Freedom with Maxine Green

Greene, Maxine. The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College, 1988. Print.


Freedom. Freedom is a tricky concept in an eighth grade English classroom. If you ask students about freedom, they will see it means that you are free to do whatever you want. If I ask them what sort of freedom they'd like, it might be choosing their seats, deciding what book they want to read, chewing gum in class, and going to the bathroom or getting a drink of water without having to ask permission.  I think these are fairly reasonable until, when students choose their own seats, that they inevitably leave other students isolated or may even find that sitting next to their friend negatively impacts their learning but can't say so because of peer pressure. Is that freedom? It also makes perfect sense for students to choose the books they read on their own or even coming to some consensus about what we read in class, but will they choose to read Tree Girl, the story of a Maya girl in Guatemala caught between the guerrillas and soldiers in a brutal civil war? Does it matter? Will they choose books to extend their world vision or that challenge their conception of gender, class, and race? It that freedom? And when a student tells me that she only needs to know how to read children's books because she is going to have a baby as soon as she can, is she free? As I read and respond to Maxine Green's The Dialect of Freedom, I see her complicating the freedom in the way I have been thinking about democracy. I have been talking about "thick" democracy, and while she does not use the same language, she argues for a "thick" understanding of freedom, one that is dialectical. Here, Green is not interested in liberty, meaning the government contract or political rights where free choice can be made. Instead, Green explores freedom as in the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities. What are the obstacles that education can help remove so that the choices can be made possible to our students? And  then what possibilities can education offer beyond consumerism and competition?

What is freedom in the space of a classroom? What kind of opportunities for articulation of freedom ought to be present in that space?  What is the "appearance of freedom" and then what IS freedom? It is not enough to say choice is freedom, for if we have a moral and ethical point of view of freedom, freedom of choice, especially for a child, is not in and of itself moral. Maxine Green writes The Dialectic of Freedom with the hope to "remind people of what it means to be alive among others, to achieve freedom in dialogue with others for the sake of personal fulfillment and the emergence of a democracy dedicated to life and decency" (xii). This hope moves thin notions of freedom (such as choice) to a more thick notion of freedom, one that is  situated in the context of social living and social responsibility. The nature of education today is individualistic and competitive, completely outside the realm of the social with its emphasis on testing, evaluation, and competition among states and countries.  Although written in 1988, Green's book resonates amidst the recent public debate amplified by the Chicago Teachers' Union strike this September. Teachers are not concerned with pay right now;  they are concerned with the emphasis on testing and teacher evaluation based on those tests. Teachers are concerned with the conditions of teaching (e.g., longer school days, the elimination of arts and music education, "teacher-proof" curricula, and overcrowded classrooms). The routine and unimaginative conditions of the testing era launched by A Nation at Risk and perpetuated by No Child Left Behind, is the antithesis of a citizenship education lacking the core value of democracy: freedom.

Green asks what is being communicated to our youth and thus perpetuated  in our society? What public values are living in the discourse of the classroom? In the discourse of individualism and competition, there is an absence of caring for others of even recognizing the shared public space:

There is a general withdrawal from what ought to be public concerns. Messages and announcements fill the air; but there is, because of the withdrawal, a widespread speechlessness, a silence where there might be -- where there ought to be -- an impassioned and significant dialogue." (2)

If the dialogue is nonexistent, if no language is uttered in this space, then there is no opportunity for real learning. What is happening is a reproduction or a transmission of information. If you can reproduce the information or if you can learn the rules to properly transmit the ideas being measured, then you will be repeating not communicating. This is not learning; this is not growth. We are free, according to Dewey in Experience, Nature, and Freedom, "not because of what we statistically are, but in so far as we are becoming different from what we have been" (1960, 280).  Of course, from a moral and ethical point of view, this "becoming different" would hopefully be more intelligent and humane. What, then, are the conditions necessary for students to choose and to act on those choices? Green reminds us that such choice and action "both occur within and by means of ongoing transactions with objective conditions and with other human beings...and must be grounded, at least to a degree, in an awareness of a world lived in common with others, a world that can be to some extent transformed" (4).



Green argues for education to "encourage free and informed choosing within a social context where ideas could be developed in the open air of public discussion and communication," and so the word "informed" here is was is essential to notions of freedom. Between ignorant and informed lives the dialectical relation or tension that Green argues is essential in the logic of freedom. Every human situation or what she calls "situatedness" offers a relation -- between subject and object, individual and environment, self and society, outsider and community, and the living consciousness and  phenomenal world (8). The idea here, is that education helps students to name alternatives and imagine an alternative state of things, and this happens in a situation or in a shared project. Students will assert their autonomy, but is it an informed autonomy? Are they really choosing if their consciousness is "anchored or submerged" (9).

In other words, students will only have an awareness of freedom if they have something they want to say and are not allowed to say it; if they have a dream and can name the obstacle to that dream. We, as teachers,  can share examples of  awareness of freedom in the curriculum in history, literature, music, and art. Green suggests the following: language and poetry of solidarity in Poland;  underground songs of the Soviet Union;  demonstrations in Chile;  schoolchildren protest in South Africa;  stories of people working and fighting in collaboration with one another discovering together a power to act. What are students choosing to do today?

The work of the classroom, the work of education is to provoke individuals to reach beyond themselves into their intersubjective space, to think about what they're doing,  to become mindful,  to share meaning,  to conceptualize their lived worlds. Many classrooms are what Green calls "consumer classrooms," and one can hear the discourse of measurement that Cintron talks about in Angels' Town as teachers talk about grades, setting goals to earn a few points in their RIT score (NWEA testing), creating activities that are point-based, and even giving "bucks" for good behavior within the popular RTI program of PBIS. The consumer classroom,  the competition classroom,  the test classroom,  the teacher-proof classroom does not release opportunities to conceptualize their lived world. Green argues that teachers can render problematic a reality that includes homelessness,   hunger,  pollution, crime,  censorship,  arms buildup, and  threats of war. She reminds us that a teacher in search of her own freedom maybe the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own:  "Children who have been provoked to reach beyond themselves,  to wonder, to imagine,  to pose their own questions are the ones most likely to learn to learn"(14).

Green talks about the  dialectic of freedom as an awareness of freedom and oppression;  for example,  some would not find a situation to be intolerable if they had no possibility of transformation in mind, if they had been unable to imagine a better state of things; I think for many of my students there is no dialectic of freedom because they are unable to imagine a better state things; they cannot name the obstacles as Green suggests, but they cannot even name what lies beyond the obstacles. There is no desire for that something. For example, many of my eighth grade female students are looking forward to getting their period so that they can have a baby like their older sister did. They spend their time after school taking care of their niece or nephew and see this lived world as inevitable and desirable.

The current rhetoric  of education is the rhetoric of modernity. There is a discourse of freedom,  but it is a discourse emphasizing free choice and self-reliance and  people overcoming dependency and taking responsibility for themselves --  like the early days of capitalism. In this election season, you can hear this in  the rhetoric of the Republican platform:  deregulation, noninterference, and privatization (17). In the classroom, students hear a similar rhetoric. Students who began their formal education in our school district in 2004 have been hearing the logic of measurement for years -- the same students who can't afford the required physical to play sports at school, who have joined gangs, look forward to being a teenage mom, and have been sitting in an ESL class for 8 years because they can't pass the ACCESS test. What is silenced in this rhetoric of freedom situated in the discourse of measurement are the social programs considered wasteful and injurious to character that might support these kids when they need better housing, medical attention, and extra curricular opportunities. Few if any of the kids "left behind" are in the art and music classes because they are in "intervention classes." Few if any of these kids play sports at school or participate in the play. Are they free? Students would say that they are free -- as in not enslaved -- but they are still subservient to a system that they cannot name according to Green.

Green's book explores the problem of freedom and the diverse experiences of freedom as she surveys the history of American literature and our collective memory;  therefore, her work fits nicely with my idea of the literature if atrocity in that we are both interested in making space in the English classroom for something much more political that can unveil and name the lived world of our students by situating it in relation to the other.  Green reminds us that there is no orientation to bring something into being if  there is no awareness of something lacking in a situation,  and this is where choice is not enough;  it must be informed choice;  it must be choice with awareness, and  that must be choice in a dialectic.

Let's start with freedom as the foundation of our curricula. The dictatorship,  occupation,  persecution,  genocide: the dialectic can begin when students know the obstacles to freedom. And here is where the dialectic gets complex;  take for example the guerrillas in  Guatemala. The guerrillas as a revolutionary movement challenged what they viewed as total repression enacting violence in the name of freedom. Green reminds us that it is nearly impossible to associate freedom as a goal with any universal concept of what is right or good, and so a curriculum about freedom will unveil the problematic of choice.

Green quotes Mann who believed that education could stop the tendency of "domination of capital and the servility of labor since no intelligent body of men could be permanently poor." School would teach moral law, self-control, and the intelligence needed to maintain a republican government; school would protect against bigotry and violence,  and students would come to name the obstacles to their project of freedom. Students would learn to refused to believe that conditions are unchangeable.  What does the school see as moral? What is the school's idea of a republican government? The rhetoric of modernity has altered this conception of education.

