Chapter Six
105: “I will invoke the concept of ‘critical literacy,’ a term used by Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, and Peter McLaren, among others, in responding to the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, a figure central to my discussion.” *** Is this a matter of terms? AB doesn’t use the term, ‘critical literacy.’ Freire recognized the attunement of triadicity with the imperatives of critical pedagogy. Berlin does not, if one takes the 1990 roundtable as any indication… Why not?
105: “I want to read Freire’s critical pedagogy across an epistemology that takes into account the indeterminacy of signification, the fragmentation of the subject, and the interrogation of foundational truth. My reading is meant as an emendation to Freire rather than as a wholesale rejection of his work.” ***So this section might give me some ideas. “emendation”? Does he confront Freire’s theory of language?
106: “He [Freire] sees in the mediating power of language, however, the possibility for the change and transformation of these conditions. While language indeed serves as a means for control and domination, it can also serve as an instrument of liberation and growth. Language in its positioning between the world and individual, the object and the subject, contains within its shaping force the power to create humans as agents of action.” ***The third…
106: Here is the critique. And I must admit I don’t get it. “The tendency instead—sometimes encouraged by the Enlightenment vestiges of Freire himself—is to privilege a unified, rational, and unmistakably male subject, to define discussion and action in naive and simplistic terms so as to obscure difference, and to offer a rationalistic conception of power and a politics of narrow group interests.” ***I’m thinking of Freire’s syllable cross grid and wondering how Berlin arrives at this assessment of Freire’s work. The point isn’t ‘to offer a rationalistic conception of power.’ It’s not to “offer” any particular conception, but to bring the human consciousness of an individual or/and group to the role language plays in the formation of his/their life. Why “unmistakably male”? This he’s gleaning from Young? Luke and Gore? Ellsworth? (How can ‘critical pedagogy’ fail if it’s never really been tried?) And “Enlightenment vestiges”… by this he means Freire “indulges” in the notion that there is ‘out there’ some Truth/Reality waiting to be discovered? Or is he referring here to the hopefulness undergirding Freire, his ontology, one that clearly assigns to individuals power. (The power of perception, understanding, consciousness, creative will.)
107: Berlin promotes Young full-bore: “Young criticizes this model [I’m assuming a model Freire promotes, as implied by the positioning of this discussion] on two scores. First, it ignores the economic and social institutions…involved in material distributions. It accepts them as natural and inevitable by failing to take them into account (liberal capitalism) or by attributing all lapses to class relations and the mode of production (socialism)…” ***How is bringing conscious awareness to language—because it is accepted as ‘natural and inevitable,’ and in order to show that an individual can practice a measure of agency in ‘codification’—’failing to take into account’ elements of power dynamics?
Having read Freire through AB, I don’t understand the elements at play in the same terms that Berlin does, via Young. Freire’s practice does not appear to me as a construction crafted for the purposes of pleasing a theory (Marxist), but for the purposes of serving a community, a peoples. Oh my goodness. Postructuralism makes me crazy. It’s like the notion of shifting, amalgam selves is so incredibly sexy that nothing concrete can be spoken of without the charge that we’re being “atomistic”… “Young concludes, ‘Such an atomistic conception of the individual as a substance to which attributes adhere fails to appreciate that individual identities and capacities are in many respects themselves the products of social processes and relations.” ***Freire’s theory of language, and AB’s triadic hermeneutics work no matter which conception you prefer; subject as unified, ‘atomistic,’ or subject as ‘product of social processes and relations…’ Clearly Berlin doesn’t see it this way, as a method of language pedagogy, not as a method of ‘critical pedagogy’;’ what is being taught? No ‘subject’ is being taught. In fact no “thing” is being taught; conscious-raising is a product of prepared environment and guided attention within that prepared environment. If Berlin was around right now, I’d try to convince him to take a close look at Montessori. I wonder what he’d have thought of her prepared environment….
108: “Young’s conception of justice is thus based on two values that provide for conditions that allow individuals to engage in activities that make for a just society: ‘(1) developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s experience…, and (2) participating in determining one’s actions and the conditions of one’s action’ (37). The two, Young acknowledges, do not grow out of human nature, nor are they universal truths.” ***NOTHING HERE ABOUT LANGUAGE!?
“They are instead assumptions based on the democratic notion that all persons are of equal moral worth. In other words, the are grounded in a conception of human nature necessary for democracy, not foundational grounds.” **But the very notion of ‘equal moral worth’ is “human nature,” via language (as it is socially constituted). Freire and AB show us that we do not need, necessarily, to shirk all conceptions of ‘foundational grounds’ in order to effectively teach literacy. It isn’t ‘retrograde’ to offer a conception of language or literacy based on ‘human nature.’ What’s striking is that by the end of this section there is absolutely no discussion of LANGUAGE and its role in justice/injustice. Pragmatism could be useful here. But I suppose, because it’s ‘old,’ it’s not…cool?
“Freedom from oppression involves the removal of institutional limits on engaging in learning, satisfying skills, play, and communication. Freedom from domination means the opportunity to engage in action and the conditions that make for action. Most important, “thorough social and political democracy is the opposite of domination’ (38).” ***NO MENTION OF LANGUAGE! And without conscious awareness of language as the formative element of the relations sketched here, there can be no agency, no freedom.
108: “Traditional notions of civic discourse have constructed fictional political agents who leave behind their differences to assume a persona that is rational and universal in thought and language. In a postmodern world, no such subject exists.” ***Hrumph. This doesn’t seem to me very useful. “Democracy then becomes radically participatory, as the heterogeneous voices that constitute any historical moment are allowed a hearing: ‘All persons should have the right and opportunity to participate in the deliberation and decision making of the institutions to which their actions contribute or which directly affect their actions’ (91).” **Yes, but this cannot happen unless and until the “subject” brings conscious awareness to the opportunities, fundamentally constructed and construed via language.
