Misson and Morgan: Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic

Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic: Transforming the English Classroom by Ray Misson and Wendy Morgan investigates literacy education based on the poststructuralist understanding that all language is socially textualized, meaning that all texts are ideological in nature and that such texts are "fundamental to the construction of our identity."  The authors take up the question of how critical literacy deals with aesthetic texts (like poetry).

Understanding critical literacy to have an agenda and to be about discourse, genre, subject position, and resistant reading, the authors ask how such a framework might be compatible with desire and performativity. They  imagine how critical literacy and poststructuralism work in the classroom reading practices. Essentially, the authors argue about the limitations of critical literacy and resistant reading offering a way to reconfigure it to allow for aesthetic and pleasure.

For middle and high school teachers, this book wants to be in conversation with you about how you are currently teaching English. The authors assume that you use a "conventional model of narrative, thematic, stylistic, or issues-based analysis, alongside a regime of tasks that may ask for creative responses but in the end values most the analytic essay or the book report." I think Common Core and previous learning standards also value this sort of model considering text-based questions and responses. Teachers are encouraged to take on the culture of the school, and the values of that school with regard to reading practices and meaning making.  Reading the text "conventionally," which I take to mean without resisting or rather without consideration for ways of knowing, is the sort of practice this book calls into question. . The authors, however, do not intend for this book to be about teaching literature  inasmuch as they are interested in teaching literacy or the reading texts that are both literary and nonoliterary because their argument is that the aesthetic is an element in all texts.

To read a text the critical literacy way is to consider the text as a product of culture that positions the readers to see the world in potentially sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist ways and then to read to resist such.  I think some classrooms do this sort of work. Such a position, however, has the potential to strip the text of pleasure.  Critical literacy then strips the aesthetic delight of the text, and so Mission and Morgan are interested in how to accommodate aesthetics to critical literacy or rather accommodate critical literacy to deal with aesthetics. The author's treatment of aesthetic is to define it or rather position it as located across a process rather than elements that can be found or identified in a texts.. Locating beauty in an object is problematic because not everyone will find the same object beautiful; thus, beauty is more in the experience of beholding the beauty; however, to behold, one must be able to notice certain qualities or what the authors refer to as "way of knowing."  it is in this that talking about aesthetics offers a similar problematic as critical literacy. Aesthetic, as I understand it, "entails a creator, the work created, and an audience" (33). in other words, to have an aesthetic, the text must have a maker and a responder -- a relational quality. Where is the location of the aesthetic? In the responder or the stimuli? What from the text is the stimuli? Isn't the aesthetic the product of reading (39)?  The aesthetic, then, seems to be equally implicated in the text as  a product of culture needing to be exposed as critical literacy.

Is all knowledge culturally determined? Is aesthetic bound up with ideology?

Ch -1 Notes:
valuation -- people place value on things they like; we want others to share what we enjoy; how are "good" texts chosen in the English classroom; what is valued by the dominant society is deemed good

textual politics -- poststructuralist theory -- texts are constructed within a society; meanings can change with different times, places, and readers; meanings in text reflect the assumptions and values of that society

identity politics -- marxist theory -- examines the positional of social classes; feminist/gender theory -- women critiqued their invisibility in literature; female writers were brought to light beside the privileged male authors; the right to appreciate texts that validate their experiences and culture

Williams and Eagleton -- good literature could no longer be determined by the author's genious; the literary  value was not intrinsic but given by the institution that created the category -- aesthetic as a product of the ideology of the dominant group****- lecturers schools, teachers produce a reading that values certain meaning -- develops readers who can PERFORM the reading and find satisfaction in it

Is an aesthetic experience a deception? Is pleasure an ideologically driven effect -- we are supposed to like it because we were taught to value it.

critical view -- made inquiries into who held power in society; traced ideologies of cultures; label masses as fooled by culture industries in power; saw mass culture as enemy; teachers job was to enlighten students by revealing the deception in the common sense offered in the texts

view of the popular -- more inclusive accepting and appreciative of a range of cultural forms, practices and texts; looked at how people engaged with entertainment; less concern with power

radical pedagogy -- critical pedagogy -- advocates opposition to the status quo; politicizes the concsiousness; struggles in the community and classroom become learning opportunities for political awareness; students taught how to critique the knowledge offered to them in the common sense texts of the culture and school; sought to cure students of their investment in popular texts

critical literacy -- focuses on texts and language not the schooling reform agenda of critical pedagogy; scrutinizes the selective representation of people, places, and events; examines the tendency to privilege some matters and marginalize others; interested in the politically charged silence in texts; identifies position readers are offered and encourages resistant reading positions