In the classroom,  we can engage with not from the vantage point of society or the system  but from the vantage points of  actors or agents in an unpredictable world,  and we have seen  the capacity to take initiatives, to begin transformation. In Green's  chapter "Reading from Private to Public: The Work of Women," she explores several literary texts and asks how much does the possibility of freedom depend on  critical reflection,self understanding, and insight into the world? And how much does it depend on being with others in a caring relationship? How much depends on actually coming together with unknown others in a similar predicament and in existential project reaching toward what is not yet? (79)

Green talks about Alice Walker's The Color Purple and how the Celie is able to survive because of the support she receives from the blues singer Shug Avery, who becomes her teacher and friend; Green writes, "Through a connection, she moves Celie not only to put questions to her familiar world but to begin to name it and act so that she can transform, through her own actions, her own life. Clearly she could not have done so alone" (104). And I think here is where I want to say that our work as teaches is not to decide for our students what life they should live or ought to live. Education is about consciousness. Some student can not notice the lived world when they are so preoccupied with survival (or seeking validation, or escaping). Not noticing,  she (Celie) could not question.  "When she questions, a space opens for her. She know she needs to take initiatives,  that she has to name the "man" if she is to see. She has been, in some familiar and deadly way, oppressed" (104).

Green talks about what the curricula must include. She argues  for the voices of participants or near participants in our lived world such as front-line soldiers, factory workers, and slaves. Silenced voices need to be heard for a new understanding, one with perplexity and uncertainty to be disclosed.  This opens up new spaces for study "metaphorical spaces" and places for "speculative audacity." They draw to mind what lies beyond the  boundaries and often to what is not yet. People become more and more aware of the unanswered questions, the unexplored corners, the nameless faces behind forgotten windows;  these are the obstacles to be transcended. (128).

Giroux: The Struggle for Life in the Classrooom

Originally published in 1988, Giroux's Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life was published shortly after the 1983 report by Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education: A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform. Implied by the title, the report explores charges that the United State's education system was failing to meet the national need for a competitive work force, and after evaluating tends in test scores between 1963 to 1980 along with comparing American schools to other nations, the report offered some 38 recommendations for reform. Now thinking about the 2005 edition of Giroux's book, we can consider that many of the recommendations were not implemented, and in fact, the best known education bill, No Child Left Behind, was signed into law in 2001 under the Bush administration (but with bipartisan support). Among other reforms such as "highly qualified teachers" and providing student contact information to military recruiters, this law requires that all schools accepting state funding administer a state (not national) standardized test and that each school must make annual yearly progress (AYP) (e.g., this year's eighth graders must do better than last year's on the same test). Giroux criticizes Bush's policies charging the standardized curricula and testing to be the kind of regulation that reduces education to job training and rote learning maintain the status quo of 1% vs. the 99%. Giroux believes that Bush is cultivating a public pedagogy of militarism, a significant element of imperialist ideology, the rhetoric of modernity following the logic of colonialism. The rhetoric of modernity that if you work hard enough, you can have anything is a myth, and policies like NCLB make sure that dreams of equality stay just that: dreams.

What was once a country founded on principles of cooperation and participation -- or a democracy -- is now a country establishing principles of individualistism and competition -- or capitalism. From civic to corporate, the sentiment of consumerism in schooling is rampant. Testing companies for students and teacher assessment are making a bundle, and students are taught that learning is a testing, that success in life can be measured quantitatively. So when I read Giroux's book Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life now, in 2012, his argument for critical pedagogy seems more important than ever, for I argue that the reason our students are not "competing" on the national level is not because our education system does not have high standards but that America's education system does not even know other nations, does not value global consciousness, does not teach inclusivity, participation, and critical engagement. The testing movement has fostered a "thin" democratic pedagogy that engages in skills rather than ideas, which has killed the spirit of debate and analysis and the conditions that cultivate theorizing and interrogating. Students look for, ask for, the worksheet to "fill-in" the answers. They wait for the teacher to pose the question that needs an answer. They only know they learned if they see an "A" or a "meets.

When Giroux talks about teacher education, he explores how teacher training has been reduced to similarly "think" methods. The prescriptive day-by-day curriculum, the research-based textbooks, the standards-based workbooks -- all of these are what Giroux calls "teacher-proof curricula." When districts fail to meet AYP, the response is to look for programs: "What programs will guarantee that we meet next year?" And there goes $3000 on materials to teach THAT subgroup of ELLs, Special Ed, low-income kids who are making us a failing school. Giroux writes that such "solutions" that define classroom life as "a fundamentally one-dimensional set of rules and regulative practices rather than as a cultural terrain where a variety of interests and practices collide in a constant and often chaotic struggle for dominance" (187). The truth is that now, that is what teachers are looking for. When I did a study last year with a group of eighth grade teachers about the 2005 mandate to teach about genocide, they all commented that what kept them from being compliant with the mandate was not having the materials to teach it. The mandate was open and allowed teachers to develop the unit of study, but they wanted the teacher-proof curricula, yet, when we talked about the state tests, they said that they hated having to "teach to the test." These teachers realized during our interview how far they have come from the way they "used to teach." All of the teachers have been teaching since before No Child Left Behind and even a few were teaching before A Nation at Risk. They talked, some emotionally, about how they missed reading stories with their students; they missed having discussions; they missed the time in class where students asked questions and wondered.

What Giroux seems to be arguing for, beyond critical pedagogy, is for this cultural terrain - -a sort of cultural study to support critical pedagogy. Now, I don't think he is talking about multiculturalism at all. I think he wants us to think about all the public spaces in which education swims through our culture and perhaps how we can shift our culture, specifically the culture of the classroom towards something much more alive and active. He asks that teachers take up the role of social activist and organize their classes around ideas of thick democracy. the question remains, and I think Giroux fails to address this question in this edition, as to how teachers do the work of a social activist in public schools dependent on test scores for funding. Will teachers who cultivate a "cultural terrain" where students critically engage in issues related to the local and global world "meet" the criteria for a passing score on their evaluations? Will their students "meet" the standards on state and soon national assessments? What are we to do with the current education system if the answer is "yes"? And then what are we to do if the answer is "no"? Giroux fails to outline a plan for how can we mobilize citizens to to demand schools adopt more democratic education policies, but perhaps he knows that the efforts may be futile. I think many Americans believe what I called (and Freire calls) a myth about success (that if you work hard, you can be in the 1%). I think Americans believe it because of the exceptions we see on TV -- the Oprahs, who come from nothing and become millionaires. And I think that most people love America because of the consumerism and the competition that breeds consumerism. They think we have a social democracy to some degree, an ideology of universal access to social rights such as education, health care, and child/elderly care but also freedom from discrimination based on differences of ability, age, ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation and social class,but they aren't willing to think about education as a form of social class discrimination.

For now, teachers can raise consciousness. We can work with our students, as Giroux and other critical pedagogy advocates would suggest, to make visible the power structures of public life, the reproductive public sphere (113).


Notes:

• Argues for a discourse of ethics--a language of critique and a language of possibility
• Democracy: it is not patriotism
• To capture the imagination of people today you need a sense of moral well-being Not only material well-being on moral purpose not only material improvement
• citizenship is and I geological process and a manifestation of specific power relations
• Schools are not neutral places where they are deeply implicated income-producing aspects of dominant culture that serve to reproduce and unjust and on equal society
• 1920s and 30s social Reconstructionists develop education for students as critical thinkers addressing social problems transforming inequalities
• Education cannot be reduced to criticism there must be some action building a background of values and beliefs to make change
• citizenship education could not merely take place in the school but needs a wider social sphere
• Sputnik in the 1950s social Reconstructionist education education became nationalistic one-dimensional
• An example where citizens working together create important social changes and improved the quality of life
• citizenship education must be seen as a form of cultural production making of citizens must be understood as a process we experience as well as our relations to others in the world in a system of representations and images
• The opposite of citizenship education his corporate self interest industrial psychology and cultural uniformity is nationalistic and discussed as patriotism; what goes along with this is mastery efficiency control raising test scores
• All on problematic appeals to rules and individual success no talk of conflict no messiness of social relations of sexism racism and class discrimination it isn't easy clear in democracy; teachers are monitored scrutinized and measured according to these rules school assessment school achievement is numerical scoresheet
• Students need to learn the language of the community and public association how to create an intern their own stories along with those others who inhabit different cultural racial and social positions to balance their own individualistic interests with those of public good
• the logic of new patriotism educated generations of future citizens by molding them
• Ideology is complex contradictory system of discourse images and then through which we experience ourselves in relation to each other
• This means that a new logic of education might be  the logic of thick democracy must include the production of new images to promote the language of possibility combining strategy of opposition and strategy for constructing a new social order
• Alternative route rules for teachers and students to pursue in and out of school linking the political struggle within schools to broader societal issues teachers using their skills to work with others who are redefining citizenship as a collective alliance with various societies 
• Step one is to protest authorities that treat human beings as means and reproduce relations of domination force and violence; Power and ideologies and capitalist society that mask a totalitarian ethics and strip critical discourse from public life
• Step two develop a vision of the future rooted in social relations that give  meaning to community life; understand democracy as a struggle for extending civil rights and improving the quality of human life
• How to do this is with and at the call discourse with the historical) that comprehends the historical consequences of what it meant to take and emancipatory position on the poor and suffering such as the Gulag, Nazis, Pol Pot*******
• Such images represent tear domination and resistance but also examples of what principles have to be defended and plot against any interest of freedom and life
• Discourse of critical democracy discourse of emancipatory experience discourse of possibility
• It is a political project it is situated in reading historical traditions critically the human capacity for political grades rather then the doctrine of historical. Inevitability
• Students have a growing political  illiteracy; consumerism individualism teach about a critical view of American history students allowed to speak from their own traditions and voices
• Dewey's conception of the valuing process the need to focus on situations which are not only problematic but controversial rather than teaching unquestioned truths of fact and values the classroom must be seen as an arena of political and social process making ... Challenge the Western moral tradition
• Remember the suffering of the past and that out of this remembering it. Ethics should be developed in which solidarity sympathy and care become central dimensions of an informed social practice
• Teach in the spirit of debate and analysis one that provides the pedagogical conditions for students to learn how to theorize well affirming... getting the voices to put students speak learn and struggle the teacher cannot demand a student not to be a racist but here she can subject a position to critique that reveals it is an act of moral and political irresponsibility related to social and historical practices
• Student voices need to be explored with their inherent semantic contradictions analyzing the ideological tension revealed by the student who claims he believes he is a good citizen but also registers racist or sexist remarks about women
• Counter to the Rortyian claim among some educators that critical theorists have no right to impose their language constructs and others
• Like Barry says teachers have to take a position and make it clear to students but we also have to recognize the fact of their own commitment does not give them right to impose a particular position on their students
• The task is not to impose our dreams and then go to challenge them to have their own dreams to define their choices not to uncritically assume them
• He argues that America is becoming a land without memory one important function of schools is to establish a society without a history of protest or a multiplicity of social and political discourses
• Examine history as a form of liberating remembrance
• Teach democracy as a way of life not as a government; democracy as a means to make the individual and democracy as the purpose of enriching the lives of individual
• First schooling is not politically are morally neutral institution; Second intellectual development had to be linked to a general theory of social welfare and could not keep isolated as a goal for the sake of its own development; not just about the capacity for critical thinking it's also about the experience in the formation of character as part of social welfare face-to-face associations that stress squaw operation solidarity and social responsibility
• Democracy involves the studying of specific social problems and conditions helping students develop the general. Social welfare necessary to expose students to a variety of point of view
• Johanne Baptist Metz argues that identity is formed when memories are aroused
• Nearest tunes are important because they provide the possibility purple reclaiming one's own stories and for forging bonds of solidarity with the living and with those who have suffered in the past
• Solidarity as a form of practice represents a break from the bonds of isolated individuality and the need to engage for and with oppressive groups and political struggles that challenge the existing order of society as being institutionally repressing and unjust 
• Classroom practices can be organized around forms of learning in which the knowledge and skills acquired served to prepare students to later develop and maintain those public spheres outside schools that are so vital for developing website solidarity and which democracy as a social movement operates  as an active force 100
• educators need to identify the kinds of material and ideological preconditions that need to exist before schools compete effective---healthcare nutrition tomorrow morning until resources
• Teachers need the power and authority to organize and shape the conditions of work so that they can teach collectively produce alternative curricula and engage in the form of emancipatory politics
• What students should learn his knowledge about social forms through which human beings live. Knowledge about power how it works racism and sexism class exploitation and structures of everyday life not to denounce stereotypes but to expose and deconstruct the processes through which they are produced and circulated
• Provide students with the language through which they can analyze their own lived relations and experiences this is affirmative and critical
• instead of emphasizing individualistic and competitive approaches to learning students are encouraged to work together on projects in terms of their production and of their evaluation
• Now it's first has to be made meaningful to students before it can be made critical
• curricula must be part of public responsibility personal freedom democratic acceptance rejecting norms and practices that and buy an extended interests of domination human suffering and explication--with such a public philosophy teachers can defend the curriculum choices to make it through this course that aims at developing an educated and powered and critical citizenry
• A teacher defines the role pedagogically and politically within the school educator speaks to the wider sphere of intervention in which the concerns of authority now its power and democracy teaching learning listening and mobilizing the interests of a more just and equitable social order
• Teachers have to lay bare how certain knowledge gets chosen was interests it represents and why students might be interest in acquiring it---this is a body of knowledge approved by staff and the general community and district
• Textual analysis-- open the text to deconstruction interrogated as part of a wider process of cultural production make the text and object of intellectual inquiry put the reader not as a passive consumer but as an active producer of meaning the text is no longer and authorial assents waiting to be translated it as a text that becomes a collection of discourses with the play of contradictory meaning 139********
• Treat text as a social construct that is produced out of the number of available discourses locate the contradictions and gaps with in an educational text and situate them historically in terms of the interest they sustain and legitimate recognize in the text it's internal politics of style and how this opens up and constrains representations of the world; how the text silences certain voices and how it is possible to release possibilities from the text that provides new insights and critical readings regarding human understanding and social practices
• Students might also be considered before my text multilayered subjects with contradictory and diverse voices that present different readings of the material provided in class regardless of how important such material is politically
• Toni Bambara-- stories are never neutral  they are always tied to particular memories narratives and history in order to move beyond pedagogy of voice that to Jess at all stores are innocent we must examine such stories around the interest and principles that struck Japan and interrogate them this part of a political project that either undermines or enables the values and practices that provide the foundation for social justice equality and democratic community 160
• Questions of racism and sexism cannot be treated merely as topics of academic interest such a position should not prevent the dialogue;   define the structure of such a discussion as to prevent racist or sexist remarks from being made simply as an exception of one point of view among many
• Study of history and teacher education programs too often excluded our histories of women minority groups and indigenous peoples this exclusion is not politically innocent when we consider how existing social arrangements are partly dependent on the subjugation and elimination of the histories and voices of those groups marginalized by the dominant culture 192
• Educators can serve to uncover and excavate those forms of historical and subjugated knowledges that point to the experiences of suffering conflict and collective struggle link the notion of historical understanding to elements of critique and hope 213******
• Schools need to be defended as an important public service educate students to be critical citizens who can think challenge take risks and believe that their actions will make a difference in larger society places provide the opportunity preliterate occasions provide opportunities for students to share their experiences to work and social relations that emphasize care and concern for others and to be introduced forms of knowledge to provide them with the conviction an opportunity to fight for quality of life in which all human brings benefit 214****
• Prevent democracy from collapsing into a new form of barbarism

Bakhtin: A Speaking Human Being Artistically Represented

As I have discussed in previous posts, and as I stated in the summary of this project, I intended to show how the novel is doing the work of history. However, as I did my own inquiry into genocide studies over the last seven years, I did not only do inquiry using the novel. It was by putting the novel into conversation with other texts and considering the remainders and questions left unanswered. What bodies and ideas reside in the silences of history? The voices that are missing are the marginalized voices, yes, but also the voices that swim in the residue of modernity's rhetoric of expansion and development. English as a subject can examine the rhetoric of modernity that shapes nationalist ideology, and as we will see, the novel actually has a place in this rhetorical analysis.

How are we to do inquiry into the rhetoric of modernity if we cannot experience the social life of discourse? Can an individual speak or is she in constant dialogue? Bakhtin says,"It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of a language" (272). Because the utterance lives and takes shape in an environment of social and historical heteroglossia, "it cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological conciousness...it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue" (276). How, then, do we make sense of today's utterances if we do not know the environment of the historical utterances that shaped today's discourse? I agree that rhetorical analysis of historical documents can shade the empty space, but journalistic or political genres can forget or ignore the heteroglossia that surrounds it, which is why I think that the English curriculum needs to include novels as we revise our curriculum for the twenty-first century. The discourse of the novel has what Bakhtin says is "an orientation that is contested, contestable, and contesting" from which "follows the decisive and distinctive importance of the novel as a genre: the human being in the novel is first, foremost and always a speaking human being; the novel requires speaking persons bringing with them their own unique ideological discourse, their own language" (332).

The novel is artistic prose in the family of rhetoric, for while there is an element of authorial intention to move the reader, the author is not merely reproducing or transmitting a person's discourse but artistically representing it. If we think about literature of atrocities, we can imagine all the survivors, perpetrators, and victims (and the spectrum connecting this naming) who have not spoken publicly about their experiences and those who do not have the skills to write their stories. Laub and Felman in Testimony explore the effect of bearing witness to the the testimony of survivors; Shoah captured the utterances of perpetrators as well as survivors, and Clendinnen in Reading the Holocaust presented a variety of genres that transmitted or reproduced speech --  none novels. Indeed an individual's speech is already and always in constant dialogue, but singularly, these texts do not place the speech and acts of the human being in an ideological world as does the novel through representing discourse.

