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.

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

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

Confronting Modernity in the English Classroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rhetoric and Revival of the Word: Genocide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thom's The Problem of Credibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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