"Radical [or Thick] Democracy" (Lensmire)

When I titled this blog "Thick Democracy," I had in mind a kind of democracy beyond the form of capitalism the United States is offering the world in then name of "progress" and "development" (that from which Mignolo argues a delinking). I am not interested in markets or globalization or domination or producing workers for the "free market" who live to work rather than work to live. I certainly do not mean the monocultural tradition of our nation. Nor do I see democracy as episodes of voting and majority rules. That democracy sit in the realm of what Mignolo calls the "rhetoric of modernity" veiled in the "logic of coloniality.' When I say democracy, thick democracy, what I mean is what Carr refers to in "Educating for Democracy": democracy is living inclusively, participatory, and with critical engagement that avoids jingoistic patriotism and a passive prescriptive ways of being. For Tim Lensmire, democracy means something similar. He sees it as Dewey did: "a way of life" that guides and expresses itself in our everyday habits and interactions with others. Because I am a teacher does not mean that my interest in education is restricted to the four walls of a classroom. No, as Dewey wrote in an essay about the rise of fascism in 1951, democracy should be in sites were we live:

When I think of the conditions under which men and women are living in many foreign countries today, fear of espionage, with danger hanging over the meeting of friends for friendly conversation in private gatherings, I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (392)

When we think about our schools, we hear news reports about teachers and data about test scores and financial incentives for teachers who can raise those test scores. We don't hear a lot about the companies creating those very tests or the testing market. Why aren't we talking about living? Why are we talking about living democracy? Because if we name our current state of schooling, it might be called how living free market or living capitalism. If we focus on life in the classroom, we can get closer to that inclusive, participatory, and critical engagement that we need, and I say we as a human beings, not as America or the United States. We are human beings, and our students need to live a life that resonates with all human beings not Western-centric ways of knowing, but human ways of knowing and being. 

Lensmire talks about the writing workshop as a "blueprint for democratic living," and while I will include note about that here, I ultimately want to think about the novel, specifically literature of atrocities (Langer),  is a blueprint for living. Essentially, I think that how we teach and what we teach has to be thick democratic practice, but I think teaching and living both require a willingness to enter crisis and work through crisis, to experience disequilibrium and find equilibrium. And the literature of atrocity seeks to create this framework just at the writing workshop does. In both frameworks, you can only come to some sense of knowing if you encounter and then work through crisis. Clenndinen talks about the Gorgon effect where when people are faced with something hideous, or a crisis, then turn away or reject it, but I am suggest, along with scholars of critical pedagogy, that we disrupt the status quo so that we can feel that critical engagement and participate in constructing not just knowledge but lived experience.

Lensmire applies Bakhin's description of carnival as a metaphor for democracy and thus living democracy in the classroom. He identifies several important features of the carnival. The first is "participation for all" where the line between spectator and performer is blurred. The second is "free and familiar contact among people" where there is a disorderly mixing of people but with a free and familiar attitude over everything.  Next is a playful , familiar relation to the world. Writing workshops, advocated by Donald Graves and Nancie Atwell,  apply these features do not lock students in the spectator role like traditional classrooms because the students are active producing authors  or engage writing companions not consuming readers (or consumers in capitalism).  There is a free and familiar movement where students are writing alone, conferencing, sharing lessening the social distance among themselves and the teacher. Of course, Lensmire cautions teachers from falling into the traditional hierarchical roles when it comes to facilitating the workshop or evaluating rather than clarifying intentions of student writing. Thus, we see that the writing workshop is lives democratic social relations and encourages an engagement with school tasks transforming writing into a playful, familiar relation to the world. They see the effect of what they have to say on multiple audiences. So we see here how the workshop disables the social order of capitalism or Western ideology of development and growth that needs to evaluate, consume and is product oriented.

