Good Teaching and Critical Pedagogy
Well, all this work on Teaching Carnival X has gotten my pedagogical wheels rolling without a class to apply it to at the moment. That said, I am currently reading up for an article I’m sketching out on performance studies in the writing classroom, and as part of this process, I’m reading Ira Shor’s Empowering Education. This foundational text was written in 1992, the year I began undergrad. What’s interesting to me is how much of what Shor discusses in this text I simply regard as good teaching, not necessarily politically engaged teaching, or transformative teaching.
I wonder why this in particular seems true. I do not believe, for example, that liberals have the market cornered on good teaching—I have had some excellent teachers in my life who professed conservative values, and some real stinkers who were dyed-in-the-wool lefties. What, therefore, is the relationship between teaching for social change and simply engaged teaching toward active learning? Some thoughts on the relationship:
* Active learning often presumes a more democratic classroom. In a space where students produce knowledge for themselves, the teacher must necessarily surrender some power. Certainly, active learning can still be highly directive, and teachers can exercise a great deal of control over and active learning scenario, but at the very least, the space opened up for a student to produce her own answer is also a space opened up for a challenge of authority. That fact alone is anti-hierarchical, though the degree to which that impulse is fostered and developed depends largely on what is done with space.
* Shor discusses “Desocializing†the classroom, which he defines as:
Understanding and challenging artificial, political limits on human development; questioning power and inequality in the status quo; examining socialized values in consciousness and in society which hold back democratic change in individuals and in the larger culture; seeing self and social transformation as a joint process. (129-130)
Interestingly, to me, if you extract some key phrases--“challenging artificial . . . limits,†“questioning . . . the status quo,†“examining . . . values . . . which hold back . . . change†what we have is a (mostly) de-politicized pedagogy that still encourages good teaching. What I wonder here is to what degree these values are necessarily progressive, or invested in progressive mindsets? For those who object to my a priori marriage of good teaching and progressive ideology, let me acknowledge that the answer to this question may be “they are not at all intrinsically related.â€
That said, my own experience as a student and as a teacher confirms for me that most, though not all, of the most innovative pedagogical environments I’ve been a part of are progressively engaged ones—not just run by progressive teachers, but actively engaged in a process of social change. So I want to pose a few questions, therefore:
* Am I assuming too much in finding commonalities with critical pedagogy and “good teaching?†Or am I begging the question and is my definition of “good teaching†already politicized?
* To what degree does an activist pedagogy necessitate an active pedagogy?
* To what degree does an active pedagogy suggest an activist pedagogy?
* Can a critical pedagogy be bi-/non-/a-partisan?
Comments
Please let me know when you decide to write the book that begins to answer these questions.
Maybe there's hope in backing up a little and thinking about the relationships between progressive teaching and progressive politics (in the conventional sense), and conservative teaching and politics. Don't mean to be slapdash, but there's enough distinction between method and material, here, to really unsettle those terms. There are also so many blends of spheres in which you could be progressive *and* conservative.
For instance, an instructor could deploy a radically decentered pedagogy in which students owned their learning (let's say this is truly constructivist, and they contribute to course design, help build assessments, substantively evaluate peer work, and actually teach each other; the instructor advises and facilitates). I don't see why that course couldn't be something called "Moral Decay in the Modern West," a lament for the good old days and an appeal for some tidying up, some decency, some respect for tradition, damnit. I guess the instructor who proposes that course is a sort of progressive (by way of nostalgia?), but almost certainly not in the everyday sense. The pedagogy is most definitely an activist's. Theoretically, the inclination is to say there's some inconsistency between course objectives and course means, but that could still be an effective class.
A fairly lame hypothetical, particularly because it's not hard to see how the innovation's rebelliousness teaches against convention, the point you raise above about challenging authority. Nevertheless, there's some consistent inconsistency that limits the cast of these terms, "activist," "critical," maybe even "partisan." I'm thinking about degrees on a scale, like the activism of liberal humanism (a Great Books seminar, possibly), the activism of service-learning, or the activism of this education class I once visited, in which the professor told a student not to follow the assignment guidelines given by another teacher - English comp - because it would stifle her active and creative soul. Is that the libertarian's activism?
Apologies for the too-long comment that pretty much just restates your question.
Posted by: dave | June 22, 2006 10:24 AM
Actually, Dave, it seems precisely the hypothetical that tests the case. Of course it's theoretically possible to use such methods, but unlikely. But even so, you're describing a course in the humanities, which seems more likely to house liberal/progressive profs anyway.
But is such a pedagogy progressive in active learning sites like MBA programs? I havfe a very distinct sense that such programs are at once politically conservative and pedagogically progressive in a certain way. The distinction, I might say, is one that may generate knowledge in case-staudy scenarios, but only as a means for deploying the priniciples being handed down. That said, I'm not sure that is a) either identifiably conservative or progressive pedagogy (damn labels) or b) all that different from the sorts of tactics we might use in a transformational liberation pedagogy the sort that Shor is arguing for.
In the end, I may have disproven my own hypothesis, but it bears more thinking to be sure.
Posted by: Cats & Dogma | June 23, 2006 4:08 PM