media studies -- puts deceitful media studies on trial; looks for bias, distortions of reality, manipulations of audience; evaluated based on assumptions of value and culture similar to Marxist critics; teacher seen as bearer of the light of pure, critical reason bringing students out of their darkness

multilteracies -- recognizes the multimodal nature of literacies in our technologically and visually soaked world of texts; all literacies positions within particular cultural and social contexts

teachers-- A - -resist introducing popular text forms as equal within literary texts; popular text forms take away from worthwhile texts; do not know how to teach popular texts productively; find it difficult to credit pop culture texts with artful design or aesthetic satisfactions that literary texts offer
B -- less comfortable with trad. literary texts; don't know how to facilitate poltiical criticism; only comfortable using pop texts if they give a voice to historically silenced interests, such as indigenous rights

gap between university English and high school English -- high school regimes encourage or require teachers to conform to the norms of their school and their profession; busy teachers are not expected to read, reflect, theorize, and translate those theories into classroom activities- 21

ch 3 -- The Social Nature of the Aesthetic

Staunton: Deranging English and Education

Staunton, John A. Deranging English/education: Teacher Inquiry, Literary Studies, and Hybrid Visions of "English" for 21st Century Schools. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2008. Print.

Staunton's 2008 book is a welcome contribution,perhaps the only contribution, to the hybrid field of English and Education. In many teacher education programs, English as a discipline is treated as separate from/than education, and I am not even sure that programs would label education as a "discipline." Education course work is generally seen as "covering" the history of education or surveying strategies to fill the teacher tool box. Thus, Staunton's work in this book asks that we re-see ourselves as more of a hybrid of the two to avoid mirroring back to those in power their assumptions about teaching,learning,literature, and students.

In this book, Staunton works to move beyond the paradigm of teacher success that looks more like transmitting the American canon of literature to something more about a joint endeavor of uncovering -"what you discover you're capable of doing in the face of student confusion, textual resistance, or serendipitous collisions" (85).

Not unlike Freire, which I don't believe he cites, Staunton sees the teacher and student as co-teachers and co-learners. (I am attempting to share the "teaching space" as well in this semesters ENGL 489 at UIC. We are all uncomfortable as "students" co-lead a seminar on Rosenblatt or teach a 10 minute lesson demonstrating active learning. During the Socratic seminar, I can feel them waiting for "my take," and I can feel myself resisting.) The "undercurrent" here is really social justice, as Staunton seeks to alter the relationship between teacher and student, student with one another.

One key concept is the notion of "found pedagogy" teaching literature for and with students (90).whereby our task is not to articulate meanings about literature or texts but to put those meanings in conversation with others" (148).

Below are notes from the final chapters -

Ch 4- anchoring points

Song of myself

92- Curricular informants moving from the sidelines of the curriculum to the front lines of the knowledge base of what and how American literature means

93- Or have we practiced so long to learn to read and to get at the meaning of poem that when confronted with the sound of language struggling with the mysteries of being in the world we are struck dumb and at a loss for words

97- What has the potential to unravel what we think we know about offering students freedom to explore their ideas in classroom settings that then close the door on any real application or test of the freedom

Disrupting the trans mission of American literature

104- To read Whitman's lines and not allow students a chance to filter meaning from their own experiences is to miss it crucial opportunity to create experiential learning and occlude a key component of the poem's own agenda

Picture- 108- It models a way of approaching history and literature that allows both to speak to contemporary context without being totally removed from their own fields of production

118- online discussion boards

122- That I need to work against the transmission of a master narrative about American literary history that is both historically and ideologically suspect

He argues for teachers to have an opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of American literature from exposure to primary texts historical and contextualizing documents and cultural artifacts from across media and artistic modes

To prepare students not to rely on the history package by their anthologies and curriculum guides which send it next messages about the content of American literature

Ch 5- what counts as knowledge

James gee -- the public discourse model - Shapes the expectations and assumptions of and about teacher candidates discourse models are theories storylines images explanatory frameworks that people hold often unconsciously and used to make sense of the world and their experiences in it

Common sense- but socially situated meanings and practices that Hyde powerful assumptions about people, communities, and literary values -124

133- finally mentions the actual students they will teach

Recognizing that either position throws us into existing and powerfully defining discourses about who we think we are when we are teaching English thrown ess into a discursive wilderness pedagogy marks the boundaries of one horizon of understanding. What we do and who we are is marked by what has come before us the way out is one that can be discovered through shared inquiry and recognition of those student students who join us on the way- 148

Ch 6

153-The work they do in English remain separate from an alien to the things they do in their pedagogy courses

Draws out this concern for social justice an undercurrent throughout this book

Hesford: Spectacular Rhetoric Notes

Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics

4/6/2013
“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).

