prospectus. 4/20/2014

Sarah Donovan

April 2013

Prospectus

Public Discourses in English Education:

Reading for Modernity in the English Classroom

The Dialectic of Democracy in Schools

According to the test scores, Valerio had a learning disability in the language area but not in other areas… He couldn’t say, for instance, what “hot,” “cold,” and “warm” have in common. The answer is “temperature,” but he said “opposites” and “liquids.”…Reading, for him,…was not reading for meaning or enjoyment but reading in order to fill in the blanks and hoping he got them right so that he wouldn’t have to do it over again...I thought about the magnificent circularity of schooling, that schooling historically has trained students into fill-in-the-blank conceptions of reading and then complained when students have thoroughly absorbed that training. (Cintron 101)

Valerio’s disability did not measure how well he engaged in discourses that were performative and social. The tests he was given did not measure his fluency in discourses constructed dialogically.  The discourse of schooling, an authoritative discourse, is resistant to probing questions and dialogic learning, so the only logical conclusion was that Valerio had a “disability.”

  In Angels’ Town, Ralph Cintron considers issues of power and social order in an ethnographic study of a Mexican-American community. He explores how people and ethnographers make sense of their lives through cultural forms of modernity. In the context of the ethnography, Cintron sees discourses of measurement as the mapping and texting that changed expansive, public land to something reigned and placed under authoritarian control. I am appropriating the phrase “discourses of measurement” for the purpose of considering education and, more specifically, the classroom as something potentially expansive and complex, but also that which is being reigned, tamed and controlled by school reform measures.

What is lost in this ordering, as Valerio’s story hopefully shows, is that nature of disorder and the innovation that comes from spaces of complexity and discovery are valuable and necessary to public life, a public life that is increasing “transnational[1]” (Hesford)..  For Cintron, the “texting” (and here I do not mean cell phone texting) that sought to tame the expansive nature of Angels’ Town (e.g., claim forms, contracts, bills of sales and even street names) reduced the mystery and potential of space to something visibly contained -- contents fenced in by paper.  In other words, the state manages space and individuals by evoking the discourse of measurement, which creates distance in social relationships thereby cultivating individualism in the shared space and positioning the state as a hegemonic body dictating its ideology.  Without human contact and person-to-person collaboration, the state can objectify the individual. Therefore, in schooling, the discourse of measurement functions to de-personalize its subjects for the sake of development and competition; students are labeled, numbered, tracked, identified, and targeted. Similarly, teachers are monitored, compared, and evaluated. Cintron might say that schools are “writing” on the students and teacher.

 It is such a common sense understanding of schooling that we will “write” on our students the knowledges of the state, so much so that it is outside of consciousness. The “writing on” and the discourse of measurement “belittles other knowing systems – implicitly, if not explicitly – or at least to make a prior discourse obsolete…These displaced ways of knowing and talking represent a precision that may not be taken as one more sign of backwardness when compared to the discourses of modernity” (Cintron 213).  It is also common sense to say that discourses of measurement lead to dependence and anxious expectations about control; subjects come to expect forms to fill out, rules to follow, and tests to gain access. As I see it here, discourses of measurement represent a force that is leading school reform and a force that is not only antithetical to democratic ideals of inclusivity, participation,  and critical engagement but will ultimately fail to prepare students to consciously participate in a transnational world.

Valerio’s “disability” performs only in a school setting, and, as Cintron suspects, that disability and the poor tests scores that quantify it as such say more about “social/political contexts in which testing occurs” (104) than in the subject, or better yet, human being: Valerio.

After decades of attempting to bring order to education, reform measures have proven insufficient thus creating what I will later describe as schooling. And as we will see, or as I hope to show, any force that attempts to control the natural order of humanity will ultimately fail because there is always an opposing force of disorder. I will say here that I see the student as the “opposing force,” and I see “disorder” as learning.  Students, as we will see, are always and already opposing the force of reform.  In 1983, Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education published an education report:  A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Implied in 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 trends in test scores from 1963 to 1980 along with comparing American schools to other nations, the report offered some 38 recommendations for reform. The commission recommended, among others, schools adopt more “rigorous and measurable standards,” seven hour school days, and career ladders to differentiate teachers based on skill and experience.  Not all recommendations were implemented, but these few demonstrate the quantitative nature of reform and the lack of qualitative interventions.  In 2001, a second education bill, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), was signed into law under the Bush administration (but with bipartisan support). Among other reforms such as "highly qualified teachers" and providing student contact information to military recruiters, NCLB 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, in Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life, 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 in order to maintain the status quo. Moreover, Giroux suggests that the Bush administration was cultivating a public pedagogy of militarism, a significant element of imperialist ideology – far from democratic practices.

If we take a look at the Illinois School Code, we can see the variety of reforms the state mandates, but on a more local level. On July 29, 2010, Public Act 96-1374 (formerly HB 4209), became effective, the Act that created the The Instructional Mandates Task Force that, among other tasks, explores and examines all instructional mandates governing public schools of the state. It makes recommendations concerning the propriety, imposition and waivers of instructional mandates. The mandates range from stating in what grade, how much time, and what topics about an issue should be taught to permitting “local decisions on allocation of minutes.” Here is a short list of current instructional mandates:  requiring an addition to the history courses a unit of instruction studying the forceful removal and illegal deportation of Mexican-American citizens; requiring all 7^th graders and all high school students enrolled in U.S. History to view the Congressional Medal of Honor film; sexual assault awareness in secondary schools; career education;  prevention and abuse of steroids; safety education; violence prevention; internet safety; avoiding abduction; ethnic groups and the role of labor unions; a unit of instruction on African American History; the role and contribution of Hispanic;  Irish famine study;  history of women; arbor and bird day;  conservation of natural resources; Lief Erickson Day; and  American Indian Day.

And now we have the Common Core Standards. This initiative, however, is not a law nor is it a public act; it is “voluntary.” Led by the nation’s governors and education commissioners, “The standards promote equity by ensuring all students, no matter where they live, are well prepared with the skills and knowledge necessary to collaborate and compete with peers in the United States and abroad…[enabling] collaboration between states on a range of tools and policies” (www.corestandards.org).  Initially a voluntary effort between states, federal incentives have created national standards. No Child Left Behind law had ambitious goals to have every student “proficient” by 2014. The deadline is nearing and as states could not achieve that standard, more and more have asked for waivers (to be exempted from federal guidelines and, thus, penalties). To get a waiver, states must develop rigorous and comprehensive plans (“higher than NCLB” 2/9/12) to improve education outcomes for all students, close achievement gaps, increase equity, and improve the quality of instruction.  This can mean adopting the Common Core Standards, or developing their own standards, but the language of accountability and college/career readiness is required along with evaluating teachers using standardized test scores and principal evaluation guidelines. As February 2013, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories have adopted the Common Core State Standards; they are exempt from penalties for low test scores. But this flexibility poses greater concerns. Not only Florida, but Virginia and Washington D.C. have created different short-term goals for different race, which have been approved.  In October of this year, the Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets students goals in math and reading based upon their race. By 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics, and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. 

While the Obama administration is offering flexibility to the states with regard to NCLB penalties and encouraging states to create their own rigorous standards and accountability measures for students, teachers and principals, the question remains on the validity of these measures to actually improve learning and, more importantly, the type of learning. To meet the sort of goals that Florida and other states are setting, schools will have to focus more attention and resources based on race or sub groups.  This is not new since NCLB and Response to Intervention (RTI), an academic intervention of frequent progress measurement and increasingly intensive research-based instructional interventions for children who are failing, but there are consequences to this.

