The Reluctant "-agogue:" Politics and Power Relations in the Classroom

by Matthew McGowan

Why do we even need people like professors at all? Why can't students just collectively and cooperatively learn from one another?

A series of doubts

"Was I suddenly going to become The Man?! Like Iconoclast's T-shirt said, was I becoming or was I already that which I despise?"

Something Kevin's questions and my later studies in and on higher education have very much brought to mind for me are troubling considerations about who has access to knowledge and its dissemination and the power dynamics involved in that arrangement. In her "Hearing Other Voices: A Critical Assessment of Popular Views on Literacy and Work," Glynda Hull contends that: "The popular discourse of workplace literacy sets up a we/they dichotomy" (669) and a serious power differential that stands in the way of creating "structures for participation in education and work that are equitable and democratic" (661). I feel and fear that such a contention applies not only to the workplace literacy programs Hull discusses, but, on a fundamental level, to entities like the "Expository Writing I" class I taught for the first time this last semester, as well as, broadly speaking, to any other course I could think of at a university.

As my first "real"/"official" teaching experience approached at the beginning of this past autumn, the part of me that aims at being a socially-conscious political activist worried a great deal about these issues. I suddenly found myself in the position of potentially becoming a "we" to "my"(!) students' "they." I was making a symbolic move "to the other side of the desk," a phrase I'd often used to tease friends who had recently become teachers in some capacity/arena, and in many of whom I'd noticed a marked change in their power-relations to those people known as students, as well as (though to a significantly lesser degree, certainly) to people who weren't even "their students." Becoming a teacher had transformed them, and not entirely for the better, and that bothered me. Would the same happen to me? Was I suddenly going to become The Man?! Like Iconoclast's T-shirt said, was I becoming or was I already that which I despise?

On a different tack, though also thanks to my activist self, I was worried about pushing or foisting my own, strong, personal political beliefs (ones that had more than once rolled the eyes of and turned off family, friends and acquaintances, subsequently causing them to tune out) onto the students in the class I was teaching…or instructing, or whatever. I imagined I would have to find some sort of balance between a wise objectivity and an Inspired Teacher passion in the classroom, though I was and remain not entirely sure exactly what that balance was or is and how to achieve and maintain it--especially since September 11 and the "war" that has grown out of those events.

If I started clearly and frequently asserting my political beliefs in the classroom, would I (and I say this in the spirit of the somewhat rhetorical--or, perhaps I should say, melodramatic--ending of the previous paragraph) start sliding down a slippery slope that would take me from being one who practiced pedagogy, to being a pedagogue, to being an ideologue, which is a step right before becoming a demagogue?

Reading Ellen Cushman's "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change" this same, past semester taught me--despite what I see as the potential for paralysis and uninforming silence such pauses can create in classroom discussion and in education at large--that it is indeed probably best that I tread carefully when bringing my politics to the classroom, that I reexamine many of my Left-liberal assumptions before acting on them as an Instructor. The distinctions Cushman makes between teaching as an act of altruism and teaching as an act of reciprocity are important ones when thinking about power dynamics and empowerment in a pedagogical setting, as are her warnings about things like "emancipatory pedagogy," something that I now think I previously subscribed to in a somewhat uncritical fashion.

Simply put, I was going to have to learn, and I am still learning, to bite my tongue in certain instances in the classroom, though I didn't and don't want to bite so hard that I've nothing left to speak with--for surely that's good for neither instructor nor student. That's why I've found a reading like Martha Nussbaum's "Women and Cultural Universals"--which advocates the position that certain, minimum standards should go along with cultural and political sensitivity to other individuals and groups--to be so valuable. The students in the class I taught didn't see it this way, though. Their reaction to the Nussbaum reading was largely negative, some even claiming that they "hated it." One male student, Nate, went so far as to say, mostly matter-of-factly but a little impatiently, "Well, it's okay for gir…"; he then somewhat self-consciously caught himself, continuing, "I mean, it's okay for women, I guess, but I don't really see how it applies to someone like me." Although this may have been a bad time to try to reverse the trend, at this moment I suddenly found myself recognizing and seriously regretting the fact that, throughout the entire semester (Nussbaum's was the last reading I had them do before the end of the term), I had hardly ever called on students; I had almost always asked for volunteers to respond to any question I put to them in class discussion and, if I didn't get any volunteers, which happened much more often than I both wanted and anticipated, I would simply move on.