Cintron, in his notes about Hesford's book, suggests that Foucault is more interested in power, especially how institutions manage to shape power on behalf of some and not others. Rhetoric, as the study of language in action, must always be about something more  -- the formation of political life whether or not the signifiers match up to anything real or even probable.

Hesford's emphasis is on recognition: "The history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition.  As this history suggests, struggles for recognition are also struggles for visibility...The stakes are precisely the unseen in vision -- the process through which something is seen or not seen (30).

Her aim is to "integrate the visual into, rather than set it against, textual approaches and to scrutinize the objectivist model of visual evidence -- seeing is believing -- foundational to contemporary human rights politics" (8). Here I am reminded of one of my students who in response to the question "How do we imagine the unimaginable and speak of the unspeakable and know of the unknowable? " (with regard to trauma and atrocities) answered that she knew it because she visited a concentration camp -- as if seeing the camp today is knowing, understanding, and believing.

Cintron writes that the "very structure of the human rights claim is a kind of spectacle in which intersecting ideologies, visual technologies, rhetorics, and so on fuse to create a reality (or the representation of reality) that reinforces certain dilemmas regarding the dominated and the dominating.  In this sense, human rights discourses seem to contain the residue of colonialism, and in an ironic way continue neocolonialst thinking. So ekphrasis, then, (to bring before the eyes), which seems so foundational to rhetorical theory because it is bound up with notions of proof and persuasion, of certainty as opposed to contingency, becomes the rhetorical figure that is exploited in the human rights spectacle."

Hesfords working with Levinas: "To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition.  It is complete not in the opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him" (198).

Introduction:

• How do human rights internationalism get translated into cultural forms that target American audiences-14 
• Consider the rescue narrative how human rights law is depoliticize into a humanitarian intervention discourse 
• Consider how the discourse of American nationalism produces subjects who see themselves as a free in comparison to developing worlds 
• The human rights spectacle or spectacular rhetorical is the appropriation of human suffering to deflect Nationalist issues
• This book considers Intercon textuality how arguments travel across contexts
• The book thinks in terms of transnational rather than global because of the national or nationstates that impact others--Nationstates are relevant in human rights context and in presenting images of issues
• Ranchers-16- Emancipation starts to distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection it starts when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or monetize that distribution.... Interpreting the world is already means transforming it or reconfiguring it
• 17- I highlight the rhetorical intercurrent textuality of images and their meanings and approach the human rights spectacle as a rhetorical phenomenon through which differently empowered social constituencies negotiate the authority of representation. Furthermore I argued that spectacular X and the contradiction that they stage are emblematic of the political and ethical struggles with which human rights advocates and scholars are engaged.
• 19-I argue that instead of thinking about the spectacle as a narcotic we need to understand it as heterogeneous and as a rhetorically dialogic process that is nevertheless subsumed within repetitive forms. Truth telling genres are the most ardent hosts of human rights spectacle.
• 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 US internationalism and its regulation of human rights subjects?
• 20- I demonstrate that no genre is immune to the spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.
• 21- The studies are intended not to represent an exhaustive survey but to highlight examples of how international Human rights law and cultural practices work together to create sites of political engagement and creative intervention. 
• 21- I seek to counter the common assumption that legal approaches are the only politically viable means of taking action against human rights violations by the states and nine state actors...******
• Attending to the intercontextuality, I will cultural and law based human rights discourses we are able to grasp how the suffering body becomes sutured to the spectacle and incorporated into the visual economy of human rights....issues of who has the power to represent home and which events are rendered visible or invisible are profoundly important...and examination of interventions or transformations of the spectacle that challenge hierarchical social relations and the fixity of identity categories and yet and down at the human rights subject with agency-22
• 23- How truth Telling achieves political effects and to manipulate affect
• 26- Convergence of human rights and humanitarian discourses and representing non-western women and their children as sympathetic I text unappealing and site for Western audiences... Children as symbolically appealing and as passive victims... How about spectacle of childhood innocence and the transformation of the child from object property to agent 

 Chapter Five -- Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Poltiics of (In)visibility

