discerning the Subject offer a useful starting point for understanding this conflict:
The individual will be understood here as simply the illusion of whole and coherent personal organization, or as the misleading description of the imaginary ground on which different subject positions are colligated. (yr. 1988 p. xxxv)
Traditionally, this imaginary ground is variously posited as the essential, transcendental, and autonomous self. The dismissal of the concept of the individual cannot be replaced with an equally autonomous configuration of the subject. Subjectivity consists rather, according to Smith, as “the series or conglomeration of positions, subject positions, provisional and not necessarily indefeasible, into which a person is called momentarily by the discourses of the world that he/she inhabits” (yr. 1988 p. xxxv). Although postmodern pedagogists generally seek to interrogate the ways that discourses shape relations of power, student resistance usually begins with the refusal to acknowledge that power, thus discounting the importance of discourse as “just words.” The illusion of autonomy then functions to support the dominant structure, effectively locking the subject/ student into that order at every turn.
The notion of autonomy and self-determination requires the internalization of the gaps and contradictions that subsist in existing power relations so they are considered personal conflicts instead of the result of competing discourses. Deeming the “self” all-powerful, then, effectively paralyzes the possibility of resisting regimes of power. For within this matrix, resistance provides the only means for agency or the ability to perform. Within the “provisional” and “momentary” construction of subjectivities, agency is seen as “the idea of a form of subjectivity where, by virtue of the contradictions and disturbances in among subject-positions, the possibility (indeed the actuality) of resistance to ideological pressure is allowed for (even though that resistance too must be produced in an ideological context)” (yr. 1988 p. xxxv). Although possibility for determination in the agent/subject binary remains a highly contested issue within the perspective, resistance to the ideology of autonomous individualism shapes postmodern pedagogical practice.
Cast in resistance to the dominant liberal-humanist model of education, postmodern pedagogical practice may be best understood through interrogation of what it resists. What can be considered the apolitical, student-centered approach of cognitive pedagogy, for example, is based upon a liberal humanist perspective. Focusing on the cognitive process of students disallows critique of the “content” of that writing: the goal is simply to help students become better writers through a focus on the process of writing. For example, in the unlikely event that a student would submit a paper that critiqued feminism in an feminist teaching paradigm, the response would likely be to critique the focus, arrangement, and development of the argument rather than interrogate the assumption or values upon which the writing was based. The student’s position on issues is often considered inviolate, and questions of audience are generally considered as the task of selecting the most appropriate for the writing occasion. For the most part then, the student addresses a sympathetic reader within a narrow community, a move which is often encouraged and one which excludes the teacher as qualified to critique the values and assumptions of the text. The aim of such pedagogy is to enable students to acquire heuristics and strategies that enable them to write a well-focused, organized, and developed text.
This notion of the autonomous individual can shape most pedagogical practices, an approach often viewed as apolitical. But often texts outside of the classroom provide a different space through which to critique ideology. While working on this project, one specific “text, “ writing on the bathroom stall, led us to consider the classroom as political space in which certain ideologies remain stifled. From the middle of August until the end of October, when maintenance workers erased the text, an exchange grew until it completely covered all three walls of the partition. The following are excerpts of that conversation:
All white women are whores with diseases.
White Power will reign forever. Go back to your own country!
And by the time you fucking white powderpuffs come into power you will have completely destroyed the ozone layer and will die from the ultraviolet rays! What power will you have then? . . . . You greedy white maggots!
Why does everybody have to be so racial? Let it go! If we all keep on fighting, there will never be peace! And who cares where people came from? We are all here now. Let’s make the best of it. Just quit your bitching!
You go back to your own country, unless you are a native American, you stank ass, pale flesh, limp haired sunken ass, varicose veined should be in Europe. And that’s not even your country (although this country was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of the minorities. But where the hell will you go (you genetic mutant)!
Peace + Love = the end of racism
Written by many different hands with bold markers or timid pencil and with loops and arrows connecting commentaries, the bathroom wall conversation punctures the illusion that students do not have overt political statements that are stifled in the classroom setting where they are expected to provide “what the teacher wants.” The assumption that students are apolitical leads to the perception that teaching can also be non-political. The recognition that students do hold political positions, in this case radical racist stances, forces us to acknowledge that academic discourse imposes on the student not only obligations of form but the effort to adapt a particular way of thinking, that of the liberal humanist subject. The bathroom wall exchange demonstrates that the problem is not only that of the nature of the “individual” but the ways in which the “individual” is positioned in relationship to public discourse.
