4/22/10 Readings

Even though I don’t, currently, teach literacy, Freire’s article, “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom and Educatio and Conscientizacao,” was an interesting read as a companion piece to his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I read a number of years ago. It was intriguing to find that Freire and his associates achieved success at teaching illiterate persons how to read using terminology from their own lives. I also found the idea that you can’t just teach people literacy by demanding (or thinking all they can do is) that students learn things by rote. True teaching and true learning comes from giving students the means of understanding that they are part of culture and can, in turn, contribute to the creation of that culture. What I’ve always found problematic about Freire’s pedagogy, is that it seems incompatible (in the broadest sense) with the kinds of students I teach in the classroom here at UNLV; students who are, in the main, far more privileged and entitled in a way that those in the part of the world in which Freire worked aren’t/weren’t. As other writers have pointed out, I am working with students who are, most likely, trying enhance and solidify their position within dominant culture. They’re going to be disinclined to a pedagogy that might threaten their goals.

I also enjoyed Ira Shore’s piece, “Monday Morning Fever.” Shore draw’s on Freire’s work and in a way that makes more sense as far as empowering students as writers no matter their socio-economic or political situation. I found Shore’s detailed pedagogy intriguing, including as it does the sharing of experience and insight about work (I wondered what my students would have to say about their work experiences and how it might compare to the comments from Shore’s students about work), his method of making the classroom student-centered from the outset by having students get up in front of the classroom to introduce themselves while the professor takes notes while making him- or herself otherwise inconspicuous, and I was most impressed with the idea of having students read their papers out loud in class as a means of grammar instruction. I have long-advised my students to use such a technique in their own writing process with what I thought of as limited success, but I had never before thought of having them do it in class. Perhaps the next time I teach composition, I will employ this pedagogical technique in my classroom.

Berlin’s essay makes the point that rhetorical pedagogies are always ideological and, as such, there’s no point in claiming otherwise. Something is always at stake when it comes to teaching and learning in the university classroom. Berlin favors what he calls social-epistemic rhetoric because such a rhetoric recognizes its ideological investments (and doesn’t shy away from them), and recognizes that the world is made up of social constructs that are historically contingent (i.e., they are specific to a time and place and, thus, do not have to be the way they are but for historical accident). Teaching this way, or from this perspective, allows professors to empower students to deconstruct their world(s) and to keep them from becoming victims of the dominant (and, at times, destructive) power structures operative in those worlds.

Berlin stands in direct contrast to a scholar like Hairston, who believes, emphatically, that ideology has no place whatsoever in the college classroom and, in particular, in the freshman composition course. The only thing, Hairston argues, we should be doing as composition professors, is teaching students how to write clearly and effectively. Students (and I think she means freshman students in particular), are not capable of dealing with all of the baggage an issues- or ideological-oriented course would freight them with. I find Hairston’s ideas on this point to be derogatory toward students. Assuming from the get-go that they aren’t smart enough or sophisticated enough to be able to handle dealing with big or important issues while they are learning to write at the same time is an underestimation of students that is unfair and, in the end, derogatory. I also feel like that, with the way she presents her ideas, she creates an either/or binary about writing and ideology that fails to take into account of the possibilities of a yes/and pedagogy. Why can’t students learn how to write just as well (if not better) in a composition class that is focused on some sort of a social or political issue that might have relevance in their everyday lives? To just dismiss that possibility outright seems shortsighted.

I also liked Smith’s article on academic gatekeeping. In it, Smith offers a down-to-earth take on the “issue” of gatekeeping. Whether we like it or not, we are gatekeepers and our students, prior to arriving in our college classrooms, have jumped through a huge number of gates to get there. I do like his supposition that we should expand our notion of what gatekeeping is, and I found his example of someone in the composition classroom who wants to be a doctor to be compelling. As writing teachers, we can’t teach someone how to operate on another human being’s brain, but we can teach such students about being a dedicated (for example) individual that will, hopefully, have an impact on the kind of doctor that student becomes later in life. In that sense Smith, as I understand him, sees gatekeeping. Gatekeeping, in other words, should not be seen as the negative it has become.