Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power

Transcription

1 Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power

2 Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power David W. Livingstone & Contributors Introduction by Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux M MACMILLAN

3 Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1987 Published by MACMILLAN EDUCATION LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Critical pedagogy and cultural power. - (Critical perspectives in education series) 1. Educational sociology I. Livingstone, David W LC191 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

4 Contents Preface vii Series Introduction ix Introduction 1 PART I Cultural Paradigms 15 CHAPTER 1 In/Forming Schooling 17 PHILIP CORRIGAN CHAPTER 2 Education and Patriarchy 41 MARY O'BRIEN PART II Ideologies and Education 55 CHAPTER 3 Critical Pedagogy and Television 57 EDMUND V. SULLIVAN CHAPTER4 Consciousness and Popular Media 77 SATU REPO CHAPTER5 Back to the Basics 99 JACK QUARTER AND FRED MATHEWS PART III Schooling & Skilling 121 CHAPTER 6 Upgrading and Opportunities 125 D. W. LIVINGSTONE CHAPTER 7 Gender and Skill 137 JANE GASKELL v

5 vi Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 CHAPTER 10 Work Experience 155 ROGER I. SIMON Who Computes? C. PAUL OLSON From Hand to Mind LIV MJELDE PART IV Political Practice 223 CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 Bibliography Index Popular Educational Politics 227 PHILIP WEXLER, REBECCA MARTUSEWICZ & JUNE KERN Teachers and Working-Class Schooling 245 DEAN ASHENDON, BOB CONNELL, GARY DOWSETT & SANDRA KESSLER Parent-Teacher Collaboration 269 MALCOLM A. LEVIN

6 Preface During the intoxicating days of free schools and de-schooling in the early 1970s, several staff members at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) were keenly engaged in various efforts to create alternative educational settings with or for disadvantaged or oppressed people (e.g. Livingstone, 1970, 1973). Few sustained such communitylevel involvement as the obstacles to progressive educational change became more evident. Most notable were Malcolm Levin and Roger Simon, who played important roles in the development of the Toronto alternative schools movement throughout the 1970s and also persisted in joint efforts to build broader social networks of alternative school activists. Only occasionally did we come together in larger groups to discuss our practical experiences with and the continuing prospects for progressive educational change, perhaps most memorably when several colleagues of Paolo Freire at the Institute for Cultural Action in Geneva conducted a two-day workshop with OISE staff in the mid-1970s. By 1980, general political conditions had become both more reactionary and more uncertain. Roger Simon and Ed Sullivan were the first to express the need for a more sustained collegial forum at OISE for critical reflection on dominant tendencies in education. Over the next few years, the Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Studies Group met regularly. In addition to Roger and Ed, the main participants were Madan Handa, Malcolm Levin, Paul Olson, Gordon West and Jack Quarter, as well as more belatedly Philip Corrigan and myself. These discussions were wide-ranging, covering biography and personal philosophy as well as current projects. Other staff members and students frequently have joined us for public seminars and debates and conferences most significantly Alison Griffith, Mary O'Brien and other members of the OISE Women's Studies Program, as well as the many graduate students and research officers who have been continuing contributors to these public vii

