JAC Volume 17 Issue 1

Q: In our correspondence with both of you, we asked each of you how you currently conceptualize the pedagogy that's associated with you. We'd like to begin the conversation by giving you both the opportunity to make a kind of brief position statement.

G: I think in some ways my interests are in curriculum more than in pedagogy. That is, I start by assuming that instructors are going to be teaching in a lot of different ways. Obviously pedagogical theories are going to influence how these instructors teach, but there's no single right way to teach, especially given the increased diversity of academic culture. Although "teaching the conflicts" can and is being used in individual classrooms and informs my own pedagogy, controversy for me is also a way of organizing different classrooms and different pedagogical styles.

S: I've been interested in critical pedagogy for the last twenty or twenty-five years, and I understand it as a pedagogy that questions the status quo. I also consider it a student-centered pedagogy that has certain values, orientations, or interests, such as being democratic, dialogic, interdisciplinary, activist, and also being what I call "desocializing." I understand that human beings are social constructions. Traditionally, the classroom is teacher-centered—an authoritarian process for constructing authority-dependent selves. Critical-democratic pedagogy, as I like to call it, disconfirms this dominant way of learning. I understand critical pedagogy as one of those social processes for the reconstruction of the social self. I'd like to do that in the classroom, and that's how I understand critical pedagogy when it questions the status quo. The pedagogy that I'm attempting to deploy, as I mentioned before, is a dialogic one, which means that it "frontloads" student discourse (subject matter that comes from student expression and student conditions) and builds a dialogue upward from there, a critical dialogue. The starting point is the student response to a theme, text, or problem, and the teacher gradually elevates his or her profile inside that dialogue. Frontloading student discourse takes the place of the traditional approach, which usually begins with a teacherly lecture about the subject matter. Instead, the students are asked to have an epistemic or knowledge-making relationship to the subject matter, and the teacher backloads his or her expertise into the way the students express their understandings, thereby accepting a democratic discipline in the process. That is, the teacher-authority is being disciplined by the foundational discourse set by the students rather than the students being unilaterally disciplined by the academic discourse of the teacher. Thus critical pedagogy tries to position itself against the hegemonic culture occupying each classroom, school, college and university.

Q: Do you think that your two approaches have anything in common? Do they have shared political orientations, shared goals, shared classroom techniques?

S: I think Jerry's proposal of teaching the conflicts is extremely valuable and an excellent curricular idea. The intelligence with which he and Don Lazere have proposed it through several books and in the profession has been a real gift. I've learned from it, and I do teach the conflicts, not exactly like Jerry does, but in a way that tries to present a variety of positions around different themes or subject matters. For example, in a composition class I might begin by posing the problem to the students "What is good writing?" As the students develop their various positions and discuss their differences, I will also bring in official texts from the field that define "good writing" from four or five different points of view. I would consider this to be honoring Jerry's idea of teaching the conflicts, the notion that "good writing is" a conflicted territory. I don't want the students to think that there's a unilateral or one-dimensional answer to it, and bringing in several texts helps sophisticate and differentiate the territory. What it represents to me is that there is a variety of, let's say, "official texts" that are in conflict with each other, as well as a variety of "unofficial texts" produced by the students themselves—their positions on this issue. And so we actually have several dimensions of conflicts being taught here: the students' positions conflict with each other, the students conflict with various official texts, and the official sources also conflict with each other. I like to think of concentric and intersecting conflicts going on, so I want to put the conflicts in the unofficial student texts in relation to the conflicts of the official disciplinary ones. And then, of course, there's me, the teacher, and I have my conflicts with both of these texts: the unofficial student ones and the official professional ones, as I have my own definition of "good writing." So I'd like to propose that it's possible to use Jerry's idea of teaching the conflicts from a student-centered approach; I try to develop a voice of unofficial student texts as the foundational discourse before I integrate either my professorial voice on the issue or the conflicts from experts in the field.

