"As we have seen, the movement and moment of self-breeching—the “smudging” of the self one has been into the self one has yet to become - - is precisely where the experience of learning self takes place and time. That is why self-breeching movement/sensation is the proper object of study by those concerned with pedagogy. A body in the process of learning is a body blurred by its own indeterminacy and by its openness to an elsewhere and to an otherwise. This implicates pedagogy in the promise of an indeterminate, unspecifiable future and an unlimited open-endedness (Grosz and Eisenmann, 2001, pp.89-90). The reality of a body’s continuous indeterminacy points to the fact that our lives are always verging on the future; they are “virtual” in that they are always breeching into “potentialities other than those now actualized” (Ellsworth 2005, p.122).
The other morning one of my zero hour students pointed out, “You know, we never really do anything in here.” My first smart-ass response was, “No, you don’t do anything in here. We do a lot.” I then started on a brief explanation, one I have down by rote, of how my class works. “English has no content; it is a process. There are no facts to know, there are ways to go about knowing. You would never learn to play basketball if you sat around and talked about it and never played it. You must read and write and think about reading and writing to become better readers and writers.” Blah, Blah, Blah says the teacher on Charlie Brown. I’m not sure he got it, but then it doesn’t matter if he did. My diatribe was a power play. He started to read, which was the goal of my pedantic performance.
When I first started teaching I was in the hall monitoring the students as was required by the administration when the bell rang to start the class. The teacher next to me smiled and said, “Showtime” as she headed into class. Then, I thought I am a teacher not a circus performer, but over time I have come to agree with Marshall McLuhan when he said that those who see a difference between education and entertainment don’t know the first thing about either one. Teaching is an improvisatory art, played upon the stage of the classroom. Like any art, Teaching is one that is successful only in the space created between audience, the work and the performer; the student, the teaching, and the teacher. What is created in the act of creation can be transformational for both the teacher and the student: the creation of an ongoing opening of knowledge.
Power
Power in the classroom does not have to be, although it more often is, a hierarchical flow. However, in whatever manner power manifests itself, whether in a top-down model, in a struggle against the power hierarchy, or in some form of power sharing (always problematical because the teacher still retains control through the allowance of power sharing), power is always present. How power manifests is the only real variable.
As a beginning teacher I believed that the students would simply do what I wanted them to do. The benefit of what I had to offer, my vast knowledge of the English Language Arts curriculum, was awaited eagerly by my new charges. I was quickly cured of this misperception. I did not assert any authority into the space of my class, therefore the students quickly filled the vacuum. I sought help from the administration. Their solution for troubling students was to spank them, or give them “pops” with a paddle. This was troubling for me. I was not a violent person, I felt that hitting any person, much less a child was not the mark of a civilized human being. Yet this was the practice of the school; it was no big deal. “Teachers who did not spare the rod were doing no more than reflecting the values of their own societies in adhering to the notion that children needed to have the devil beaten out of them” (McWilliam 1999, p.86). Corporal punishment was an accepted practice in the school. I was encouraged to dispense the “pops” myself. The students would respect my authority if I were the person wielding the paddle. Male coaches would often come to a female teacher’s classroom, pull a male student, who was giving that teacher problems from the room, and dispense the punishment outside the doorway. It was acceptable for a female teacher to call upon the male authority for the implementation of the punishment. Yet, it was expected that I was to take care of my own being male; and, since I would not, I was seen as a weak disciplinarian, and by extension, weak in my authority as a teacher both in my classroom and in my subject.
I resisted this view of authority. Two years after my first experience teaching, I had voluntarily moved back to Austin and began teaching in a low-income, high-minority school. I felt that what I had to offer my students could help them become better people and lead better lives. The paternalism of that idea had not yet occurred to me. I was not so arrogant as to believe that my students were lacking somehow and just needed to be filled up with the right kind of information, however I did believe that they needed an education in order to succeed in a white middle class world where one was expected to look, talk, and act in a certain manner in order to fit in. I saw teaching as a way to fight the power; this was after all the Reagan years. I was very much locked into what Ellsworth (2005) called the grid, where the instruction was geared to moving the student from one point to another. The student, in order to gain power, had to learn to exist in a new location. “Pedagogy practiced for the sake of the grid functions as a mere connector between predetermined meanings and identities” (Ellsworth 2005, p.120). The teacher as the empowering agent helps the deprived student move to a higher social/economic class, to a higher level of understanding as understood by the superior knowledge of the teacher.
During the first few days of the first Gulf War, I had my all my students write letters to George Bush (the elder), making arguments for or against the war. I wanted to empower them, give them voice, make them feel they were an influential part of the American process; I wanted all of this while teaching them to write according to the prescribed dictates of the essential elements of the state of Texas. I am unsure what the students took from my politics, and my attempt to impress those political beliefs upon them. I am also unsure if they saw the end point to which I was pushing them as a desirable goal. I am positive I had no clue where they were starting from, nor that many of the students did not see that starting point as necessarily a bad thing. I had not yet realized, as Ellsworth writes, “The grid has no ability to “see” knowledge as it is in the making. It has no faculty to sense the movement/sensation out of which knowledge itself emerges: the experience of the learning self in the making” (Ellsworth 2005, p.120). I had not yet embodied the idea of learning as an ongoing event, but rather in a Madeline Hunter kind of way, learning was still an end point that needed to be reached as quickly as possible.
