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

Riffing on a class discussion

at a Baptist funeral in Atlanta
they mourned a woman who
spoke truth to power
spoke truth to power
spoke truth to power

and the power didn’t like it
didn’t think it “right”
or correct
or polite
or white

keep ’em apart, they say, keep ’em apart
keep ’em apart, they say

can’t politicize the personal
can’t personalize the political
all ya can do is shut yer mouth
shut yer mouth
shut yer mouth

unless you’re crying for a fallen king
in backward boots
with a cold war swing
who never met a contra-
diction he didn’t like
or a useful fiction he couldn’t write

but he never personalized the political
never politicized the personal

kept ’em apart, they say, kept ’em apart
kept ’em apart, they say

winners write the history
right the mis-story
hype the mystery
type the chivalry
into the pages of our catechisms
hide the schisms
break the prisms
fill the prisons
with schizophrenic ghosts
twitching through first amendment dreams

Plasma screens, miasma screams, diaspora schemes

keep ’em apart, they say, keep ’em apart
keep ’em apart, they say

Don't hog the cover

In class today we began our conversation on James Paul Gee’s An Introduction to Discourse Analysis—perhaps the most accessible book on the topic available. I was struck by two things from the discussion:

One, that for the students who completed the reading, Gee’s presentations of grammar-as-perspective and the seven tasks of language proved immediately useful to them as they prepare their functional analyses. His cognitive/social approach to d/Discourse analysis will help them take the grammatical data they’re “mining” and use it to examine how a text presents a perspective (or lens) on the world.

Two, that the relationship between language and power is something a majority of students have thought about before, even if they didn’t put it in such direct and (perhaps) narrow terms. And if they haven’t thought about that relationship directly, many of them are fairly quick to pick up the memes of political critique.

Here’s my tension: to what extent am I leading this class to places I want to go and not to the places they want to or need to go? It seems to me that there is a “sage on the stage” structure to this class—and I’m talking way too much. One could say that I’m helping reproduce stereotypical classroom Discourse—teacher talk, student listen (and respond when necessary).

What would happen if I were to shut up? Where would we go? And would the course “cover” the stuff I think it needs to cover?

Cover. Covey. Convey. Conceal?

It’s interesting that the term used to denote what gets taught in class is “coverage.” We cover the material. Do we duck and cover, too? Does the “coverage model” hide as much as it displays? Do we cover ourselves? Our asses? Does my “sage on the stage” routine cover my need to appear authoritative and knowledgeable?

Bruce said it:

the times are tough, yeah
just gettin’ tougher
the whole world is rough
just gettin’ rougher
cover me

A Call from On-High

From Senator Byrd (lifted from Atrios):

…I plead with the American public to tune-in to what is happening in this country. Please forget the political party with which you may usually be associated, and, instead, think about the right of due process, the presumption of innocence, and the right to a private life. Forget the now tired political spin that, if one does not support warrant-less spying, then one may be a bosom buddy of Osama Bin Laden.

Yeah. Right on.

Today it begins

The humanities are already dead,
shocked through a faulty surge protector.

Dirge projector.

Purge director.

Urge erector.

The beat goes on. and on. and on.

The humanities are already dead, twitching but
not beating, not on life support or feeding tubes.

Dead in that way they make movies about.

Dead in that spiritual way we use clichés about,
in that psychological way we go on about,
in that mystical way we throw crystals out
onto dining room tables covered in yesterday’s news.

The humanities are dead, long live

What?

The inhumanities? The Hindu manatees? The inconsequentialities?

The forgotten face of Socrates?

I’m an Aristotle man, myself. Dig that rhetorical rag.

Let’s pretend a glorious sad death
on the rocks at the bottom of a pacific cliff—
a shattered bottle glistening on the speckled gray
beside a twisted corpse.

Assisted force? A fisted horse? Hysterical source?

A suicidal course.

A note in the breast pocket of a tweed sports coat.

“In a shaker filled with ice pour
two oz. of gin.
Shake and strain
into a chilled glass.
Garnish with a lemon twist.
Mist with a whisper of vermouth.”