One concern of the writing workshop is a similar concern with the rhetoric of modernity and that is of individualistic efforts and rewards. Indeed, individualism does, as Berlin (1988) writes a "denunciation of economic, political, and social pressures to conform" (486), it is lacking that social aspect of democracy. Students can target an authority figure like Lensmire describes (17), but they need to retain that ambivalent quality (getting at the crisis or discomfort I mentioned earlier) in order to get at the "critical" engagement I also cited earlier.  These are still "carnavalescque" as Lensmire argues because of one more aspect Bakhtin talks about and that is the profane nature of carnivals where there is abuse and people are laughed at, but for Bakhin, as Lensmire argues, " profanation is profoundly ambivalent -- that is, both negative and positive, both destructive and regenerating" (11). And so I think this is the potential of the writing workshop to be "thick." While the workshop can be situated in personal narratives, students can push their writing in a change that challenges aspects of their world like Dewey's street corner conversations about the uncensored news. Lensmire writes, "for Bakhtin, carnival abuse represented an explicit, collective struggle with an oppressive social order. At best writing workshops as currently imagined, might allow for individual dissent. At worst, they might shut down even this, because their guiding visions provide no real resource for making sense of and responding to student resistance and opposition" (20). I would argue that this is where we are in America, too. 

Not only is there an issue with the teacher's role, but we also have to be concerned with how students, human beings, treat one another. Lensmire says, "My worry is that this openness and fluidity is only apparent, that beneath it are more stable patterns of peer relations among children that divide them, subordinate some to others, and routinely deny certain children the help and support that others receive from peers" (21). Of course, if we can unmask and subvert these structures in our schools, imagine what will happen in the lived spaces outside the institution. In his book, Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching, he tells stories of how such valuations and devaluations of peers were acted out in social/physical patterns and the stories in the workshop. Lensmire explains that the stories we write and live are acting out how the world and we are "supposed" to be and then what we might "imagine" ourselves and the world to be. The "supposed" might be the free market, consumer-oriented, the-strong-survive culture of America, and the "imagined" might be that which students cannot say or do or would like to say or do -- this might be in that hegemonic frame, but it might also be in a more liberatory frame. I had a student writes a short story about bullying, and she rendered the bully from her own experience and created a new character, the protagonist, to be an upstander. When I asked her to talk to me about her choices, the students said, "Because I couldn't do it. Because I know I should be an upstander, but I want somewhere to sit at lunch, and I can't afford to stand up." This was the canonical peer culture that Jerome Bruner (1990) talks about. So we see that the writing workshop has the potential to contribute to the more humane, inclusive, participatory democracy -- thick democracy -- where they learn relations with the world through peer relations. In these spaces of interaction, multiple world views, potentially conflicting world views, perform a sort of crisis that people can, in fact, embrace rather than reject -- that is, if we can learn to welcome and value this sort of critical engagement.

In a traditional school, and even in some schools labeled "progressive," students learn that their success actually depends on avoiding conflict and conforming to the rules and expectations of their teachers. The teacher has the power. I don't think there is anyway around this, for even when I "give up my power," I am using my power to do so. I don't actually want to give up my power or be a neutral voice. I want to use my power to disrupt oppressive structures,  and I think that scholars of critical pedagogy (Freire, Giroux, MacLaren) would say that teachers, in fact, should not be neutral. Lensmire uses the metaphor of a novelist and Bakhtin's concepts of monologic and polyphonic novels to make a point about the power of a teacher.

The novelist moves with power in relation to the character in both monologic and polyphonic novels.  The question, then, is not whether the novelist does or does not exert control, but to what end the novelist's power is put. In the monologic novel, the novelist's power is used to create a single worldview, praised and elaborated by the subordinate voices of subordinate characters. In the polyphonic novel, the novelist's power is used to create multiple, conflicting worlds embodied in the voices  of divers characters. The polyphonic novelist arranges situations and encounters with other characters that provide and clarify the characters' own perspectives...as Bakhtin put it: "The issue here is not an absence of, but a radical change in, the author's position" (p. 67). And that radical change is in the service of the destruction of a single, dominating, monologic worldview. (Lensmire 39)

The teacher's role then, if we can substitute teacher for author as Lensmire intends, is to help students make sense of their own worldview and their place in it while bringing into the conversation other worldviews being careful not to reproduce the monologic paradigm of traditional pedagogies by enforcing their own worldview. When I talk of disrupting oppressive structures, I am thinking about traditional schooling as a "plot in which a person's social position or category determines her relations with the institution and the people within it...where the humanness or uniqueness of an individual has no decisive influence on how the story turns out...by sorting and classifying" (42).

