Class Time and the "New"

One of the central problems to any kind of critical pedagogy is that students are socialized to resist it. Not actively, perhaps, but many are so used to being told what to learn and how to learn it that they have difficulty claiming the role of agent in their education. Certainly, many teachers aren’t prepared to offer that role to students either, preferring instead a “safe” model of classroom discourse that privileges teacher centrality. None of this is new stuff—it's part of the on-going discussion of critical pedagogy.

A question: to what extent does the relatively critical classroom I’ve been working to establish encourage absenteeism and/or an avoidance of work? I ask because I was taken aback today by the high number of absences—at least 8 people, or one-third of the class—on a day when the students were to discuss drafts of their first major assignment. That some don’t want to or couldn’t get drafts done is of no surprise, but I thought the obligation to the groups would bring more people to class. I guess I also thought that people who might be struggling with the assignment would want the help that the class could offer. Talking about absences always takes the focus off the point that really matters: the people who were in the class.

And here’s the real topic of this entry: class discussion is where the real stuff happens in this class. The readings and the assignments offer us focal points and topics, but the class discussions add a much needed social-sense to the material. And the next challenge—as it has been all semester so far—is to get that social-sense decentered from me and onto the students themselves. These discussions demonstrate that we can act as a community to make sure people understand what’s going on and how to use the stuff we’re learning to perform critical acts. And criticism is social action, an act to change the social context in some way. Why is there sometimes resistance to this idea? What’s to be gained from resisting a critical engagement with texts? Why would someone want to be passive in the face of social forces trying to define everything for them? (Perhaps because life is good for some. Why rebel against a system makes things easy for you?)

Which leads me to ask, what of the students who don’t like this course set up? Is that driving the absences? Or is it forcing more to show up? Is it keeping people from participating fully? But what would their participation look like if the class was structured differently? What’s going on in other kinds of classes that students think absences are no big deal?

We’re back to the socialized passivity in education.

For the students who are engaging the material and working on the assignments, the class time seems to serve as space for reflection and “testing”—for trying out(loud) their understanding of the material. For some, the class time is always an “encounter with the new,” and that seems to me to be an inefficient way of learning. The “new” should be met outside of class, where students can meet the material for the first time and work to form their own understanding of it and its relevance. When the class is used to introduce the new, the students often take passive positions. The presentation of the new (whether by teacher or peer) removes that important first step of negotiation, the struggle to “come to meaning” with a text that demands an active engagement with the language. To wait for that engagement to happen in class—and usually by someone else—is to wait for a pre-packaged bundle that can be carried away. Education as fast-food dining.

Bachelor degree/Whopper with cheese