Critique as Social Action
In what ways can critique be social action? In what ways can it materialize? Can it be more than an academic exercise given a great deal of lip service in the classroom but not valued elsewhere? Must critique be accompanied by solutions? Must everyone be a critic?
I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot lately because I’ve been thinking about who and what I am as a teacher. The act of critique has been quite central to my identity and pedagogy for years now, yet I’m not sure what I’ve been trying to get at. And trying to employ something like a critical pedagogy (though I never do it “all the way”) certainly heightens my frustration exponentially. I’m idealistic about education—it’s an exercise in optimism, dammit. But education buckles so easily under the weight of cynicism and apathy that I wonder sometimes if the whole damn system isn’t just too tenuous, that it isn’t meant for a culture on the verge of empire and extinction, that it just can’t cut through the virtual barb-wire of economic stratification. For critique to be more than academic exercise, doesn’t it require a desire for change? An urge to make something better? But our educational system works best for those who don’t want or need change. Rich suburbs (and maybe private colleges) don’t want no critical pedagogy. They want learning as an anesthesia, something that tells them it’s ok to be who and where they are, that life as middle managers can be rewarding, that advantages ALWAYS and ONLY come to those who deserve them. Education as comfort food—a heap of mashed potatoes and quart of Ben and Jerry’s. Poor school districts need the power of critique the most, but we’ve so burdened them with testing requirements and crumbling buildings and lousy resources and low salaries that there can’t be much energy left at the end of the day to say, “Wait, why are things like this?” And the American myth of education says that any kid worth her salt (back when salt had monetary value) can Rise Up past these inequalities and get herself the education she needs to succeed. Hmm. So we get the “human interest” story of the poor kid turned pro athlete, and he walks us through the falling hallways of his elementary school and he tells how hard it was and how hard he worked and to look at him now. But he doesn’t turn to the camera and say, “What are you going to do about the ways things are for others?” His story isn’t meant to make us question the status quo, it’s meant to help us accept it. Things can’t be that bad “down there” if he got out. Those who stay have only themselves to blame.
Critique as social action. How do we do it? The deck is stacked against us, because critique in this culture is now associated with fringe mentalities—it’s the artists and the feminists and the Marxists and the college professors and the rest of the kooks. Critique, THEY say, is a luxury for the idle. Good working people don’t have time for critique. They need answers. And if you can’t provide answers, then GET IN LINE.
But critique isn’t always meant to solve, and we need to figure out how to fit that idea into a culture/economy that values the product over the process. So how do I get the class engaged in critique in ways that get carried out of the classroom? And is the goal to push my students into identities as critics? Of this, I’m no longer sure.
Not so long ago I was a much more political teacher than I am now. I took critical pedagogy to mean something like “oppositional teaching” or “agitprop instruction.” Students found me fair and provocative (my evaluations tell me so), but I became troubled with the performative nature of my teaching, and I’m sure there were times I created a toxic classroom. What’s changed? For one, I feel more set in my politics, more confident. And I don’t think I need my teaching to provide me a space to confirm myself anymore. I don’t find students with opposing views threats to me or my identity or my authority. So rather than bring to class firestorm texts meant to enrage and say to the students, “Look at this! Be pissed off at this!” I feel more comfortable turning attention to the process and the tools. I don’t hide my political self in the class, but it’s not the point of the class anymore.
But becoming comfortable with my political self was a long, painful process, and my students are really just at the beginning of that process. Shouldn’t education expose that process? Shouldn’t it provide the spaces for claiming an identity in the face of a homogenizing media? Perhaps the act of critique—regardless of the material solutions it may or may not provide—is the act of self-actualization in tandem with the recognition of others.
Blog that.
Social Obligations
Today’s class marked something of a turning point, I think. We moved from a teacher-centered discussion to a teacher-facilitated one. I brought in two blog posts and the subsequent comments for each—one from sportsfilter and one from redstate. I wanted the students to talk about how the comments represented some form of Discourse. That is, how do the people leaving the comments establish and respond to conventions while also performing particular language tasks—such as building identities, exchanging “social goods,” or making connections among each other? The discussion touched on all the major points from the Gee reading: Conversations (capital C) as contexts and background information; intertextuality as a tool for creating identity and excluding others from the discourse; social languages as markers of relationships and affiliations.
What’s becoming clear to me is that I need to connect more directly the functional grammar with the “tools of inquiry” Gee is laying out. I have to resist the assumption that the connection is self-evident—because it’s really not. For example, Gee makes very little use of the grammatical terms in his early chapters. And while I know that the social theory that drives his type of inquiry is much like that which drives the functional perspective on language, I shouldn’t assume that others who haven’t studied either can make the connections.
ASSUME = ASS+U+ME
Functional grammar provides us with a distinct terminology for describing the words we see and hear in the texts we encounter. We can certainly do discourse analysis without it, but I believe that the close attention to clause construction provides us with another way of understanding what’s happening in a text—what its social action is. When our texts are described in terms from both FG and Gee’s discourse analysis, we provide ourselves and our readers with that much more data on which we can negotiate.