7 viii Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power discussions and related research projects. Several summer school programs and a continuing guest lecture series have also permitted us to share ideas and experiences with a number of other colleagues. Although they have visited for varied periods, Michael Apple, Bob Connell, Roger Dale, Miriam David, Jane Gaskell, Madeleine Grumet, Henry Giroux, John Harp, Liv Mjelde, Robin Small, Philip Wexler, Paul Willis, Geoff Whitty and Michael Young all have contributed substantially to our group discussions. The chapters in this book attempt to identify underlying dimensions of popular ways of thinking about education in general within the complex and subtle ideological settings of advanced capitalism. Systematic analyses of the abstractions underlying popular thought are regarded as a necessary ingredient both for the development of shared critical understanding of the social construction of social reality among subordinate groups as well as of sustained action to transform this reality. Dominant cultural paradigms, general ideological forms, specific educational ideologies and actual and potential forms of progressive educational practice are all examined here in terms of the continuing construction of class and gender relations in the major educational institutions of schooling, mass media and families. The book is intended to offer original theoretical insights and substantial empirical studies sensitive to both Marxist and feminist perspectives on current forms of education. Most of the chapters were discussed at a two-day forum in early 1984 and subsequently revised. Jane Gaskell, June Kern, Liv Mjelde, Mary O'Brien and Satu Repo deserve special thanks for their intensive participation in this forum. The editorial job of bringing the manuscript to publication was much more time-consuming and difficult than I anticipated when I agreed, nearly three years ago, to "co-ordinate" the production of a book to disseminate some of the results of our collective efforts more widely. But the excellent work of the people typing and setting up the text has helped to make the job tolerable. Margaret Brennan, Vivian Ching-Ako, Brenda Mignardi and Sue Murphy all typed at least one paper, often on very short notice. Gail Buckland typed andretyped all the rest and handled much of the complex array of communications involved in the latter stages of the project with admirable speed and grace. Doug Hart and Adele Sanderson helped with varied administrative and computer program issues. Linda Carty dug out numerous obscure bits of bibliographic and index information, while George Smith produced the integrated bibliography and formatted the entire text into camera-ready copy. Whether the political conditions for progressive educational and social change will improve significantly in the near future remains an open question. Interested readers may find here some basic tools for fostering

8 Preface ix the growth of popular cultural power. Without such growth, progressive educational change remains illusory. D.W. LIVINGSTONE TORONTO

9 Series Introduction by Henry A. Giroux and Paulo Freire A number of Western Marxist thinkers, who wrote between the 1920s and the 1950s, struggled to keep alive a redemptive and radically utopian spirit as the basis for establishing a major connection between critical thought and action. 1 One of the most important of these thinkers, Ernst Bloch, created an entire political philosophy on what he was to call later The Principle of Hope. 2 In that work Bloch argued that it was inconceivable to speak of a critical discourse outside of a radical utopianism and steadfastly refused to engage in a politics of withdrawal or cynicism. This centrality of the concept of concrete utopianism as a precondition for critical thought and collective struggle was inextr-icably linked to two other theoretical notions: the importance of historical memory and the indisputable power and necessity of critique. The political significance of historical memory is captured in a now famous letter written to Walter Benjamin by Theodor Adorno. In it, Adorno claimed that "all reification is forgetting... objects become thinglike at the moment when they are seized without all their elements being contemporaneous, where something of them is forgotten. " 3 For Adorno, as well as for a number of Western Marxists and other radical critics, the loss of historical memory was the precondition for all forms of domination. The implication was that forgetting instances of human suffering and the dynamics of human struggle not only rendered existing forms of domination "natural" and acceptable, but also made it more difficult for those who were victimized by such oppression to develop an ontological basis for challenging the ideological and political conditions that produced such suffering. Conversely, historical memory as part of the language of possibility linked knowledge to power in critically appropriating the past and declaring that such suffering matters. That is, such suffering was to be recounted because oppression needed to be illuminated in order to be overcome through practical action. This suffering further illuminated a historical continuum xi

10 xii Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power of struggle forged through human communities and forms of solidarity the legacy of which it was imperative to keep alive as part of an ongoing tradition of radical theory. Radical critics such as Adorno, Bloch, Benjamin and others focused on the notion of historical memory to accentuate the need for radical theorists to develop a discourse that would break through the false harmony of dominant ideology, start with the problems of the oppressed, and accentuate a politics of difference in which diverse forms of domination and the attendent social movements that addressed them could be seen as part of an emancipatory political project. Central to such a project was an emphasis on forms of critique which were relentless in the task of unmasking the lies, myths, and distortions that constructed the basis for the dominant order. But critique was more than an unmasking affair, it was also a form of practical learning that involved listening to the experiences of others, promoting a capacity for self-criticism, and using such criticism as the basis for developing programmatic discourses for building alternative hopes and realizable visions. In many respects, the legacy of hope and struggle characteristic of this radical perspective speaks directly to the opportunity for intellectuals engaged in social change and struggle to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political. In the first instance, this means redefining historical memory, critique, and radical utopianism as elements of a political discourse whose central thrust must be understood primarily as a pedagogical process. That is, such a discourse works to highlight the pedagogical nature of political claims made dependent upon social practices in which knowledge is constructed and deconstructed, dialogue is contextualized around emancipatory interests, learning is actively pursued as part of a radical project for new _forms of ethical and political community, and the production of subjectivities is seen as a central educational issue. In the second instance, making the pedagogical more political means extending the notion of schooling in order to encompass the broader category of education. This is an especially important theoretical thrust because it makes visible the need to examine critically how the production of subjectivities and subjects takes place in other public spheres outside of schooling, Moreover, it calls attention to the need for critical educators and others to develop a radical theory of education in which it becomes essential to examine how diverse public spheres interact in shaping the ideological and material conditions that contribute to instances of domination as well as struggle. Similarly, the broader notion of education provides the basis for developing a political agenda in which the struggle for new democratic counterpublic spheres can be linked to an ongoing struggle for democracy itself. One of the major objectives of Critical Perspectives in Education is to contribute to the reconstruction of a political and pedagogical discourse