Schools are using race and poverty as excuses for low performance or barriers to high achievement; classes are now segregated accordingly. This follows a slow-growth model of achievement leading to measures that hope to speed up learning:  doubling up on math classes; tripling reading classes; removing art, music, and foreign language in place of skills-based intervention classes. But what is happening in these reading intervention classes: programs like RIGOR, Read 180, SAIL, AMP, or whatever other acronym the schools adopt to raise reading test scores?  Students are developing habits of mind where they ask for the worksheet that orders the selected knowledge for them. They wait for the test where they can select and bubble in the “right” response. They sit at computers for timed reading.  Such practices have little chance for interrupting the academic and economic hierarchy, thus making it nearly impossible for students to participate in the discourses that shape their existence.  Reforms have proven, based on the successive efforts outlined above,  to not raise test scores for all students, but aside from test scores, this form of education (schooling) that  isolates skills and knowledge from political and global contexts will simply never develop a citizenry who can innovate and one day tackle the sustainability issues we face today by. Critical pedagogues will argue this is the point of education, to maintain the status quo, but the subject of this dissertation is, in part, to consider what middle and high school English teachers do and how we can understand what we do in light of the social and political context of this new initiative.

Teachers must participate in the system of certification, where the state “writes on” teachers the permission to teach in public schools; this system of “educating” teachers also reveals Cintron’s “discourses of measurement.” Teachers learn how to use data (test scores) to drive instruction; teachers identify the “bubble kids” or students who are close to passing the state tests and need interventions; we must take classes to understand IEPs, 504s, and ACCESS scores (a “newcomer” ESL students also has to take the state tests); and finally, there is a behavior system (e.g., PBIS) to learn to identify students as green, yellow, or red. Students in the yellow walk around with a form for teachers to measure with a 1, 2, or 3 their ability to conform to expectations. Such is the modern teacher. New English teachers hoping to read Great Expectations or Hamlet or even Hunger Games in their English see their students like the state; they are data. And the students, after a decade of NCLB, perform as data. They live in the discourses of measurement. They have been trained to think in measurable ways.  I will call this “thin” pedagogy – the sort of curriculum and instruction that is skills based for the purpose of knowledge accumulation. English teachers face a crisis in the classroom as they attempt to introduce methods that are “thicker” such as reading for understanding or learning through discussion and writing -- ways of learning that promote understanding through engagement and participation and reading for discourses and experiences rather than filling in blanks on a worksheet or clicking answers on a computerized test, even if it is “individualized” as the MAP tests posits. The MAP, developed by the Northwest Evaluation Association, is a web-based test that provides numerical data for reading, language arts, and math; it takes five weeks to administer three times a year; in other words, the computer labs of the school are taken up fifteen weeks of the school year for testing (in addition to the ISAT or state test). And, Chicago plans to use MAP scores as part of the “value-added” evaluation of teachers (NWEA and Value-Added Measures).

Here is the point: there is paradox in education reform. While positing reform for the sake of progress, reform, in fact, enacts an antique and even violent logic in its exclusionary systems.  Only one type of knowledge was measured in Valerio’s case, and it was the kind the system could quantify: the discourse of measurement. But what of the other discourses of public life, the many discourses or, as Foucault writes, “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (54)?  This is not to say that the only discourses in schools are discourses of measurement, for as I have said, the opposing forces are always at work (e.g., Valerio is able to categorize but using a different discourse). Nevertheless, the dominant discourse of measurement is deeply invested in a value system that no longer aligns with democratic ideals (or perhaps never did). Here, I want to introduce a definition of democracy that will frame my project. In “The Challenge of Democracy to Education,” Dewey wrote: “…democracy in order to live must change and move… If it is to live… [it] must go forward… If it does not go forward, if it tries to stand still, it is already starting on the backward road that leads to extinction.” Dewey goes on to say that schools must “provide an understanding of the movement and direction of social forces and an understanding of the social needs and of the resources that may be used to satisfy them.” He stresses “understanding” rather than “knowledge” because no amount of information or knowledge about guarantees understanding or “the spring of intelligent action” (183). Schooling is ignoring this “challenge” because schooling is an iteration of a political system involving institutions and discourses of regulation and social control; schooling sees like a state or nation. Thus, if we are to participate in transnational public life, we must understand the discourses that create and manage the public. This is the work of education, of Dewey’s democracy. 

 James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, uses the phrase “high modernism” to describe ideology that causes  us (citizens, teachers, students) to see like a state; the discourses of measurement (and thus reform), like seeing like a state, attempt to make the world static, stop it in place, so that it can be more easily assessed and controlled. Scott writes, “High modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably aesthetic terms. For them [high modernists], an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense” (Scott’s emphasis 4). And once such plans failed, the state would resort to what Scott calls “miniaturization: the creation of more easily controlled micro-order” (4). The discourses of measurement and order construct a master narrative of what the world looks like, what seems to matter, and how people should behave in a “rationally organized” society. The discourses locate our position in the master narrative and punish any social transgression (Misson and Morgan 67). Of course, when considering Scott’s high modernism, we see the state as authoritarian, but our state is a democracy. Why do we think of public school as a democratic institution?  Indeed, the formal structures that order society are in place in America like voting, representatives, and a text that says citizens are equal before the law. Yet, if we consider Dewey’s democracy, as described above, we see a very different representation even a different discourse of democracy. Democracy has yet to arrive and may never arrive because it is dynamic, fluid, and evolutionary. Of course, some will say, “Yes, I voted. I am living in a democracy.”   This act is easily made legible because it can be counted, measured. Nevertheless, a quantifiable act does not, perhaps cannot, demonstrate an understanding of the social forces that create social needs nor the resources that might satisfy such needs, particularly transnational forces, needs, and resources in which we, as a nation state and as citizens who consent to representation, are implicated.

The master narrative of public life in America and all these various manifestations of school reform collectively represent the imperatives of modernity and what I will discuss as the narrative of modernity throughout this project; modernity is a complex narrative with hidden and violent turns, and this dissertation argues that English teachers must lead the way in reading schooling and the texts of our discipline for discourses that shape and are shaped by public life. Walter Mignolo, in The Darker Side of Modernity, explains that the exposition of this narrative begins in Europe and builds Western civilization and its achievements while hiding its darker side of coloniality; in other words, there is no modernity without coloniality. This darker side embodies colonial systems and hierarchical systems that discriminate based on class, race, gender, ability and sexuality. Systems of knowledge, for example, position European knowledges as central to the state ideology and a model of global power denying or hiding other knowledges. Cultural systems follow the logic of coloniality by creating systems that reinforce Eurocentric economic systems of production and labor. For example, capitalism in education is evident in the outsourcing of teacher evaluations to Pearson, a publishing company, which will evaluate two 10-minute videos of the prospective teacher and the written reflection essentially deciding who gets a license to teach. Also corporations are developing student evaluations. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) received a $186 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top assessment competition to design the “next-generation assessment system” (www.parcconline.org).  Arne Duncan said in a September 2010 speech called “Beyond the Bubble tests: The Next Generation of Assessments”: “For the first time, many teachers will have the state assessments they have longed for – tests of critical thinking and complex student learning that are not just fill-in-the-blank bubble tests of basic skills but support good teaching in the classroom” (quoted in Strauss). (Design constraints and timelines make it unlikely that this test will be ready for the 2014-15 school year.) First, teachers have not longed for the state to decide what to teach and test their students, and, second, this Race to the Top competition positioned states against each other for funding that made them complicit in state controlled schooling; we now have, still have, a hierarchical structure whereby the federal government controls what was a state initiative: Common Core Standards and the PARCC assessment.