The bathroom wall provides textual evidence that students are capable of far more than the sanitized, lifeless texts they often submitted for class assignments. In spite of their often incendiary perspectives, the vitality and style of the bathroom wall dialogue remains intriguing. We can consider, then, that the bland politics of the writing classroom may stultify the writing process itself. Safe, distant, disengaged student writings are difficult for the instructor to read, and I would guess even harder for the student to write. In the apolitical writing classroom, students and teachers are both silenced. This bathroom wall epiphany vividly demonstrates Aronowitz and Giroux’s point that “authentic student voices are pushed to the margins of existence, recognition, and possibility” (yr. 1991 p. 115). If we feel that our classroom practices provide spaces open to writing about any topic, from any position, and to any audience, the bathroom wall exchange indicates that self-censorship is part and parcel of the writing classroom.
Considering this alternate student text asks us to reconceptualize what Flower and Hayes call the “task environment” of the composition classroom and to acknowledge its limitations in order to accommodate the social situatedness of students. Cognitive rhetoric then becomes sociocognitive. Carol Berkenkotter notes that “conceptual knowledge, like language use, is indexical” that is, it “points to a part of the situation in which the communication is being conducted” (yr. 1984 p. 159). Further, as Berkenkotter reports, Shirley Brice Heath’s study of language learning indicates that children from non-mainstream backgrounds learn “socially based schema for literate behaviors . . . [of which] only a fraction are acknowledged, much less sanctioned, within school culture which reflects the ways of speaking and knowing of the white middle class” (yr. 1984 p. 161). And probably the only view expressed on the bathroom wall that the classroom would have sanctioned, “Peace + Love = the end of Racism” mirrors a white middle class perspective, one which many of us fail to recognize as overtly political—this statement is politically transparent because it reflects the accepted cultural ideology.
The bathroom wall exchange forces a collision between expressionism, cognitivism, and authentic student voice. This introduction of the social to cognitive, however, begins the irrevocable process of altering teaching objectives and the strategies for attaining those objectives. The bathroom wall exchange creates the fissure that leads us to seriously consider Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s view that the liberal humanist notion of the individual permeates the process of education to the extent that it appears seamless or transparent. They note that “the dominant curriculum constructs the subject in such a manner that it can be readily inserted into the existing social order” (yr. 1991 p. 2). In the humanities, this construction relies upon the notion that “the individual and his [sic] consciousness [are] manifestations of a human essence that is timeless, ahistorical, transcultural, and not determined by the circumstances of social and economic life” (yr. 1991 p. 3). Denial of the material, social, and political serves as the mechanism to dismiss the concerns of marginalized groups. Those who lack material resources and access to social and political power are thus the primary site for postmodernism’s contestation and opposition of the liberal humanist model. Drawing upon the work of Stuart Hall, Volosinov, and Gramsci, James Berlin clearly situates that critique in rhetoric:
language is always an arena of struggle to make certain meanings’ certain ideological formulations’ prevail. Cultural codes thus are constantly in conflict. They contend for hegemony in defining and directing the material conditions of experience as well as consciousness itself. The signifying practices of different groups thus compete in forwarding different agendas for the ways people are to regard their historical conditions and their modes of responding to them, and these signifying practices are thus
always a scene of battle. (yr. 1991 p. 139)
Against this compelling argument, intellectual acceptance bumps up against resistance to performing pedagogy. The notion of privacy can be located as attendant to a crumbling perception of the individual. Morton and Zavarzadeh explain: “through his consciousness the individual achieves not only privacy, but also stability, and, above all, unitariness” ( yr. 1991 p. 3). Consciousness, privacy, autonomy, stability, and unity are, according to Giroux, replaced by “specific desires, forms of self-reflection, and concrete social practices . . . within an interface of subject positions” as we restructure how we can know what we can know (yr. 1991 p. 207). The crucial question, then, is from what position does the teacher begin? Postmodern pedagogical approaches, such as that of Ronald Strickland’s confrontational pedagogy, not only impose the teacher’s agenda on the student but, some may argue, unfairly requires that students respond to challenges regarding their very conception of what they are as human beings. A humanist/cognitivist, student-centered focus may question the implications of a pedagogical approach that promises to transform classrooms into a battleground.