Young’s vision of democratic action smacks of naivite, too. Been in a union. So contentious.
And then… Habermas. “Finally, this conception of democracy is based on a politics of deliberatory discourse in which rhetoric is at the center of public life.” ***Not literacy education.
109: “A literacy that is without this commitment to active participation in decision making in the public sphere, however, cannot possibly serve the interests of egalitarian political arrangements.”
110: “Placing Freire within a postmodern frame enables us to relate this silencing of citizens through literacy education to the formation of subjects as agents. Without language to name our experience, we inevitably become instruments of the language of others.” ***Who doesn’t have ‘language to name our experience’? Language is natural development, always socially constructed. We are always ‘instruments of the language of others’… both/and… through conscienticazao, we gain agency within this situation.
110: ” …literacy enables the individual to understand that the conditions of experience [language being one of them] are made by human agents and thus can be remade by human agents. Furthermore, this making and remaking take place in communities, in social collections. The lessons of postmodern difference remind us, however, that the individual must never be sacrificed to any group-enforced norm. All voices must be heard and considered in taking action; the worth of the individual must never be compromised.” **I don’t understand this ‘must’…
“Differences among students organize themselves around class, race, gender, age, and other divisions, and it is the responsibility of the teacher to make certain that these differences are enunciated and examined.”
111: “It is at the moment of denial that the role of the teacher as problem poser is crucial, providing methods for questioning that locate the points of conflict and contradiction. These methods most often require a focus on the language students invoke in responding to their experience.”***The teacher as ‘problem poser’? I thought the students were to pose the questions/problems? This is a departure, I think, from AB. Still, there is no mention here of Freire’s theory of language. The classroom situates the teacher very curiously.
111: “The teacher attempts to supply students with heuristic strategies for decoding their characteristic ways of representing the world.”
“Here we see why the literacy teacher, the expert in language, is at the center of education in a democratic society (and not just because English studies has historically been used in US schools to reinforce hegemonic ideological positions).” **”expert in language”? What does that mean? In Montessorian terms, the literacy teacher would be ‘expert in environment preparation’ or ‘expert in heuristics-construction’… This is a departure.
You do not need a postmodern subject to conceive of a democratic classroom, seems to me at this point…
111: “The questions the teacher poses are designed to reveal the contradictions and conflicts inscribed in the very language of the students’ thoughts and utterances. The teacher’s understanding of structuralist and poststrucuralist assertions about the operations of language in forming consciousness here comes to the fore.” **First mention of ‘consciousness’ forming…But still not conscientisazao.
Okay, by 112 we see Berlin describing a classroom that, through dialogue and debate (words he uses), arrives at a place where students and teachers become equal problem posers. Nothing is said, here, of heuristics (material, textual) aside from dialogue. And the classrooms are oriented, it seems from this reading, to probe ‘cultural codes’ not to evoke individual’s awareness about how she composes. This is the departure. It’s a matter of dimension, of level. For AB, conscientisacao is an evoked awareness about how language (and other ‘codes,’ like music) works in the composing process. Because language, a social system of codification, is inherently political, conscientisacao is inherently political. The pedagogical imperative for AB, however, does not extend to crafting conscientisacao towards confronting ‘cultural codes.’ Her imperative is to get students to recognize that and how they make meaning. This might inevitably lead to confronting cultural codes (or the teacher might craft the classroom so that it does), but without the recognition that and how they make meaning, students cannot freely, with agency, willfully embody those confrontations in a meaningful, purposeful way.
The classroom Berlin describes does not include the kind of Freirean heuristics–like the syllabic grid—AB notes repeatedly. I wonder if that level of probing is part of the Berlin classroom. As it is described here in chapter 6, however, dialogue is the only heuristic mentioned. AB’s ‘final purpose’ is different: 113: “The final purpose of the course is to encourage citizens who are actively literate, that is, critical agents of change who are socially and politically engaged—in this way realizing some of the highest democratic ideals.”
113: “Rather than organizing its activities around the preservation and maintenance of a sacred canon of literary texts, it would focus on the production, distribution, exchange, and reception of textuality, in general and in specific cases, both in the past and present. English studies would thus explore the role of signifying practices in the ongoing life of societies—stated more specifically, in their relations to economic, social, political, and cultural arrangements. These signifying practices would be regarded in their concrete relations to subject formation, to the shaping of consciousness in lived experience. Here, once again, the subject is not the sovereign and free agent of traditional literary studies. Instead the subject is the point of convergence of conflicted discourses—the product of discourse rather than the unencumbered initiator of it.” ***So the dissolution of the subject, the postmodern conception of the subject, is necessary because it forces us to consider conditions/historicity as active in the meaning making process? AB’s Freirean conception of the subject achieves this; the idea isn’t that we teach a subject how to read and write, but that she already makes meaning doing these things (and others). Conscientisacao is a condition for agency. It is the subject in its most ‘pure’ form, both as being and as doing: acting awareness. Here the epistemic meets the ontological, too.
The classroom Berlin describes concerns itself with social conditions of production and consumption, bringing awareness to texts as they are situated. AB’s classroom concerns itself with evoking awareness that and how minds make meaning. Berlin’s complaint about AB is that she never sees it necessary or right to concern directly with social conditions?
115: “Differences about what exists, what is good, what is possible, and the power arrangements among the three are frequently at issue in conflicting conceptions of the most appropriate rhetorical strategies or the best poetic forms and devices.”
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