...a really adequate discourse for portraying a world's unique ideology can only be that world's own discourse, although not that discourse in itself, but only in conjunction with the discourse of an author [who is aware of that which he intends to represent].  A novelist may even choose not to give his character a direct discourse of his own, he may confine himself to the representation of the character's actions alone; in such an authorial representation, however, if it is thorough and adequate, the alien discourse (i.e., the discourse  of the character himself) always sounds together with authorial speech. (334)

The novel, as stated above, does not want to reproduce or transmit; it  does not want to parody voices situated in social and historical contexts. There is a problematic of reproducing or transmitting texts, especially ones that need a degree of mediation to establish social and historical context for readers, modern readers in particular.

A central problem of the novel is the artistic representation of another's speech. If an novelist bears witness to the story of a women who survived the Guatemalan genocide, how is he to represent not just her words, but her speech, her discourse? The problem is that her story is a rendering of history told in a discourse unique to her that then interacts with the discourse of her listener, the novelist. The question is who precisely is speaking and under what concrete circumstances?  If we stop at the utterance and consider only the words transmitted, we do not consider the images lying behind the isolated utterances of social language.  The image the novelist creates reveals the truth and limits of a given language because it is a social discourse, and in any social discourse, there are spaces of nonunderstanding even if we are using the same semantic or syntactic rules of language.

The novel has what Bakhtin calls a "double-voicedness" that pushes to the "limit the mutual nonunderstanding represented by people who speak different languages" (356).   What Bahktin says he means by social language is not semantic and lexical choices but a "concrete socio-linguistic belief system that defines a distinct identity for itself within the boundaries of language  that is unitary only in the abstract" (356). What exactly does this mean, I am not sure yet, but in trying to make sense of it, I think he is saying that  the novelist could either use the discourse of the novel to  mark off different historical and cultural social worlds -- with jargon, dialect, lexical markers, etc --  if he seeks to make a direct commentary on language use. But the novelist can do more (and better is what I think Bakhtin is saying). The novelist can create a perspective for another's speech by creating a specific novelistic image of language; this notion of "image of language" is central to Bakhtin's chapter, "Discourse of the Novel," but I am not sure if I am grasping this. It is much easier, of course, to note direct dialogue of characters and to hear the dialects as such, but the novelist is creating the image of language not is such an overt manner, I think. The novelist is one part of the double-voicedness, one part of the discourse -- the part artistically representing the discourse of the social and historical context. Bakhtin writes:

 Thanks to the ability of a language to represent another language while still retaining the capacity to sound simultaneously  both outside it and within it, to talk about it and at the same time to talk in it and with it -- and thanks to the ability of the language being represented simultaneously to serve as an object of representation while continuing  to be able to speak to itself -- thanks to all this, the creation of specific novelistic images of languages becomes possible.  Therefore, the framing authorial context can least of all treat the language it is representing  as a thing, a mute and unresponsive speech object, something that remains outside the authorial context as might any other object of speech. (358).

In creating the image of language, the novelist can create  new living contexts that expose new truths and limits, which then might answer questions otherwise unavailable in the unrepresented discourse. Two linguistic conciousnessnes are present -- creating a new zone of contact to explore -- the one being represented and the one representing, each belonging to a different system of language.  Bakhtin says that if there is no second representing conciousness that what results is not an image of language but a sample of some other person's language. He writes, "An image of language may be structured only from the point of view of another language, which is taken as the norm. The novelist, then, is the norm who structures utterances in that language and who therefore introduce into the potentialities of language itself their own actualizing intention (360) -- a collision of two different points of view on the world. Does this mean that the novelist must have an actual language in mind, an actual human being he or she is representing? The definition of the novelistic hybrid is this: an artisitcally organized system for bringing languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving out of a living image of another language (361).

The novelistic plot, then, serves to represent speaking persons and their ideological worlds, according to Bakhtin.  What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language and thus ideological world. Bakhtin suggest that in this space, there is an overcoming of otherness -- an otherness that is only contingent, external, and illusory. In this sense by perceiving the otherness, one recognizes the erasing of temporal and spatial boundaries. Could we say that the novel minimizes the distancing present in other genres? Can the images of language represent atrocities? If it is intentionally organizes as such, does it mean that it is successful? Is the fact that the novel is not attempting to achieve exact and complete reproduction of those alien languages he incorporates into the new text make its efforts to achieve artistic consistency among the images of these languages sufficient for rendering history?

Thus, if there is no novelist, there is no double-voicedness or no second representing conciousness in the discourse. In memoirs, autobiographies, essays, speeches, conventions, and contracts, readers miss the second discourse that creates the reality of different points of view on the world. In between those different points of view, questions and potentialities are revealed; we witness the limits.  A single-voiced discourse or a collection of single voiced discourses offers readers samples; the reader must do the representing, but are all reader as capable of representing as a novelist, able to illuminate one language by means of another? I think there is something here -- this difference between double and single voicedness.Bakhtin compares the novel to poetry, drama and epic, but I am trying to get a sense of how the novel is doing something that a document, say the Genocide Convention, or the guidelines for the Gacaca hearings in Rwanda, or even Primo Levi's If This is a Man don't do. Are those single-voiced? Do we need single-voiced and double-voiced texts in the English classroom?

Am I even asking the "right" questions here?

Todd's help:

 The short answer to the question "Why Bakhtin?" is that he gives you a
language to describe how, of all genres, the novel includes many voices,
how it destabilizes attempts at an abstract or stable account of life and
language, and how it invites readers to understand any utterance as
unfinished. In reading Bakhin (B’)  I think it’s especially important to
think of his observations on the novel as descriptive not just of the
novel, but of language as it actually functions in real life, and, by
extension, life itself.  If we keep this in mind, we can apply a lot of
what B’ says about the novel in general to novels about genocide.

By way of contrast, when B' talks of the Epic as a fixed form that is
disconnected from present reality, that cannot admit change, that forces
real language to be “poured into” it in order to qualify as an Epic, are
there parallels in other forms of writing about genocide (like official
reports) that tend to ossify language, to remove it from the realm of
actual experience?   But regarding the novel, B’ writes about its inherent
instability, its constantly “becoming,” its “free and flexible”
“openendedness,” its capacity to bring into one text a huge range of
voices and modes of expression. In that way, the novel--of all genres--is
the one that most approximates the language of real life and people's
attempts to understand and represent it.

We might also consider what B’ says about how the novel (i.e. the way
people really use language) has the potential to critique and destabilize
hierarchies, how nothing is sacred to its critique, and how it brings
whatever we’re considering into a “zone of contact” with experience.

In essence, B’ explores this notion of the novel as a genre that resists
stability and domestication.  One might say it’s delightfully “messy.”
This is so, according to B’, because “verbal discourse is a social
phenomenon”: it cannot be cut off from the world in which it comes to mean
something.  Because the world we live in is so “messy” (esp. when things
like genocide happens) the novel itself (again, read: language) can’t be
pinned down with any kind of precise definition or description.  It
includes “a diversity of social speech types,” an evolving collection of
different ways with words that move in and out of each other, that may
complement or work against each other in more ways than we can ever
anticipate or describe with any finalization.  This what “heteroglossia”
is—this character of internal tension within anything that is ever said or
written between forces that are trying to fix its meaning and those that
compromise its stability.  Put another way, B’ is interested in what might
be called the “flux” of language, its internal stratification and
movement, the ways in which all of the different languages within an
utterance are dialogically interacting and influencing each other.  Or, to
try yet another definition, heteroglossia is the way in which languages
“talk to” each other within a single text.

Ever read HUCK FINN?  Remember that scene where Huck is on the raft and
decides to write a letter to the Widow Douglass telling her where he is
and and turning Jim in?  Huck says that he feels terribly sinful for not
doing it before, that he knows it's the right thing to do, etc.  But then
he remembers what a good friend Jim has been, tears up the letter, and
resolves that he'll go to hell rather than betray his companion.  In that
one scene you see tons of different languages: Huck the narrator, Twain
winking and acknowledging that he believes that it would actually be wrong
to turn Jim in (double-voicedness).  But in that utterance situated in the
novel, you also see previous utterances of slave owners, abolitionists,
etc.  That one scene is populated by different languages and ideologies
all over the place.

To be sure, we have no choice but to treat language as a more-or-less
fixed system (we couldn’t talk or write to each other if we didn’t), but
B’ helps us see how any attempt to do that is subject to its own internal
tension. These tensions, it seems to me, open up spaces to recognize in
the novel a multiplicity of ideologically-laden voices, and the reader is
drawn into participating in that conversation.

I'm not sure if this is all that helpful, but I find B' to be delightfully
challenging in that he explains how the novelist arranges artistically not
a fixed form, not a static view of life or language, but countless
languages in dialogue with each other. Let's keep talking about this when
we meet with Dave.