• Rights bearing subject deflect attention from or draw it to the social and economic conditions that shape children's lives
• Questions depoliticizing the victim of children's human rights law
• There is a subversive element of children's agency when the substance of that Universalism is not innocence for children sense of familial and social responsibility-- and this is evident in so e genocude literature .. It resists victimizing demonstrating agency in the child... What is the mediator's role-- a call for greater collaboration between human rights activists artists and scholars in investigating how the axes of ethical engagement are regulated through the often conversion discourses of humanitarianism and human rights internationalism
• Educating as rescue narrative--159--This was in part a narrative in tree girl and was a narrative in my unit of about tree girl ; It is also a narrative at my melody school
• A humanitarian narrative of self actualization with an imperialist history emerge as a virtuous reporter and advocate whose value and agency are affirmed by the lacking other--160
• Teaching about international or transnational atrocities is dangerous for the teacher because the spectacular figure of the exploited child is most often depicted as foreign racially or ethnically different and non autonomous and innocent being betrayed by familial and cultural traditions
• Do the books and try that out western intervention the characters cannot be saved? Is there no agency? 
• Is there a larger transformation narrative which moves from pain and trauma to personal expression and growth
• 162-The literacy math graff -- The universalizing Idea that you respective of the particularities of any given context literacy correlates with social standing and economic advancement
• The taxpayers witness to a journey through their creation of a rhetorical space of transnational intimacy between children and an imagined western audience-163
• 174- The challenge is not to reproduce the colonial legacy of anthologizing societies as uncivil and repressing the agency of both children and adults then re-creating the spectacle of salvation through such interventions
• 174- Developmental narrative.. It plots a story of socio-civil incorporation by which the human rights personality becomes legible to the self and others
• 175-Cosmopolitan aesthetic... Redemption as subjects of a heroic narrative in which they and the imagined Westernview were triumphant over the deficient moral aesthetic boundaries of the brothel
• This transformation narrative distracts attention from the severe poverty and exploitation to which the children are subjected in favor of the expertise of the cosmopolitan arch critic which the children are encouraged to emulate and new forms of neoliberalism and its regulation of social difference subjectivity and public morality
• Darker side .. What is needed is a multidimensional analysis of children's agency that considers that interdependency of human rights including how poor labor conditions for adults inadequate wages lack of health for disability benefits unsafe working conditions contribute to the family's dependency on child labor176
• This confronts modernity 
• Be skeptical of the dualisms forced versus chosen moral versus immoral to terminate representations of women and children
• Account for the transnational national and cultural forces and narratives that define our alignments with children and those that limit children's agency has moral and political subjects
• The process that children are cultural actors the documentary reformulate what it means to see children as complex subjects who subjectivity is not grounded in a struggle for recognition but in their ability to respond to impoverished, social and economic circumstances.--182
• By focusing on the children's daily struggles and resilience the film counters the spectacle of children as passive victims that is common to human rights and humanitarian campaigns specifically those that target Western audiences--183
• The film does not have a transformation or rescue narrative there are no heroes or villains the film documents to children struggles the lack of choices and resources and the generational cycle of poverty and it exposes the contradictions of advocacy work 184
• Moments that kid viewers an opportunity to think about their role as witness a small dessert and otherwise continuous observation page and the potential pedagogical role of the film in the context of its making
• 185- ranciere- The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible the sayable and ithe thinkable.
• a refusal to construing the children as mere victims or to infantilize their families or the society in which they live
• 186-The film persuades by enabling a relationship built on the recognition of children as cultural actors and moral agents and by not translating the children's experiences in terms of idealized western models of development...reimagining the discourse of childhood dependence***
• Tensions between individual capacity and vulnerability in between protection and empowerment are not easily resolved
• See child agency as a matter of social and economic rights and not solely civil and political rights as a matter of both political recognition and the rest redistribution of resources. ... In order that the issue of children's human rights to be ethically grounded 