G: I've come late to reading Ira's work, but I now realize that, long before I started advocating teaching the conflicts, Ira was using and writing about a method of introducing controversy in his classes. In fact I've underlined some good examples for future use that I wish I had known about earlier, and that I should already have been citing. One of the criticisms directed at me is that I emphasize faculty debate over student debate. I agree with Ira that "teaching the conflicts" does need to be located within student discourse. I also think that the tension between student discourses and academic discourses is one of the central conflicts that should organize courses and curricula. In fact one way to address the debate about academic discourse would be to incorporate that debate into our classes, asking students to take on the questions "What is academic discourse? When should one try to use it? When should one not?" And so forth.

I do have a question for Ira about a possible tension or conflict in our work. Yesterday, in a session in which you spoke, Ira, you talked about an "architecture of control" in the classroom, which takes the familiar form of seats in rows facing front, centered on the authority of the professor, and so forth. You said that this architecture of control within the classroom is typically designed to keep students at a disadvantage, to enhance the authority of the teacher. In my work I've been trying to suggest that this "architecture of control" is represented more subtly in the disconnection between courses and discourses in the standard curriculum. This comes back to my claim that there are going to be a variety of different pedagogies; for better or worse, there are going to be some who continue to use the "banking" approach to knowledge that Freire so eloquently attacks. At a conference a few years ago that I attended at which everybody was bashing the banking theory, one teacher interrupted and said, "Wait a minute, I sympathize with your point but I happen to be a good `banker.' I think I help my kids." If you agree that there are going to be a variety of teaching styles, then one can make a case that we need some teachers to be "bankers," perhaps to problematize the "critical teachers" while they in turn are problematizing the "bankers."

In any case, when students go from a critical pedagogy class to a class taught according to the banking theory, or from a class taught by a social constructionist to a class taught by an essentialist, the resulting curricular cognitive dissonance is deeply disempowering for many students. In other words, isn't there a form of disempowerment that takes place not "in the classroom" but in the spaces between classrooms, when a student goes from a Freirean class to another class where the rules suddenly change without notice, and the only way the student can effectively cope is to give each teacher what he or she "wants"? Perhaps you've taken this issue up in writing that I haven't seen, but in everything that you've written, I think, the focus is very much on the individual teacher and the individual class. There's not much sense of who the other teachers are in the institution, what they might be doing and how their explicit and implicit messages might conflict with yours. Don't we need an analysis of the clash and interplay of classes as they face the student and the resulting cognitive dissonance?

S: I think that's an important point and we should talk more about the whole curriculum. But the question of student-centered pedagogy is a curricular issue and not simply a classroom issue, because we have to ask, "What does it mean for a curriculum to invite the students to take a critical posture toward knowledge? Which kinds of pedagogy, deployed across the curriculum, encourage or discourage students from thinking of themselves as critical agents of their own education?" Students report themselves disoriented from class to class now, even though it's apparently the same type of traditional lecture pedagogy going on. There was an article written by Lucille McCarthy called "A Stranger in Strange Lands" where she describes following an undergraduate named Dave from class to class. Dave Garrison. And what Lucille McCarthy found was that even though every class Dave went to was traditional, teacher-centered, and discipline-centered, as far as he was concerned, he had to start from scratch to figure out what each teacher wanted. To him, each teacher had an idiosyncratic discourse, an idiosyncratic way of using words and deploying the course material, and he had to go in and figure them out individually. "What is this teacher's language? What is this teacher's politics? What does this teacher like? How does this teacher feel about this?" His conclusion was that if you want to get an A in a course, you have to figure out what the teacher wants, and that's not always easy. And he was talking about a traditional curriculum, so it's not that students going from dialogic to lecture-based classrooms are going to be disoriented. The students will be disoriented already because they are disempowered people in each of those idiosyncratic discourses (which are localized versions of traditional teaching).