K-12 Educators Become Cultural Anthropologists // Roger Thayer Stone Center For Latin American Studies at Tulane University

K-12 Educators Become Cultural Anthropologists // Roger Thayer Stone Center For Latin American Studies at Tulane University

Confronting Modernity in the English Classroom

Genocide and the idea of teaching about something that  is clearly "something bad" that should not happen does not offer much to argue about. Yet, when I learned about genocide in 2005 and began teaching about 21st century genocides that same year, I discovered that the word "genocide" and how it is used does, in fact, open space for argument.  At NCTE, I am presenting the curriculum for the English 459 course I teach at UIC, developed with colleagues, about troubling tradition and re-imagining the English classroom. The idea is to have an introductory course that supports new teachers as we first trouble the idea that our job is to teach a novel or a period in literature and then imagine the discomfort of doing something different.  What would it mean to teach and learn English if there were no "right" answer to bubble in? I'm in my third year of my doctorate, which focuses on re-imagining the English classroom as a place of raising global consciousness and participation. The starting point for the project is literature of atrocities, specifically genocide, but the idea is how we can use Illinois' 2005 mandate to teach about genocide as a call for reconsidering the materials and topics we are using to teach reading and writing. This idea is, of course, troubling for many traditional English teachers, but in the classes I teach at UIC and DePaul for new teachers, we are beginning to plant the seed for change.

English classrooms have been teaching the Diary of Anne Frank and Eli Wiesel's Night for years, but English as a subject in schools woefully has neglected the topic of genocide and has engaged in little theorizing about "genocide," meaning its rhetorical nature to evoke a distanced terror, that which is unimaginable and unspeakable. English seems reluctant to confront this significant history and possibility of modern society with an even greater resistance to collaborating with each other and the academy to ascertain what the English classroom should be doing to cultivate a globally conscious and literate discipline. I suggest that not only is genocide within the purview of current intentions of the teaching of English in middle and high schools but that English needs to confront modernity and genocide as inherent in the logic of modernity to fulfill its promise to represent and critique the world we inhabit, to "read" the word and the world (who said this). The English classroom can expose ideology in what we read and participate in future new thinking about human society by what we say, write, create, and do. It is appropriate for English to include genocide in the continuing attempt to close in on what language does and how it is appropriated in narrative and argument.There are several paradigms of English that show how genocide can be one way we can begin to problematize modernity.

Given that genocide is retrievable only in narrative and cultural reconstructions, issues of testimony and representation parallel controversy over the inadequacy of memory, the tensions of truth, and the  telling of history.  English can incorporate diverse perspectives that complicate national stereotyping and simplistic accounts. The English classroom can do its own study of the cultural, historical and social structural factors so capable of replication because of what Mignolo calls the rhetoric of modernity using the logic of coloniality. Texts do this work, enact this rhetoric and logic. English is not incapable of examining social and structural components of the genocidal environment or how genocidal  structural components like making texts that make a society "legible" (Scott) and the texts in the "discourse of measurement" (Cintron) similarly practice rhetorics of modernity and the logic of coloniality. English would read beyond the protagonists and antagonists of genocide to penetrate the gaps and fissures (Bakhtin)  that seemingly separated participants -- what of that empty space between narratives? Instead of telling the story of hegemony or the story of perpetrator and victim, the emphasis can be on patterns of reciprocity of relations (Ortner 1984, 157), exposing the dialectical aspects of the context of genocide and the context, the telling of genocide, and the public use of the language of genocide.

To learn about that which we did not bear witness puts us in the position of listener and a distanced witness to an atrocity. To hear about genocide, similarly puts us at a distance to witness how the word is appropriated in rhetorical terms. This transactional space is dependent on the problematic of testimony and the narrative construction of "truth." English is concerned with this space and understands that "truth" is always constructed by language, symbols of exchange, and that in language the symbols of exchange are only truly communicated when the beings exchanging these symbols are of equal status. I think it is fair to say that no two beings will every come to that transactional space equal, and so the narrative construction is always a representation, always in motion, and always a problematic of referentiality. Langer talks about Holocaust testimony as represented reality, and I think it is fair to say that all testimony is a represented reality that seeks to make legible that which is unimaginable. Language is a way of ordering that past in the present, and author must render his testimony as a survivor or the heard testimony of a survivor (as the author-witness); such a rendering requires that the author fill the gaps in memory, invent a narratorial voice, make legible chaotic fragments using Langer's literary imagination:  the literature of atrocities. The author and the reader then share this transactional space and must grapple with the problematic in the referential inadequacy of the testimonial text. Bakhtin's heteroglossia might explain why the discipline of English can best unravel the intertwining of the literary and historical, for there is no one version of events, no singular truth.

In the English classroom, there is no one authority, yet all texts seek to construct authority while at the same time considering the fact that the empirical link between experience and narrative will be lost in literary construction. There is a danger of relativism in the transactional space, that all voices or all interpretations may become equally valid. That said, I think the transactional space of an English is well aware of the power of language to move people to action and to influence ideology. The classroom is a place to talk about the danger of relativism in regard to this replicable chapter in human history. The structural aspects of the story of a genocide do complicate "truth" as such, but the representation is enough to demonstrate the rhetoric of modernity in action and the replicable chapter in human history in which students can write.

By facing the distanced terror and reading the unimaginable, the English classroom can capitalize on its unique perspective on narrative frameworks and reliance on texts in pursuit of revealing rhetoric of modernity. The connection between discourse systems -- discourse of measurement, discourse of narrative -- would stimulate increased theorizing about genocide but also about English curriculum. By increasing awareness of pregenocidal conditions brought on by modernity, we and our students become obliged to demystify the ideology used to justify atrocities, the same ideology of development that has distorted democracy. Students can be globally literate citizens who can see the value of ambiguity and gaps in some narratives and the danger in others as residents of Western modernity living in the logic of coloniality.

The Rhetoric and Revival of the Word: Genocide

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric Of Motives. New York : Prentice-Hall, 1952 [c1950]. Print.
Denich, Bette. "Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide" (1994)

What do we mean by "genocide"?  How do our terms color our conceptualization of an idea, event, an act? How do we appropriate a term for our rhetorical purposes? Is it deceptive?

Burke writes that the basic function of rhetoric is  the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.  In place of rhetoric might be science. Science is a semantic or descriptive terminology for charting the conditions of nature from an impersonal point of view, regardless of one's wishes or preferences.  If, however, there is a "wish," it is more than descriptive but hortatory. "It is not just trying to tell how things are, in strictly 'scenic' terms; it is trying to move people" (41). The statement(s) might include particular details or information, but the call is not scientific but rhetorical.  Thus, if scientific language is a preparation for action, rhetorical language is inducement to action(or to attitude, attitude being an incipient act).

The word "genocide" while immersed in scientific vocabularies is rhetorical and thus appropriated "to move people."   This word, coined by Rafael Lemkin in 1944, represents physical aspects of genocide in The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide formally presented on December 9, 1948 and ratified in 1951. "Genocide" is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

  "Genocide" represents a history and a future. It names atrocities and appropriates historical imagery for future political, economic, and social action. Burke writes of "the future"  as "not the sort of thing one can put under a microscope, or even test by knowledge of exactly equivalent conditions in the past." And so the term lies outside strictly scientific vocabularies of description and is situated in the frame of political exhortation. Burke tells us,"For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols" (43).  However, the problem with  "genocide,"  and the reason why the phrase "Never Again" is an empty assertion, is because for a symbol to induce action, the beings in the exchange must be equal. As a term used by one symbol-using entity to induce action in another of equal status, "genocide" is an example of rhetoric between beings of unequal status; one being is not free to act. The word's rhetorical function is no longer wholly realistic but idealistic in this realm of inequality.  Thus, when one appropriates the term "genocide," there is inherently a rhetorical and perhaps deceptive motive -- one that is the antithesis of Rafael Lemkin's intention to make "genocide" real, measurable, identifiable, and thus capable of preventing and punishing. It is an term that while it does induce pity and disgust, it does not wholly moving people to prevent or punish (although I think we can consider the ICC as taking steps towards this).The guerrilla movement, however, appropriate the term genocide for their own cause. Predominantly middle class students, activists and former government workers, the guerrillas cultivated an image of solidarity with the peasants (Maya and poor ladinos). While there were some peasants who took up arms with the guerrillas, most were stuck in the middle of the conflict between the government and the guerrillas.

If we think about the "genocide" in Guatemala in the 1980s, we can see why "genocide" worked as an idealistic rhetoric rather than realistic.  When Pamela Yates produced When Mountains Tremble in 1982 showing "the acts" -- the Guatemalan government killing of members of indigenous groups, the Maya;  causing serious bodily harm to members of a group, the Maya; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group -- she was not free to prevent or punish the acts. She used the term genocide in her movie to set up a rhetorical situation to induce action. But what sort of action? What the documentary represented was a common logic of structural exclusion in which a nation's control over territory is taken to mean the literal absence of others. In this case the nationalist ideology of primarly Ladino land owners were exclusive in a symbolic and real sense defining the relationship between the state/landowners and indigenous peoples. What Yates showed went beyond the symbolic exclusion to the literal excision of Maya from the body politic.