A nurturing pedagogist might primarily be concerned was student casualties. Certainly, all teaching attempts to alter students in some way, even if it only promotes the correct use of commas; and certainly, the student may be assumed to understand that change is an integral aspect of the educational experience. But a radical agenda for a shift in primary assumptions can seem downright dangerous. While accomplishing the task of reconfiguring student understanding of the notion of the “individual” seems all but impossible, the risk attendant with that undertaking seems tremendous, and the prospect of success presents even greater difficulties within a nurturing paradigm. As Robert Miklitsch notes, “ideology, as Gramsci and Althusser among others have taught us, is not simply an “intellectual” matter. In other words, if ideology, like hegemony, is primarily an unconscious process, critical pedagogy must engage affect and intellect, emotion and cognition if it is to be persuasive, which is to say transformative (yr. 1994 p. 64).
These concerns are not without merit. Nick Tingle outlines the dangers in terms of the emotional implications of professing through postmodernism. He holds that “liberatory pedagogy requires for its practical and pedagogical implementation a deeper understanding of the profound psychological responses it may invoke in students” (yr. 1992 p. 75). He observes that his students often have some difficulty in their efforts to “recognize a distinction between inner and outer, between what is in here and what is out there” (yr. 1992 p. 79). Tingle also notes that students may experience a crisis of identity (narcissistic wounding) as if some outside force had laid claim to a territory one previously regarded as under one’s own control. Students may indeed, with respect to challenges to their beliefs, react with much the same sorts of feeling of embarrassment and even shame that one might experience before accusations that one’s nose is too long or one’s body too fat. (yr. 1992 p. 81)
Despite this possible response, Tingle defends a confrontational approach which directly challenges the student’s beliefs by noting that “the moment of despair offers the potential for a realization of one’s limitation or infinitude” (yr. 1992 p. 86). As we wound the self to the point of destruction, the student may “reflect coolly and dispassionately, particularly as he [sic] scrutinizes the data of observations” (yr. 1992 p. 86). This experiential transformation mirrors the intellectual goal of postmodern pedagogy as it attempts to move the student from a conception of the self as autonomous to the “self” as existing in a finite network of interdependencies over which one can never hope to exercise complete control. Arnold Rothenstein in The Narcissistic Pursuit of Perfection argues that “recognition of this interdependence, the admission of narcissistic need may prove itself to be narcissistically wounding, for to admit to such need means admitting to sustaining objects which exist in some sense beyond the self” (yr. 1993 p. 83). Or, to put it in Lacanian terms, “narcissistic wounding serves as an acknowledgment of the tear between the imaginary and symbolic” the grandiose narcissist believes in and protects her mirror image through a careful suturing which must be undone.
In other words, the serious admittance of a social-constructionist perspective itself may likely provoke narcissistic wounding. For example, our own recognition that relations with our professors mirrored a familial dynamic created a narcissistic crisis that threatened (but eventually enriched) the course of our education. As one graduate student reshaped her perceptions of her relationship with the fatherly professor who had taken her under his wing and prescribed the course of her scholarly work, her student persona unraveled and, for a period of time, without this familiar way of being as a student, she lacked any strategy for representing herself in the classroom. She was undone. This undoing makes for a messy process according to Tingle, who concludes his discussion with a warning to the postmodern pedagogist:
One must expect to meet real psychological resistance--anger, depression, and despair, the painful consequences of that narcissistic wounding which must occur as students seek to realize and confront their self-limitations. Further this resistance must be not be seen as resistance to “truth,” but as attempts to flee the painful effects attendant upon the transformation of narcissism. (yr. 1992 p. 88)
As daunting as this scenario may appear to the classroom teacher, Tingle still oversimplifies the dynamic of the response that he deliberately provokes in his classroom. As he states, narcissistic wounding often evokes shame as a response. In Shame: The Exposed Self, Michael Lewis, a developmental, clinical psychologist, emphasizes the implications of shame: “our internal struggles are not battles between instincts and reality, but conflicts that typically involve the understanding and negotiating of shame, its elicitors and frequency”( yr. 1992 p. 2). As does Tingle, Lewis acknowledges that “shame encompasses the whole of ourselves” (yr. 1992 p. 2). Lewis, however, details the effects of shame on the individual “it demonstrates a wish to hide, to disappear, or even to die” and responses which include “danger, depression, or withdrawal”(yr. 1992 p. 2). Lewis notes that “the student embarrassed, loses confidence, and vows to avoid taking courses given by that professor” (yr. 1992 p. 2). In fact, Lewis holds that narcissism is the ultimate attempt to “avoid” shame. (yr. 1992 p. 3). In his examination of the specific problems that shame can provoke, Lewis addresses the issue of gender. Through his extensive studies, he concludes that differences in socialization methods lead females to “experience shame more frequently than males and to respond to shame more often with depression or withdrawal from the situation than rage or by confronting the source of the shame” (yr. 1992 p. 210).