Somewhere along the way, I became a popular teacher. Three years ago when I moved from middle school to one of the high schools, the school secretary, whose senior daughter I had in my class, told me on the third day of school, “Mr. Neal, you are the hot new teacher this year.” I was not surprised, although a bit embarrassed. I had for several years been the teacher that most of the students wanted to have. This has become problematical for me, I question the connection between being popular and being a good teacher. My popularity “recasts the relationship all too problematically as a hierarchy of influencer and influencee, and in doing so, appears to return good pedagogy to a problematic version of teaching as a personality cult” (McWilliam 1999, p. 68). My students, for the most part, do what I want them to do because they want to please me. My popularity becomes the power I wield in the classroom. A cult of personality that controls in as much a totalitarian manner as the coaches with their paddles at the first school I taught.
I tell these transitional episodes from my teaching not to glorify myself, nor to hold myself up as an exemplar of good teaching. I agree with McWilliam when she writes,
The concept about pedagogy as progress - - the idea that we know better now - - is more seductive. We are no longer trapped by false assumptions and practices born of ignorance, well-intentioned though they might have been. We like being the heroes of the progress story, the enlightened ones who, when confronted by a recalcitrant student, know to reach for the evaluation instrument rather than the dunce’s hat (McWilliam 1999, p. 15).
When I first started teaching I had been instructed in an evangelical manner. If I taught using these certain methodologies I would be successful, or so I was told. This method was not the way I was taught as a high school student, so it gave me a sense that I was cutting edge, on the forefront of teaching. I was mistaken. There is not a progression, simply a shift of location. The contemporary poet Michael Palmer refuses the moniker of avant-garde because he said it assumed a direction. I hesitate to now say that what I do does anything, because that assumes I am doing something right. My students read and write. Can they all pass the AP test, or even the TAKS? No is the simple answer. Is it my fault? I refuse to accept responsibility for either their success or failures. Yes, what I do and what I allow can help or hinder the learning in the making, but ultimately my students have to engage in the process for any kind of transformation on their part to take place. I try to open a space that is language rich, composed of their language, my language, and the discourse of the school.
“My purpose was to show that there is more than one way to think about the proper teacher/student relationship - - despite the extent to which a particular formula for judging propriety may dominate in a given time and place. We can, and do, and will again, think otherwise” (McWilliam 1999, p. 43).
Performance
. . . we need to know ourselves as “professional actors,” not only in the theatrical sense but also in the sense of knowing “ the rules of etiquette, status and gravity” go with being professional enough to claim payment and ethical standing (McWilliam 1999, p.175).
Part of the reason my classes are popular is because they are fun. I see my teaching as a performative act, not necessarily as an actor but more as an artist in a room full of artist apprentices. The materials in which my students and I create are the words we engage with in the texts we are reading, and the texts we are creating through our writing. Early on in my teaching I abandoned workbooks, grammar texts, and the literature text book: the orthodox tools of the English classroom. The texts I use are the books my students are reading and the experience of their lives.
Even after all of the years I have been teaching, my students see this as a transgression against the norm. I encourage this belief because I see it as a benefit to what I am trying to accomplish. The students feel as if they are breaking the rules of what is a proper classroom. Instead of being told what to read and told what to write, they are free to indulge their own tastes in literature and pursue their own predilections in writing. It becomes a kind of carnival in as much as the class is perceived to be counter to the “normal” high school English class. All of this is of course a performance on my part. The students are working on the TEKS as dictated by the state of Texas. It is just that they are not experiencing the standards in the perceived standardized manner. “Individuals are not freed from orthodoxy by carnival, but they are permitted to indulge themselves, to experience that “unrestrained sensuousness” (p.109) that in all other times and places is verboten” (McWilliam 1999, p. 168). Too often the sensuousness of reading, writing and language use in general has been excised from the English classroom, and replaced with a stilted seriousness. A large part of the fun of English is the delight in playing with the words. I feel much more can be learned through play and enjoyment than with learning the “correct” way to write an essay “if one is to succeed in college.” It is not that I do not take seriously the project I have embarked upon, nor the requirements and responsibilities I have as a teacher; it is just I do not take seriously the way school is “supposed to be.”
A few days ago during what was supposed to be silent reading time, three of my students were sitting at the back of the room talking about a series of books about African-American high school students they had been reading. They were deep into a discussion about suicide and if it were a sin or not. In one of the books, the main character had killed himself at the end of the book. When they noticed that I was listening they became apologetic for not being on task. They felt that because they were “just talking” about the books and enjoying themselves that they must be doing something wrong. It made me laugh, which confused them even more than if I had fussed at them.
Modern prescriptions of good teaching as professional work do not sanction disorder-as-fun within their prescriptions of change-enhancing practice. As is the case with feminist pedagogy, any risks to be taken must be within the limits of the project, or else they risk too much. The project must be taken seriously. The texts must be serious texts (McWilliam 1999, p.175).