According to Mignolo, hierarchical systems follow the logic of coloniality. I see a similar logic underlying the rhetoric of competition we see in schooling reform measures.  The modernity narrative tells constitutive narratives:  setting standards, measuring progress, and comparing  data across the country helps us to participate in, if not control, the globalized economy “triumphantly marching into the future” (Mignolo);  the assumption that the standards secure our place in transnational projects overlooks the possibility that non-standards are alive and working toward another imagined future.  The two narratives, of course, engender different responses, which is why one is celebrated and the other is hidden. Modernity, and discourses of modernity such as measurement, is a concept of a nation, one that serves to cultivate a state identity and celebrates nationalism openly; it uses the rhetoric of development, progress, and competition to establish ideological values in its subjects.  Coloniality is the hidden agenda, an agenda not celebrated because the economic practices of the modern state exclude discourses that do not fit with the nationalist vision.  We might see the Valerios of the world as the subjects, or human beings, as excluded subjects even, but, in fact, they are included in the discourses of modernity as subjects who can be exploited or colonized – necessary subjects in hierarchical systems.

For years, Valerio had the stamp “LD” (learning disability) on his report cards, a spectacle that achieved the effect and affect of modernity’s rhetoric for most of Valerio’s schooling. The stamp selected him for low-wage earners to be managed by others, but the affect of living through this selection process motivated Valerio to work the system. After receiving decent grades in a few “regular” high school classes, he asked (and fought) school officials to be removed from LD lists. Valerio said he felt like “one of the dumbest students in the school…that I was not going to go on to college and that I was not going to be very successful in life” (Cintron 123).  The rhetoric of modernity, the rhetoric of salvation, the rhetoric of newness, the rhetoric of progress, as we see, has consequences. This is not to say that tradition is the answer or that development is not necessary, but we see that schooling discourses shape and are shaped to produce a particular effect and affect which is fundamental to meaning and thus bound up with the ideology of modernity, a Western modernity, as ideal. A student will read “college and career ready” (a phrase pervasive in the Common Core Standards) as a personal mission and “does not meet” (a score on the Illinois achievement test) as a personal failure. The implication is such that without an understanding and ability to read for discourses, as Valerio learned to do, the possibility of alternative “modernities” is lost.  If the mission of education is modernity (i.e. progress and development),   why must progress be situated in the discourses of measurement?  Why must progress have consequences that ignore, insult, exploit, or impoverish? Is there just one modernity?  Mignolo, if I understand him correctly, might say “no,” and suggest  “epistemic and political disobedience that consists of the appropriation of European modernity while dwelling in the house of coloniality”; in other words, reconsider this “universal” modernity and “clear up a space where we might become creators of our own modernity” (39).

As an English teacher, then, the tension between ideologies should lead teachers and teacher educators to ask: what should the modern English teacher be doing? Should we be using data from standardized tests across the global to drive our instruction and curriculum? Should we be exploring political and literary writing that emerged in various periods and shaped beliefs about modernity? Should we be discussing course aims in K-12 that are more compatible with higher education English departments, and perhaps more nuanced notions of modernity? Or might there be another option, one that might create our own (which I see as multiple rather than national, but not necessarily as plural but perhaps anti-nationalistic) modernity as Mignolo might say. I argue for an approach that experiences the organization of discourses as social, rhetorical and aesthetic so that education can be about “understanding” – that will be the English teacher’s “disobedience.”

  Education alone cannot successfully counteract the discourses of modernity; nevertheless, education is something that can contribute to an intellectual, ideological environment in which we are not completely subjected to the darker side of modernist discourses. One of the characteristics of modernity is that it sought to move away from a reliance on superstition or myth and instead ground knowledge in experience, observation, and experimentation. This focus on experience (real lived lives) is a valuable aspect of modernity that is important in education.  In other words, my critique of modernity is not that it lacks value; indeed progress and development can help with sustainability of natural resources, for example, but I do reject its darker side – the side that includes colonization and restrictive forms of measurement as discussed above.

Up to this point, I have been attempting to connect that ideology of recent school reform policy has a lot to do with viewing education and democracy with modernity’s impulse to fix things in time, to make them legible, easily assessed and controlled.  Democracy, on the other hand, at least how Dewey talks about it, is about constantly reflecting upon and responding to our experiences in an evolving world.   I understand dialectic as a tension that exists between two or more conflicting or interacting forces, and I see democracy as embodying this tension as modernity does. 

My Case

In 2004, my first year as a middle school English teacher in an Illinois public school, the centralizing force of schooling, or what Bakhtin referred to as the centripetal force, and NCLB pulled me into discourses of measurement. Because I was new or because I was naïve, I found it difficult to distance myself from the discourses enough to see the set of values NCLB was promoting. Some would say that I “drank the Kool-Aid.”  In the first English department meeting of the school year, each English teacher was handed his or her student rosters with test scores from the previous school year. I was told to highlight the students who were “on the bubble,” or that did not “meet” on the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT) but were within a few points. I was told that I needed to develop a plan using this data to raise their test scores using the “district-approved” curriculum.

In a matter of hours, my training in literature was organized into a district-approved textbook written by Who Knows and published by Prentice Hall, another corporate publishing company. The social discourses in Lord of the Flies and imagined discourses of students in a Socratic seminar with John Locke and Thomas Hobbes to deliberate ethics and human nature – what I had planned to teach -- were silenced by the discourses of school reform.  The school district paid Prentice Hall over a million dollars for math, history, and literature textbooks my first year teaching. For literature, we had CD’s with recordings of every text, VHS tapes for “anticipatory activities,” a database for test questions, three levels of consumables or abbreviated (i.e., bowdlerized) versions of the texts for English Language Learners (ELLs) or students who needed an “adapted reader” (students labeled like Valerio), and skills worksheets with every graphic organizer imaginable.  And in addition to the investment in textbooks, our school also adopted what I mentioned above: Measures of Academic Progress (MAP). Students knew their Lexiles and RIT scores, a curriculum scale that uses individual item difficulty values to estimate student achievement, compared them to each other, and used these scales to select literature. Needless to say, the classrooms and hallways were covered with data. I even had visitors from other schools marvel at my charts.

A few years after NCLB took effect, and the textbooks were no longer so new that we gave up covering them with shopping bag paper, a decidedly different reform mandate passed in Illinois, one that seemed incompatible with schooling’s discourses of measurement. And on the first day of my third year of teaching eighth grade English, I received a notice that the Social Studies and Language Arts Departments of our elementary school district would need to add a unit about genocide to our curriculum. In the midst of analyzing ISAT data and identifying “bubble kids,” we received a press release from then Governor Blagojevich that said this:

As we teach our kids the important lessons of history, we have to be sure that they understand that racial, national, ethnic and religious hatred can lead to horrible tragedies. Sadly, these are not just the problems of our parents’ or grandparents’ generations.  We have to make sure our schools teach the importance of embracing differences among people and encourage students to fight intolerance and hatred wherever they see it. (August 2005)

Here is the contradiction as I see it: while this mandate was, in fact, a discourse of measurement,  a discourse that controls what is taught in schools, among these things to be measured is an issue which, if taught with nuance and integrity, defies measurement in its complexity: genocide. In other words, the genocide mandate became, for me, a symbol for the contradiction in education on one level and the contradiction of modernity on another level. The word “genocide” came to embody this dialectic of democracy that I see and experience in education.  

At a time when the national education movement was indeed globally aware in the democratic sense of development, progress, and competition with other nations, the rhetoric of the genocide mandate, and I mean the actual text of this mandate, was dialectical in nature.  While indeed mandating a topic of instruction, which is a part of the official discourse, the language of the mandate (as I will discuss in chapter one) deviated from language of competition and achievement by asking for an awareness of global atrocities without stipulating how to teach it or measure it. The genocide mandate complicates the public discourse of education because it is not about evaluation or measurement in the quantitative sense but rather overtly asks for a conversation about globalization in the classroom. It might ask teachers and students to read about genocide for a day, a week or a month. Or, it might ask teachers and students to read for the discourses of measurement that propagate conditions of coloniality and ultimately genocide. This is my “thick” interpretation of the mandate, a way of interpreting education reform and what we do in the classroom with the expressed purpose of troubling discourses of measurement and “delinking” students from Western rhetoric and the logic of coloniality (Mignolo). Carr, in “Educating for Democracy” explains a thick interpretation of democracy this way:

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.  They 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. (Carr 118)

If we extend Carr’s interpretation of democracy to reading, we might say interpret texts in more “thin,” quantitative ways such as identifying or knowing, or “thick,” qualitative ways that seek understanding and which often lead to more reading. Thick interpretation subverts discourses of measurement by recognizing the limitations of knowing and sees interpretation as always partial and transactional. “Thick interpretation” uncovers gaps and fissures in a text’s narrative or argument.