11 Series Introduction xiii in which forms of historical and social critique are joined with programmatic considerations for extending the imperatives of democracy in those public and private institutions that shape the quality of human life. Moreover, this new series has a practical bent in that it aims critically to appropriate, from a number of disciplines and radical traditions, insights and social practices that can be used in the service of a politics that provides theoretically useful support to teachers, parents, and others engaged in an ongoing struggle for justice and peace. Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power not only represents the best interests of the legacy of radical social theory we have described above, but in building upon the foundation of such a tradition, it actually goes beyond it. In doing so, it links what we call the language of critique with the language of possibility and posits a view of historical understanding and method of inquiry that expresses a profoundly important discourse and set of issues around which to reconstruct the nature and the project of a radical theory of education. On one level, this is most evident in the ways in which the collection of articles in this book differs from more recent traditions of radical educational theory, especially in North America and Western Europe. Early forms of radical educational theorizing provided the context in which schooling was analyzed as part of a set of wider institutional and political practices. In this case, schools were linked directly to the work process and implicated in reproducing the class divisions necessary for maintaining the distribution of capital, labor, and power essential to the capitalist order. This reproductive link was analyzed almost exclusively through the parameters of class analysis and was uncovered in the social relations of schooling as well as in the distribution and legitimation of what can be generally categorized as dominant culture. While this perspective played a central role in renewing the primacy of the political in the schooling process and calling into question the role of schools in the Western democracies, it failed to move beyond the language of critique and offered little hope for those who had to work in or deal with schools on a daily basis. Moreover, this position wrongly assumed that all forms of domination were derivative of class oppression and in doing so failed adequately to theorize about either the diversity of oppression that characterized schooling or the importance of appropriating theoretical tools and pedagogical strategies from social movements that did not reduce their political projects and historical understanding to the imperatives of class analysis. Needless to say, as important as reproductive accounts were in their many versions, they failed to address the experiences of those educators, parents, and others who work in and with the schools. In part, this was an inevitable consequence of a theoretical position that contained little or no possibility of engaging schools as sites of political

12 xiv Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power struggle. Similarly, this position grounded its own political project in a discourse of either strong or weak versions of Marxist orthodoxy that had very little to say about advancing the discourse of democracy in either a formal or substantive sense, which in turn made it difficult for this position to relate to the historical experiences, legacies, and aspirations of those groups who still believed in such a discourse but lacked the theoretical tools to interrogate it critically. Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power breaks sharply with this tradition and in doing so represents a second generation of radical educational theorizing. The break is most evident in the way in which the authors in this volume collectively contribute to a discourse that is less concerned with defending an orthodoxy of one sort or another than with raising new questions and making new connections. This is no small matter in the current conservative historical conjuncture. The courage to produce a discourse which can be read for a language of possibility is something to be grateful for in the age of Reagan and Thatcher. One manifestation of this break from current radical theorizing centers around the attempt to situate pedagogical practice within the broader category of education. Education in this sense is viewed as a process through which the production of particular meanings and social practices constructed within various cultural realms functions to define these realms as distinctive social forms marked by particular types of pedagogical work, i.e., specific forms of knowledge, communication, leadership forms, ideological interests, and so on. What is striking about this formulation is that it extends the notion of radical pedagogy to a variety of cultural spheres and in doing so opens up areas of popular culture, mass media, trade union organizing, the family, and other public spheres to forms of educational and political analysis that render them accessible as occasions for pedagogical work. Related to redefining schooling as part of a wider process of education, Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power provides a renewed emphasis on the politics of cultural production and its intimacy with everyday life and practical learning. For example, there is a concerted attempt among the authors in this volume to give the issue of subjectivity and experience a central place in developing a critical pedagogy. That is, the issue of how language, time, activity, and space actively work within specific historically constructed forms such as schools or the media to position and legitimate particular types of experience is given extensive treatment in this book. Similarly, there is an equally important effort to understand how students, women, workers, and other subordinate groups construct their own voices within a range of public and private spheres and how these voices, in their contradictions and insights, mediate and attempt to make sense of their worlds. This is not a discourse about the binary