Taken aback (possibly visibly) by this comment (would all the other students in the class simply let this stand, even the women?), I practiced my to-date preferred tongue-biting-but-still-suggestive approach: I turned to the rest of the class and asked, "Does anyone else have a response to this? Either to the reading or to Nate's take on it? Anyone?" No reply came. After a pause, I asked, with what I suspect was a tone of disbelief in my voice, "Do any of the women in the class have any response?" Eventually, a response (from a woman) came, but it was the only one volunteered, and still I didn't call on anyone, again, to my regret; to my fault, really. I now feel as though a lot of opportunities for learning on both sides of the desk were missed by this lack of potentially invigorating discussion. I recognize, of course (because I've been a participant in this phenomenon from the student side of the desk), that I could have called on students all the time in class and still gotten very few responses, but I do still feel that I should have created more of a learning environment in which more discussion could have happened.

When I was first told that the Expository Writing I course I would be teaching was not at all a lecture format class, but was instead largely a guided group activity and peer review environment, I was a bit put off and disappointed. (When was I going to get to profess my feelings about the world of ideas, literature and writing to a group of people, helping them to see all the wonderful--and terrible--things I see and have seen?) Shortly thereafter, however, my disappointment turned to relief. Again, thoughts like "Who am I to try to make these people be interested in this stuff?" came to mind. For that matter, could I really (yet?) formulate a coherent response to (i.e. a refutation or at least a defense against) a piece of writing like Mitchell Stephens' "Thinking 'Above the Stream': New Philosophies"?

Also most present at the beginning of my first "teaching" experience was the unexpected problem of speaking about the things I'd read to a group of people in a rather different fashion than I was accustomed to. I was reminded of the fact that good students (a group which, having achieved what I believe I have so far in the realm of academics, I consider myself a part of) don't always make good teachers--most good students accomplish what they do by being good listeners. David Bartholomae, in his "Inventing the University," notes (via Linda Flower) that "the difficulty inexperienced writers have with writing can be understood as a difficulty in negotiating the transition between writer-based and reader-based prose" (514). I would twist this statement to say that the difficulty some inexperienced teachers have with teaching can be understood as a difficulty in negotiating the transition between peer- and teacher-aimed thinking and talking about writing to student-aimed thinking and talking about writing. Both "pedagogue" and "demagogue" share the Greek root agogos, a word that refers to leaders and leading. A rather interested and engaged student for close to twenty-five years now, and for many of those years imagining myself becoming a teacher one day, I found myself finally presented with the opportunity to teach (or instruct) and not quite prepared to shift roles. Or, to put these feelings another way: most people have done plenty of running, sitting and breathing by the time they reach adulthood, but activities like running a race and practicing zazen prove to be surprisingly difficult.

The questions that next come to me are a) How defined are all these roles and categories anyway? b) How valuable and valid are they today? and c) How defined is the field these questions are related to today, anyway? Starting with the last question first--While Bartholomae notes: "I think that all writers, in order to write, must imagine for themselves the privilege of being 'insiders'--that is, of being both inside an established and powerful discourse, and of being granted the right to speak" (516), Joseph Harris, in his "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing," reminds his readers, I think correctly, that "the borders of most discourses are hazily marked and often traveled, and that the communities they define are thus often indistinct and overlapping" (266). This is a difficult position to ask students entering a university to take on and/or take in. Harris (largely in response to Bartholomae's discussion of students' navigation of the university's various discourses) offers an at least partial solution:

Rather than framing our work in terms of helping students move from one community of discourse into another, then, it might prove more useful (and accurate) to view our task as adding to or complicating their uses of language.