The genocide mandate, particularly the word “genocide,” helped me recognize and understand education reform as something much more authoritarian, what I have been calling “schooling” and carefully avoiding the word “education” with regard to reform. Here I will elaborate.  Mark Twain said, “Don’t let your schooling interfere with your education,” which might help us think about schooling as that which fashions minds and behaviors according to the interests and beliefs of the state determining the knowledges and skills worth reproducing and measuring. Schooling might be seen as a system of domesticating people or making them fit in to the demands of the state. The pedagogy of schooling is “thin” in what is right or wrong, what is fact and what is not, what is good behavior or bad behavior or thinking. Schooling, therefore, is interested in the status quo.  Schooling depends on there being an authority (teacher, textbook) to authorize what counts as learning. Text or language that sought to reform schooling, as discussed above, functions as a centralizing force, a nationalizing force, an exclusionary force – much like the texts that prepared for genocidal acts (e.g., deportation lists, mapping land for camps, ethnic-based laws). Of course, I am not going so far as to make a direct comparison to schooling and genocide, but I do want to point out the discourse of measurement present in both. However, the text in the genocide mandate, while functioning as a centralizing force, potentially prepares teachers for a different sort of act, an act that complicates the center. (I write “potentially” here because while the language of the mandate does not ask for quantitative assessments, teachers could still teach about genocide rather than teaching understanding because the language is not prescriptive – nor would I want it to be.)

Kenneth 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. The language of mandates was, therefore, functioning rhetorically because teachers were moved to act one way or another.  The genocide mandate moved me to action. I may have responded by teaching students about genocide much like English teachers have done with the Holocaust texts, like Elie Wiesel’s Night: by Googling a unit for a novel or a topic, giving multiple-choice quizzes chapter by chapter, having students learn a list of vocabulary words and giving a test on the contents. Instead, I set aside Prentice Hall and brought in the political and literary writing that emerged during and after crimes against humanity; discourses by subject matter, social community, and institutions offered different vantage points on tradition and modernity before, during, and after genocide (e.g., The Genocide Convention, Senate transcripts, The League of Nations Covenant, memoirs, fictions, poems, philosophy, and Truth Commission Reports). This eighth grade class was doing that which we ask graduate students to do: they were discussing how historic events across the globe not only excited intense debates but also provided literary opportunities for defining new vantage points on ideas of tradition and modernity. They read for discourses so that they could begin to understand that which is, in essence, not understandable. When I say read for I mean that instead of reading to show we know a skill like “summarizing,” we are reading in order to better understand how these discourses work, where they come from, what their consequences are, and whose interests they represent. Why did Pol Pot organize an autogenocide in Cambodia? What was the historic significance of Serbian nationalism according to the Serb, the Bosnians, the Croats, the U.N., the U.S.? Why, since the Genocide Convention of 1948 to prevent future Holocausts, have people committed genocide again and again? What writing emerged from these modern atrocities? In what genres? Why?  In this modern era, why do such barbaric acts continue, and what is it about modernity that perpetuates nationalism and thus violent nationalistic acts? Studying the rhetoric of these discourses in an important and neglected part of what advocates of critical pedagogy say we should do. These questions here, it seems to me, manifest education—to draw out possibilities for realization and action in public life – understanding, reading for the discourses that construct our understanding of public life, and the rhetoricality of texts.

Critical pedagogy, pedagogy that reads  against  the master narrative to recognize unjust and repressive systems in society, is certainly a worthwhile endeavor in that it recognizes and resists unjust testing practices and discrepancies of funding in schools; however, resistance to oppression in critical pedagogy is insufficient. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor, in Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1980), describes a liberatory classroom as “a break from routines which offers a study of routines so that the familiar shape of life is appreciated with criticism rather than acceptance” (99). The goal is for students to be separated from the culture which has made them into manipulable objects, into subjects re-entering society armed against domination. And he goes on to explain that the person responsible for provoking such separation and re-entry is the teacher:”By identifying, abstracting, and problematizing the most important themes of student experience, the teacher detaches students from their reality and then presents the material for their systematic scrutiny” (100).  “Re-entry,” “detaches,” “systematic.” I read this as an iteration of measurement discourses, as though students can separate or detach and that they can ever leave and re-enter the public. I do not intend to minimize the important work of critical pedagogues here. Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, and even Ira Shor inspired my own teaching philosophy, and this dissertation’s argument also wants to trouble schooling and representation of reality. Nevertheless, I do not want to replace one measurement discourse for another, one pedagogical stance for another, or one reading practice for another. Instead, or in addition, reading for and/or against the rhetorical and aesthetic features of texts admits the social and ideological nature of texts and recognizes and invites students’ subjectivities into the transactional space of making meaning. Both rhetorical and aesthetic ways of knowing are valued and seen as complementary. We cannot be content with skill-based, legible forms of education any more than we can be content analyzing and describing the rhetoric of discourses.  Reimagining the English classroom as a transactional space illuminates democratic thought systems. And I mean “democratic” as Dewey sees democracy and as the modern, measurement-based democracy precisely because a “reading for” or “thick interpretation” approach encourages students to participate intellectually in an ever-changing and evolving world situated dialectically.

Discourses in Narrative

It seems to me that the English classroom is the setting for these intense debates and a site for intervening in the coloniality of current school reform. Narratives serve as an access point for young learners to read for political and historic discourses that comment on tradition and modernity. The discourses in a narratives represent the social discourses of public life; the language of narratives work to artistically represent that which cannot be captured in a single-voiced genre. Narratives produce a sort of aesthetic enlightenment as they draw us into sympathetic involvement with the characters as individuals, perhaps imagining what it might be like to be or be with these imaginary individuals.  This is not to say that informational texts cannot elicit our sympathy; however, a narrative is designed to tell or advance a narrative. Narratives offer what Rosenblatt would call a “living through,” not simply knowledge. After all, artists of various kinds have known for a long time that human beings are sufficiently complex that we are informed and motivated by much more than factual information. Nevertheless, the sympathy- eliciting function of narrative can lead readers into the "wrong" direction. If we consider Hesford's Spectacular Rhetorics, we might see how such narratives enact a spectacle, an exploitation of victims, for example, to provoke sympathy. While Nussbaum in Poetic Justice encourages sympathy-based considerations, such a claim overlooks non-sympathy-based considerations. Teachers and authors, however, can support students in reading for both. Aesthetic “entails a creator, the work created, and an audience” (Misson and Morgan 33). For young readers who are new to political ideology, the author of a novel can take a character’s direct discourse and infuse it with authorial intentions, a double-voiced discourse that functions to speak indirectly to introduce expressive intentions that might not come through in an informational genre. There is something deceptive in this, I think, but for this reason, we can see the novel as the beginning of our inquiry, for the narrative structure exposes gaps and fissures in social discourse. These are spaces were students will ask questions and do inquiry.  In other words, English is a discipline that can subvert discourse of measurement, intervene in the logic of coloniality, and cultivate the practice of thick democracy and understanding.