The members who signed The Convention are the ones obliging their governments to prevent and punish, yet the dynamics between members and the accused are not equal. One being is not free to act.  The word "genocide" has an idealistic rhetorical function when we see it being used in the media for policy and philanthropy. When Colin Powell used the word genocide to name the atrocities in Darfur in 2004, the Illinois Senate wrote a mandate requiring all public schools to teach and additional unit on genocide (in addition to, not with or instead of a unit on the Holocaust). What, then, was the function of the word "genocide" in this other document, an educational mandate? What rhetorical value would the word carry between the a state senate and school districts, between school districts and teachers, between teachers and students. What rhetorical value would that word carry in the curriculum industry?

Just as the ideology of nationalism does not in itself induce political action, the naming of an act does not in itself induce action. The transformation from idea to action involves a series of symbolic processes that mediate communication between leaders and people invoking them to think, feel, and act collectively according to the premise of the ideology.  Such symbols as we see with the word genocide have emotional and cognitive meaning, so the transmittal of nationalist ideologies (as with Aryan, Serbian and Croatian,Hutu, Turks) from "the intellectual sphere to that of mass politics can be seen as involving the manipulation of symbols with polarizing emotional content " (Denich 369). Denich, in her article "Dismembering Yugoslavia" explains WWII ethnic conflict as something deliberately minimized by the Tito regime by suppressing symbolic reminders (like The Pigeon Cave production that explored Serbian nationalism) and then revived  with symbolic presentations that dismembered Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. During the Tito regime, survivors of the WWII massacres had to quietly remember the dead by visiting pigeon caves and other unmarked burial sites. The Tito regime did not want to commemorate the burial sites because it did not want reminders of the nationalist ideologies of WWII.  Not long after the suppression of the performance of "The Pigeon Cave," came an outburst of art, literature and scholarship on national themes portraying Serbian history and the context of the WWII genocide. The Serbian nationalist revitalization appropriated "genocide" for their cause to secede from Yugoslavia as its own state. Both Serbs and Croats turned to formulations of nationhood, the excision of ethnic groups from territory, and thus resurrected a framework that had culminated in the pigeon caves, the Ustasha massacres of Serbs by Croats in 1941: genocide 

In this case, we see how genocide is used to argue for a homogenous state. Denich writes, " In order to 'avoid in the future the great suffering with the Serbs' neighbors inflict upon them whenever then have an opportunity to do so,' the Chetniks proposed a 'homogenous Serbia'" ( 375).

Transfers and exchanges of population, especially of Croats from the Serbian and of Serbs from the Croatian areas, is the only way to arrive at their separation and to create better relations between them, and thereby remove the possibility of a repetition of the terrible crimes that occurred even in the First World War, but especially during this war, in the entire area in which the Serbs and Croats live intermixed, and where the Croats and Moslems have undertaken in a calculated way the extermination of the Serbs. (Quoted by Tomasevich 1975: 167; see also Milovanovic 1986: 261-275)

 On July 25, 1990 the new government of Croatia took office as a real action of division and ethnic opposition. Still symbolic was the exclusion of non-Croat when the Utasha flag was raised. Serbs knew the coat-of-arms symbol represented the very nationalism that massacred Serbs years ago. Denich argues that "the reappearance of the symbols associated with genocide must be examined in light of memories that had been both individually and collectively repressed and, in light of their transformation, over a half-century, into a cultural artifact of a particular sort" (381). Vuk Draskovic, a Serbian novelist wrote, "If war comes, I fear most for the fate of the Croatian people. In Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia there isn't a Serb to whom the Croats don't owe several liters of blood. There isn't a house in which someone wasn't massacred....So I understand why Serbs, if war comes, would like to fight against the Croats" (Borba 1991). Denich clarifies that the modern Serbs had not experienced the Utasha genocide, and "their wartime suffering had come at the hands of the Germans...rather than Croats"; however, the pigeon caves were exhumed literally and figuratively. Both Serbs and Croats used the narratives of genocide from their ancestors in 1990 for their own nationalist agenda by conducting a memorial ceremony in 1990 to exhume collective graves and reintement the remains with Orthodox burial rites.

Okay, here we might talk about what is happening in the Highlands of Guatemala as we speak with the exhumation of mass graves and the Spanish courts to charge Rios Montt with genocide. There is a Pan-Maya revival happening, but I don't think this is nationalist in the same way as the Serbs and Croats appropriated the term.

The effect of publicizing the Ustasha atrocities was to "kindle animosity toward the Croat perpetrators of violence against fellow Serbs and toward the current nationalist government, with its revival of Ustasha symbols." Denich explains that rather than renaming the issue as one of minority rights within Croatia (as the Maya seem to be doing -- although they are not minorities in ethnic numbers but rather an economic minority), it became a call to arms.

David Apter calls this moment in history a "disjunctive moment" when relations of power are transformed through reformulations of ideology that combine theory with power. Denich writes, "The political effect of mythical thinking is to polarize" (382), and I think this is what Burke may mean when he says rhetoric becomes idealistic when the beings exchanging the symbol are unequal. Perhaps the word is mythical -- or magical (I think Burke calls it at some point) -- but genocide is a word that is "used" only for the ideal of nationalism. Serbs, Croats, even the Maya are or have appropriated this word for their ethnic identity or cause and/or power.  The universalistic premise of constitutional democracy was not necessarily the goal. For survivors of "acts," prevention and punishment might have been a motive for appropriating genocide, but I am not so sure that Lemkin imagined that the Serbs would use genocide as an argument for another one. I think the Maya are taking steps for justice, but the the Pan Maya movement has elements of nationalism. 

So I think that as we comply with the mandate to teach a unit on genocide or as we make changes in our curriculum to  build knowledge, enlarge experience, and broaden worldviews. We can see this unit as about preparing to students to participate globally. Instead of teaching about "genocide," a word that I think we have established as being politically charged and even deceptively appropriated, we can teach about globalization and its impact on democratic principles. We can do inquiry into the standard narratives looking for gaps to do inquiry. 

Thom's The Problem of Credibility

Thom, James Alexander. The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction. Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest, 2010. Print.

James Alexander Thom was formerly a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. He is the author of Follow the River, Long Knife, From Sea to Shining Sea, Panther in the Sky (for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel), Sign-Talker, The Children of First Man, and The Red Heart. He lives in the Indiana hill country near Bloomington with his wife, Dark Rain of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. Dark Rain is a director of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Planning Council. The author's Website is: www.jamesalexanderthom.com.

The concern of history and the concern of language, for that matter, is a question of truth. What is true? What is the truth? Language is never ending. An utterance communicated does not end with the last word but moves to the listener, the reader for interpretation and meaning. What was said? What does it mean? I think those are two different questions.   History, like language, is never ending. When an event is recollected, it becomes a history, and even when that remembering seems to end, people are still looking for "the truth" or another history of that event. So I see language and history always being partial to the extent that there is space unaccounted for -- gaps and fissures. How are we to fill in these gaps and fissures in truth? What do we call that which we do to fill in the gaps? I think it is the work of fiction, and I think that because we need fiction to fill in the gaps that we cannot talk about "the" truth but rather "a" truth. And so here, we are getting at how I see the English classroom being something more than literature. I see the English classroom as the place of examining the gaps and fissure of story. Some say everything is an argument (Graff) and some say everything is a narrative (Schaafsma). I think they are one and the same. We tell a story because we are sharing our argument. We make an argument because we have a story to tell.

I began this project thinking about what a novel can do that nonfiction could not. I wanted to think about what a piece of historical fiction like Ben Mikaelsen's Tree Girl  could say about the genocide of 200, 000 Mayas in the Guatemalan Highlands in the 1980s could do that a nonfiction text could not do. I think I can make a good argument for the way fiction can represent a truth and appropriate a metaphor for the purposes of expressing themes of resilience and cooperation so inherent to Maya life and the depict Mignolo's rhetoric of modernity through the logic of coloniality in its characterization while considering its young adult audience.  However, I am beginning to see how this novel leaves fissures in need of further inquiry, and that is why it is important to read -- not for what it does but for what it does not do. It does not tell the truth; it tells a truth. When frame for this story has a beginning and an ending; that which history does not. The language of Gaby's story, the protagonist, stops when the book is closed, but the meaning does not.

What James Alexander Thom discusses in his book about the craft of writing historical fiction is the problem of credibility, or to be more specific: the problem of too much credibility.  Thom talks about readers being misled by the credibility of the author of historical fiction, but I would argue that readers are often misled by texts more generally, and this, we may see, might be the renewed objective of the new English classroom: to see all texts as both a story and an argument. Indeed, readers can learn a great deal from reading; we can learn "facts" from the writer. Many such texts, specifically historical fiction pieces, contain indexes and bibliographies because writers are great researchers -- a combination of novelist and historian. However, despite bibliographies and even prologues that state "this book is a novel, everything in it is true and can be verified in research references" or "this novel is based on historical events," the writer must draw on inferences to tell a story. There is a certain degree of verisimilitude.

