JAC Volume 16 Issue 3

Xin Liu Gale relates that although she had been an English teacher in China for ten years, as a new teaching assistant she was nervous as she stood ready to teach her first American English class. She wondered what entitled her, a Chinese native, to teach English speakers their native tongue. Watching those twenty-five students staring at her in expectation, she feared that they would walk out of the classroom as soon as she spoke in her conspicuously foreign accent—and she was genuinely surprised when they did not. "These American students," she reflected, "have granted me their consent to be my students; what can I do to be worthy of their trust?" (153). While this anecdote appears at the conclusion of Gale's Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom, I envision this pivotal moment in Gale's pedagogical life as the point of departure for her intellectual journey, since her text illuminates how, as teachers, we can reponsibly use our authority to work toward creating an environment of trust—the kind that Gale experienced that first day—and generate reciprocity between the domain of the academy and students' home cultures.

Winner of the 1995 W. Ross Winterowd Award for the Most Outstanding Book in Composition Theory, Teachers, Discourses, and Authority investigates the issue of teacher authority in the classroom. Gale begins by providing a historical perspective on the changing role of authority in the academy, tracing the shift from teacher-centered to more student-centered classrooms brought about in part by CUNY's open admissions policy in the 1960s. She credits radical educationists such as Ira Shor, Paulo Freire, Michael Holzman, and Henry Giroux with advancing analysis of the relationship between power and literacy and thus contributing greatly to a "new understanding" of teacher authority. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Gale reminds us that the teacher's authority is securd by the teacher's discourse and can never be disassociated from academic authority: teacher discourse invariably embodies the dominant culture's ideology and ultimately reflects class privilege. Thus, while she applauds radical educationists for articulating teaching as a political act, she argues that radical pedagogy ultimately fails because it seeks to substitute an old canon for a new one, a substitution insufficient to prevent teacher authority from becoming oppressive. She stresses that we need a "new description" of teacher authority that acknowledges the double-sidedness of authority and discourse and enables us to use them both more constructively in the classroom.

Gale makes a significant move in this direction as she seeks to redefine Richard Rorty's notion of normal/abnormal discourse, which she deems inadequate as a theoretical framework. Rather, she asserts that three kinds of discourse—Normal Discourse (academic discourse), Responsive Abnormal Discourse (discourse that intentionally challenges and draws from normal discourse), and Nonresponsive Abnormal Discourse (student discourse)—"form a continuum, with the dominant discourse occupying the middle ground from which the teacher's radical discourse and the students' discourse(s) extend toward opposite ends" (58). If normal discourse can be simply defined as the language of the academy, Responsive Abnormal Discourse is characterized by "the writer's familiarity with the norms, conventions, ideologies, and major concerns of normal discourse as well as by the writer's intention to ignore or abandon them" (80). When writers intentionally corrupt a discourse, they do so as a kind of linguistic rebellion, and this manipulation of language becomes the discourse equivalent of an sledgehammer, since it shatters canonical knowledge (normal discourse) while still relying on the underlying conventions of normal discourse which produced it.

On the other hand, Nonresponsive Abnormal Discourse, student discourse, demonstrates a lack of control on the part of the writer, who has a vague understanding of normal discourse but is not aware enough of its "content and secrets" to use the discourse efficiently. The problem, as Gale views it, is in the way that teachers have traditionally positioned their own knowledge/discourse against students' discourse. As she urges,

As Gale suggests, this concept of a "connecting point" is relevant for those minority groups who struggle for literacy in a doinant culture. She sees this union of discourses as the means by which to develop critical literacy and argues that the goal of the first-year composition class is to bring students into direct contact with a discourse different from their own, yet allow their voices to also be heard. Gale theorizes this melding of discourses in a two-level interaction. The primary interaction aims at familiarizing students speaking Nonresponsive Abnormal Discourse with Normal Discourse so that they can break away from their home language, and the secondary interaction "keeps a watchful eye of normal discourse's authority lest it becomes silencing, for Responsive Abnormal Discourse knows well how the institutional constraints can intimidate and oppress those from the underprivileged communities" (118).

Gale describes teachers who participate in the two-level interaction in the classroom as "edifying teachers." Like Rorty's edifying philosophers, edifying teachers speak abnormal discourse and maintain a critical distance from normal discourse and the dominant culture. She distinguishes edifying teachers by their "ability to turn the constraints of discourse, authority, and institutional practices into creative and enabling power through communicating with their students across boundaries of communities, cultures, discourses, and disciplines" (6). Ultimately, Gale asks us to see ourselves as edifying teachers who speak two discourses that represent different intellectual traditions and cultures. It is through the conflict of the two discourses that the edifying teacher attempts to edify the "existing symbolic system so that it will be less hegemonic and exclusive" (123-24). While edifying teachers acknowledge their role as cultural agents and realize that they are responsible, even obligated, to teach normal discourse, they always remain wary of its hegemonic power. Edifying teachers work to bring students' home culture into the academic community, enabling students to participate in the conversation and eventually generate their own Responsive Abnormal Discourse.

The power and credence of Gale's text is also in the interspersion of narrative from her experience as a teacher of English in China. Gale tells a remarkable story of being hired, despite her lack of credentials, to teach English at a high school where most of the students' parents worked in a nearby textile factory. The only texts Gale had available were excerpts from newspapers and Mao's works, and Gale tells about a promising student, Tang Li, who wanted to become a teacher of English. Tang Li's father, a textile worker, opposed his daughter's continuing with her education, and Tang Li succumbed to her father's authority. After high school graduation, like many of Gale's students, Tang Li became a worker in the same textile factory, and Gale laments that "Tang Li had to spend the rest of her life standing in front of a machine, weaving with her hands rather than creating with her brain" (42).

Gale's experience of teaching in China during the Cultural Revolution shows that teachers, as cultural agents for the institution, can never truly sever their ties. As she observes, "As long as teachers want to have power to oppose the dominant society, they have to belong to the academic institution and become part of its oppositional tradition. It is this dual role that the teacher has to recognize" (46). And it is this recognition that Gale helps us achieve.