I am not proposing such addition as a neutral or value-free pedagogy. Rather, I would expect and hope for a kind of useful dissonance as students are confronted with ways of talking about the world with which they are not yet wholly familiar. What I am arguing against, though, is the notion that our students should necessarily be working towards the mastery of some particular, well-defined sort of discourse. It seems to me that they might better be encouraged towards a kind of polyphony--an awareness of and pleasure in the various competing discourses that make up their own [266].

This sounds like a great approach to me, however, once again, I find myself bedeviled (perhaps by Kevin's T-shirt) with questions and concerns. I'm troubled--to paint with even broader strokes for a minute--by things like (restricting my observations to the U.S.)--since my days as an undergraduate--the rise and growing influence of all sorts of political conservatism and religious fundamentalism and the popularity of television like The Man Show and professional wrestling. Though I'll also say that when I was first exposed to concepts like postmodernism as an undergraduate I was as confused and conflicted as I was excited--like I needed to become any more of a self-conscious second-guesser. The point I'm trying to get at is this: perhaps the American populace (remember, I'm still using my broad brush here) simply doesn't want or can't take all the complexification that concepts like postmodernism, multicultural diversity and polyphony ask for, and perhaps that's why "we" see such a resistance to such diversity (or, perhaps we could say more pointedly, to political correctness) and a desire to return to perceived simpler, more "traditional" or "conservative" positions on or in contemporary life by many groups of people today. For with too much multivocality, "these people" (at least) may say, lies the danger of Babel.

Having reached this point in my argument, I find myself--a first-time teacher whose classroom jokes have proven to be largely dated and/or too particular and therefore unfunny to my students (none of them over twenty, I don't think), thinking about these students somewhat ageist thoughts ("This Columbine generation scares me!"), not liking (or perhaps not understanding!) their music (this new generation of cock rock and wildly sexist and materialist rap), and not knowing how to "get through to them" (even with seemingly unavoidable news reports about the plight of Afghani women virtually none of them really seemed to care about anything Nussbaum had to say)--bemoaning the dumbing-down of a generation, of America itself. Harris, fortunately, has what I feel is a reorienting response to this, as well:

There has been much debate in recent years over whether we need, above all, to respect our students' "right to their own language," or to teach them the ways and forms of "academic discourse." Both sides of this argument, in the end, rest their cases on the same suspect generalization: that we and our students belong to different and fairly distinct communities of discourse, that we have "our" "academic" discourse and they have "their own" "common" (?!) ones. The choice is one between opposing fictions. The "languages" that our students bring to us cannot but have been shaped, at least in part, by their experiences in school, and thus must, in some ways, already be "academic." Similarly, our teaching will and should always be affected by a host of beliefs and values that we hold regardless of our roles as academics [268].

This makes sense, too. After all, like very probably most of the people that I'm sharing this classroom with, I was born and bred (in a middle class family) in the same state many of these students are from, and was a former undergrad from the same university, and our ages are not that different (just a decade)! Perhaps this is the danger Kevin was warning us about in the cafeteria that day (with his call for no more teachers)--the danger of differentiations in power, however perceived or meager, driving wedges (perhaps even imperceptibly at times) in between people and stagnating communities, impeding communication and learning.

