femminista: thoughts of a feminist rhetorician

In my Postmodern Rhetoric class, we had a fairly lengthy discussion of Marshall Alcorn's Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Construction of Desire. Unfortunately, the topic that I was most interested in discussing didn't emerge until the end of class (and I had a bit of difficulty being heard). My classmates were discussing the difficulties that arise when students make racist comments (or comments that you otherwise feel is inappropriate), either in class or within their writing. The question of assessment, as always, demanded much of our attention. One of my colleagues mentioned a comment that one of his students made in class recently. Regarding Katrina, this student said "but isn't that what natural disasters are for? To weed out the weak and the poor?" Another colleague mentioned a student paper where the student argues that we should separate bilingual students (I believe he means students who do not speak English as a first language) from English-speaking students because the ESL students slow the others down.

The point that I wanted to raise, as we discussed ways to respond or not respond to such situation, concerned the position of the teacher in relation to the remarks being made. I pointed out that we (at least in outward appearance) are members of group privilege that is not limited to our power as teachers. We have the luxury of choosing to leave such comments unacknowledged. My proposal was that we complicate the situation further and consider how the dynamic changes when the instructor belongs to one of the groups being deprecated. For example, if a student made the comment about Katrina to a teacher who happened to be from New Orleans and had lost members of her family, how does that change the response? Or, even more importantly, what if one of your other students was a Katrina survivor? What is your responsibility to that student as the arbitar of classroom discourse? The argument is that we want to avoid responding because we don't want to shut the student down, but by failing to respond are we not implicitly condoning that student's statement? Yes, we want to encourage our students to speak freely and engage in a dialectical process that helps them develop new tools for thinking critically about the world and being able to articulate those thoughts. However, by failing to respond to a racist or biggoted comment aren't we sabotaging the very dynamic that we are trying to encourage.

This is all made very tricky by the issues of subjectivity and ideology. We don't want to force our own ideologies onto our students; we want to help them learn and develop the tools that will allow them to make their own decisions. Yet to some extent, we are always operating under the assumption that our beliefs are right and the only way to really engage in liberatory pedagogical practices is to always be cognizant of our own biases and subjectivities and to actively avoid placing value judgments on our students' beliefs. That being said, things are never so clear cut. Part of our jobs as teachers is to negotiate the shaky ground on which discourse is built and in doing that, we must to some extent rely on our own sense of ethics. The important (and difficult thing) is to maintain the distinction between ethics and ideology. What that student said about Katrina was wrong and inappropriate. I feel that deeply and at the same time I fear that my own ideolgical baggage is interfering with my judgment and of course it is. Our ideological background always influences the way that we engage in and address situations. We seem to want a clear cut answer to something that can never be so easily delineated. Sometimes we have to respond as human beings relying on a set of ethics that we believe in, even though we run the risk of confusing the ethical with the ideological. I suppose I think of all the times that people have made careless remarks like that and no one has called them on it and it seems to me that it is always our responsibility to be advocates for those who cannot advocate for themselves. Recognizing that we don't have the right to enforce our ideologies onto our students does not absolve us of our responsibilities as human beings.

And if you're still reading after that tirade, here's what I said in my post on our class bulletin board:

Alcorn is working under the assumption that “composition teachers as purveyors of social responsibility” is acceptable. As much as I believe in the importance of social responsibility, I still feel uneasy with Alcorn’s discussion of its implementation. Ultimately, I’m concerned that he doesn’t interrogate the potential for abuse of power in the classroom when instructors (often unknowingly) try to force their personal political beliefs on their students. In other words, composition instructors often confuse social responsibility with their own ideologies. Students come to us without an accurate awareness of the world and it is our job to pull off their blinders and allow them to see things as they “really” are: the Bush administration is corrupt and the war is wrong or the opposite. We often wear our own blinders, confident in the rightness of our beliefs and so, rather than giving students the tools to examine and interpret the world critically and thoughtfully, we give them the tools to see things our way , which is, ironically, something that Alcorn discusses about writing. Alcorn says about students: “they know very well that there are other ways of looking at things, but they have difficulty thinking what these other viewpoints might possibly be”(92). For some teachers, I would reword that to say that it isn’t that teachers have difficulty thinking of other viewpoints but that they have difficulty considering those viewpoints to be equally valid to their own.

Assuming that our students come into the classroom blinded by eighteen years of indoctrination and lacking the critical thinking skills to question and interpret the world is, frankly, insulting. Now, we certainly can work under the assumption that we can help students learn how to better articulate their questions and interpretations. We teach composition, which is essentially communication. Claiming that “[s]tudents tend to live their habitual ways of looking at situations as the only way” makes a value judgment that inhibits learning. Of course, Alcorn does acknowledge that not all students are like this; some are quite adept at engaging in dialectical discourse. However, I think that Alcorn is positioning students in an awkward place for someone who claims to teach social responsibility. He places them in a space of intellectual inferiority. He establishes a hierarchy that discourages reciprocal learning in the classroom environment.

Actually, I appreciate many of the insights that Alcorn has to offer. I believe that education, to achieve its potential value, must also help them grow personally. I believe that personal, emotional growth is vital to intellectual growth. Alcorn also points out that assessment and the desire to meet expectations often results in a kind of double-consciousness for students. Since writing instructors are human beings with their own desires, it can be difficult to assess students without privileging what we want from them. Many of his points are useful and all of them are well-meaning. In fact, I am pleased that someone is raising issues of desire and mourning in the writing process, but at the same time, I am wary of large-scale generalizations that I believe he makes about students.