Category Archives: Critical Pedagogy Annotated Lit Search

Notes on articles from my initial lit search on critical pedagogy and comp/ rhet

McGee – Climbing Walls: Attempting Critical Pedagogy as a 21st Century Preservice Teaching

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McGee, A. Robin. “Climbing Walls: Attempting Critical Pedagogy as a 21st Century Preservice Teacher.” Language Arts. 88.4 (2011): 270-277. Print.

A. Robin McGee documents her preservice teaching experience with a sixth grade class where she enacted critical pedagogy. Led by student inquiry, McGee uses Freirian theory of critical pedagogy to help her students learn about issues they were concerned about, immigrants and immigration, through problem-posing. She also reflects on lessons she has learned:

Does it make sense to state that as a 21st-century preservice teacher, I was teaching for social justice? I was able to do some work in the spirit of a just and democratic society. However, if I had opened up my cycle of critical praxis more fully, rather than being so caught up in the mechanics of figuring out “teaching,” my class could have accomplished so much more. If I had been willing to turn over more of the direction and autonomy to the students and the stories they had found, I am sure that the results would have been different—more dramatic and more meaningful.

Kalamaras – Confessions of a Socio-Epistemic Rhetorician: Negotiating the Seemingly Nonnegotiable inthe Development of Part-Time Faculty

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Kalamaras, George. “Confessions of a Socio-Epistemic Rhetorician: Negotiaating the Seemingly Nonnegotiable in the Development of Part-Time Faculty.” English Education. 24.4 (1992): 229-236. Print.

In this article, George Kalamaras describes his experience as a newly hired assistant professor and associate director of a writing program. Kalamaras highlights the dissonance in his department between his view as a Socio-epistemic rhetorician and more Classical Rhetoricians in the department. The differences, however, extend into other areas of the department such as, coherence of the department. These differences are more of an issue for Kalamaras who has to work with overworked, underpaid part-time faculty.

In the end, Kalamaras finds that the differences is not all bad, and can in fact through dialogue produce a similar liberatory effect as that desired for students:

The socio-epistemic  rhetorician,  then, in her attempt  to reshape  a writing  program,  must be open to having her own ideology  reshaped  as well. Thus, rather  than abandoning  her ideological  commitments,  she deepens  them, redefining  the parameters of her  own position  in ways  which  are more  inclusive,  that  is, dialogical rather  than dichotomous. She must, paradoxically,  be willing  to  “let go”  of  her  commitments  in  order to  come  to  know  them  more complexly (235-236).

Greer – “No Smiling Madonna”: Marian Wharton and the Struggle to Construct a Critical Pedagogy for the Working Class, 1914-1917

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Greer, Jane. “‘No Smiling Madonna’: Marian Wharton and the Struggle to Construct a Critical Pedagogy for the Working Class, 1914-1917.” College Composition and Communication. 51.2 (1999): 248-271. Print.

In this essay, Greer does historiographic work and discusses the life and work of Marian Wharton. Wharton helped shape the English curriculum at People’s College from 1914-1917 with a specific focus on empowering the working-class.

Greer hopes that by exploring Wharton’s struggles she can highlight and learn more about the contradictions that women and other marginalized people face when trying to enact liberatory pedagogy within existing traditional institutions i.e. “free choice and restricted options.” She cites Elizabith Ellsworth and Ira Shor as contemporary teachers that also struggle with these issues in their scholarship on critical pedagogy.

Greer finds that the main tension in Wharton’s work are the unacknowledged existing hierarchies among competing linguistic systems that ultimately disrupt her project (265). For example, in Wharton’s English textbook Plain English designed to teach “revolutionary English” she equates error-free writing with “clear thinking” implying that her students’ different language use made them cognitively deficient (265).

Greer draws parallese between Wharton and contemporary writing instruction:

Just  as Wharton’s  voice  in Plain English moves  among a range of radical and conservative  registers that reflect her personal commitments as well as institutional and cultural  influences,  so  too  our  own  pedagogical  discourse  is  never  fully  our own: it is freighted with competing languages, some of which may reverberate at frequencies  so  low  and  subtle we  may have  difficulty hearing them  ourselves.

Greer suggests that by acknowledging our own tensions and making them transparent to our students we may become role models of the critical students we want them to be.

Gorzelsky – Working Boundaries: From Student Resistance to Student Agency

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Gorzelsky, Gwen. “Working Boundaries: From Student Resistance to Student Agency.” College Composition and Communication. 61.1 (2009): 64-84. Print.

In this article Gwen Gorzelsky shares her ethnographic study of an intermediate composition class successfully engaging in critical pedagogy. Situating her study in the research of Durst, Trainor, and Wallace and Ewald, Gorzelsky explores the line between privileging Composition Studies’ goals of critical pedagogy and students’ pragmatic needs.