So what I'm suggesting with the dialogic approach is, before any teacher draws on his or her academic discourse, that we pose a problem through which the students are invited immediately to practice a critical posture towards knowledge, language and learning. Whatever the subject matter is, they have to take a stance towards it, as Bruner might say—whether it's biology, accounting, English or history or whatever—and we have to ask ourselves, "What pedagogy evokes their critical posture?" and, "How do we then encourage it across the curriculum?" If a pedagogy is critical and dialogic, when the students go to classes, the changing subject matter won't matter because in each setting they'll be asked to be cognitive, critically cognitive in relation to that subject matter, so they know wherever they go that their starting point is the foundation of the classroom discourse, and the teacher will be fitting his or her subject knowledge and the learning process to meet the students. Any single class will thrive if the whole curriculum is based on what I call "frontloading" student discourse. It's not likely that an individual class can have a deep impact if we only think of this as a single-class pedagogy. We have the most to gain by trying to distribute that method throughout the entire curriculum, which is not the case now.

G: I think there's a problem there, because first of all I think a lot of students, not necessarily cynically, like traditional pedagogy, don't feel alienated by it, and in fact report a greater degree of alienation in a classroom which is student-centered. Certainly many teachers would feel either unable to operate in the way that you recommend, Ira, or would be opposed to operating that way. They might say, "It's quite okay for you to manage your classes this way, you seem to get good results, and we're not interested in shutting down your classes, but, again, I'm a good banker, and I refuse to believe that my effect is provoking more alienation than yours." It seems to me that there's a problem with your approach as a curricular approach. What you just said, as I heard you, is that critical pedagogical theory should become the meta-discourse across the curriculum, the master discourse that will give students the critical concepts with which to analyze the whole curriculum. But as you well know there are other competing groups who want to supply the meta-discourse and thus a big fight over who will supply it. It seems to me, and here maybe we are not so far apart after all, that we should bring this whole debate between traditional pedagogy, critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogies, and various other pedagogies into the classroom. It seems to me this very debate needs to inform the curriculum, but insofar as you want your team to supply the meta-discourse you risk sounding like Allan Bloom [laughter], saying, we're gonna be the big umbrella. I don't think, right now, anyone's going to be the big umbrella, but the debate itself can be clarified for students.

S: I think that we should have a very vigorous debate about pedagogy and curricular policy, and see where things sort out. A lot of people who are rather traditional lecturers and banking-style professors don't have confidence to try other methods. Because school is hegemonic, they haven't seen alternative methods, they haven't grown up with them, they can't easily observe them, they don't know what the goals are. The academy and the school system are teacher-centered, not student-centered. There is no free market of ideas or methodologies out there. In the debate we'll have to make very clear what the difference in the approaches are, and what you lose and gain in each approach, and also provide pilot models. I don't expect this to be an overnight change. I think this is a ten or twenty year curricular change.

G: I think the way to begin making it "an overnight change" is to try to move this debate right into the courses and curricula as soon as possible. The place to have this debate, it seems to me, is not in curriculum committee meetings, because it's not going to be resolved there. We're just going to recycle our positions.

S: I think it should happen in the classroom also. Your idea of making the conflicts the organizing principle of the curriculum and also of the syllabus is a sound idea. What I'm trying to point out is that, prior to having students confront the conflicts of experts about any subject matter, we should begin with the conflicts between the students and the teacher and among the students themselves. Prior to the teacher's introduction of academic subject matter the classroom terrain is already conflicted because of authoritarian social relations in education and in society. So, we don't have to bring conflicts into this territory; it's always already conflicted. I would say that how we sit, how we raise hands, how we address each other, how we use our bodies in the classroom, how we make the syllabus are all pre-existing conditions of cultural conflict in the classroom. What are the terms on which all these educational practices that constitute the curriculum are made? Those all now exist as hegemonic givers, because the institution is going merrily on its way. But those givens of authority create alienation that interferes with students making contact with intellectuals of any stripe.

