This is how things get messy just as
Spring's turning into Summer. Months ago, a former professor read a
couple of the first entries on my literacy pedagogy and suggested
that I read Jacques Rancière's
The Ignorant Schoolmaster a discussion about emancipation and (sort of) pedagogy, based on the teaching of Joseph Jacotot.
School years being what they are, I'm just getting around to it, but
it's pretty clearly important stuff. After finishing the
translator's introduction, I've got to get a little bit of this out.
The thing that
struck me most tonight was the notion of story telling as an
antithesis to explication. Because it presumes an equality of
intelligence, story telling is egalitarian, while explication is
(obviously) not. I'm trying to figure out how to get my head around
this on a practical level. When I first started teaching middle
school, I found myself telling a lot of stories – it actually was a
source of guilt – as a means of helping my students to see
connections. It was certainly explication in any real sense of the
word, but in a textured narrative style. It took the form of the “so
you see . . .” Besides creating a human connection between myself
and my students, it gave me the chance to convey knowledge as an
anecdote without the presumption that I was more intelligent – just
more experienced in one particular instance. In hindsight, I had
much better relationships over the long run with these students than
I did with students from other periods where I was less narrative
(and, to be honest, less egalitarian). So there's something to story
telling, surprisingly enough.
This all comes in
the context of my grappling with the deskilling of teachers that is
at the forefront of the effort to destroy public education and one of
the last (remotely) powerful sectors of organized labor in America.
I know the danger of speaking of a teacher as an equal with students
because the Common Core and Danielson frameworks are being used as a
cudgel throughout New York City to beat all content specialty out of
the profession. The New New Criticism's insistence that students
need only to read and never to take in context or make crucial
connections certainly makes it seem like there's no need to have any
content knowledge, but of course that quickly devolves into something
ridiculous and hollow. “A Modest Proposal” without context is
satire without the sideways glance – a bare call for cannibalizing
infants that is both confusing and uninteresting beyond its shock
value.
I'm appealing to
the canon though, and that's tantamount to elitist rearguard knee
jerking, right? But how would Stephen Colbert be funny without
context – the awareness of the satire, given the absence of a wink?
For that matter, how would his show be remotely comprehensible on
any level without knowledge of external specifics? Or, to hit at the
heart of what matters most to the neo-liberal education “reformers,”
are really all about, how would an instruction manual be
comprehensible without contextual working knowledge? A lathe worker
cannot simply be handed a machine and a manual, no matter how well
trained in the ability to decipher texts. A farmer cannot be dumped
on a tract of land with a Monsanto starter kit and expect results.
Knowledge has to accompany texts or they are at best inefficient ways
to convey information; at the worst, they are rendered useless. Of
course, that's not really what neo-liberal education theorists are
talking about though, is it?
So I'm interested
in what Rancière will add
to these ideas for me. Is it merely an esoteric summer musing that I
only have time for because I'm wrapping up the year? Is it a guise
for a process of deconstructing education without simultaneously
doing anything real about context in which that system exists? Is it
just an excuse for me to tell more stories in class?
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