I am thinking about the twelve students assigned to me last year whom the district admittedly failed, students in our school since kindergarten but permanently sorted into Title One services only to arrive in eighth grade still "failing" the ACCESS test and reading a the "third grade" level according to NWEA testing. There was nothing categorical about these individuals, and only have "finishing" the prescribed, teacher-proof program, did we all discover the student's life outside the classroom was what Lensmire calls "an adventure." Our classroom became a workshop where the students, for the first time, were asked to take up a new relation with their teacher and peers -- to teach each other, write with each other, talk to each other, and even each with each other. The child's voice emerged out this opportunity to speak and write out their experiences -- both real and imagined. It was only because we asked each other to tell stories that their lives became as important as the literature we were reading. They saw that their experiences and their traumas -- and there were many traumas -- are worth telling. And it was only through sharing those stories and hearing people's questions that they found points of crisis to "explore and expose" in their writing. Some chose to expose this in fiction (like the student who created a character to be an upstander), but some left blank pages saying that they were not ready to explore that crisis yet. The blank page actually spoke volumes.  The key here is that, for many of these students, they had been obedience in filling out worksheets and repeating what teachers told them. They learned to write by writing what the teacher told them to write, and when they produced what they were told, they were encouraged -- even rewarded with candy.These students were coerced for so many years by institutional authority, and I didn't really stop the coercion, to be honest. As you can see, I did not resist interfering with the meaning students were trying to make. I told Julia that the poem about her baby brother's laughter was worth writing, and I told Juanita that a story about the smell in the visiting center where her father is in jail is worth exploring in a vignette.Yes, we talk about craft and figurative language, but we also talk about what it means. I actually go even further into their business, however, when I talk about what I know and think about the world and the people in it. I push -- yes, I push -- for the meanings and values in the poems and stories asking What is the message here? What do you want me to feel and discover? What value are you putting into the world? What ideas are living in these words that will go out and shape the world? This is why I always ask for a "letter to the reader" (me) about what choices were made and why. However, I don't think what we did last year was for the sake of reading and writing. Our dialogue was about writing to make sense of the ways we are in the world and noticing, even valuing, how our ways of being are different. Lisa Delpit would have teachers take that further to say that teachers should not only make visible the differences between individuals but to make visible the "rules of power" and how society values ways of being in the world.

I think Lensmire would name the work I described above as "deliberation." When students find these beautiful, powerful moments in their lives to explore and expose, they need to also consider how their rendering of those moments  is "bound up with the cultures they inhabit and that inhabit them." So much of schooling is about the individual, and so much about the writing workshop is about honoring the individual stories of students, but this has been at the expense of silencing the hierarchy of cultures and   "meanings and values of family, community, and peers, " in different cultures (51). While I am interested in teaching students how to express themselves through writing, I am also interested in that participatory aspect of democracy thinking about how reading and writing (and other literacies) can foster a participation and then a critical engagement with their world. For this reason, I think that it is not enough to have students express themselves or their world. They need  frameworks for understanding their own worldview and access to other worldviews to see the intersection of such frameworks. The self does not exist in a vacuum. It is formed by social relations.  Lensmire quotes Joseph Harris (1987): "Writing is not simply a tool we use to express a self we already have; it is a means by which we form a self to express" (161). Lensmire clarifies that the self is not necessarily determined by cultural resources, but "the resources available -- the experiences, languages, histories, and stories -- obviously constrain the possible selves you can become" (63). What critical pedagogy asks for, then, is that students become active participants in the construction of their worlds. Are my students beginning to see that they can, in fact, shape their path? Once they realized that their academic and  thus social path was controlled by this test that they didn't think twice about -- ACCESS -- they certainly felt that they at least held a hammer. And this was just the beginning of the unveiling of the framework.