Chapter 3: Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle

• 95--Hesford critiques Mackinnon's anti-pornographic stance and causal argument that pornography created conditions whereby Serbian men raid Muslim and Croat women ... McKinnon is more interested in linking human rights violation to her anti-pornography stands then in exploring these women's testimonial for what they say about the complexities appointments victimization cultural location and agency.. Thus the text is in-service of her argument and not in service if the women.
• Pedagogically we need to be aware of how we use the tax and her classrooms are they in service of the conceptual idea or framework or in-service of complicating the subjectivity of the people
• 95- Consumption of great as spectacle exemplifies the pervasive visibility of women as rape victims and international news media and US public discourse and the emphasis and women's human rights campaigns and violence against women
• 96- If human rights images and testimonies aim to create a rhetorical space of intersubjectivity of bearing witness how can human rights activists and scholars account for ruptures and identification and crises and witnessing? 
• 98- Bearing witness--a critical stance of bearing witness wherein the witness listener reviewer does not take the place of the other... The original subjects themselves did not register the experience in the fullness of its meaning (Baer) 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.
• 99- The process of documenting human rights violations is paradoxical in that violence is often represented in order for it to be resisted...." And for me this is a problem in the classroom because we are reading representations of violence in order to confront progress and development for its darker side, so we are reading violations and projecting narratives-- hero narrative, rescuer narrative-
• Hesford asks what forms of empathic engagement are constituted as solutions to violence and what are the limits of such forms? She talks about the crisis of witnessing referring to the risks of representing violence
• Life writing studies-- the mediated nature of the testimonial genre and the editorial process if collaboration and mediation 
• 100- She argues the need to recognize the interdependence of witnessing and listening... The paradoxes of representation involved in becoming a rhetorical witness of rape warfare as genocide and of the allegorical structure of human rights claims to this recognition. The paradox that such representations bring front and center of course this configuration of the individual has an embodiment of group identity and group vulnerability a sense of collective identity recognized by the genocide convention. 
• 103-- secondary witness- gets stuck in the gap between what is said in testimony in the way of speaking body or written text says it
• Cambodia 
• What assumptions about children contributed to Khmer rouges plan?
• What beliefs about progress and development?
• Can our research tell the truth? Can a memoir testify?
• How do they make sense of their experiences, how do they channel their pain into a struggle for justice, the process if recognizing themselves as human rights subjects -- not interested in what happened to the people(as victims).
• Works against western expectations that victims were all poor an uneducated 
• Memoir/ testimony- the individuals trauma is implicated in the social regardless if whether she chooses to speak -- live witness's speech act is a violation as it makes her live through it again; the witness and viewer recreate the spectacle of victimization as a scene if forced recognition.
• Can one testimony speak for a collective?
• Tensions between witnessing and spectacle 
• Inadequacy of representation - limits of narratability and public reproduction and exposure of the private
• Think about how the global economy and international politics including the United States have intervened is supposedly local conflicts, and how such are configured rhetorically-- how and why would it matter if accounts of systematic violence and its legacies were part if our memorial landscapes-- 122
• Hesford deliberates the potential if a differentiated politics of recognition that move beyond recognition

Fecho: Teaching for the Students

Bob Fecho is a professor at the University of Georgia's department of language and literacy education. The book provides a framework for creating a classroom built on dialogue, inquiry, and critique.  He addresses concerns that education students bring to class. While I am an 8th grade English teacher, teaching full time, I am also a teacher educator and know that I am in a unique position to not only inform but shape teacher practice.

It is interesting to note that Fecho acknowledge Bakhtin's work as the "backbone of this book" given that my current dissertation committee has found problems with my use of Bakhtin as a framework for   my argument to teach novels in this age of Common Core's movement toward informational texts.

Chapter Notes

Fecho 

 12 the intent of dialogue rather than to destroy is to create without creation there can be no dialogue

The purpose of the chapter case to emphasize the importance of Generative lesson. It is done and service of gaining confidence to develop their understanding of future Texts and genres  they encounter

Ch 2
P22--What made this teaching critical for me was the overt focus and tacit implication that we live in a political society and that all social institutions including schools are driven by powerful political forces

24---Don't drive ideas into the ground where they won't be turned over examined and perhaps be considered--Instead post questions Perdenalas alternatives engage in dialogue and provide tools which current and future dialog could be achieved

Ch.3
Transaction--When we read we are encountering the text and ways for which only our experiences can prepare us; There are no generic readers or generic interpretations that only innumerable relationships between readers  and texts -29

My experiences don't preclude me from imagining or engaging in dialogue in order to gain insight into other perspectives but they do color, inhibit, enable, spin,  or somehow shape my eventual understandings

31 My job to teach students how to read and respond to those and other text... Helping students develop skills for unpacking text and using writing as a means for doing so. Much more motivational weight

... Works as complex investigations of the human condition and wanted my students to have the opportunity to save those texts in order to have the text shape them

33--I seek yo create wobble in the dialogic classroom. - To get students to notice and consider their beliefs and the worlds they inhabit 

Ch 4-- tension , squeeze and release 
41-I believe it's not tension  itself that represents a concern but how we respond to end-use tension that causes complications in our lives... The point isn't necessarily to remove tension to gain insight into the tension and have that insight support your efforts 43

Ch 5 difficulty

Ch 6 wobble 
Wobble US on the shoulder and induces us to ask why it nudges us toward action it suggests we get out at our chair and do something