13 Series Introduction xv coding of reproduction vs. resistance. Instead, it is an attempt to understand how forms of subjectivity are regulated and transformed through the structured character of such social forms as language, ideologies, myths, significations, and narratives. Central to these concerns of the authors in this book is an attempt to situate historically the construction of experience as it is mediated through the particular practices of gender, race, and class specific ideologies. More to the point, the concept of experience, the notion of social forms, and the category of transformation are specifically viewed as instances of cultural productions which only become intelligible when seen in relation to systems of power that point to both the persistence of oppressive structures and ideologies and the possibilities for struggle and social change. In this case, the issue of subjectivity represents a recognition that who we are, how we act, what we think, and what stories we tell becomes more intelligible within a critical pedagogy that acknowledges what histories are in place before the issue of learning can be seriously addressed. Similarly, the regulation and transformation of experience highlight the significance of a critical pedagogy that gives primary importance to forms of teaching and understanding that begin with the social and historical particularities of peoples' lives. Critical pedagogy links the question of the historical formation of social forms with the issue of how they work subjectively. In drawing upon current theories of psychoanalysis and feminism, Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power demonstrates the importance of developing forms of sociality that connect rationality with power and desire and not merely with discursive structures. Of considerable importance here is an acknowledgement of the centrality of developing a politics of the body, one in which everyday experiences, interests, desires, and needs configure as part of a cultural politics attempting to broaden and deepen the notions of both oppression and emancipation. The implications of this position for critical educators can be seen in analyses that explore how a sense of identity is imposed upon people through unequal relations of power mediated through language, social practices, representations, and regulations that position different groups within sets of experiences constructed around gender, racial and class-specific interests. It is important to underscore that within the varied theoretical perspectives that shape Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power the category of transformation is viewed not merely as a matter of institutional change, it is also linked to forms of practice that resonate with the development and production of new needs, desires, and subjectivities. The concept of transformation is redefined in this text in a way that is both theoretically refreshing and politically encouraging. For example, the struggle to challenge and change dominating forms of language and

14 xvi Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power ideology is inextricably linked to the transformation of other realms of struggle. In this case, the notion of struggle includes not just the terrain of ideology but also the terrain of social and political institutions. What emerges from this perspective is a view of cultural politics that includes the changing of ideology and the changing of material circumstances. In addition, the notion of struggle is associated with a multiplicity of political interventions as expressed in various social movements. But this is not a politics without a history. Dominant ideologies and practices are also challenged through forms of historical inquiry that point to the collective struggles and the existence of counter-hegemonic educational public spheres that existed outside of the realm of traditional private and state supported schooling. At issue here is a notion of cultural politics that attempts to advance the discourse of democracy by linking it to the struggle for oppositional forms of knowledge both inside and outside of dominant public spheres such as public schools. In this case, there is a call for counter educational work that is necessary for both the defense and transformation of public schooling and other spheres of education. Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power is a text that should prove to be of considerable value to educators who want to analyze the multifaceted way in which educational processes work; moreover, it provides a range of critical discourses that will surely help us as educators to rethink the nature of what we do as intellectuals, what kind of society we want to live in, and what we want our students to know if they are to be empowered.as active and criticial citizens of the world. "Last but not least, Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power further establishes the critical pedagogy and cultural studies group at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education as one of the major influences and centers for developing and advancing the discourse of critical pedagogy. I am sure that this text will represent one of many more important contributions to be made by this group in the future." FOOTNOTES See for example, George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977); Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: New Left Books, 1974). 2 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volumes I, II, III. (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986). 3 Cited in Martin Jay, "Anamnestic Totalization," Theory and Society II (1982), p. 5.

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