Although Lewis does not directly address the issue, it may be safe to speculate that other marginalized groups also deal with shame in the same manner, a situation which reinscribes that marginalization under the guise of incorporation or “liberation.” Although evoking shame may often be a necessary response to challenges to the notion of the autonomous individual, postmodern pedagogical practices are clearly not the only possible site for narcissistic wounding. Shameful responses also manifest themselves in seemingly non-provocative circumstances. For example, in his role as a teacher, Lewis observes that students who feel shame, that is, humiliation which encompasses the whole of themselves, will often not revise papers because they do not wish to “risk more disapproval and further shame by resubmitting a paper for judgment”(yr. 1992 p. 4). Student resistance to revision and especially teacher-based suggestions for revision is certainly a common experience for the composition teacher, but consideration of this common required activity as a possible source of shame in the student recasts the entire pedagogical project. While the manifestations of shame may be more obvious in dealing with student’s views on controversial issues, the same process enacted in benign situations is overlooked or demonstrates teacher ignore-ance.
Shannon, an African-American female student, had written a reasonable argument that HIV positive surgeons should be required to inform their patients of their condition. While Shannon focused her discussion on the dangers of transmitting the HIV virus on a specific area that remains controversial, I felt her writing did not address the question of the surgeon’s civil rights adequately, so I began to probe slightly:
“Shannon, do you feel that everyone who comes into contact with an HIV positive person should be informed? For example, would you have the right to be informed if I were HIV positive?”
“Yes.”
“O.K. let’s take it a step further. Do you feel that you are at risk if you ride an elevator with someone who is HIV positive?”
“Yes.”
“Should we then require that HIV positive people wear some sort of identification so that the general public may be alerted to the possibility of infection?”
“Yes.”
“O.K. Then wouldn’t it just be safest to gather up all of the HIV positive people in the country and transport them to some sparsely populated area, such as Northern Montana, so that we just don’t have to worry about them at all?”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
Shannon then laughed nervously, ducked her head down, and her previously erect posture seemed to fold in. So, I let the conversation drop. Did I shame Shannon, a fragile student who entered the classroom extremely anxious about her writing? We had both worked very hard during the course of the semester. I had slowly earned her trust as a fair respondent to her writings, and she had spent hours outside the class with writing tutors working to master basic writing conventions. Yet, something, most likely my stunned facial expression or an incredulous tone of voice, invoked shame.
Initially, our considerations of the implications of this classroom incident focused on the challenge to Shannon’s stance as the source of shame, overlooking the likelihood that, for this student, the act of writing itself had been a source of the same shamed response at the beginning of the semester. Upon closer examination, however, we recognize the most obvious manifestations of shame only become visible in a site where the teacher is uncomfortable with the notion of confrontation. Additionally, any evocation of shame can reinforce traditional teaching methodologies, which may view this scenario as an attempt to make the student compliant in order to strengthen individual character. But banishing traditional methodologies does not eliminate shame. Common reactions to shame (forgetting, denial, laughter, and confession) are, in fact, frequent occurrences in the writing classroom.
