This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.
CEPACS
Volume 4
I'm new to the net, and have been reading the T-AMLIT files with interest. I'm a poet, teaching Native American poetry on the undergraduate level, to mostly juniors and seniors. The texts I use include 'That's What She Said", ed. by Rayna Green; "Songs From This Earth on Turtle's Back," ed by Joseph Bruchac; The Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Writers, ed by Duane Niatum; as poetry texts, and "Survival This Way," ed by Joseph Bruchac, a collection of interviews of Native poets; and "I Tell You Now," ed by Swann and Krupat, a collection of autobioigraphical essays. I also bring in handouts by poets such as Chrystos, Sherman Alexie, and occasionally an essay relevant to the poems we are reading. I agree with Carter Revard, that "if the course does not change their lives, then the course has failed, I have failed, and they have failed to see its point."
My question concerns the resistance of some (non-Native) students to taking in the devastating information about the holocaust in the americas, the continuing genocidal policies, realities of reservation life, etc. etc. I've had a few students who have shown strong resistance to the material - one student who basically said the poets should "shut up and stop whining" and described their anger as "reverse racism." As we were involved in a discussion of the poet as witness, my response was to throw the question back to the class - "is this whining?" In general, the class felt the poems were strong witnessing poems, though sometimes difficult to take in. Several expressed anger at the version of history they'd been taught, as well as the fact that they hadn't encountered a single Native voice in four years of college until taking this course. Still, the student quoted above is one whose life was not changed, who did not get the point. I want to be prepared for the next student with a similar response.
Have other teachers of Native literature or other difficult or controversial material (gay and lesbian studies, for example) found strategies for teaching that can get through this type of resistance?
note to carter: Good to find you here. Hope to see moccasin tracks all over the net soon. Looking forward to seeing NEL. Hope you are well and writing.
Cheryl Savageau
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Date: Wed, 8 Jun 1994 20:57:28 -0400
Subject: JRNL: TEACHING THE DIFFICULT
This posting has some very strong feelings about it.
I'd love to continue this thread, especially IN the context of
particular subjects, such as gay/lesbian narratives, race conflict,
class literature, and so on.
Randy Bass
I have been thinking about the claim made by several that the teacher's job is to change students'lives. I want to take issue with that claim. First, it strikes me as very self-important, even god-like, and I'm in no position to change lives even if I knew how to do it. Second, I just don't think it is true: students are the only ones who can change their lives. Third, it's really condescending. If we begin with the premise that we are there to change their lives then they are right when they think we are trying to give them propaganda.
I would say that we have two responsibilities: to provide a challenging atmosphere in which all students are made to question their beliefs and reactions; indeed, where even I am forced to examine them; and then to provide the tools to help sort the ideas and feelings out.
I've tried Lucy Maddox's technique, and I think they are pretty successful because they respect the students' right to form their own ideas and reactions. I try to keep my students focused on the text--what is the writer saying. If they understand the message they can decide what they will do with it.
I taught a course in the Literature of AIDS, and the most resistant student was one of the few gay students in the class. He hated the "irresponsibility" of older gay men who had brought on this disease, which had so impacted his life. I'm not at all sure at the end of the class that he had become any more for- giving, but he did understand the issue of latency period, and that the virus was widely spread before anyone understood the mode of transmission. I believe I had dispatched my responsibility.
We must realize, I think, the limitation of what we should affect in our teaching especially when we are teaching material that his already highly charged and conspicuously politicized. We must respect the rights of students to have different reactions and responses than we have as long as they understand the material. Once their responses are legitimized, they feel much freer to explore other responses.
[I am working on a very primitive system that does not allow me to go back and edit. I hope this makes some sense.]
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Date: Tue, 14 Jun 1994 09:53:59 -0400
Subject: JRNL: TEACHING THE DIFFICULT
I applaud the person from Towson whose unsigned message took issue with the earlier correspondent who talked of our responsibility to change our students' lives. Even if we were to arrogate that power to ourselves, the problem is that you just don't know what will change your students' lives. I suspect that it is seldom anything you do deliberately. SAo it is best to stick to what one can do and model -- which is to read widely, alertly, rigorously, and with unquenchable curiosity to learn.