I see the discipline of English as a site of possibility for “thick interpretation” that reads for the rhetorical nature of aesthetic texts. Misson and Morgan write, “With aesthetic texts, one is often conscious that the language is being used in uncommon and uncommonly intense ways” (34). The “uncommon” is paradoxically and precisely what education reform needs.  Aesthetics teach an awareness of the provisional nature of truth which makes us examine more carefully the text or discourses which we are presented (121). While “understanding” is indeed part of the goal of democratic, public life, I will argue that the rhetoricality of discourses is also a site of possibility for English, a site that will continue to include the now habitual discourses of measurement, which I argue include critical literacy. Our reading practices are culturally conditioned accounting for the politics of texts and making generalizations about what reader does or should entail. Critical literacy refuses the personal response and does not, according to Misson and Morgan, account for the “particularities and peculiarities of an individual reader’s negotiations with a text” (91). And so I see critical literacy and even critical pedagogy as another discourse of measurement because it wants to restrict a reading or a way of knowing.  Thus, my argument is not for a new way of reading or teaching English; I am not calling for a “compliant” or “resistant” reading or even for both.  Reading is not merely an intellectual exercise – either one that prepares a student for a standardized test or one that asks for a student to read through a psychological, feminist, or Marxist lens.  Reading is intellectual yet it is also affective and personal.  “The cognitive and affective negotiations with texts are many layered, shifting, ambivalent, or contradictory, simultaneously aligned with some aspects of a text and resistant to others, or indeed the same aspects” (94). 

When we consider how middle schoolers read complex texts, it will be my story of their reading experiences, an account which can never be the same as their experiences with the various texts. In teaching literature of atrocities with eighth grade students, I noticed some complete affective and cognitive satisfaction with the texts’ formal features (memoir, historical fiction, poem) and its content. Some readers’ responses were aligned with the content and ideologies yet dissatisfied with the form and some were much more satisfied with the aesthetic and resisted the ideological aspects of the text, and, for certain, students’ responses and understandings were sometimes ambivalent or contradictory.  Even though the content is “sad” (as most eighth graders say), the students demonstrate a sense of pleasure or satisfaction. Misson and Morgan explain it as such:

They find them themselves in sympathy with the worldview being represented in it, or they find it enlarges their worldview. Having consented to be managed by the text in this way, readers take delight in all that it has to offer. And so they feel replete as readers who have been enabled to have their desires evoked and satisfied, perhaps in new or intensified ways, and who have been shown a world whose ideas resonate with or extend their ideas of how things are or can be. As they sense the congruence of the form that realises [sic] its world, their ideological alignment matches their aesthetic engagement with the text. (97)

And so we see that the reader trusts the form’s crafting of the content while in the flow of reading and how the experience of the reading is a form of recognition.  After the reading, the reader may have lingering questions of the content or the form. There may or may not be an evaluation and the form may fail to move the reader affectively or intellectually.  In a classroom, however, teachers and students can move beyond recognition by situating the text in conversation with other literary and informational texts to make apparent the rhetorical and aesthetic issues of the content and form. The English classroom can work to make visible the “intersecting ideologies, visual technologies, and rhetorics that fuse to create a reality (or interpretation of reality) that reinforce certain dilemmas regarding the dominated and the dominating” (Hesford). 

The aim of education is not just to open students to the spectacle of atrocities or the spectacle of others’ lives, but Hesford suggests, in discussing Levinas, and I agree, the aim is closer to Dewey’s democracy when we come responsible for the other (Hesford 198). Such a move cannot happen when  in the summative school assessments, teachers and students still expect logical, evaluative statements rather than their more “immediate, inchoate, and emotional responses”(Misson and Morgan 108). However, getting teachers and students to “denaturalize” correct compliant or resistant readings, to adopt a certain frame or lens for reading, or to use certain analytic methods also gestures at an attempt to make reading legible or measurable. The NCLB years of teaching and reading in very measurable ways is, however, important to explicitly address in the twenty-first century English classroom. I think teachers and students have to be explicit about the sources of and reasons for one’s expectations and preferences for reading. The work for the teachers is to develop ways to recognize the affective, cognitive, aesthetic, and ideological grounds and the interplay among these, and interplay that is quite qualitative.

As I have been arguing, one of the features of Western modernity and thus education reform is its obsession with measurement. Not only is this obsession a hegemonic mechanism valuing some knowledges and silencing others, but it is failing to achieve the state’s goal of winning the academic achievement race against other nation states as evidenced by failed reforms such as A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind.  In Seeing like a State James Scott shows such “schemes” to improve the human condition have failed. Ultimately, regimenting an expansive space, in fact, kills the messiness of nature that gives the space life in the first place. Making legible that which is inherently illegible is the aim of the state, but I argue that illegibility is actually more valuable. Legiblity is the antithesis of what the world in the twenty first century needs if we are to protect natural resources and knowledges with potential to solve global problems hidden in the dark side of modernity. Thus, this dissertation is about the connection between genocide and modernity and why I think literature, specifically literature of atrocities, is particularly useful in shifting education from knowledge about to reading for understanding.  Literature facilitates understanding that is both rhetorical (Booth) and aesthetic (Nussbaum, Gallagher, Misson and Morgan). Literary accounts of genocide help illuminate the discourses of modernity and measurement precisely because the text draws attention to the construction and artistic representation of ideas. Aesthetic texts such as a novel are “more opposed than other genres to the reductive economic way of seeing the world, more committed to qualitative distinctions” (Nussbaum 32).  And aesthetic texts set up a dilemma for exploration as in how the aesthetic works in the texts and readers in ideological ways and so our intellectual beliefs and experiences are deeply implicated. Wayne Booth reminds us that an author crafted the texts we read and that we give to our students to read (since English teachers or “school” controls what texts enter the classroom discourse).  Every text “carves out from mankind those readers for which its peculiar effects were designed”: “However impersonal he may try to be, his readers will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner – and of course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all values. Our reaction to his various commitments, secret or overt, will help determine our response to the work” (71).

Chapter Previews

In chapter one, “The Rhetoric of a Mandate,” I will discuss the rhetorical situation that prompted the 2005 Illinois mandate to require a unit of instruction about genocide in all public schools. The list of genocides suggested in this document, “Public Act 094-0478” – the Armenian Genocide, the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, and more recent atrocities in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan –privileges the knowledge of certain genocides while continuing to silence others such as Guatemala, Argentina, East Timor, Iraqi Kurds and others that I again silence here by not naming them. If we take a look at the reason for genocide above, we can see that the document lists hatred (based on ethical/racial/religious identity) as the sole reason. That in itself is simplistic and reductive. It covers up the fact that there are complex social, economic, and political causes of genocide.  One of the goals of this project is to help students uncover this kind of reductive discourse and gain a greater understanding of such kinds of complexities. The language of the mandate is a “discourse of measurement” (Cintron). This document is a text that writes on teachers and students an interpretation of education, or more precisely instructions for “schooling,” a Freirian term to indicate the oppressive nature of public education. The House Bill writes:  “One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that national, ethnic, racial or religious hatred can overtake any nation or society, leading to calamitous consequences.” Here, we see school reform is entering a moral discourse not present in the language of standards; furthermore, language of the mandate does not provide materials for teachers nor dictate how to teach about genocide. Instead, the text asks teachers to do inquiry in order to teach, and because the familiar, controlling order is lacking, teachers, for the first time since before A Nation at Risk experienced a crisis of sorts.

This is one specific and concrete example of how education is “reined in” by the discourses discussed in the introduction. I will show how the legislative process was an example of what Hesford calls “spectacular rhetorics,” and how the discourse of the mandate caused 1) a crisis for teachers who were trained to teach with a more standards-based and data-driven curriculum and 2) an opportunity to re-imagine what English teachers can do in the classroom. How does a mandate to teach about genocide fit with the mandate to get students to score well on standardized tests and be “college and career ready”? What is the job of a teacher in this century? What is the purpose of education? Thus, we see, hopefully, that I am using this specific issue of teaching an understanding of “genocide” as an example of or a metaphor for the much broader tension between standardization and experience.

