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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: January 22, 2002
Latest Update: January 22, 2002
Faculty:
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Olivier at tapcourse@yahoo.com
takata@uwp.edu

Teaching as Transforming Discourse

Journal entry by jeanne

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, January 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on a PSN thread on shaping students' thought. It entertains important philosophical questions that I think students as well as teachers need to consider. Essay up as we discuss the issue. For now, please read the PSN thread on which it is based:

On Monday, January 21, George Snedeker posted to PSN:

Subject: teaching and ideology

we all probably try to coerce our students into an enlightened view of oppressed or marginalized groups. the problem as I see it is the question as to how attitudes are influenced by what is taught. consider the possibility that this is not the real causal variable. perhaps it is just their own material interests and the kind of education they get from the media and work chums. perhaps the radical ideas we try to teach them have little force in the long run?

I offer this reflection, not as a reason to give up the ideological struggle, but rather as a way of putting into question too simple ideas about the impact of what we teach. our students are not empty boxes to be filled. they are ideological subjects as we are.

Original message:

Subject: Re: How fear can justify repression To hammer home Hank's point I would like to draw the list's attention to an excellent article by Jo Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Ann Stueve and Robert E. Moore, "Education, Social Liberalism, and Economic Conservatism: Attitudes towards Homeless People," American Sociological Review, 1995, V.60 (February: 126-140). In their studies of college students the effects of a college education wehere to increase tolerance for poverty and homelessness, but "...less support for economic aid to the homeless." In other words college works to socialize students into the values of equal opportunity and respect, but NOT equal outcomes. What this demands is a change in the way we teach, the resources we use and how we work with our students to understand such concepts as class. It means also working with academic unions to prevent penalization of self-reflective service learning component of any college. For myself, I am teaching intro this semester and am using Barbara Ehrenreich's, Nikel and Dimed, K. Lucker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Bell Hooks, Where We Stand, and a very good reader by Margart Andersen, Kim Logio, and Howard Taylor, Understanding Society. In addition, the students must complete 10 hours of partiicpation observation (could include service work) that will link a sociological understanding of everyday settings with basic concepts of class, race, gender, etc. I am hoping this will help to increase a basic level of awarenes of how class operates in our society. Oh, yeah, I also have them do four changes in the National Budget and then justify those changes by using the sociological data, and explain them to their fellow classmates. If anyone is interested check out the WEB site at UC Berkeley:

http://socrates.berkeley.edu:3333/budget/budget.html I would like to hear how others are working to raise class consciousness among their students. Hey, in our books it is simply developing The Sociological Imagination, right?). Best, Talmadge

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, Henry W Vandenburgh wrote:

In the US, this probably means we should start a labor type party. What I didn't mention is that in all of the worthy considerations mentioned, class is usually the furthest runner up. So, as Michael Lind correctly pointed out, we get kids who become elite (and non-labor oriented) liberals, having been steeped in warmed over radicalism. This liberalism (again as Lind would have it) sort of occupies the ecological niche where a labor party would go. Workers correctly feel as though they are being patronized by these folks, who after painting multicolor fists on the wall at Bard College, sort of slide into becoming social service people, or purveyors of culture.. or whatnot. By implication, the left is psychologized and trivialized. PC is an example of this type of thing. "You said something racist or sexist" (hardly ever classist). Only individual behavior matters. It's a matter or just trying to have good middle class manners, doncha know?

I have to believe that it's still really an issue of priviliging class as the primary contradiction-- the issue mentioned the least in America-- the others are important for solidarity, but they are not primary under capitalism. I missused the concept of repressive desublimation. Marcuse meant with this concept that some impulse release (repressed under Victorian capitalism) can now be commodified and let out of the bag as long as it's flattened and perverted, giving us porn and the jet-ski. But I think that left politics in its bourgeois identity politics stage follows an analagous process. Get as in our faces as much as you want to about race, gender, agism, able-bodyism, as long as you seriously don't take class into consideration, and don't call for expropriation of anything.

I agree with much of what Lauren and Talmadge have said. I also think we should fight racism, sexism, agism, able bodyism, and the like. The same goes for anti-imperialism, which I have also cited at times as being a potential magnet for bourgeois leftism (because it's distant from us). I think that meaningful struggles against these evils MIGHT hasten the day when we can confront the devastating effects of our present system of property relations, or they might not if only psychologized and desublimated as a struggle against white males for example. I think we are now only at a stage where social democracy is possible. More progress might be possible as a reaction to limitation in the third world or to environmental concerns-- and so for me it goes.

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, Sue McPherson wrote:

"Henry W Vandenburgh" wrote:

[snip] to get into. What really gives me the red ass, though, is that these are the places where we hear the most about "race, class, gender, marx, and don't forget--pomo." My represive desublimation detector is going off. But what you're talking about is the contradiction between what people say and what they do. Whether out of guilt, fear, greed, or stupidity, this is how things are, but how do we change that? Sue McPherson

On Tuesday, January 22, 2002, Talmadge Wright posted to the thread:

George raise an excellent point proven in fact by the study I quoted. Students are not tabla rasas whose minds we inscribe upon. Each is socially located and inscribed with their historical experiences of race, class, gender, age, sexuality, etc. Our challange as teachers is seeking ways to understand these positions and then looking for methods to bridge the gaps created by social distance. For example, here at Loyola we have many students from the suburbs who are new to the city of Chicago. One method of breaking this literal and social distance is by bringing them into activities that allow them to encounter people not like themselves. Then the challenge is one of working on the emotional reactions that result from such confrontations and placing them in a sociological context. We can't do this just through lectures, and discussions work only partially.

However, the most important point about classroom discussions brought up by my students is that they get to see how other students react and understand the situation, thus opening up new spaces for themselves to imagine a social reaction different from what they have been taught. This was also the premise of having students work directly with street people when I taught in San Jose - they created a coalition of students, homeless persons and community activists which forced many of them to challenge the concepts they previously held dear, students and homeless persons alike. The group, the STudent Homeless Alliance, now the Commuminty Homeless Alliance Ministry, continues ten years later to still shake the local political rafters in San Jose.

Of course, the purpose of capitalist social segregation and elite homogenization is to prevent this process from taking place under the guise of being "safe."

Talmadge

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