handbook of public pedagogy

List One
A non-exhaustive list of books I vividly remember from childhood:
Anne of Green Gables. Bridge to Terabithia. Little Women. The Narnia Chronicles. The Secret Garden. The Lorax. A Wrinkle in Time. The Lord of the Rings. A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Where the Red Fern Grows. A Little Princess. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Yearling. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank. Little House on the Prairie.

List Two
The ones out of those I haven't ever reread as an adult because even thinking about them makes me sniffle quietly to myself and need a bowl of ice cream as cold but yummy comfort:
Bridge to Terabithia. Where the Red Fern Grows. The Yearling.

List Three
The ones that I reread as an adult and didn't get angry at:
The Lorax. A Wrinkle in Time.

As you can see, that's a short list. Especially when you consider that if I made List One longer, List Three wouldn't change much. It's sort of mind-boggling that as a mixed-race kid living in a suburb of Pittsburgh and going to inner-city schools, I managed to identify with Anne and Jo and Alice and Lucy and Sara and Laura, but somehow I did it.

In "Problematizing 'Public Pedagogy' in Educational Research," Glenn C. Savage critiques the way that others, particularly Henry Giroux, theorize in what Savage labels an "enveloping negativity," where they perceive popular culture/public pedagogy as an overwhelming, universalizing, all-encompassing force that act to maintain and perpetuate dominant ideological discourses (109). Savage argues that this stance ignores the existence of resistance to those discourses and posits power as an above-down force which must be opposed, rather than something possessed in varying measures by many that ebbs and flows.

Although Savage does not directly reference Freire at any point, some of the critique he levels against Giroux is similar to part of my contention with Freire: There is an implication that within formal education lies the potential for bringing its students to the "right" way of thinking so that they can resist the dominant discourse.

The primary thrust of Savage's piece seems to be that both literally the term "public pedagogy" and the concepts that some theorists have tied to that term are not helpful for authentic analysis, nor are ideas of emancipating "individuals from the repressive pangs of 'public pedagogy' and everyday life" (113). This argument is taken up and expanded by Carmen Luke in "Introduction: Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life," as well as by Robin Redmon Wright in "Unmasking Hegemony with The Avengers." Both Luke and Wright emphasize the importance of avoiding the search for a unifying principle, an idea that Elisabeth Hayes and James Paul Gee also address in their discussion of "Public Pedagogy Through Video Games," where they consider what critical thinking really means. Hayes and Gee go on to define it as "gaining the tools to analyze what they are learning in terms of 'interests' and the distribution of 'social goods" (191). My attempt here is to try to mediate between these views, and that attempt is still in progress.

While the idea that there is a "right way" of thinking that I am to disseminate unto my students so that they may see the light and thereby become free is one I withdraw from, I'm not sure that I can fully agree with these critiques, either. Savage's argument seems to be one of semantics, to a significant degree; "public pedagogy," as indicated by this very volume, has been defined in a number of ways by a number of people, and not all of those definitions presume the existence of the powerful oppressor and the impotent oppressed. What terms he would prefer to use is not made entirely apparent by his essay, and it would have benefited from a clearer distinction between his objection to terms versus his objection to concepts.

Luke, Wright, and Hayes/Gee all seem to posit the presence of fundamentally resistant texts within popular culture and resistive acts by people with regard to such texts, however, and this I think is questionable in much the same way that Savage problematizes Giroux. Just as the idea of mass culture as a monolithic entity experienced by all in the same coercive way is too simplistic, so too is the presumption that it is possible for something created within and as part of popular culture to be wholly free from dominant ideology. For example, Wright notes in passing "the indisputable fact that Honor Blackman," who played Cathy Gale on The Avengers, "is a very beautiful woman," and seems to feel that this relates to the impact of presenting a character who refused to conform to gender roles (140). However, Wright never goes on to explore what it means if these shows that are texts of resistance nonetheless maintain a demand for feminine beauty.

On a related note, if we consider Hayes and Gee's definition, that seems to leave very open the possibility that critical thinking may well lead to the continued-but-now-deliberate support of hegemony. To clarify what I mean by this: I absolutely believe that it is in the best interests of nearly all members of society to oppose oppression and destroy hegemony. However, if this were an easy conclusion to come to, then more people would come to it. What makes it difficult is that our entire social structure and society is built around maintaining hegemonic dominance, so it requires significant effort for people to see such dominance as anything other than normal and acceptable. Thus, while Hayes and Gee may be correct in that becoming a producer puts a person in a position to consider the distribution of social goods, if being a producer necessarily led to a critical consciousness, capitalism would make resistance to domination less likely, in contrast to most theories of social justice.