I take my students very seriously; they are the texts of my classroom. When allowed to have fun with language, they will perform to a higher level than when dictated to by the stereotype of an admonishing old school marm with a grammar book in one hand and the literature canon in the other.
Pedagogical Space
The space of the in-between is the locus for social, cultural, and natural transformations; it is not simply a convenient space for movements and realignments but in fact is the only place - -the place around identities, between identities - - where becoming, an openness to futurity, outstrips the conservational impetus to retain cohesion and unity (Ellsworth 2005, p.123)
Ellsworth in Places of Learning, examines pedagogical spaces outside of the traditional classroom. I am limited by the space of my classroom. However it is simply an empty room, by itself. The kind of space which is created in the box I am given is dependent upon my students and myself. In this room, as easily as in museums, a space can be opened where learning can occur. On the first day of class, I read a children’s book called “Arnie the Doughnut” to my students. In the book Arnie and the man who bought him try to brainstorm ideas about what Arnie can be instead of being eaten. One of the ideas is to be a picture frame. I use that nub of an idea to have my students help decorate my room and thereby lay claim to it. All of the students color a doughnut I have copied on paper. While they are coloring and gluing glitter and feathers on their doughnut in order to be the best doughnut they can be, I walk around and take their pictures. The next day I pass out the pictures, they frame them in their doughnuts and hang them from the ceiling along with the multi-colored happy faces which already dangle there. By the end of the day I have 150 framed pictures of my students in the room; it becomes not my space, but their space.
Admittedly my classroom looks more like the traditional elementary classroom than a high school senior English class. There are Cat in the Hat posters outside the door greeting the students as they come in, posters of writers are slapped in a seemingly willy-nilly fashion on the walls, a life-size card board cut out of the Three stooges stands in one corner, Christmas lights blink on and off all year, stuffed animals sit on the shelves with the hundreds of books which are on display in my limited marketing attempt to entice the students to pick one up and read it. As the students come into the room and whenever they write, music, ranging from Parliament/Funkadelic to Benny Goodman, plays from the boom box on my desk. In addition to the thirty Franklin desks assigned to my room, I have four chairs, a rocking chair, three bean bags and a rug for the students to use when they read and write. All of this is thrown out purposefully in an attempt on my part to create an alternate atmosphere to that of the school as a whole. It is a space where the students will more likely want to be than not, a comfortable space that to use Ellsworth’s phrase, is a “good-enough holding environment” which is a potential pivot place between inner and outer realities, but it cannot guarantee the arrival of learning as the experience of knowledge and self in the making. What the holding environment holds is the potential for innovation and learning, a potential energy that waits to be released by its intermingling with its user (Ellsworth 2005, p.70).
It is a space, I hope, that has the potential to act as a hinge between the school outside the room and outside of the school, and between the students’ lives as students and as young adults soon to be leaving the public school environment. I like to think that I have created a space where the students feel comfortable enough to “break with the teacher’s voice—the break that creates the experience of the innovative , learning, inventive self” (Ellsworth 2005, p.71). Ultimately I want my students to be able to continue to read and write on their own without the direction of myself or any other teacher; I want them to be able to open up their own spaces of learning.
In My End is My Beginning
. . .the kinds of lives we can thereby live, are thus most strongly linked to the kinds of communion we can create, not to the hegemonies we can resist. . . one way to begin the representing of lives, including our own sociological ones, is to create new forms of telling, new rituals for sharing . . .(Richardson as cited in Ellsworth 2005, p.128
Schools are spaces for telling, where rituals are acted out each day which reinscribe old hegemonies of thought and ways of knowing, but they can also be sites where people in communion with one another call forth new rituals of a different, if not better, world. This is not to say that we are any better at teaching than in the past, nor are we likely to become so. To assume that there is one better way, is to assume that knowledge has an end point. In Zen, once someone has reached enlightenment, the next day they still have to go to work. However “the concept of pedagogy as progress- - the idea that we know better now- - is more seductive. . . We like being the heroes of the progress story, the enlightened ones . .” (McWilliam 1999, p. 15). However what we like, our pleasure, is often just an acceptance of what we want, our desires, as the norm. Pleasure is learned not natural. The kinds of pleasure we take from teaching we learn from the world we live in. Learning is a transitive verb, an ongoing action; not a fixed moment in time. The learning takes place in the spaces between the past and the present; the “still point of the turning world,” as T.S. Eliot wrote. The moment is always in motion from an interpreted past to an indeterminate future, the smudging of the self between what it was believed to be to what it might become is the point where learning occurs in an ongoing and continual process. “Might . . pedagogy - - function less as finished object and more as “spatial process, open to whatever use it may be put to in an indeterminate future, not as a container of solids but as a facilitator of flows” (Ellsworth 2005, p. 125). I believe, and it is only a flawed and socially constructed belief like any other, that pedagogy can be this optimistic. One can hope.
Sources
Ellsworth, Elizabeth. (2005). Places of Learning. New York, New York: Routledge.
McWilliam, Erica. (1999). Pedagogical Pleasures. New York: Peter Lang.
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