Perhaps another way of explaining or approaching an understanding of what I now think was a fairly lackluster first semester of teaching for me and a fairly lackluster first semester of university English the students in my(!) class is by way of recognizing that we were all trying to do our work when a particularly horrendous moment in peoples' lives and in world history occurred within the first couple of weeks of the semester--the attacks of September 11. My conflicted and confused brain was ready to either melt inside or jump out of my Left-liberal skull on any given day in the weeks after that Tuesday. (And I thought November of 2000, when George W. Bush stole the Presidential election of the United States, was the most upset and frustrated I would feel for a long time.) Concentrating on anything was unbelievably difficult. And, even given all that I do share with my students, I have a hard time really imagining what it was like being a first year student at college under these circumstances. Perhaps these students couldn't take Martha Nussbaum seriously because, like me, the news had filled them up and worn them out--it was almost impossible to care about most things.

In retrospect I think that this, the events of September 11 and their repercussions, is also part of the reason why I didn't "push" students more in class this past semester, because I didn't know if I, let alone if they, could manage any sort of heated debate in class. Though, as Lynch's, George's and Cooper's "Moments of Argument: Agonistic Inquiry and Confrontational Cooperation," has reminded me, "bringing conflicts into the classroom does not necessarily mean turning the classroom into a site of conflict" (409). My task and my challenge now is to find a strategy for maintaining this tricky balance, just as I must find the balance of biting my tongue just enough so as to not shut down and/or turn off students, and the balance of imposing myself on my students just enough so that they learn and help each other and me to learn, but not so much that I end up abusing the position of power (however meager) I currently hold.

This brings me to a point that's been in the back of my mind from the time I first started considering what my pedagogical approach to Expository Writing I was going to be, right up until the composition of this essay, which, like just sitting and breathing, takes some time to come to terms with, I think. The point is this: I have chosen, like the students in the class I instructed (and will instruct; and perhaps someday will even "profess") have chosen (to whatever degree), to get an education from an academic institution. And, if I am going to be effective or successful in the things that I knew were a part of that institutional system when I "signed up"--e.g. getting good grades, being a good teacher to a classroom full of students, etc.; overall being a "good" and "responsible" graduate student--then I have to both rely on and utilize the system I am a part of to at least some degree and for the time being.

Given all I have invested in my education and, now, in the education of others, I can't quite recommend Kevin's (utopian?) anarchistic vision of a world without professors at this time--for now, at least, it's largely impractical and would likely prove to be something like counterproductive. And if postmodernism has cursed me with an even greater potential for self-conscious doubt (and if this hasn't been a scourge on the Left in America since September 11 then it never has been) and even schizophrenia, it has also let me know about the possibilities of complicitous critique. That is, a mode of criticism--as Linda Hutcheon has configured it--"bound up…with its own complicity with power and domination, one that acknowledges that it cannot escape implication in that which it nevertheless still wants to analyze and maybe even undermine" (4). And "[t]he ambiguities of this kind of position," Hutcheon continues, "are translated both into the content and the form of postmodern art, which at once purveys and challenges ideology--but always self-consciously" (4).

So while I consider my pedagogical practice far from an art, let alone a postmodern one, this sounds to me like a good provisional position to take--one I can adopt for now, that is until someone like Kevin can convince me that I, The Teacher…or The Instructor, or whatever…am no longer needed. I don't really know if or rather that I am what I despise now that I've moved to the other side of the desk, but I think that has more to do with the fact that I've given up on despising, if I ever really believed in it in the first place. Perhaps that giving up is the only way out of falling prey to Iconoclast's claim.

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Knoll, Mike Rose; eds. Bedford/St. Martins. Boston, Massachusetts, 2001.

Harris, Joseph. "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing." On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Lisa Ede, ed. Bedford/St. Martins. Boston, Massachusetts, 1999.

Hull, Glynda. "Hearing Other Voices: A Critical Assessment of Popular Views on Literacy and Work." Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Knoll, Mike Rose; eds. Bedford/St. Martins. Boston, Massachusetts, 2001.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. Routledge. New York, 1989.

Lynch, David; George, Diana; and Cooper, Marilyn. "Moments of Argument: Agonistic Inquiry and Confrontational Cooperation." On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Lisa Ede, ed. Bedford/St. Martins. Boston, Massachusetts, 1999.

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