54- The intention of the course is not to develop a consensus of understanding but to create an atmosphere and which wobble takes place

56- The paradox that a class where it is safe to investigate complex ideas sometimes feels risky and unsafe to the participants

Make it safe to experience such uncertainty

ch 7  
p. 69 -- to be a dialogic teacher is to question the engagement that occurs in your classroom; if you are unhappy with the current state of that engagement -- it it seems that too many students are merely occupying  seats and waiting out time -- then you need to admit to yourself ..it's you

ch 8
p. 75 -- by not realizing the importance of changing contexts, we tend to position our learning experiences in narrow ruts of understanding.  Our sense making can go only so far because we have fenced it in. 

ch 9 
p. 81 - Is it just about going from not knowing to knowing, as if we all cared about the same ideas, learned a the same pace, and prioritized what we learned in the same ways...Shouldn't our intent as educators be to understand the make-up of these varied contexts and what powerful potential they bring to our learning? Isn't it important for us to have insight into the diversity  among and within individuals  and how that rich mix contributes to learning in different ways? 


p. 83 -- Love...is an act of courage and unless we enter classrooms with love, humility, and faith in the power of humans to create and recreate, we will fail in our attempts to dialogue.

Of course, from Peter Elbow I know that part of grading student writing is that you have to choose to "like" it, and I have been known to use the word "love" with my students as in "I do this because I love you." There are times, however, that I get stuck in this "I have the answer" routine and feel like the class is against me only too late realizing that I failed at the love and humility and the faith in my students to dialogue with me on a topic. Such moments eat away at me until I see them again and ask for a redo or just try harder to love, possess humility, and have faith in them. 

ch 10
questioning

ch 11
constructing a simultaneously  unified and diverse self...p. 96 "Who we are becoming depends on where we are, how we have constructed ourselves to date, and to what extent we remain in dialogue with our contexts and diverse identities."

p. 101 -- "But if we who educate can grasp  that all of us are entered into a complex mesh of dialogical transactions with our selves and our many contexts, then we can also grasp that we teach for so much more than competency on a test."

ch 12
seamlessness

Writing as a Way of Being: Yagelski

In Writing as a Way of Being, Yagelski explores what anyone who has ever written something they believed at the time was important already knows: that the actual experience of writing is actually quite separate from the text. And this is why, once the piece of text is "finished" that a writer feels separate from that text, even distanced, and, I would go so far as to say somewhat depressed realizing that the "finishing" of the text was nowhere near as exhilarating as the writing itself.

Thus, when teachers talk about writing as having the potential to change things, they often overlook that it is the experience of writing that often has greater potential to move the writer to a place of greater understanding of himself and the world rather than the information in the text or the information that is communicated when someone else reads it. With an emphasis on skill-based learning and correct text production in the writing classroom, teachers and students are missing out on this, Yagelski's ontological argument.  He emphasis a pedagogy that focuses on the "writer writing" rather than the "writer's writing":

The text does not appear in this pedagogy, but rather than being the focus of writing instruction, it becomes a component of the process of inquiry into self and world that the act of writing can be.  In this way, the text becomes part of a larger act of inquiry through writing, which in turn becomes a vehicle for truth-seeking, in Couture's sense of that term. In other words, we write as a way of being together in the world -- as a way to understand ourselves and our connection to what is around us; in this formulation, we write with the text rather than to produce a text. (8)

As an answer to the thin pedagogy of skill-based pedagogy and learning correct writing, this type of pedagogy is what Yagelski calls a "pedagogy of community," and as I argue elsewhere, closer to the type of democracy we should be practicing -- inclusivity, critical engagement and participation. To make education about "rightness" or "correctness" is to narrow the purpose of education, which should be about enabling us to imagine a better more sustainable future. It requires innovation and imagination, but it also requires a connectedness with each other and our world.  It is such a limited goal to make writing about communication and being academically successful. Yet, I will admit that I have to deliberately conscious resisting such rhetoric in my teaching. If our goal is to prepare them for workplaces defined by economic globalization, we are perpetuating the status quo that has caused this crisis of sustainability (139).  It is a Western value that oppressed the "other" and exploits resources, so it is less about creating a better world and more about merely participating in a world that is already constructed for our students, a world unsustainable.

If you have ever allowed your class enough time to settle into writing, you can see the beauty of the act of writing.