G: I agree with you that we need to start not with "the conflict of experts" but with "the conflict between the students and the teacher" and the conflicts among the students. I think, however, that it's important to give students control of an academic discourse in negotiating these conflicts, and I think students can assimilate academic discourse more quickly if we find better ways to organize it for them. You're more convinced than I of the need to postpone the introduction of academic discourse and "subject matter" until the top-down dynamics of the classroom are exposed. It seems to me that those top-down dynamics are already subject matter, and to have a helpful and rigorous discussion of them (Who sits where? Who's got the power? Why are we doing it this way?) one already has to have a certain kind of vocabulary, abstractly intellectual if not strictly academic. So I have a problem with your view that we need to postpone the moment of intellectualization. Of course I fully agree that it doesn't help to lay a lot of heavy intellectual stuff on students who aren't getting it, and who just feel alienated and intimidated by the discourse, but this is why organizing that stuff for students is so crucial.

S: Let's take the subject matter of the learning process itself. Now we could bring in several different learning theorists and how they talk about how the classroom should be structured. We could bring in constructivists like Dewey and Whitehead, Vygotsky and Bruner, and we can bring in cognitivists, to present a disciplinary debate that would be very rooted in the history of educational ideas. Or we can ask the students in their own language—we don't have to use special language—it's not a necessity to use academic discourse—we could ask the students "Would you rather sit in a circle or in rows, and why?" and we'd have a debate on that. "And would you rather raise hands or speak by mutual consent? What do you think an A grade should be? What's a B grade? How many absences and latenesses? What does it mean to be late? Should you get plus and minus grading or is it simple letter grading? Do you prefer a lecture course or a discussion seminar?" and so on. We can pose all these structural questions about how to organize and govern the learning process prior to the introduction of formal subject matter from a canon or from a discipline.

The difference that I'm drawing here between our approaches is that I'm interested in teaching to the power conflicts between the students and the institution, the students and the teacher, the students and the process, and the students with each other. You're right, Jerry, that's "subject matter" but it's not canonical or academic or disciplinary subject matter. It does have a base in, say, sociology, philosophy of education, or learning theory, so we can then turn to bodies of expert knowledge or texts that we could integrate in, and that's exactly what I would like to do. But if I had brought in the academic texts first, it would have preempted the language with which students relate to these issues prior to encountering the academic versions.

G: Maybe, but maybe not. I think this is an important issue, backloading versus frontloading. I think we've done a bad job of frontloading, but I'm not prepared to give up on it. [Laughter.] You said yesterday in a presentation, "I have to maintain a low profile at the beginning of the class so that the students have less to mimic. If I come on strong as a teacher at the beginning of the class they will just mimic me." Well, mimicking you may be the first necessary step before they can go beyond you. Arguably, we should want to give students something to mimic because mimicry is a means of acquiring power. If it's a successful mimetic transfer, if you frontload academic discourse well, and the students can identify with your language and use that language, then they may be ready to mix it up with you sooner than they would be if you say, "Okay, at this stage I don't want you guys to try to use my language; use your own language." This is a difficult question that probably can't be settled at the theoretical level since conditions would differ from class to class. But I have a problem with your assumption that the teacher who's aggressive early in the process is likely to suppress the students, as if there were an inverse ratio between the teacher being aggressive and the students being passive.

S: I think that academic discourses, as we know them in various disciplines, and student discourses developed in everyday life, are both inadequate instruments to develop the critical culture in a democratic society. I can't embrace academic discourse as it now exists as the endpoint of student development; neither am I patting students on the back and embracing their discourse as something liberatory and wonderful. Both students and teachers are social constructions. We both start out as products of an unequal history, and all our discourses are infected by hegemony, but we have the option of critique and transcendence, which is what I hope critical pedagogy makes happen. That means I don't want students to mimic my discourse and I don't want to copy theirs; rather I want to listen to their discourse, and then—how should I put it—situate my discourse into the profile of theirs so we create some kind of tension and dynamic where they're not merely copying me, but we're all trying to invent a new critical idiom of communication that we don't have yet (what I call "the third idiom"). If I don't adjust my discourse to theirs, then the students are going to feel like strangers in a strange land who have to mimic my language to get a grade and they'll simply be cloning me.