Lewis demonstrates these responses through the retelling of another academic situation, one in which a student coped with her shame by “leaving the classroom and avoiding Professor X” (yr. 1992 p. 129). A denial response, however, projects responsibility and the emotional response itself on external conditions (yr. 1992 p. 130). Laughter, on the other hand, allows the individual feeling shame to disassociate herself and become the Other who observes the potentially shaming situation (yr. 1992 p. 133). And, finally confession, like laughter, allows movement away from the self into the position of Other and offers the most potential for learning. According to Lewis, the act of confession offers relief by allowing the person to see the one shamed as “no longer him” (yr. 1992 p. 133). In other words, the narcissistic wounding which leads to confession may foster the development of an intellectual stance. Michel Foucault offers some crucial insight into how this might work:
If one had to confess, this was not merely because the person to whom one confessed had the power to forgive, console, and direct, but because the work of producing the truth was obliged to pass through this relationship . . . . The truth did not reside solely in the subject, who by confessing would reveal it fully formed. It was constituted in two stages: present, but incomplete, blind to itself in the one who spoke. . . . (yr. 1980 p. 66).
If confession is a condition of the production of knowledge, the question then becomes, is it a necessary condition? Perhaps so. In the classroom experience, forgetting and denial are responses that offer limited possibilities for resolution to the conflict which provokes shame. Laughter, on the other hand, seems a fruitful starting point for creating the conditions necessary for learning, but may be limited in that the release that comes with laughter may foreclose sufficient interrogation of the conflict. Confession or, more accurately, the process of naming that conflict which is perceived as interior or personal, however, offers possibilities for directly mediating critical issues and moving an emotional response into the public realm toward intellectual understanding. This movement resists the notion of teacher as therapist or nurturer and utilizes emotive responses as a highly productive starting point for the work of the classroom.
Viewing anger, denial, and laughter as manifestations of shame configures them as potent sites for the production of knowledge, and moves the pedagogical project away from common teacher perceptions of students as lazy, indifferent, or lacking seriousness. Additionally, the knowledge that a shame-based response may result from any aspect of classroom practice, ranging from a lack of student skill in controlling a computer mouse to a direct intellectual challenge to the student’s most deeply held beliefs, permits the teacher to more easily recognize and acknowledge these kinds of responses as they occur in the classroom. While providing a means to reconfigure classroom practice, a teacher’s grasp of the dynamics of shame in the classroom remains fragmented and partial since student responses are often misreadings of the classroom environment.
In other words, the teacher can seldom accurately locate the cause of a shamed response or overtly ameliorate the effects of that response. This condition, however, complicates rather denies the need for teacher intervention. Robert Brooke suggests that the teacher refuse to enter into the dialogic and deflect inquiry back to the student in a Rogerian gesture since, as he posits;
The important relationship, then, is largely within the divided person, since it involves a relationship between her conscious self and her projection or current understanding of the knowledge and purpose of the knowing authority. The real dialogue between people is less important for psychic growth than the internal dialogue with the person who supposedly knows. (yr. 1981 p. 681)
For the composition classroom, articulation takes the form of student writing, and a teacher’s refusal to intervene in students’ imagined dialogues constitutes a denial of the production of text as a public act. This ignores or discounts the importance of forum, the writing occasion, audience, and the aim of the writing. That is, the drive to offer “facilitative” response to student work, to not “appropriate student texts,” to “respect students’ right to their own texts,” to use Straub’s words (yr. 1996 p. 223), denies the project of rhetoric in an effort to avoid the symptoms of student shame. Overly facilitative responses, then, submerge the pedagogical project so that the teacher’s implicit, non-directive responses to student writing encourage interiorization and privatization, a guessing game for the student whose primary aim is to discover what the teacher wants. Such an approach refuses to grant students the opportunity to engage in serious intellectual work which may, perhaps, require working through seemingly negative emotional responses. This kind of protection smacks of infantilization, denying the student’s power.
Coming to terms with the emotional implications of teaching and learning requires acknowledgment that they “are dangerous activities,” no matter how that practiced is configured. Students who are able to adapt to the expectations of the university with relative ease, generally because they come from middle-class backgrounds which prepare them for a particular kind of social interaction, may avoid seriously grappling with challenges to the way they see the world. Firmly entrenched in the transmission model and generally holding a careerist view of education, they may be conferred a degree unscathed by the educational process. Classroom practices that encourage denial and/or forgetting (avoidance) may seem more comfortable, particularly for the teacher. Only a slight turn is required, however, to perceive this comfort as the teacher’s own denial and avoidance of the responsibilities attendant with the educational process.