Mignolo argues that decolonial thinking emerged and unfolded as responses to the ideals projected to and enacted in the non-European world, so to counter the logic of coloniality or measurement in education, we, as teachers and policy makers, must intervene with the logic of decoloniality.  Indeed, Mignolo’s language is one of social justice, yet the work I am or will propose is the practice of critical thinking and understanding about the rhetoric and fiction of transnationalism for public life. Democracy, as understood in “Democracy and Its Limitations” by Ralph Cintron, has competing meanings and is as a “thought system,” it is “yet to arrive.” The English classroom is just the space to “call out the shortcomings of democracy.”

In chapter two, “Reading for Modernity in English,” I will discuss how teachers of English can re-imagine the English classroom by first considering the aesthetics and rhetoricality of the texts we read with our students. I present several paradigms of English that show how narratives about genocide already problematized modernity and make a case for the discipline of English in middle and secondary schools to be less about skills and knowledge and more about reading for and understanding discourses and the rhetorical nature of all texts, specifically aesthetic works, as a project of public participation.

I argue that English as a discipline needs to read for modernity and can do so through the political and literary writing that emerged from transnational, genocidal events. Inherent in these texts is the paradox of modernity: the poverty of accumulation, for example. Thus, in this chapter, I present several paradigms of English that show how narratives about genocide already problematize modernity because of the aesthetic and rhetorical discourses; such texts that critique schemes to improve the human condition have, in fact, failed (Scott). (I will consider James Scott’s arguments in Seeing Like a State to elucidate failed schemes.) First, the complexity of genocide is retrievable in narrative, and English teachers and students can expose the dialectical aspects of the context of genocide and the public use of the language of genocide. Informational texts or modernist documents are insufficient, as are narrative texts, to gain a thorough understanding of genocide.  We need all kinds of documents that speak to the various ways in which we as humans come to understanding things, and artistic textual representations are particularly important as I argue. Hesford’s work in Spectacular Rhetorics will be useful here for a discussion of interpreting the world as already transforming or reconfiguring it and her argument that “no genre is immune to the spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology” (20).  Next, English is concerned with the transactional space of reading (Rosenblatt); the discipline 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 in spaces of public discourse, such as the classroom. In the classroom discussion, the point is not to achieve a truth through communication but to communicate in various ways so that we can come to understand and asses multiple truths, understanding the provisional and partial nature of truth. Finally, I assert that 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.

In chapter three, “The Rhetoricality of the Word,” I will concentrate on the argument Walter D. Mignolo makes in The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options.  I acknowledge that his work may be characterizes as a social justice project, I do not appropriate it here for that purpose.  I am suggesting that certain kinds of teaching and learning can contribute to positive social/political consequences. I think Mignolo’s work is particularly valuable to this dissertation about reading because he sees modernity as a complex narrative. Therefore, this chapter is a rhetorical analysis of how the word “genocide” has been appropriated for different political purposes, which demonstrates modernity as a complex narrative. The evidence presented in this chapter demonstrates human rights atrocities as the darker side of Western modernity.  This argument illustrates my claim that state measurement discourses attempt to make legible that which is by nature complex and resistant to legibility.

This chapter, then, moves to a review (more in depth than the previous chapter) of Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics for what a reading of an image can do to help us understand the narratives at work when we witness representations of human rights violations. “A task that consists of not—of no longer—treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.  Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things.  It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech.  It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (Foucault, 49). Hesford’s work calls attention to how human rights internationalism gets translated into cultural forms that target American audiences. She considers the rescue narrative and how human rights law is depoliticized into humanitarian intervention discourse, which turns human rights into a spectacle. Spectacular rhetorics is the appropriation of human suffering to deflect nationalist issues. This book considers intercontextuality or how arguments travel across contexts and thinks in terms of transnational rather than global because Hesford wants to call attention to how nation states impact others, specifically through presenting images. Distribution of the visible is part of the configuration of domination and subjection; emancipation starts when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or monetizes that distribution (16). In other words, interpreting the world is already a means of transforming it or reconfiguring it.  Education in America, then, can be seen as doing this sort of distribution or work toward a thought system that troubles the spectacle. Rather than as a narcotic we need to understand, it can be taught as a” heterogeneous and rhetorically dialogic process that is nevertheless subsumed within repetitive forms” (19).   Hesford asks: How do deployments of the spectacular rhetoric advance political, cultural, and moral agendas? How do truth telling genres and the contexts they generate support the spectacular and increasingly panoptic culture of U.S. internationalism and its regulation of human rights subjects? She demonstrates that no genre is immune to the spectacular in human rights narratology and deliberates the potential of a differentiated politics of recognition that move beyond recognition, and so, again, the English classroom is an ideal site for investigating this phenomenon.

In chapter four, “Learning as Disorder, Learning though Crisis,” In this chapter, I will argue that what is at stake for teachers and students in reimagining the English classroom is a citizenry more adequately prepared to intervene in the most destructive aspects of modernity, challenge the virtue of democracy to understand the competing motives behind it.  Delinking (Mignolo) or recognizing Cintron’s “oligarchic democracy” will cause a crisis for teachers and students, but it is a crisis that is necessary for bringing forth thick democratic principles and stimulating global consciousness. What texts are most resistant to measurement? What texts will help students see the living and competing social discourses of the public? The discourses of measurement seek to transmit information and ideas. Standardization is a neat way of dictating what knowledge is valuable and how to know if you have it.  There is comfort in the predicable nature of this apparatus. Learning, however, is unpredictable, strange, messy, and uncomfortable; experience is fluid, evolving: disorder. There must be a moment of crisis or disequilibrium in for there to be growth or discovery, that is until the next moment of crisis. Piaget calls this the equilibration, and it is the nature of learning.

I will then attempt to trace how literature of atrocities can be a sort of aesthetic experience and cognitive intervention in schooling. Aesthetic texts make visible the spectacle and the logic of coloniality that I discuss in chapter three, and the literary approach is a viable means of engaging in the sort of democratic thought that might lead to action against human rights violations by the state and action for a more just public life, which would make what we do in the classroom more like education than schooling (Hesford 21).  Teaching reading for the aesthetic and rhetorical nature of texts enacts a sort “democratic thought system” and a way of being in the world.  As an example, I will discuss Shoshana Felman’s “Story of a Class” from Testimony as she asks, “Is the testimony, therefore, simply a medium of historical transmission, or is it, in obscure ways, the unsuspected medium of healing? If history has clinical dimensions, how can testimony intervene, pragmatically and efficaciously, at once historically (politically and rhetorically) and clinically (aesthetically)” (9)?  She explains how her class in learning about the Holocaust “broke out into a crisis” (47). What was unusual, however, was that the experience did not end in silence; instead, it fermented into endless and relentless talking in the days and weeks to come and outside the walls of the classroom. She says that students felt alone and suddenly “deprived of their bonding to the world and to one another” (48).

 In learning about atrocities and in bearing witness to events through political and literary writings, students can delink from coloniality (Mignolo) or break free of s “common sense thinking” (Kumashiro),  and move beyond recognition (Hesford).   I want to call attention to the inadequacy of representation and the limits of narratability and public reproduction. It is this delinking from common sense notions of progress, development, and even democracy that is a requirement of “thick” democratic practice.  

