ENGL 402 - Week 5
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PDF Reading from Sakai:
Hairston.pdf
"Critical Pedagogies: Dreaming of Democracy," by Ann George
Critical Pedagogy foregrounds self-empowerment and social transformation in its practice. Instructors of Critical Pedagogy call upon their students to challenge "unequal power relations that produce and are produced by cultural practices and institutions (including schools )" (77)
"'[L]anguage — in its mediation between the world and the individual...—contains within its shaping force the power of creating humans as agents of action.'" (qtd. in George 78)
In the 1980s, Conservatives worked to reshape public education into a quasi-capitalistic agenda—bolstered by reports that suggested American students' inability to compete in the global economy. Critical instructors challenged this model by stating "public education was designed to 'perpetuat[e]...disparities in power and...inequalities in every form of day-to-day existence'" (qtd in George 79).
Ira Shor:
Wrote Empowering Education (1992) and When Students Have Power (1996).
emphasis mine 👇
"he 'poses subject matter [of the course] itself as a problem' (37). Students in Shor's classes co-create the syllabus by contributing readings and voting on unit themes, write classroom bylaws, and negotiate grading contracts right down to the attendance policies." (81)
Amy Lee:
Suggests, in a nutshell, "writing courses 'make visible the cultural and political work of our reading and writing practices'" (qtd in George 82). "Lee also provides a wonderfully detailed account of co-developing grading criteria with students, who, interestingly, prioritize process (contributions to peer review, collaborative projects, discussion) over the merits of written products" (82).
"Lee's pedagogy, informed by poststructuralist theory and process pedagogy, emphasizes textual and self 'revisioning' in the form of a 'critical self-inventory' (182). 'The 'aim,' Lee insists, 'is not a definitive end (actual actions, political or otherwise), so much as the development of a critical process' that shows students the constructed nature of their worlds" (qtd in George 86).
Carol Winkelmann:
Designed a technology-themed writing course. The result, she claims, was
"heteroglossic and hytextual, cooperative and conflicted, fused and fragmentary, totally ireverent and thoroughly intertextual" (444). Importantly, the class project revealed the "the 'text' was a corporate process in which social relations were reaffirmed, reproduced, realigned, and refabricated" (445). The student learning and the work of the course lay in the composing process rather than the product. Like Lee, then, Winkelmann suggests that critical composition pedagogy challenges not just how but what we grade." (82).
John Dewey:
Offers critical teachers a model of democracy as "'a mode of associated living, of joint communicated experience' in what citizens 'refer [their] own action[s] to that of others, and...consider the action of others to give point and direction to [their] own'" (qtd in George 83).
Reading Response - Critical Pedagogies
I found myself pretty persuaded by the end of the "Critical Pedagogies" chapter; particularly by the female, scholarly voices George quotes towards the end. Amy Lee's and Carol Winkelmann's description of Critical Pedagogy as a means to train students to self-reflect and self-revise was very compelling. I feel engaging students in this way, asking them to both understand those around them and to look introspectively within, upholds the idea that the individual is worth celebrating; that a single person is capable of the same functions and practices of another—with the proper training of course. Contrary to early Critical Pedagogies, Lee's and Winkelmann's practices prioritize and democratize "process" as a means to call students to action. By involving them in the creation of assignments, the terms and grading requirements for the class, and associated deadlines, the instructor shifts the power structure away from themselves and onto the students. Lee's aim for her brand of pedagogy is to evert the "development of critical process" or to show "students the constructed nature of their worlds" (86). I really like this because, essentially, she's saying that anyone can have a hand in that structuring.
Winkelmann's pedagogy was extremely compelling because she places an emphasis on our culture's connection to the digital. I feel I will be referencing her work a lot when I design my syllabus and mini-lesson. I am extremely excited to see how this type of pedagogy lends itself to a GitHub environment specifically. Inherently collaboration driven, GitHub automatically attributes user contributions and monitors repo traffic so that interactions within the environment run smoothly. Depending on the structure of the repository, students could have the same powers and permissions as instructors, taking this idea of democratizing the classroom to an entirely new level. The only difference is, by asking students to compose all elements of their collaborative assignments in GitHub you ensure that every student's contribution is attributed to them. For example, say students were asked to create a new Issue for (I'm going to use Winkelmann's example here) their collaborative, "corporate text" (82). The students could populate this space with brainstorming, they could work between the Issues and the Projects boards to assign tasks, they could react to comments with emojis, they could assign labels and milestones, and, most importantly, each student's contributions are tracked and monitored by the environment and all data that's collected can be referenced later by anyone. This effectively eliminates a student's ability to get out of doing work. Also, there are technical advantages to working in this type of environment that could translate well into students' potential career paths. Needless to say, I'm excited to get to work on designing a GitHub course!