As the emotive equivalent of the liberal-humanist notion of the autonomous individual, an interrogation of the dynamics of narcissism situates perceptions of the personal as an integral and unavoidable aspect of teaching and learning. While the above discussions of the role of the teacher in the classroom and the possible effects of classroom practices on the student indicate a modernist preoccupation with the notion of the individual, interrogation rather than dismissal of these concerns affirms the postmodern project. We could not seriously address Theresa Ebert’s point that “pedagogy is not therapy, but sustained education of critique-al citizens, who have the conceptual ability to analyze, participate in, and change the existing social relations of production” (yr. 1996 p. 796), for example, without a critique of our own resistance at the site of that resistance. Our discussion of the role of the teacher in the classroom and possible student responses to postmodern pedagogy could merely clear the ground for embarking on the more pertinent teaching objective of critical literacy. And in some sense, it does. Addressing sites of liberal-humanist teacher resistance to the postmodern project through analysis of social relations in the classroom, however, also provides strategies for negotiating that same resistance in liberal-humanist students.
Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry A. Giroux. Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Berkenkotter, Carol. “Student Writers and Their Sense of Authority Over Texts.” College Composition and Communication 35 (1984): 312-19.
Berlin, James. “Foreword.” Changing Classroom Practices: Resources for Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. David Downing. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. vii-xii.
Brooke, Robert. “Lacan, Transference, and Writing Instruction.” College Composition and Communication 49.6 (Oct 1987): 670-691.
---. “Underlife and Writing Instruction.” College Composition and Communication 38.2 (May 1987): 141-153.
Culley, Margo and Catherine Portuges. Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
Ebert, Teresa L. “For a Red Pedagogy: Feminism, Desire, and Need.” College English 58 7 (Nov 1996): 795-819.
Felman, Shoshona. “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable.” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 21-44.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Trans. Colin Gordan, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. Ed. Colin Gordan. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Authority in the Feminist Classroom: A Contradiction in Terms?” Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching. Ed. Margo Culley and Catherine Portuges. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. 203-208.
Gallop, Jane. “The Father’s Seduction.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. 413-31.
Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.” College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 173-93.
Harkin, Patricia and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. New York: MLA, 1991.
Henning, Barbara. “Essay: The World Was Stone Cold: Basic Writing in an Urban University. College English 53.6 (Oct 1991): 674-685.
hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989.
Jarratt, Susan C. “Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict.” in Contending With Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Ed. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. New York: MLA, 1991. 105-123.
Kirsch, Gesa E. and Joy S. Ritchie. “Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research.” College Composition and Communication 46.1 (1995): 7-29.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
Lauer, Janice M., Gene Montague, Andrea Lunsford, and Janet Emig. The Four Worlds of Writing. 3rd. ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
Lewis, Michael. Shame: The Exposed Self. New York: Free P, 1992.
Micklitsch, John. “Punk Pedagogy or Performing Contradiction: The Risks and Rewards of Anti-Transference. The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 16.1 (1994): 57-67.
Morton, Donald and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. Texts for Change: Theory/Pedagogy/Politics Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Powers-Stubbs, Karen et.al. “Watching Ourselves: Feminist Teachers and Authority. A Symposium on Feminist Experiences in the Composition Classroom.” College Composition and Communication 43.3 (October 1992): 297-321.
Rothenstein, Arnold. The Narcissistic Pursuit of Perfection. New York: International Universities Press, 1993.
Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Straub, Richard. “The Concept of Control in Teacher Response: Defining the Varieties of ’Directive’ and ’Facilitative’ Commentary.” College Composition and Communication 47.2 (May 1996): 223.251.
Strickland, Ronald. “Confrontational Pedagogy and Traditional Literary Studies. College English 52 (March 1990): 291-300.
Sugg, Redding, Jr. Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1978.
Tingle, Nick. “Self and Liberatory Pedagogy: Transforming Narcissism.” Journal of Advanced Composition 12.1(1992): 75-89.
© Radical Pedagogy