Yagelski also criticized the progressive pedagogies -- which I tend to practice -- by saying that writing as political action or community service is still focused on the product and not the act. He argues that even the process movement "has effected little change when it comes to where we cast our collective gaze in our efforts to understand and teach writing: Our eyes remain fixed on the text" (144).  The cautionary message here is that if writing is reduced to writing as a skill," it is distancing the act of writing from living in all its complexity."  In other words, it limits it to an activity rather than its potential for being.  The challenge then is to teach students to learn from the and through the act of writing rather than write in the service of learning or to produce.

In line with my argument for doing inquiry, Yagelski cites Bartholomae's overarching purpose in writing as a "critical project" to cultivate a critical perspective of the world and "to help them develop a set of intellectual skills to interrogate the texts they encounter, including their own" (152).  Because Batholomae's focus in on critical academic skills, Yagelski argues that it is too narrow. That said, the part that is consistent with writing as a way of being is that " the goal isn't simply to make a better text but to provoke genuine inquiry that can lead to insight into and understanding of the issues that emerge from the writing" (152). Bartholomae's pedagogy wants to expose the master narrative that is in the essays students write and seeks to trouble the frames for producing, revising and evaluating texts -- all frames of a master narrative.  Thus, mainstream instruction that emphasized writing "good texts"  fails to interrupt the master narrative and cultural values that have produced the society that we have, the one that exploits and oppresses.

As students revise or work on drafts of any writing, Yagelski suggests a pedagogy that asks about the experience that was the focus of writing (not the text). Teaching writing is engaging in writing as an act of inquiry into their own experience of the world. Writing is participating in the world and who they are in this world.  Peer response is valuable in this pedagogy because it is an act of community building and shared meaning making and because it is not limited to improving texts.  The other side to this is that writing is individual and social. Thomas Kent wrote that there can be no meaning without the other; writing itself acknowledges the other; an individual contains many voices.

The challenge of schools, therefore, is to cultivate curricula and pedagogies that take into account the complexities of human learning and human life that is part of distinct and overlapping global communities (163). The narrow curriculum that is prescriptive and measurable is an attempt to control such complexity.

Teaching how to produce texts has not achieved the goal of teaching students how to do school nor do they use it in the workplace. But, Yagelski argues that what if we would have taught these kids writing as a way of being. Might it have "opened up a capacity of writing to understand anew their experience of themselves in the world...What might the communities they created look like?"

Gourevitch

Gourevitch

Page 19 the best reason I have for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it the horror as for interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand it's Legacy

 He writes that evidence of the genocide is in visible world yet even the occasional exposed bones the conspicuous number of amputees and people with deformities scars and the super abundance of packed orphanages could not be taken as evidence that what had happened you Roandaa was an attempt to a lemonade people the only way we know what happened was because of the peoples stories. 21

The stories in this book our testimony the author Gourevitch  uses his stories as testimony the survivors bear witness and Gurevich is the listener also bearing witness; However it is not just one story but many stories that he we've together trying to fill the caps as more questions are exposed into move closer to the truth for example when he's talking to Samuel about being locked in the church and the priest sends word for an intervention from Dr. Gerard or the pastor one Memory is that the church president said "your problem has already found a solution you must die" but one of Semuels colleagues remembers the phrase differently "you must be eliminated got no longer want you" 28

A story conveyed about community is great important here in another reason why genocide is an appropriate topic for the English classroom Carlanda convoy explains while Baltar was stranded one night they heard cries it was a woman... He explained that the Springwheat heard was a conventional distress signal and then acaridan obligation in 20 years descry you do to move and then you must come running you have no choice you must and if you ignore this crying he would have to answer to it this is how Rwandans live in the hills; people live separately together; there is responsibility and if you don't help you must answer: are you with the criminals, a coward, what do you expect when you cry? This is community he says...34

Yes this is moral compasses the moral of teaching but this is the moral I think this is the logic of ethics that we must introduce in the dialectic of freedom freedom in relation freedom that's informed as green would say

Can this be used against community...accusing accomplices?

Tutsi refugees in Laredo where the priest who lead the genocide lived organized a march outside his residence at the same time Serbs had daily news coverage 1994--it was not covered in the press


In 1996 there was an indictment and our author went to Laredo to find Pastor  and first met his son or Dr. Ntaki. when he found him, he met his wife , mixed, and of course they have their own story. They say witnesses are the new government tools saying what the gov. wants.