In chapter five, “Spectacular Fictionality,” I will discuss benefits of a literary education that values experience.  I will attempt to show literary genres, specifically novels, are aesthetic and rhetorical in nature.  And then suggest that because of complex narrative in novels, students actually “live through” (Rosenblatt) experiences that support understanding of public life while ultimately shaping students’ social and political ideologies.  I argue through Gallagher’s “The Rise of Fictionality” that fiction considers the position of the reader as external to the fiction, which positions the reader as capable of speculating on the action. Because the novel’s fictionality seeks to suspend disbelief, fictionality is about believability or plausibility rather than reality. According to Gallagher, fiction is not wanting to trick the reader into thinking that he or she “knows” something. It seems that Gallagher is wanting to explore fictionality as features that satisfy some sort of wanting in readers, a wanting that is specific to modernity. And so the question Gallagher asks is this: What was it about early modernity in the first capitalist nation that propagated not just realist fiction but realist fiction? What does it mean to read a narrative as credible while thinking it affirms nothing?” (346).  However, Nussbaum in Poetic Justice seems to wants the literary experience to be of “use” or about knowing. Nussbaum compares what one reads to one’s own unfolding experience, and her use of the word “experience” in this texts resonates with Dewey’s concept of democracy as unfolding. If we think of reading in this way, s combining one’s own absorbed imagining with periods of more detached critical scrutiny, we can begin to see why we might find in reading an activity well-suited for public reasoning and public life (Nussbaum 9). Fiction, according to Nussbaum, helps people become “judicious spectators” of life and ways of being. Here we see not just a view of  reading as a moral education to help us make sense of our personal experience, but one that we can defend to others and support along with others, with whom we wish to live (84).  

I will consider the rhetorical nature of Gallagher and Nussbaum’s arguments about fiction.  Here, I will introduce the problem of fiction, specifically with young readers, using Hesford’s argument in Spectacular Rhetorics that no genre is immune to the spectacular. Fiction calls attention to the spectacles of life; it asks readers to recognize it, whatever it may be in the narrative. However important recognition of humanity is, it is not, as Hesford argues, “a narcotic” and “we need to understand it as heterogeneous and as a rhetorically dialogic process that is nevertheless subsumed within repetitive forms (19). We know how the state is implicated in how they organize schools, but I want to draw attention to how English teachers are implicated in what and how they teach reading. Is it enough to recognize stories and consider arguments, or are the texts asking for something beyond recognition?

  In chapter six, “Reading Beyond Recognition,” I will discuss the aesthetics and rhetoricality of a genre named by Lawrence Langer as “literature of atrocities” in The Literary Imagination “because its literary expression is rooted in a historical reality that haunts the reader, we cannot dismiss it as we might some more extravagant passages (22).” ­I will consider the features of this genre that have the potential to perpetuate, intervene, and/or trouble features of the master narrative of modernity. This genre, I argue, calls attention to and might even answer Hesford’s questions: How do deployments of spectacular rhetoric advance political, cultural, and moral agendas? How do truth telling genres and the contexts they generate support the spectacular and increasing panoptic culture of United States internationalism and its regulation of human rights subjects?

In literature of atrocity, according to Langer, there are “insiders” and “outsiders,” and in questioning the need for an “outsider” to write about the atrocity when there are so many “insiders” is to ask who can tell the or a truth.  Perhaps only those who had not part can focus on them rationally and imaginatively. Perhaps “it has become a problem for the writer to relate the small circle of his private experience to the immense circumference of contemporary human violence and suffering” (23).  While Langer’s argument specifically sites Holocaust literature (e.g., the literary nonfiction of  The Diary of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man  and the literary fiction of  Pierre Gascar’s The Season of the Dead, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird   and  William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice), I will extend the genre to include literature from the genocide of Armenians and Cambodians, literature from the genocide in Guatemala, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda (although there is much more to consider).  Such literature exposes the difficulty of reality and representation, and this genre, as I intend to demonstrate, appropriately troubles that which we should consider in all genres and all the ways we read the world: literary and informational and textual as well as visual.

I argue that English teachers are best suited to teach about modernity because they can select literary writing that captures the complexity of history discarding or complicating the overtly didactic texts and considering nuanced, ethically ambiguous texts that problematized representation. I provide examples of young adult literature of atrocities that I see as successful in devising an idiom and style for the unspeakable that is indeed nuanced, complex, and ethically ambiguous (and perhaps some texts that are not). I review several texts that contextualize the effects of modernity and construct what Baer calls a “framework of consciousness” from which students can analyze the rhetoric of modernity and “uncover” the logic of coloniality (Calder). I will critique this framework again considering Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics considering the spectacular nature of the imagery in these texts and the narratives- rescue narrative, human  rights law is depoliticized into a humanitarian intervention discourse, appropriation of human suffering, how truth telling genres achieve political effect and manipulate affect because of the witnessing.

In chapter seven, “Citizen[2] Readers,” I ask: What is the impact of reading literature of atrocities on eighth grade students? What happens when we ask our students to recognize and consider our responsibility for understanding transnationalism? What happens when we follow the form of literature in our classes and teach through an inquiry based method, a process of uncovering the aesthetic qualities and rhetorical nature of texts on a student’s identity as a reader and citizen? What is the impact of an English classroom that resists measurement methods (e.g., test prep, skills focused, multiple choice assessment, scientifically-proven curriculum, data-driven instruction) on NCLB-schooled students?  This chapter explores how students reason about being a student and the consequences their thought system has for their thinking about reading and their place in the world.  This chapter attempts to denaturalize normalized (the result of a lifetime of NCLB for these students) discourses about being a student – discourses that help to perpetuate narrow ways of understanding our identity as citizens and thus narrow ways of  reading the world that are incompatible with objectives for education in a democratic, globalized society. 

I will do a study of several eighth grade students who, in their eighth grade 2012-13 English class, read a variety of literary and informational texts that perhaps once seemed discrete and unrelated but together constitute a coherent genre identified at the Literature of Atrocity (which I might call darker side of modernity). This school year, I did not ask whether this curriculum should be done; the texts had been written. Our task was to evaluate how it has been done, judge its effectiveness, and, as Langer suggests, analyze its implications for literature and for society. Students read literature that represented 1) the Maya during the Guatemalan genocide in the early 1980’s; 2) the Cambodian genocide in the mid 1970’s considering “truth telling genres” and “bearing witness”; 3)  the Armenian genocide  in the early 1900’s and did inquiry into  fictionalizing aspects of  historical fiction and  the ongoing veracity of the term “genocide” in Turkey; 3) read for the social, political, and economic causes and consequences of a variety of cultural intersections; and 4) considered the sort of errors teachers make when teaching about the Holocaust analyzing several representations of Anne Frank’s diary and Elie Wiesel’s continued efforts to move citizens beyond recognition. We read with attention to the rhetorical and aesthetic nature of narrative and informational texts – with no test prep, textbooks, or pre-packaged curriculum except to draw attention to how such methods ask for different reading practices. This will be a qualitative study using transcripts from semi-structured interviews (individual and small group), a demographic survey, and written artifacts of student work to shed light on variance during the data collection process. I intend to select students whom I perceive to have had different responses to the pedagogy and to use textual analysis of the interviews and artifacts to code and interpret the data.

            In the final chapter, “Preparing for a Democratic Public Life,” this chapter suggests ways English teachers and English teacher educators might create spaces for teachers to rethink how their reading practices and experiences with curriculum are always mediated and produced by discourses that reflect perspectives, experiences, and values of Western states. I will acknowledge the possible resistance teachers may have to pedagogy that does not lend itself to clean measurement, specifically how teacher evaluations are tied to students test scores. I want to come back to the idea of democracy as a system of thought rather than a static form of governing. As Cintron argues in “Democracy and Its Limitations,” and as Mignolo argues in The Darker Side of Modernity, democracy as competing meanings. Democracy is a thought system that has yet to arrive, and education in the English classroom (not schooling) is just the place to call attention to the shortcomings and possibilities of democracy. First, I consider our work in English education, where we education future English teachers, as politically implicated; what we include or exclude in our pedagogy already has ethical and political implications. Next, I suggest that we read with our teacher candidates, that we read for social and political understanding of the discourse of measurement that is so pervasive in schooling. I also suggest that we prepare teacher candidates to be comfortable with discomfort as Kumashiro would say so that they might trouble their past experiences in schooling and reimagine the English classroom as space to not ignore, not just subvert, but a space to recognize and “understanding of the movement and direction of social forces” and then move beyond to “an understanding of the social needs and of the resources that may be used to satisfy them” (Dewey 183).