When students come to me with a cute story or a poem, the critical pedagogue I fancy myself to be,  I have to question. I have to ask them why?I have to ask them for the meaning of this writing and what it contributes or silences. Yes, sometimes they just want to write about pandas, but I do ask "Why pandas? Why is this what you know and what interest you? How did you come to prefer this creature? What are you not writing about  because you chose pandas?"  I think, and Lensmire seems to agree, that we have to take up a critical position as to the meaning of students' writing, and we have to question their intentions. If we don't do this, students' work will not get beyond expression and individualistic in a world dependent on relations. Giroux writes:

Developing a pedagogy that takes the notion of student voice seriously means developing a critically affirmative language that works both with and on the experiences that students bring to the classroom. This means taking seriously and confirming the language forms, modes of reasoning, dispositions, and histories that give students an active voice in defining the world; it also means working on the experiences of such students in order for them to examine both their strengths and weaknesses. (1991, 104)

Great. Now we have all these participating voices, but Lensmire asks what if those voices "sound too much like the already existing world." He questions critical pedagogues as seeming "overconfident that student voice will flourish in the face of questioning." The "critical" point here is to provide access to worldviews that will help students answer the questions or, better yet, ask more questions  and explore and expose those questions in their writing.  Lensmire talks of "appropriation" as

the activity of the self in the face of cultural resources  [where] the individual responds to and transforms the utterances of others in the production of her own speaking and writing. Thus, on one hand, the idea of appropriation reminds us that our voices are dependent on the voices of others who preceded us and provides us with words to use...On the other hand, ...[it] highlights the taking over, the working over, by individuals, of the language of others. (77). 

And so with the carefully chosen texts that read multiple world views, students will have a consciousness about how their world views were constructed as through this "crisis" or realization create something new, something that is still theirs but is now deliberately collective. They are not merely repeating the old -- what teachers or text told them -- but  entering the conversation and "taking a position in relation to others and the meanings and values that precede us" while also "revising that position, that voice, across time" (84).

Essentially, the teacher has to engage and exert some power to position students in relation to others in their own culture and that of others so that their voices develop. Is this the "develop" of capitalism? No, we are not talking about creating a workforce. It is about students awakening , being conscious. This has not been met without resistance -- to say the least. The students I mentioned above complain about having to think all the time. They are fighting the voices of their parents and siblings and teachers  from whom they've learned; they are fighting the person they are "supposed" to be. (Julia wants to be a mom like her older sister who is 16 with two kids. And Juanita think she is like her sister destined to be in the alternative high school with the "loser".) Lensmire writes, "there is pain that often accompanies saying this , and not that. Students need others if their voices are to continue to develop. Within the classroom, they need teachers who recognize their struggles for voice, and help them transform these struggles into occasions for becoming" (84). Their lives have not been written, and as participants, with the practice being participants,  they can shape not only their future, but that of the collective. And as the teacher participant, I will help. They will interact with others outside and inside their primary associations -- even if the school is determined to control this through sorting-- they will encounter different ways of acting, thinking and feeling. Lensmire suggests that we 1) recognize what he calls "friendship groups" granting them the right to choose who they need for comfort, information and inspiration and 2) create "public spaces, sharing times, within which meaning and values issuing from these groups are questioned, shaken for integrity, deliberated, and reconstructed" (96).  Here we are doing what Lensmire say is "actively seeking to understand" what others are saying (and why and how). We have to shake students of the traditional value of silence and obedience in the classroom and cultivate inclusivity, participation and critical engagement.