Michael Kischner
I couldn't agree more with the June 8 posting on the subject of "teaching the difficult," in which the writer rejects the notion that we teach in order to change our students' lives.
As we present our students with difficult (i.e. challenging, unsettling, disturbing) texts, should we be afraid that the students themselves will become difficult (i.e. questioning our assumptions, our perspectives, our conclusions)? Do we want acquiescence? Weren't many of us in college ourselves resistant to attempts by authority figures in the university to try to change--to shape-- our lives, and weren't our lives in fact changed and shaped by books we discovered and read, often independently of our professors' curricular and ideological agendas?
In teaching, the medium really becomes the message, and the medium is too often dominated by the professor's voice and its printed extensions (syllabus, framing of discussion questions, writing assignments, etc.), rather than the varied and not always unanimous voices of the writers we select. I guess what I would suggest is that we try to put ourselves in the position of our students. If we are preaching to them, fine, but let's recognize that we are doing so. And let's be wary of branding as heretics those whose responses to our sermons and/or texts don't conform to those dictated from the pulpit.
Michael Lee
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Date: Fri, 17 Jun 1994 09:21:38 -0400
Subject: JRNL: TEACHING THE DIFFICULT
In any case, I invite the beginning of a new JOURNAL topic--related or
unrelated to this one.
Randy Bass
[I was out of town for a while, and missed the beginning of this thread, so this is a response only to the posts of the last three or four days.]
I feel like I need to put in a word for "changing people's lives", something which happened to me in several classes I took as an undergraduate (and one that I took as a graduate). To be frank, my ideas about the world, and the assumptions with which my students enter, are not the same--and they are not the same in more or less consistent patterns having to do with the familiar litany of political issues that us leftists tend to raise. Further, I believe that American Literature (and the literatures of people of color in the U.S., which is what I teach) is fundamentally concerned with these political issues. For me to act like I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything would be simply irresponsible. For me to act like I am not happy to know that in most classes I've taught I've developed personal relationships (which last beyond the semester) with one, two or even three students, the sorts of relationships which are later often articulated as "life-changing", would be absurd. I have a lot at stake, politically, emotionally, and indeed professionally in these relationships. I most certainly am trying to change people's lives.
None of this is to confuse such an intention with (1) the belief that, by using the right formula, I will change *all* my students' lives; (2) the belief that didacticism, lecturing, etc. is the most effective way of changing people's lives; (3) the belief that there isn't another portion of my students whose lives are not changed in my class, and who leave my classes with their prejudices about PC universities and crazy radical teachers intact.
To be frank, I wonder what it means when teachers say they should *not* try to change their students' lives.
Kenny Mostern
UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group
Against: racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism
For: the truth--and the funk!
If the references are to my particular remarks, I appreciate greatly the humility with which teachers insist that it is arrogant to think teaching or courses change the lives of students, or that teachers should have any part in such changes if they occurred. I appreciate also the assertion that only students can change their lives, as if no one outside ever does anything that might change them, but this strikes me as not a true assertion at all. It seems to me a retreat into the pious pretence of doing only the opening of the door while the intelligent student goes in and does everything as the innocent and generous and oh so nicely tolerant and beatific teacher has washed both hands of whatever happens to the student's mind, future, beliefs. Oh, says the nice teacher, you did it all yourself, didn't you, dear? That of course is not arrogance, is it? I do not believe, however, that teachers can evade responsibility for being part of a student's education in such a neat and Pilate-like way. What is truth? says the pontifical tutor, while pointing carefully at the texts in which the student is to find it.
In other words, beware of Socrates. There is a reason why his claim to find the truth in the people he questions may have provoked people to give him a bit of truth serum for his own consumption. I think it is not possible to be Socratic unless you are Plato manipulating the puppet Socrates whom you have created for your teaching purposes. I think it is worth considering whether in the claim that one has not altered lives, merely allowed students to choose whether to alter them, one is being truly humble or is being Socratically sophistical.