Conclusion

 I think we can agree that as a modern nation, we celebrate development and knowledges that can be measured and counted, yet I hope I have shown that development comes at the cost of oppressing other knowledges that might enlighten and uncover current and long term problems implicated in development (e.g., social, economic, and ecological). This cost, hidden in education reform rhetoric, can be uncovered in the field of English. And the “thick” reading practices that I advocate can prepare our students to be citizens in a transnational public. Nevertheless, schooling reform has English teachers living in the discourses of measurement and teaching about and for information and skills.  Because we are at the beginning of another trend, I am suggesting that the reform should come by way of re-imagining the discipline of English as a discipline of reading for discourses, reading for understanding of the social forces that shape society. I argue that reading for and experiencing discourses in aesthetic genres like atrocity narratives will actually reveal the paradox of understanding (and I think this may be the most important point).  A paradox is the simultaneous existence of two apparently incompatible things such as schooling and education, democracy and democracy, modernity and modernity. In literature, the representational tactics make a character seemingly knowable, but, as Gallagher suggests, “peculiarly delimited” because the character is a textual being. Literature draws attention to this paradox of knowing; it draws attention to the problem of representation. Discourses of measurement do not want to draw attention to the impossibility of quantifying learning, yet in literature of atrocity there is a danger in responding to trauma that indulges in the illusion that we might somehow be able to assimilate atrocities fully into our understanding that that trauma is legible or quantifiable. While this is a paradox of understanding, it is precisely what learning is – already and always partial and unquantifiable.

Working Bibliography

Apple, Micahel. The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Auerbach, Carl and Silverstein, Louise B. Qualitative Data: An Introduction to Coding and Analysis. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

Baer, E. “A New Algorithm in Evil- Children's Litearture in a Post-Holocaust World.” The Lion and the Unicorn (2000): 378-401.

Bagdasarian, Adam. The Forgotten Fire. New York: Laurel-Leaf, 2002.

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961.

Boyd, Sandy. PARCC Consortium Awarded Race to the Top Assessment Funds. News Statement. Washington: Achieve, 2010.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952.

Calder, Lendol. "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey." The Journal of American History March 2006: 1358-1370.

Canuel, Mark. "The Politics and Literature of Revolution." Syllabus. University of Illinois at Chicago, Spring 2012.

Carr, P. “Educating for Democracy: With or Without Social Justice.” Teacher Education Quarterly (2008): 117-136.

Chozick, Brook Barnes and Amy. “Media Companies, Seeing Profit Slip, Push into Education.” The New York Times 2012 йил 10-August: 1.

Christophe, Felicitas Macgilchrist and Barbara. "Translating Globalizatoin Theories into Educational Research: Thoughts on Recent Shifts in Holocaust Education." Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (2011): 145-158.

Cintron, Ralph. Angels' Town. Chicago: Beacon Press, 1998.

Cintron, Ralph. "Democracy and Its Limitations." Ackerman, John M. and Coogan, David J. The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. 98-118.

Clendinnen, Inga. Reading the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Combres, Elizabeth. Broken Memory: A Novel of Rwanda. Toronto: Groundwood, 2009.

Debray, Rigoberta Menchu and Elisabeth. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984.

Denich, Bettie. “Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide.” American Ethnologoist (1994): 367-390.

Destigter, Todd. Reflections of a Citizen Teacher: Literacy, Democracy, and the Forgotten Students of Addison High. NCTE, 2001.

Dewey, John. "The Challenge of Democracy to Education." Dewey, John. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953: Volume 11: 1935-1937. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2008. 181-190.

Farnham, J.F. “Ethical Ambiguity and the Teaching of the Holocaust.” English Journal (1983): 519-542.

Felman, Shoshana. Laub, Dori. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalaysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. Doubleday, 2001.

French, Brigittine. Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity: Violence, Cultural Rights, and Modernity in Highland Guatemala. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010.

Frere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000.

Gallagher, Catherine. "The Rise of Fictionality." Moretti, Franco. The Novel. Princeton, 2006. 336-63.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Gilbert, Ruth. “Grasping the Unimaginable: Recent Holocaust Novels for Children by Morris Gleitzman and John Boyne.” Children's Literature in Education (2010): 355-366.

Giroux. Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Democracy's Promise and Education's Challenge. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005.

Gourevitch, Phillip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.

Gov. Blagojevich Signs Law Expanding Genocide Education in Illinois: Studies will now include recent atrocities in Armenia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan. News. Springfield: Office of the Govenror, 2005.

Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004.

Green, Maxine. The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press, 1988.

Hesford, Wendy S. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Ho, Minfong. The Stone Goddess. New York: Scholastic, 2005.

Jordan, Sarah D. “Educating Without Overwhelming Authorial Strategoes in Children's Holocaust Literature.” Children's Literature in Education (2004): 199-218.

Kosinski, Jerzy. The Painted Bird. New York: Grove Press, 1995.

Kumashiro, Kevin. Against Common Sense. New York: 2009, 2009.

Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

Levi, Primo. If This is a Man and The Truce. Little, Brown Book Group, 1991.

Lindquist, David. "Developing Holocaust Curricula: The Content Decision-Making Process." The Clearing House (2008): 27-34.

—. "Five Perspectives for Teaching the Holocaust." American Secondary Education (2008): 4-14.

Lindquist, David M. "Guidelines for Teaching the Holocaust: Avoiding Common Pedagogical Errors." The Social Studies (2006): 215-221.

Loewen, James. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: The New Press, 2007.

McCormick, Patricia. Never Fall Down: A Boy Soldier's Story of Survival. New York: Balzer, 2012.

McLaren, Peter. Life In Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education. Boston: Pearson, 2007.

Meed, Alice. Girl of Kosovo. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Mikaelsen, Ben. Tree Girl. New York: Harper Tempest, 2004.

Misson, Ray and Wendy Morgan. Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic: Transforming the English Classroom. Urbana: NCTE, 2006.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Piaget, Jean. The Development of Thought. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

Pisapia, Jeffrey Ellison and John. "The State of Holocaust Education in Illinois." IDEA 7 September 2006: 2006.

Power, Samantha. A Problem form Hell: American and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic, 2002.

Robin, Corey. "Dedicated to Democracy." London Review of Books 18 November 2004: 3-6.

Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. Noble and Noble, 1968.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Shor, Ira. Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1980.

Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk. Daughter of War: A Novel. Markham: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2008.

—. Nobody's Child. Toronto: Boardwalk, 2003.

—. The Hunger. Toronto: Dundurn Group, 1999.

Stassen, Jean-Philippe. Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda. New York: First Second, 2006.

Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.

Tottens, Parsons. A Century of Genocide. n.d.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Hill and Wang, 2006.

---

[1] This prospectus employs Hesford’s  “transnational” rather than “global” to draw attention to “the ongoing relevance of nation-states and nationalisms,” how “subjects are constituted and connected through technologies and rationalities,” and how “relations between individuals and nation-states, between corporations and the state, and between state and nonstate actors are negotiated” (Hesford 14). “Trans” means across, beyond, through, and change, which indicates the dynamism of the public imaginary. 

[2] an allusion to Todd Destigter’s Reflections of a Citizen Teacher: Literacy, Democracy, and the Forgotten  Students of Addison High (2001)