And there’s a point I haven’t made clearly enough in class. Discourse analysis—even functional analysis—is meant to be social, to be done by people willing to share their interpretations with others and to reconfigure those interpretations in light of the ideas of others. No analysis happens in a vacuum, in the sense that every text is steeped in context and that every analyst must bounce her or his ideas off of others. Just as meaning is made through the (often uneven) negotiation between speaker and hearer, writer and reader, analysis is done through the (preferably even) sharing of ideas between analysts. Asking the groups to respond to each other’s DAJs might be a good start. Groups could, for a week or so, analyze the same texts and then compare notes. Perhaps when the new groups form next week, that could be the first assignment. A good way to build trust?
Billy says:I've lived long enough to have learned,
The closer you get to the fire, the more you get burned
But that won't happen to us,
Because it's always been a matter of trust.
I’m beginning to think, however, that the FG stuff could have waited two or three weeks. It just seems to have freaked people out more than helping them. I need to think about how I open this class in the future. The idea of diving right in is one that I like, but it may just be too much. I’m a bit concerned that the trouble with the grammatical terms—and the justified concerns about what this class is really about—are too distracting. Did I chase people from the class who should have otherwise stayed? Have I strengthened my position as class center by teaching the hard stuff first? Have I made myself indispensable in wrong ways and for wrong reasons? These are legitimate questions, I think. I wonder if my enthusiasm for language studies led me to overlook the rightful concerns of my students.
DANGER: Difficulty Ahead
The class took the survey on the Discourse Analysis Journal (DAJ) assignment, and I think the (very initial) results of it and the conversation that followed are interesting. First, a methodological issue: the survey featured 24 statements about the DAJ divided into five sections—engagement with the assignment, understanding of the central function of the assignment, difficulty with the assignment, use of the assignment in other areas of the course, and assessment of the assignment. For each statement, the student could choose between “agree, somewhat agree, neutral, somewhat disagree, disagree.” We spoke for a while about the use of “neutral” as an option. Some students thought that it allowed for passive, cop-out responses. And there is apparently research that supports this idea. In putting together the survey, I wasn’t uncomfortable with including “neutral.” I thought it gave students an option for those statements on which they haven’t taken a position on. But the more I think about the case against “neutral” the more I wish I had left it off. Doing so would have required the students to take a position—and if they hadn’t thought one through on a particular statement, they could then use the survey to come to a position. That’s what action research is supposed to do—nudge the researcher and the participants toward a better understanding of what’s going on in the class. Perhaps if we’re given the “neutral” option, we don’t get nudged.
I have to spend some time with the survey sheets before I can post any thoughtful conclusions. My first reaction is that the students have resisted seeing the DAJ as “busy work,” for the most part, but that they are having some difficulty using the assignment as a bridge between the course readings and the class activities. It will be interesting to see how the responses break down according to year, major, and gender.
Something I’m trying to do in this class is to get students comfortable with the idea of difficulty—with the notion that education is hard, and that we should value it because it is hard. A problem with traditional higher education is that difficulty is often defined in terms of workload. More classes, more reading, more papers, more things to study—the more you have the harder school is. But this is all so quantitative. And I think many students (and institutions) have defined academic success as the ability to gulp and store information. The more on the plate, the more difficult the education. This quantitative definition of “difficult” has led to an educational system of niche scheduling and passive infotainment downloading.
What became clear in class yesterday was that students are uncomfortable in the face of the difficult. Yeah, that makes sense. But what doesn’t is how quickly that discomfort translates into avoidance or passivity. Difficulty in cognitive terms—in the sense that it can mean a cognitive dissonance, or a sense of confusion, or a challenge to accepted ideas—this kind of difficulty has been given a negative connotation. It seems that to find something difficult in the cognitive sense—as opposed to the physical sense as typified in the heavy workloads—is to find oneself lacking in intellectual ability or experiences. Well, that may be true—but neither lack is a bad thing. But both can be used as excuses not to deal with the difficult or to allow the difficult to be explained for us. A number of students have said the equivalent of “I’ve never done this stuff before.” To which I reply, “Of course you haven’t—and that’s good.” If they had done it before, I would wonder why they are in the class.
The beauty of the difficult (as I like to call it) is that it often opens us to new ways of thinking and doing—to different approaches and different ways of being. To shun the difficult is to think of education as a tailor-made suit—expensive and well-fit, but too easy to get in and out of.
In some ways the class needs to build a better sense of trust—among the students and between the students and me. I do think we’re on our way, though I’m troubled by the students who sit in class confused and silent and don’t come to see me. And by those who stay away from the class meetings when readings or assignments are due. Yet, I’m heartened by those who are embracing the de-centered nature of the class, and by those who aren’t afraid to comment and to ask questions.
If we come to trust each other as people working toward the same goals, then I think the difficult can be embraced as a chance for all of us to change and to learn to see the world in different ways.
Other notes: many students would like to see the course materials applied to “real-world” texts—and we’ll certainly be doing that soon. The Katrina casebook is almost set. But I think I should try to bring in texts to accompany each reading. I’m hoping to find some pieces on the Correta Scott King funeral to illustrate competing cultural models.