With that said, it appears likely to me that whether a teacher wants the course to change lives or not is not likely to make a lot of difference. Some teachers claiming merely to open doors have a remarkable way of getting students to come out of certain rooms into other rooms, where things go very differently for those students than they would have gone had the students thought about different doorknobs a bit. Other teachers trying to drive students through only certain doors huff and puff and seem never to get anyone into the intended rooms. In that sense, it is probably true that only students can change their lives: but I make no apologies for believing that the aim of a college education is to find what is so, that the books are chosen to get closer to what is so, that the students who read them carefully will have a good chance of learning more fully and accurately the ways by which they have come to be where, who, and what they are. Nor do I think it is arrogant to say the students who go out of the course the same as when they came in have not succeeded, and that the teacher has not succeeded, in the object of any college course, which is to provide, provoke, encourage learning that makes a difference in the understanding of students in the course as to what is true in the world they live in. There are a lot of ways to provide, provoke and encourage this: I expect those colleagues who have been responding to this topic have good ways of doing it, and I do not expect them to be reading the books and talking with the students very differently from the ways I am doing these things. That is, I expect the students to read carefully, to think seriously, to talk honestly, to listen intently, to question, challenge, wonder, joke, not doze more than a few minutes per period unless under real overload and undersleep stress, and to consider the course as one they chose and are taking seriously instead of one they had to get into because some dean said it was the Q or X or Multicultural vitamin they needed to get through the sheepskin door. Whatever change of life may occur is likely to be small enough. But are there teachers out there who really seriously and in all humility think courses and colleges are not supposed to change lives and who teach in the expectation and hope that if such changes occur no one will blame THEM for it? Where do you teach, in Laodicea?
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Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 12:08:23 -0400
Subject: JRNL: High School Canons
Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville
Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
Dear Carole Hamilton--I'm inclined to question the very premise on which you seem to be basing your wholly laudable efforts to revise your school's syllabus (a term I don't take to be synonymous with canon). To think in terms of a new list of must-read authors simply repeats with different contents the kind of narrowness (the notion of a consensually agreed-upon body of "great" texts or authors) that you suggest is the problem in the first place. My own inclination would be to think in terms of essential issues rather than essential texts. As a college teacher, I'm pleased when students come in having done some thinking about questions of race, gender, class, sexuality, etc. I care much less about what particular texts helped initiate that thinking. On other matters, though I'm certainly not up on rhetoric and composition theory, I don't think that exposure to models of "beautiful writing" has proven to help student writing very much, has it? (Not to mention that the very canonical revision you're taking on rests, among other things, on the historicity and instability of notions of the "beautiful.")
These are just a few things that you're probably already pondering. Good luck.
Alan Golding Univ. of Louisville
I am less concerned with which texts my freshman students have read in high school than in the kind of writing preparation they have had. I would respectfully suggest that there is no such thing as "beautiful writing" which can or should be promoted as a model for students. As you have discovered that inclusion in the canon has depended to a great extent on the taste/needs/mindset, etc. of the canon-makers, so too is "beautiful writing" a construct that has less to do with the writer than with the 'judge'.
I find that students who have been taught to model their work after "beautiful writing" either: (1) are woefully lacking in confidence and blocked by their years of being taught that they don't measure up, or (2) write foolish, empty prose that sounds 'elevated' but has neither sense nor substance.
A recent study reported that of the three kinds of writing students are taught in high school (narration, process, and argument), they do well only in the first two. The latter, the study goes on to say, is the single most important genre of writing students must master to succeed in college and in the work force--and the one at which they are least successful. So I guess my 'advice' about your canon selection would be to throw out the 'beautiful writing' requirement in favor of one which emphasizes critical thinking and clear argument about any and all texts.
