O. Alan Weltzien
English
WMC [University of Montana-Western]
C.H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, a husband/wife scholarly team at the University of Albany, SUNY, have shifted ground in their new book from their earlier Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing (1984). In the middle of Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, amidst other close readings that are largely critical, they take themselves to task, arguing that their earlier generalizations about "new rhetoric" mistakenly sustain the status quo. Knoblauch and Brannon now try to "go radical" in their dissections of recent discussions of literacy and their close definition of "critical teaching." Their analysis contains much merit, though one wonders whether their idealism can be translated, on any wide scale, into praxis--to borrow one of their favorite words. Critical Teaching castigates more than it praises, and in some respects it grows tiresome. The book's eight chapters might each have been cut by a third or half without significantly distorting their content.
Its opening sentence employs the metaphor of reading in a currently fashionable though suspect manner: "This book reads some stories from the educational world that are currently narrating the lives and circumstances of American citizens" (vii). Who is reading or narrating what? But granting them leeway, their opening chapter, an overview of the book, attempts to answer that question. They define "critical teaching" (acknowledging their indebtedness to Ira Shor and Brazilian theorist Paolo Freire, two of their main heroes) as "radical," "liberatory," "transformative." Such teaching embraces the inevitably "political character of schools" and overturns the mainstream conceptions of literacy: "In a culture cominated by scientific objectivism, it is anything but a self-evident assertion that 'literacy' is an ideological or political construction. Indeed, the stories about literacy that currently dominate American attention have given considerable effort to concealing their political agendas in order to insist that their definitions are natural and right. . ." (11).
Their opening chapter plays like an overture, summarizing their criticisms of functionalist literacy, cultural literacy, and even "literacy for personal growth," the argument of expressivism. These initial melodies grow into Chapters Four through Six, respectively. Knoblauch and Brannon argue, with some cogency, that functionalist literacy and cultural literacy dominate national attention because "they articulate the needs, hopes, anxieties, and frustrations of conservative ideology" (20). I find them less persuasive when they take to task the assumptions and classroom practices characteristic of expressivism, a powerful philosophy that has informed composition theory and pedagogy for the past generation. For the most part, though, their focus on the relation between naming and power relations among, for example, the educational research establishment, university professors, and school administrators, as compared with the vast majority of schoolteachers, may prove their book's main strength. Knoblauch and Brannon "propose" in Chapter One, "to look at how things are named in that [school] world, who has authority to do the naming and who doesn't, how representations frame parents, teachers, and students, [and] cast them in certain kinds of roles or 'subject positions'" (5). They do a good job, though the severity of indictment in some respects taxes one's patience, or may turn some readers off.
Knoblauch and Brannon explore "the politics of representation" in their second chapter, titled "The Real Political Correctness," in large part a close and damning reading of Dinesh D'Souza's much hyped Illiberal Education. They argue that the general public receives a mostly distorted picture of positive critical teaching in action because "much of what critical teaching stands for, in its positive depiction, is antithetical to the values and commitments of the corporate sponsors of American storytelling," who instead sponsor "a passive consumerism, rather than active engagement in the construction of social life, and a long-standing hostility to practices of critical inquiry...including liberatory pedagogy" (31). Knoblauch and Brannon turn political correctness, that overheated label, on its head, offering four principles of "real political correctness" (RPC) that persuasively expose the recent "politics of representation."
They put their cards on the table at the beginning of Chapter Three, "Images of Critical Teaching," which attempts to provide a positive antidote to RPC: "the purpose of a critical pedagogy is to help alleviate unethical and oppressive conditions--to further the utopian project that has been at the philosophical heart of the 'American experiment' from its beginnings" (49). "Utopian" suggests their limitations. In this chapter Knoblauch and Brannon offer two briefer and two longer stories of effective critical teaching, and the latter are a mixed bag. These two teachers' stories suggest both confusion about the practical pedagogical goals of critical teaching and massive student resistance to the enterprise. Hardly a strong recommendation here. Elsewhere, notably in Chapter Seven's opening, they offer a shining example of critical teaching, but most of us don't work in places like New York City's Consortium for Worker Education, offering ESL workshops to unionists who are recent arrivals working in terrible conditions.
Too, when the authors defend critical teaching by claiming it "doesn't politicize education; it recognizes the political nature of education," or that it "doesn't aim at polarizing people by its emphasis on multiculturalism and human diversity," but "aims to establish difference as a legitimate feature of community" (49), some readers will resist their distinctions or not grant them. For Knoblauch and Brannon, here and there scattered voices cry out in the wilderness of oppression. They champion journals such as Radical Teacher, collections such as The Politics of education, writers such as Jonathan Kozol, and even publishers such as their own Boynton/Cook (who gets patted on the back in two different places). Their analyses of functional and cultural literacy are trenchant, and in their chapter titled "Critical Literacy" they expose shortcomings in the "conceptual sources of critical literacy" such as Marxism and feminism.
The book's final chapter, on "Teacher Inquiry: Knowing for Ourselves," calls for teacher research being "carried out by teachers themselves rather than by educational researchers" (185). The chapter reviews the many dimensions of teachers' lowly status and then calls for a new kind of research, a qualitative research based in narrative and owned by teachers themselves. They cite, as a successful example of this "program of critical literacy," the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature, an Albany area group of secondary teachers who have "been producing portraits of high school literature classrooms" (195). Throughout the book Knoblanch and Brannon have been exploding the notion of objectivity, yet when they privilege "classroom narratives" that "create...tranquil, objectified conditions" or "teacherly knowledge" in "accessible objective form" (193), they appear to have it both ways.
Knoblauch and Brannon's sometimes lengthy sentences demand close attention. I admire their honesty in recognizing, for example, their own privileged place. They wonder if they have misrepresented functional literacy (175) and acknowledge "the ethical paradox here, the imbalance of power that enables us to publish a book criticizing that imbalance yet also effectively sustaining it" (178). I am quite sympathetic to their idealism yet am left wondering where and how I might practice critical teaching. I wonder about its practical outcomes. Yet teacher research that is genuinely collaborative between university education personnel and schoolteachers, where the latter inform and lead as much as the former, steps in the right direction. Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy deserves a serious read.