Perhaps the real issue is with our desire to find the answer. According to Savage, Giroux paints all corporate activity and mass culture as the wrong, while Wright and others are very willing to see any resistance as wholly opposed to hegemonic dominance, and both views seem to be questing for a solid answer as to how we can define dominance versus resistance, as though they are two mutually exclusive items and cannot exist in the same places—an odd approach for any work in a volume titled The Handbook of Public Pedagogy, which implies a number of contradictions and consistently-debated territories in its very premise.

teaching to transgress & pedagogies of difference

I never planned to teach.

Teaching was what my mom did. Early on, she taught students, and then she switched to staff development where she taught teachers, and then she taught students-who-would-become-teachers, and then she was a principal, so she was back to teaching teachers. That was her thing, not mine.

People would ask, "Are you going to be a teacher like your mom?" and I'd roll my eyes and turn up my nose and say, "No. That's not what I do."

When I started teaching, I thought they'd ask if I was qualified, if I knew what I was doing, if I could really teach. The answer to all of these questions was "no." I'd had a two-day training session and was provided with sample syllabi, none of which I used. Using them would have been easier, but I take the Yoda approach—if I'm going to do something, the easy way out isn't an option. I picked a set of readings where we went from advertising & capitalism to television-as-text to gender to race & class, because I wanted them to write about things that they could own, things that were part of their lives.

But still. The first time I walked into a classroom as an instructor, I was scared to death.

Then I started reading the responses to the first-day diagnostic writing prompt, and the addendums my students—brand-new college freshmen—wrote in their blue books.

"I'm bad at writing."
"I'm not sure I can do this."
"I'm afraid I'll fail."
"I hope you like my essay."

That was when two things happened. The first thing that happened was my realizing that in this situation, I had the power. They weren't going to ask me if I was qualified, because they were too terrified that they weren't. The second thing that happened was I fell in love. You know the bolt-of-lightning fairy-tale movie kind of love at first sight? Yeah. That was pretty much exactly what happened to me with teaching. Because I had the power, and that meant I could give it to them.

Reading bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom was like having a conversation with someone who keeps saying what I was about to say, leaving me with not much to do other than holler "Word!" with the occasional fist-bump or high-five. While hooks draws heavily on Freire's work—much of which certainly resonated with me—her interpretation and discussion of it was easier for me to connect to my own personal experience, as she discussed being a black woman in feminist classrooms and helping people find their voices.

There is a passage in which hooks explains that after a discussion in a restaurant, a black woman "who hesitated before she entered the conversation because she was unsure about whether or not she could convey the complexity of her thought" came up and "[shared] that the conversation…enabled her to give voice to feelings and ideas she had always 'kept' to herself" (72). I think for most of us, this is our teaching ideal: A student (whether formally or informally a student) says, "You made a difference." And yet, it's not always so simple.

Making a difference doesn't always make people happier.

In "Pedagogies of Difference, Race, and Representation: Film as a Site of Translation and Politics," from Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change, the primary argument that Henry Giroux makes is that multicultural education and cultural critique must function together to be genuinely meaningful. We cannot teach students to decode the texts of culture without also teaching them "how material relations of power work to sustain structures of inequality and exploitation" (88). Identifying some of the stereotypes and meanings and ideological representations in cultural texts is not the end, nor are these meanings simply a reflection or hint as to what the "real world" is like. They constitute the social world.

Hooks tells of the moment when she realized that "shifting paradigms" can cause "discomfort," saying, "I respect that pain" (43). This, I think, is crucial. If I engage in critical pedagogy, I am not merely trying to help students see the world "correctly," as Freire puts it; I am disrupting the worldview of my students. For some, I am helping them find a way to voice things they have always thought. And for some, I am showing them that the world is not what they have always thought.

And this is why the point that Giroux makes is so important: He is arguing that students must be able to see a way to change the system. We cannot end with mere analysis; he sees this as fundamentally meaningless, and I would argue that, for students who take that analysis seriously and intently, it also is likely to provide them with a sense of hopelessness. Education must involve helping students acquire the tools to change things, to make a difference.

discussion of pedagogy of the oppressed

Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire

In his introduction to Freire's seminal work, Donaldo Macedo remarks upon the omission of Freire's work from the curricula of the majority of educational programs in United States institutions, charging that the omission is due to the "'academic selective selection' of bodies of knowledge" (16). The institution of higher education in the United States tends to promote the furthering of institutionalization, not the questioning of social institutions; as such, a work like Freire's is fundamentally antithetical to its purposes. Freire's argument is that education is either normative, acting to reinforce the social structure that maintains a state of oppressors and oppressed, or transformative, helping people come to the state of critical consciousness necessary to change the world. The majority of the book consists of his explanation of how revolutionary leaders (i.e., teachers) can appropriately engage with the people to help them reach critical consciousness.