JANE GASSNER
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jg0a@lehigh.edu
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005 Drown Hall #35
Bethlehem, PA 18015
758-3324
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Volume 4
Number 6
[Return to Index]
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 1994 22:10:40 -0400
Subject: JRNL: TEACHING the DIFFICULT
Like it or not, teaching Ceremony to students at the Univ. of Nevada,
Reno, students who are by and large white, m.c., and conservative, is
going to change some lives (in my class, a lot of lives. . . ). This
begs the question, why did I choose to teach it? To fill some kind of
multicultural quota? because I like the book? because it provides a
door/window not generally available to these students? because I had some
underlying, perhaps unconscious desire to change lives?
hmmm. . .
I like the stmt previously made here that if we presume to teach the difficult, we must assume our students will be difficult. I like that and I like it when my students are difficult (all of this difficult in the spirit of the pervious writer), but this once again begs that question of why do we choose to teach what we choose to teach? Be it dead white guys or live Chicana poets, if we set out to challenge our students, don't we, somewhere, somehow, hope to effect change?
Does challenge imply gatekeeping?
(god, I hope not)
In the words of Robinson Jeffers: "--You and I, Cassandra."
--ShaunAnne Tangney
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Volume 4
Number 7
[Return to Index]
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 1994 22:17:41 -0400
Subject: JRNL: High School Canons
This thread has generated some interesting comments. As on other issues, there seems to be a split between those who believe they do and do not teach cultural values. I believe there is such a thing as "beautiful writing," just as there is beautiful painting and beautiful music. The aesthetics of it, however, is obviously problematic. An investigation of aesthetics and cultural definitions of "the beautiful" will probably lead us into an endless morass, though.
Therefore, I want to endorse something Jane Gassner put forward: the need to improve argumentation in student writing. In my 1st year/full year English, I spend 5 weeks on reading essays. This is more than my colleagues who spend most of their time on fiction. Here the writing model for students is more beneficial. They are learning (via example) to articulate clear and logicalargument and to study rhetoric that is closer to them. They will, for instance, try to convince people to accept their opinions, whereas very few of them would write novels.
My pragmatic advice for syllabus-construction is to get a good historical essay anthology and teach a large selection of non-fiction. For those culturally inclined, it also shows what issues remain constant and what die out, resurface or emerge as new.
Blair Hemstock
In reply to the think pieces on the canon question. It's funny to read these responses. THey take the position that we read literature in order to write. Students, then, read lit. to write critically or to learn various kinds of writing. Sure, there is something to that, and it certainly seems to be the bent now, but there are other reasons to read literature. They don't involve assignments necessarily either it seems to me. All lthose kinds of reading get lost easily in the writing and critical thinking discussions. I wouldn't for a moment want to shut those down, but I'd love to the see the discussion open to include the reasons why we read liteature and then, perhaps, some thinking from that as to why our students might read it.
I have mixed feelings about establishing canons, but they will be there whether we do it or the textbook makers or test makers do it. Status quo has a way of establishing itself. Kids in HS pretty much read what I read in HS (1965), and my own children seem to want and need other things. They are both very much into mysteries and scifi and often ask me and their teachers why these aren't allowed in school. They have read little lit. by other than white male authors and most of that is difficult for them to admire or to relate to (although my oldest had a does of F. Scott and loved GATSBY). This seems to me to an easy to dismiss but complicated questions--the HS canon. Would it be possible to let students pose areas or subjects that they'd like to read it and design for them indpendent reading (or some inclass also)? This has been extremely helpful to me with my freshmen and to me as someone who gets bored with teaching the same works over and over. I like to be learning along with my students and new works do dthat for me.
Finally, I've also felt that the most important reason to teach lit. in HS had to do with getting the kids to want to read on their own. That's a different problem for different classes and races but it's the same problemm too in a way. One of my sons reads a lot on lhis own. The other won't touch a book, and he hates what he reads in school, although he is a striaght A student in English.
I'm pressed for time, but I wanted to get my 2cents in on this canon thing.
Tony Petrosky
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This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.
CEPACS