Truth is the aim of inquiry but most of the greatest theories are actually false; however, such inquiry does constitute progress with respect to the goal of truth, so it is possible, according to Karl Popper, for one false theory to be closer to the truth.  And with  literature or creative writing, verisimilitude has the property of seeming true, of resembling reality. As discussed in my post  about Slater's meme, how language makes imitation possible, in order for text to hold persuasive for an audience, it must be grounded in a seeming reality. So we can think about mimesis as evolving into versimilitude rather than being a copy or reproduction of an idea. As we discussed in the post about Slater's meme, a meme is imitated but never copied, so ideas are shared but are never exact thus always alive and taking shape through transmission. Here we cannot talk about history as being true or of a text being "fact" because historical "fact" must be interpreted and then crafted into a story by a writer for a reader who then interprets this new text for "fact" or a "truth."  Of course, inferences are influenced by one's own expectations and personal bias and experiences, but when we come to a text that has any version of the word "history" in it, readers tend to let their guard down and take up the "historical" as "the" truth rather than considering the rendering or fiction that is inherent in any text.

I would like to make a distinction here between verisimilitude as a "likeness or semblance of truth" and something altogether different which would be...what...that which is not at all like the truth or some form of essentializing even. Thom recounts a situation where he read historical fiction, one that had a claim about being true and verified by references. He says that he tried to verify the author's version of some story by finding others who had accepted this author's account, talking to other authorities on the topic and eventually writing his own version in one of his novels.After coming upon some "obscure scholarly refutation," Thom realized he had perpetuated a myth in his novel. The original novelist had started a "false" version, and because of Slater's meme, this idea of history kept recirculating. Is the lesson here to go to the beginning? Where does a story begin? What truth can you verify? No text can be credibly enough, but I don't think that is the point -- whether it is historical fiction or memoir. For a reader to glean any truth, the text must reflect realistic aspects of human life and the writer must be able to render the story to have the credibility that promotes the willing suspension of disbelief in the reader.  The novel, and history, and language, contained in a text (a beginning and an end contained on a page)  is a total illusion of life within itself. It is a closed fictional world (even if it is label nonfiction, memoir, autobiography, biography, essay). The credibility then cannot come from research and "facts" or accounts of an event; the credibility must be seen in terms of the text's own internal logic. While the reader's inference and interpretation pose a problem for mimesis; the answer to this problem is to see verisimilitude as a technical problem to resolve within the context of the novel's fictional world or the memoir's rendering of the writer's world.  The truth of a text is in its internal logic but the verisimilitude of this logic will always be deferred because the text's grounding in the real can always be contested.

A text is always a site of struggle (most of the time a political, social or economic struggle) over the real and its meanings. What is truth? What is verisimilitude? As an English teacher, we can think about these questions in every text we read, but I think that the novel, particularly the historical fiction novels, offer a site of entry for our audience (middle and high school students) to do inquiry. In making sense of the novel's internal logic, the reader is faced with his own ignorance of the past. What is truth? What is fiction? What are the remainders that have settled into the fissures of the narrative waiting further inquiry?

Fain, Perez, and Slater's Educating for Democracy, Changing the World

Fain, Stephen M.,, Slater, Judith J.Callejo-Pérez, David M.,eds. Educating For Democracy In A Changing World: Understanding Freedom In Contemporary America. New York : Peter Lang, 2007. Print.

Chapter 11, "Language of the Curriculum: Memes of Practice," Judith J. Slater

Judith J. Slater is a co-author of Higher Education and Human Capital: Re/thinking the Doctorate in America (2011), Collaboration in Education (2010), The War Against the Professions: The Impact of Politics and Economics on the Idea of University (2008), Teen Life in Asia (Teen Life Around the World) 2004), Pedagogy of Place (2003), The Freirian Legacy (2002), Acts of Alignment: Of Women in Math and Science and All of Us Who Search for Balance (2000), and  Anatomy of a Collaboration: Study of a College of Education/Public School Partnership (1996).

Educating for Democracy (2007) is a response to the events of 9/11 and argues that while the Bush administration further militarized the United States to protect the country, he carried this movement of regimenting systems to what Cintron calls a "discourse of measurement," a discourse that brought on initiatives such as No Child Left Behind. The ever-increasing threats to our nations security began a self-inflicted threat to freedom in and with Americans.  The irony is that freedom, as a requisite condition for democracy, became part of a discourse of measurement that redefined democracy. Democracy in America has become something much more narrow and controlled -- a thin democracy. And this trend has threatened the education in America -- equating learning with test scores and democracy with capitalism. The authors caution Americans and ask that we be more aware of the practices of the state alerting readers to instances of abridgement of our freedoms and pointing to what is influencing such practices.  As I am considering critical pedagogy and the practices of teachers in middle and high school, I am looking at how Slater, in particular, considers the rhetoric of curriculum. What is the logic at work here?

Slater begins her chapter talking about the use of language. Of course, in the field of education, mass beliefs and behaviors about education and schooling are communicated through language, and such beliefs are duplicated as that language makes its way through district offices, then faculty meetings, and then the classrooms. We, the education community, make certain assumptions about this language, this semantic environment, and for the most part, the assumptions are that this is what we "should" be doing, especially if it is "research-based." The language, however, is based on an ideology about what education and schooling is supposed to be and do. What is this ideology? "What allows this transformation of idea to language to occur? More importantly, what ideational representations do we place out there in print and between people and institutions that lead to action or inaction, to political, social and economic predispositions that permeate the common agreements that we have about who we understand and misunderstand each other and the institutions that we create to enforce and perpetuate them" (144).  Slater considers the mechanism of  memetics here.

Citing Richard Dawkins (1989) who coined the term memes to represent those elements of culture that are passed on by imitation, Slater  explains that by naming things and ideas, we given them a "boost in their quest for imitation and replication, building more and more memes around theme that are maintained and grow in size and complexity...for example, standardized testing takes on a new meaning within and without the original context that it was designed to represent" (145). Because memes are what Slater calls "second replicators unique to human beings," they vary as they are passed on, never passing exact copies, from person to person. We think, act, and learn through imitation and instruction as we evolve personal ideas that are in the interest of the replicating memes, according to Blakemore (1999). For example, the movement from A Nation at Risk to the legislation of  No Child Left Behind demonstrate how ideas were copied from site to site across the country and how classrooms began to look more and more alike as they taught to the test. Teachers stopped talking about what the text is doing and began talking about how to select the best answer because of the spread of memes. But what is it about the language or our minds that explains why some minds imitate and others resist replication? Does the memes need to be more easily imitated in order for it to spread? When I did some research last semester comparing the discourse of two mandates, it was clear that the "standards mandate" was followed and replicated over the "genocide mandate" primarily because the language was more "thin" or easily to replicate.

Slater asks, "How can less spreadable memes be sustained and compete concerning decisions about curriculum and instruction? What conditions would create environments for alternative memes to penetrate the discussion about education?"

If we first think about the functionalist use of language as a form of social control,we can think of language for transmission of information to establish relationship among people. The language itself may not be what controls, however, but rather the interpretation of the language. Slater says that the most powerful meme is democracy, but what meme of democracy is being imitated? Whose version of democracy should be imitated and how is this communicated? Slater writes, "The communicative function uses of mass media, the press, movies, television, and the Internet to help raise aspirations of people as they strive to be like others and this is facilitated by imitating memes. The world keeps going on the collected wisdom, information that helps control the environment from one generation to the next, creating cultural and intellectual cooperation that we take for granted in our meme-driven world" (150). It seems to me that this meme-driven world is, in fact, merely symbolic in nature. It is an imitation and not the real; the rhetoric of democracy, a democracy of competition and measurement, is the verbal world of schools. Slater and Hayakawa call this a false map. The imitator, perhaps a teacher, believes the prejudices of maps that are presented are the actual territory, maps with misinformation and error, rhetorical maps. Because so many teachers believe the map, the meme, is scientifically based and because we believe the source has authority because he or she is in a position of power, then we believe the maps (or language).

Of course, this logic of meme does not put much faith in the minds of teachers to resist meme or to produce new a new meme that might cultivate a profession of critical thinkers. Language is symbolic, and while its interpretation has the power to shape action and inaction,any new meme will not necessarily be any more true than the last. Slater argues against "oververbalizations, smoke screens for action and ideas, guided by words alone rather than facts that should guide us," but the "should guide us" language here assumes the curriculum workers can "create and imitate memes that lead to more appropriate ends" (151). She asks "rather than letting the memes of imitation of programs and ideas control the endless duplication, let those on the front lines, who know the student population best, work toward the goals of equity instead of having the solutions come to them ready made and impenetrable"(152). She is referring to the timelines, penalties,  funding and the legislation to measure equity and accountability. 