G: I like your idea of "a new idiom of communication" that isn't either that of the teachers or the students but contains and engages the tensions between them. But let me suggest how a focus on controversy might enable us to avoid having to choose so starkly between backloading and frontloading. I've lately been starting a lot of my classes with a statement by Allan Bloom that I've quoted in Professing Literature and Beyond the Culture Wars: "In good education we just read the books. We don't have all these fancy methodologies which come between the reader and the text."² And I put over against that a short statement from a review of Bloom by Rorty that says, "We never just read the books; we always bring our own contexts and politics to reading."³ These sentences are very short and succinct, yet they open out into a lot of different kinds of questions. Now, the possible advantage of doing this is that while you're frontloading academic discourse, you're presenting students with clashing views, so it's not exactly clear who's right, nor which view you as teacher identify with, and the question is a somewhat open one. I mean, Bloom isn't obviously totally wrong, so that by frontloading a controversy that one hopes is not at a highly professional level but on a general level, you're frontloading in a way that discourages passive conformity to the teacher's view because there are two different views here. Might this be a way of not having to choose between our discourse and theirs?

S: I think that's a better way to begin. I would just urge that, prior to the introduction of these various positions, the students should characterize for themselves what their individual positions are vis ã vis "reading." Their "unofficial" texts should be articulated prior to introducing "official" texts, so that student thought is juxtaposed to various academic thinkers. We're very good at saying, "Well, in the field there's Bloom and then there's Hirsch and there's Sizer and there's Goodlad," so that we know the various positions there are in educational criticism in the last ten years. But where are the students positioned as active rhetors in this debate?

G: Yes, why should they care about this debate?

S: Why should they care about it? What questions do they bring to the debate? Do they become cognitively active before we presume to bring the debate to them? There's so much to choose from in, say, the last ten years, such an enormous amount of material. How do we have a principle of selection when we want to introduce the conflicts? What the students say and how they perceive educational crisis, educational reform and so on might best inform us about what kind of selections to make from the conflicts in the official canon. Then I would feel like a more competent teacher because I would be observing the profile of student consciousness first before I then presume to construct a reading list.

Also frontloading does something else: it invites them to be active learners rather than passive ones. Before receiving texts they're producing texts, so that the classroom is considered a site of cultural production and not just a site of cultural consumption. Cultural critique is extremely important and the way you've designed it is really a useful way to do that. But then can they also experience themselves as cultural producers? We're constructing here a democratic speech community, and that speech community then reaches out from what it understands to the things that it doesn't know. It's going to reach out into canonical debates we bring to it.

Q: That brings up criticisms that other people have made of both your pedagogies or approaches, that we might talk about. Jerry, you've been criticized, for example, by Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh in an article in Democratic Culture, for not teaching truly critical thinking, for using the tools of the status quo, like democratic debate, to support the status quo. What would you say to this, Jerry?

G: Please remind me—which aspect of the status quo?

Q: Capitalism.

G: Oh, the easy one. [Laughter] I guess I plead guilty. I think capitalism is probably here to stay. One can score points in certain precincts of the academy by engaging in ultra-left denunciations of capitalism, but if we're talking about helping students such denunciations are a dead end. I mean, are we supposed to prevent students from being able to get jobs in order to save them from corruption by success? There's an interesting dialogue that Ira and Freire have about this issue where they say, quite sensibly, that it would be perverse for critical teachers to attempt to make it impossible for students to succeed within capitalism so they can't be co-opted by the system.⁴ As a sort of sentimental socialist myself, I'm aware of the profound problems of capitalism, but I don't see an alternative right now but to try to help students and to try to reform capitalism. Richard Ohmann's English in America has recently been reissued after twenty years, and Ohmann has written a new introduction, and I've written a foreword to it. He makes some good statements about the problems with a radicalism that is so eager to change everything that it changes nothing, and he also talks about the mistake of trashing "mere reformism." He argues that we need to start distinguishing between reformism that can make a difference and reformism that doesn't really change anything. It's easy to make big, sweeping, doctrinaire attacks on capitalism and I too could do it, but what good would that do? I don't think it would help students.

Q: Would you agree with this criticism of Jerry's work, Ira?