If Freire's main points were Facebook statuses, I'd "like" them. A lot. I'd probably become a fan, if Facebook hadn't decided that liking something and being a fan of something were the same thing; as it is, I officially like Paulo Freire. Freire's explanation of the mindset of the oppressor is one of the clearest I have ever encountered: "Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to [the oppressors] like oppression…For them, to be is to have" and "the oppressors cannot perceive that if having is a condition of being, it is a necessary condition for all women and men" (57-58). While Freire was writing about conditions in Brazil, as he engaged in literacy work with Brazilian peasants, this explanation resonates in the contemporary United States, as the privileged argue against universal health care—indeed, as they argue against any measures designed to provide the oppressed any modicum of what they themselves would never agree to go without.

The denouncement Freire provides of the "banking model" of education, in which students are the passive recipients of knowledge who arrive empty-headed to be filled with facts imparted by the teacher, is integral to a concept of education as liberatory. Education in the United States seems to move further and further away from that concept; rather than perceiving education as helping students become able to engage in a process of critical inquiry about themselves, their society, and the very education they participate in, education becomes a way to train students how to take their place in the world. An example: "Tracking" students from kindergarten through high school, where based upon an "objective" evaluation of their abilities which is itself constructed by standards based upon the normalization of privilege and inequality, some students are encouraged to go to college while others are trained (rather than educated) to take up a role in the workforce. Standardized tests measure how well students are retaining the knowledge poured into their heads like Jell-o into a mold, with no consideration of whether they can apply that knowledge, much less whether they are able to assess the ideological biases of the information provided.

All this is in direct contradiction to Freire's argument that true education requires teacher and students to engage in dialogue, to learn from each other and together create meaning. And so, we have a population wherein the majority of people do not vote…while those same people distrust the government they are choosing not to participate in. We have an educational system wherein teachers bemoan their students' apathy and mistrust…while those same teachers would never trust their students enough to engage in a dialogue with them about what they want to learn. Some might object to Freire's argument on the grounds that it is unabashedly ideological: His goal is a revolution. To that objection, I would point out that everything is ideological; the idea that knowledge, education, or teaching can be without ideology is a myth perpetrated to support a system in which the doctrine of the status quo is without bias, while any challenges to that doctrine are fanatical, reactionary, irrational, unrealistic, and most likely immoral.*

And yet, I have some points of hesitation about Freire's work.

First: For all that Freire argues for theory/praxis and reflection/action being meaningless without each other, he provides little in the way of concrete examples of how one would go about applying this pedagogy. I spent 31 pages in Chapter 4 wondering exactly what "decoding" and "codification" meant until we finally encountered an example. In the introduction, Macedo claims that the "call for language clarity is an ideological issue, not merely a linguistic one" (23). To put it simply, I disagree. For those questioning the use of words like "oppression" or "revolution," I tend to think that Macedo's suggestion is correct, but at many points, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is simultaneously repetitive and unclear. Do I think that Freire's pedagogy can be applied to any and every form of education? Yes. Absolutely. Does he provide a clear explanation of how that can be done? Not so much.

Second: I am uncomfortable with the emphasis on humans-as-different-from-nature and its accompanying implication that part of being human is controlling nature, that "a decisive attitude towards the world" results in "separation from and objectification of the world in order to transform it" (100). In some ways, it seems almost as though Freire not only accepts but actively argues for replacing the domination of persons with the domination of nature. While I certainly am not advocating for seeing the world or nature as conscious, and as something that lacks consciousness, it does not require care and respect for personhood in the way that humanity must, I am reluctant to support any proposal for absolute objectification of that which is living, both on moral and on practical grounds (as the result of objectification of and control over the world has not been notably positive to date).

It is this second objection that is the stronger of my issues, because both that and the occasional implication that it is possible to guide others to a realization of objective reality make me somewhat dubious about whether the heart of Freire's theory is genuinely entirely oppositional. This may be more a problem of my interpretation or the translation from the original than a flaw in Freire's work, so to illustrate this, let me quote two passages which appear very close to each other.

Consider "If humankind produce social reality (which in the 'inversion of the praxis' turns back upon them and conditions them), then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity," versus, "Just as objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance [emphasis mine]" (51). I have inverted the order of these sentences from Freire's text. The second sentence seems to me to be at best unclear and at worst directly contradictory to the first. If we produce social reality, then how can it be objective? It does not exist apart from us, and for each observer, it would appear different, would it not? It may be that "objective" is being used here in a sense that I am not correctly interpreting, but similar references to objectivity and reality appear several times in Freire's work, and each time, I wished that Freire would have chosen to explain in more depth what he means by "reality" in this context or how ideas of objective reality fit into his overall framework.

* Subsidizing farmers, corporations, and military contractors is capitalism. Ensuring that people don't starve is socialism. Maintaining highways and police departments is capitalism. Improving public transportation options is catering to those who are too lazy to work and get a car. White people are just people—they're the majority. Brown people are people of color, people with a race, people who need to be explained—they're the minority (even though there are far more brown people in the world than white people). "Men" means people. "Women" means women.