"Power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality -- even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood" (52). Gourevitch goes on to discuss the colonial history of Rwanda as evidence saying, "The Belgians could hardly have pretended they were needed to bring order to Rwanda. Instead, they sought out those features of the existing civilization that fit their own ideas of mastery and subjugation and bent them to fit their purposes....The scientists brought their measuring tapes and calipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses.  Sure enough, the scientists found what they believed all along. Tutsis had "nobler," more 'naturally," aristrocratic dimensions than the "coarse" and "bestial" Hutus" (55=56). Belgian went about regimenting (Scott) Rwandan society along ethnic lines shifting the internal and structural power to Tutsis able to levy taxes against their Hutu neighbors in the early 1930s. In 1933, Belgian issued ethnic identity cards making it impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis. It was no longer a class issue - -no social mobility was possible; it was not an employment issue, not an economic issue, and not even a blood issue. It was the state categorizing citizens, marking them and thus constructing the stage for genocide.

Hutu was roughly 85%, and the Tutusis were about 14% (Twa were the remaining percentage).  In 1957, a group of Hutu intellectuals argued for a Hutu state on the basis of majority rules, actually using the identification mechanism for their argument.  Such was the logic of democracy of the time -- ethnicity. The construction of the ethnic binary and desire for an ethnic state was the beginning of political violence between Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda.  Gourevitch calls this the "social revolution" of Hutus organizing a violent campaign against Tutsis using the rhetoric of democracy or Westernization (as Mignolo would say) in the logic of colonialism. Colonel Logiest, a Hutu revolutionary, said: "It will not be a democracy if it is not equally successful in respecting the rights of minorities...A country in which justice loses this fundamental quality prepares the worst disorders and its own collapse" (quoted 61). Clearly, the social revolution was not considering "rights" as a central issue.  In 1962, Rwanda was granted independence, but not before the UN warned "that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsis" (61).  Gourevitch puts this story of fratricide in conversation with the story of Cain and Abel and the failure of the "blood-revenge model of justice."

"Between December 24 and 28 1963, Vuillemin [a schoolteacher] reported, well-organized massacres left as many as fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Ginkongoro alone...by mid 1964 as many as a quarter million Tutsis had fled the country...Sir Bertrand Russell described the scene in Rwanda that year as 'the most horrible systematic massacre we hae had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis'" (65).


The strength of Gourevitch's book is not just rendering the stories but entering the conversation with the voices;  he tells when he reflects on how the testimony went how he was listening is the most valuable part in his narrative

I'm page 71 he says we are each of us functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us and looking back there are these discrete tracks of memory the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others ideas of us and the more private times when we are Freer to imagine ourselves

His reason is discovered as a listener when he listens to Odette it accursed him that if others have so often made your life their business and perhaps you want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and  inviolability your own

He says remembering has its economy like experience itself and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom and I grand I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered in your memories and I felt that we were both glad of it

Page 95 and strange as it may sound the ideology or what Rwandans call the logic of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it to the specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication  binds  leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace , and the individual always an annoyance to totality-- ceases to exist

killing brings people together

Studying several different examples of genocide important we discover in this text issue of the United Nations and how because of the history of the UN in Bosnia and Somalia the Rwandans to not trust the viewing so in addition to learning about resilience of the people or Hegemony, The text into conversation the mechanisms that fail; Students can understand some historical context for the current global issues for example the retired United Nations Sec. Kofi Annan  on his written a new book criticizing the in  and calling for reformation

Odette's story continues but Gourevitch adds Paul Rusesabogina's story who was in a position to complicate the binary of perpetrator and victim as he tells of negotiating for people's lives

The author is a witness as he listens to stories he's listening to testimony he is bearing witness he is listening and bearing witness she writes on page 122 I had the impression with him more than with others that as he told it she was seen the events he described a fax that as he stared into the past the outcome was not get obvious and that when he looked at me With his clear eyes a touch Hayzee he was still seeing the scenes she described perhaps even hoping to understand them for the story made no sense the major who had spared his life may have recognized Thomas but to Thomas the major was a stranger and this is an example of the testimony that Feldman  talks about...  The testimony is the history only in looking back are you creating history and the moment it's not history it's the present

Page 128 the authors of the genocide understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength and the gray force that really drives people's power hatred and power are both in their different ways passion the difference is that hatred is truly negative while power is essentially positive you surrender to Hatred but you a spire to power

Gourevitch complicates the story between Paul and Odette; he adds the priest story when Wenceslas who is a priest later charged in France with providing  with lists of Tutsi refugees at his church,  publishing refugees out of hiding to be killed, attending massacres without interfering, sabotaging United Nation efforts to evacuate refugees from the church and calling teenage girls to have sex with him. Wenceslas says, " I didn't have a choice; it was necessary to appear pro- militia. If I had had a different attitude, we all have disappeared"(136).

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.