I am not convinced that those on the "front line" can shake the years of mimesis that pervade their pedagogy, but I do think that Slater ends her chapter with an important point about democracy and what a rhetoric of thick democracy can do to counter the logic of meme. Democracy is not about imitation; it is the antithesis. Democracy is complex, messy, and alive. Slater says that an orientation to this type of democracy requires another form of thought and language that is open to debate and dialogue so that they truly reflect the underlying values of a society.  "We have to be careful what memes we aid and abet and which ones we as yet have the opportunity to create" (153). Indeed, we do, but the question really needs to be "What is the answer to the logic of meme?"

Carr's Educating for Democracy

Carr, P. (2008). Educating for Democracy: With or without Social Justice. Teacher Education Quarterly, 35(4), 117-136.

What kind of democracy are we talking about?

When we talk about competition, higher standards, and accountability, we are talking about capitalism and free market. When we talk about be responsive to needs of all students, serving as a force of disrupting status quo (inclusivity), and moving toward a participatory, critically engaged community of learners, we are getting at social democracy. what kind of democracy are we enacting and teaching to our students?

The first section of Carr's article has proven to be the most helpful for my understanding of what happens in the classroom, specifically what knowledges are at the center and the margin of the pedagogy (the vision and materials of the classroom). Epistemologically, what counts as knowledge in that space? Are students learning inclusivity, participation, and critical engagement? Or are they learning obedience and conformity?  This either/or is certainly a binary that we can trouble, but I tend to see the overt and hidden messages of schools to be more about obedience and conformity to the idea of America as a free market rather than a social democracy.  And for the majority of my students (and their families) who are living in the periphery of the free market, I think enacting a social democracy will help them to construct alternatives or at least begin the delinking that Mignolo talks about. Carr calls this binary thin and thick democracy: 

The thick interpretation involves a more holistic, inclusive, participatory, and critical engagement, one that avoids jingoistic patriotism (Westheimer, 2006) and a passive, prescriptive curriculum and learning experience (Apple, 1996). This version of thick democracy reflects a concern for political literacy (Guttman, 1999), emancipatory engagement (Giroux, 1988), and political action (McLaren, 2007) that critics of the traditional or thin conception of democratic education have articulated. The key concern for the thick perspective of democracy resides in power relations, identity and social change, whereas the thin paradigm is primarily concerned with electoral processes, political parties, and structures and processes related to formal democracy. (118)

 Another way of looking at this is as I have stated above which is seeing "thin" democracy as that privatized, market democracy. If we teach our student to compete by making test scores the purpose of education, and if we say that our goal is to make students employable, then we are participating in the neo-liberal agenda. I think Carr is not actually arguing against agendas, but arguing for a different agenda -- one of social justice. Social justice is required because we must actually engage and disrupt the neo-liberal agenda before and while we are constructing a more "thick" democratic agenda.  We must develop civic literacy if we are to shift schooling.

Carr's paper presents his research in the College of Education in a university in Ohio where he had students  (129) and faculty (15) complete separate questionnaires in the 2005-6 school year.  In these questionnaires, Carr sought to understand how students and faculty conceptualize democracy and social justice in education. Students did not tend to see social justice as a fundamental component of democracy and faculty members noted how the controlling mechanisms of education/schooling  (autocratic in nature) often get in the way of democratic values.  One participant commented on how because his upbringing was homogenous, it was easy to be a citizen -- citizenship was narrowly defined, which success connecting it with democracy more explicitly is an important consideration, according to Carr (124). Another finding with the student population was the the "impact and role of power in shaping democracy" -- or at least one particular kind of democracy. Carr quotes Parker(2006) to talk about preparing teachers and thus students for democratic project: 

Difficult though listening is for any of us—especially across social positions—the project is all the more worthy of effort, experimentation, and gumption. In this way, there is some chance that educators might contribute, in a small but significant way, to “re-forming” the democratic public. This public, this heterogeneous group connected by political friendship, fundamentally is one “in which speed takes the place of blood, and acts of decision take the place of acts of vengence” (Pocock, 1998, p. 32). Citizens who possess broad social and disciplinary knowledge plus the disposition to speak and open to one another, whether they like one another or not, are precisely what the  democratic project cannot do without. ("Public discourses in schools: Purposes, problems, possibilities." Educational Research, 35 (8), 16.

Carr's research provides several important considerations for teacher education programs that I see as equally important for k-12 and college education as well. Teacher educators and teachers should address the substance and purpose of classroom practice with emphasis on the quality of what is being taught and the learning produced (identifying central concepts and in-depth understanding). Teaching about democracy and social justice cannot be an "add on" but must be inherent in practice.  He also suggests that we consider the "starting-point" for students as we develop an conceptual framework for social justice education so that students can and will engage critically. He cites Patrick (2003) in Teaching Democracy for an better understanding of this integrated approach: 

Effective education for citizenship in a democracy dynamically connects the four components of civic knowledge, cognitive civic skills, participatory civic skills, and civic dispositions. Effective teaching and learning of civic knowledge, for example, require that it be connected to civic skills and dispositions in various kinds of activities. Evaluation of one component over the other—for example, civic knowledge over skills or vice-versa—is a pedagogical flaw that impedes civic  learning. This, teaching should combine core content and the processes by which students develop skills and dispositions. (p. 3)

Thus, when we work with new teachers or with K-12 students, we need to think about civic learning as both the how and what of education. There are some systemic obstacles to implementing social justice education -- namely, the capitalist democratic framework of schooling, but that is precisely why the effort must be explicit. As Giroux argues, teachers must be politicized; and as McLaren says: teaching is never neutral.

·         Perceptions and experience of the educators in relation to democracy in education and its impact on what students learn about democracy
·         Connection between democracy and social justice
·         Thin – electoral process, political parties, and structures/processes related to formal democracy
·         Thick – holistic, inclusive, participator, and critical engagement avoids jingoistic patriotism and a passive prescriptive curriculum and learning experience – a concern for political literacy, emancipator engagement, political action – the key is in power relations, identity and social change,
·         Shifting toward constrained curriculum, supposedly higher standers, greater focus on employability, accountability – decrease in explicitly teaching for and about political literacy
·         Desirable traits for people living in a community – recycle, clean up, teat old peoplewith respect – but the are not democratic citizenship
·         Galston (2003) and Hess (2004) Teachers must be prepared and willing to address controversial issues in the classroom, and also be able to make direct linkages with civic skills and attidudes  in an explicit way
·         Most education students have a weak understanding of global issues that directly impact lives of Americans, which necessitates further inquiry into the role of teacher-educators
·         Intersection between social justice and democracy
·         Marshall and Oliva (2006) – social justice – equity, cultural diversity, the need for tolerance and respect for human rights and identity, the achievement gap, democracy and a sense of community  and belongingness, inclusion of groups that do not immediately come to  mind – differently abled
·         Moral imperative of ethical and responsible leadership
·         3 key components
o    Progressive or critical theoretical perspective
o    A deconstruction of the practical realities and perpetuation of inequities and the marginalization of members of a learning community who are outside the dominant culture
o    View schools as sites that not only engage in academic pursuits but also as locations that help creat actives to bring about the democratic reconstruction of society (Dantly and Tillman, 2006, 18-9)
·         Social justice praxis – linking the principles of democracy and equity in provocative ways so that social justice agenda becomes a vibrant part of everyday work of school leaders
·         Critical engagement Westheimer and Kahne (2004)
·         Education – production and reproduction of particular identities and social positioning
·         Bales argues (2006) teacher ed programs need to be vigilant in relation to international trends, research, and developing a relationship between teachers and learners – not discrete and finite set of teacher skills – examine how we might alter the accountability trajectory in the policy  spectacle that surrounds us; how far can democratic ed be effectively purused within tightly regimented and highly prescriptive teacher ed programs weary of not meeting standards
·         Collaborative inquiry – messy and demanding but aligns with democratic and social justice oriented values

·         Productive pedagogy – Ladwig (2004)
1. The overemphasis on classroom environments and processes rather than on
substance and purposes.
2. The relationships between foundational studies, curriculum studies and field
experiences which are currently insufficiently connected.
3. The purpose and structure of field experiences which centre too often on practicing
teaching techniques with relatively little concern for what is being taught
and the quality of learning produced.
4. The focus on student management relative to student learning, which mistakenly
assumes that management should be addressed first and separately.
5. The emphasis on syllabus content and constraints of the formal curriculum
relative to identifying central concepts and producing depth of understanding.
·         I would argue teaching morally.
·         Teaching about controversial issues – democracy and social justice – must take into account the starting-point for students; effective resources that outline the impetus, conceptual framework and application needs to be highlighted
·        Refuse to take a neutral position
·         Moral imperative of providing ethical and inclusive leadership (Ryan (2006) – curriculum in a socially just way
·         Dangers of being too focused on standards Wilson cooper (2006)