Gorzelsky studies the pedagogy of Justin Vidovic and his respect of students’ boundaries along with the use of traditional classroom techniques such as Initial Response Evaluation. She suggests that the combination of these traditional and critical teaching strategies creates a “classroom ethos that strongly supports their agency – their ownership of their developing ideas and texts” (66). Gorzelshy concludes that those in Composition Studies should not “sharply prioritize” either critical pedagogy and it’s goals or students’ pragmatic goals:

I suggest that our professional responsibility is to enhance the greater good of those systems and their potential readiness for change, rather than to pursue isolated goals, whether our own or students’. In taking this approach, we forego critical pedagogy’s emphasis on revolution, which is inevitably linear and focused on a single goal, in favor of the kind of change that ripples throughout systems while keeping them in the balance needed to support life and growth (82).

Gaugan – From Literature to Language: Personal Writing in Critical Pedagogy

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Gaugan, John. “From Literature to Language: Personal Writing and Critical Pedagogy.” English Education. 31.4 (1999): 310-326. Print.

In this article, John Gaugan explores what it means to engage in liberating pedagogy in the writing classroom. Through various examples from his English courses Gaugan shows how he navigates the fine line between helping students critically question what they “know” and the world without imposing his own agenda of democratic values. His questions are similar to those of Elisabeth Ellsworth (1989). Part of his solution is grounded in on-going dialogue; not telling students what to think, but continuously encouraging them to rethink (315).

Gaugan labels his teaching “social epistemic” or “cultural studies” and admits that this model can fall into the traditional, nondemocratic banking model. However, Gaugan states that while he selects the themes and texts of his course, his course remains more student-centered than teacher-centered:

Despite these admissions,  I  don’t  think my teaching is traditional.  My classes  are more student- than teacher-centered, more  language-  than literature-focused, more  process-  than product-oriented. I question  or suggest  rather  than insist or prescribe. I ask  students  to  consider  their privileged position. I  try to make  them  think  –  but not exactly  as  I do.  I share my point of view but welcome  theirs. I  encourage reader  response. I don’t own a teacher’s manual. (325)

Corkery – Rhetoric of Race: Critical Pedagogy Without Resistance

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Corkery, Caleb. “Rhetoric of Race: Critical Pedagogy without Resistance.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 36.3 (2009): 244-57. Print.

In this article, Caleb Corkery explicates how he uses rhetorical theory and critical pedagogy in his composition classroom. Corkery uses rhetoric as a non-threatening lens and shows his students how racial arguments have been asserted and defended throughout U.S. history. The goal is to demonstrate that racial identities are in fact constructed. Through this approach, Corkery asserts that he helps to position his students along side the author and text which allows the necessary emotional distance to “properly” engage with the text. Corkery suggests that targeting white students and/ or white identity, or “subordinate students” is a set up for failure – a mutually beneficial inquiry should be the goal.

Using rhetoric provides the text to interrogate and ensures a focus on language:

Composition instructors are in a unique position to connect the inspiration for critical pedagogies to individual awareness. Applying rhetorical skills to the arguments that have historically divided races in this country forces white students to reconcile, on their own, the evolving construction of white supremacy with the “unraced” status of whites today. A critical approach that centers on rhetorical theory is also more appropriate for a writing course, as might argue Soles, Harris, and O’Dair, who warn that critical pedagogies in composition courses neglect their duty to language study (in Beech 182).

Ellsworth – Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?

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Ellsworth, Elizabeth. “Why Doesn’t this Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myth of Critical Pedagogy.” Harvard Educational Review. 59.3 (1989):297-324. Print.

In this article Elizabeth Ellsworth offers an interpretation of an anti-racism course she offered and uses that  interpretation to support her critique of then current (1980s) discourses of critical pedagogy. She argues that key critical pedagogy terms such as “empowerment,” “student voice,” “dialogue,” and even “critical” are repressive myths that sustain relations of domination and exacerbated “banking education” (298).

One major premise asserted by Ellsworth is that a critical pedagogue is one who enforces rules of reason in the class and that rationalism can also be used to dominate. Drawing on feminist studies, Ellsworth suggests that while post-structuralism can also be used to dominate, it also offers critique against the violence of rationalism that excludes women, people of color, and other marginalized groups (303). Post-structuralist thought is not bound to “reason, but to discourse, literally narratives about the world that are admittedly partial” (303).

Ellsworth asks the question, “what diversity do we silence in the name of ‘liberatory’ pedagogy?” (299) and interrogates the unnamed agendas of courses enacting critical pedagogy and professors teaching them. She concludes with a quote from Trinh T. Minh-ha: “there are no social positions exempt from becoming oppressive to other… any group – any position – can move into the oppressor role” (322).