S: I think that the "teaching the conflicts" method is a progressive step forward in educational discourse, because we have not had teaching the conflicts throughout the history of American education. What we've had is a kind of one-dimensional required syllabus, and part of the tremendous battles of the culture wars of the last twenty or thirty years is that finally there's a serious critique of the standard syllabus. Well, there's always been a critique of the standard pedagogy going back to Dewey and earlier than Dewey. There have been child-centered and then progressive education alternatives being tested continually. But they've always been driven to the margins. The status quo has been intolerant of dissent and alternatives, and it hasn't liked options to itself sinking root in the educational system. Teaching the conflicts represents an ideal of a forum in which all positions are obliged to confront each other in a curriculum which does not legislate out of existence feminism, multiculturalism, queer theory, Marxism or socialism or any of the critical, counter-hegemonic discourses. So I see that as trying to hold the democratic myth of the nation to its own ideals of a democratic forum which we don't now have.

G: Absolutely.

S: The question I have is a pedagogical one. Presenting in class only "official" academic texts will privilege academic discourse and the teacher, which will unbalance the process, and marginalize the students who can't discourse easily on those texts chosen to "teach the conflicts." But I'm optimistic that they eventually will if their own unofficial discourse is frontloaded, so my challenge to Jerry is to ask him to avoid privileging the existing texts of academic discourse, and to face up to the prior conflicts of the students versus the institution.

G: First, to pick up on your first point, Ira, I'm pleased that you seem to agree that teaching the conflicts would figure to make less marginal the kind of radical critique that Marxists like Zavarzadeh and Morton are talking about. Teaching the conflicts is about creating a public sphere in which Marxist and feminist discourses are not ghettoized and reduced to talking to each other all the time. I'm interested in there being a strong Marxist and socialist presence in universities, and preserving that may not be easy over the next few decades. I think it's in the interests of radicals to create a kind of public sphere in which their own positions can become part of a larger national conversation instead of remaining marginalized, largely, in the academy.

I do agree with Ira's concern, though, and I'd have to admit that in my own teaching I've often felt frustrated because the gulf that he talks about between professorial discourse and student discourse, even with teaching the conflicts, is still very much there. But perhaps we need to discuss what we mean by "professorial discourse." I notice, Ira, that you seem to make use of op ed pieces and letters to the editor and so forth in your course reading material. Such material seems to me usefully intermediate between academic discourse and student discourse, although to some students an op ed piece in the New York Times would look indistinguishable from an academic article, with the level of discussion seeming very esoteric. So there's a problem of finding the right kind of material that's in between, intermediate between, academic and student discourse, and that maybe begins to move to that not yet existent different discourse that Ira talks about which isn't quite either of them. In any case, I suspect that in practice Ira and I are not all that far apart on the kind of "academic discourse" we would use with beginning students.

Q: Some types of critical pedagogy have been criticized, for example by you, Jerry, in "A Critique of Critical Pedagogy" and in parts of Beyond the Culture Wars for not really being liberatory at all, and for backing students into a corner until the students think the thoughts that the supposedly liberatory teacher approves of. What do you each have to say about that issue?

G: Well, first I'd just like to note that Greg, Jay, and I were basing that critique largely on a reading of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire's Education and Critical Consciousness, works by Henry Giroux, bell hooks, and Patricia Ellsworth, and so this critique has to be delimited to those texts. I think the articles do overgeneralize—one shouldn't tar everybody with these criticisms. But I did make the criticisms.

Q: What do you think of that, Ira?

S: In class, my critical practice is to say as little as possible for as long as possible, so I maintain initially a low profile as a rhetor pronouncing positions. Often, as a result, students become very curious—they want me to say more, they want to know what I think. I'll say something if they ask me directly a question, but the word I repeat to myself as I go into the first weeks of a course is "restraint, restraint, restraint." Don't overreact, don't talk too much, listen, question.

G: From their writings one gathers that not all exponents of critical pedagogy are as restrained as Ira. I think the critics, including myself, are concerned about that moment at which radical political critique enters the class, a Marxist critique or a feminist critique in a class where many of the students may not be particularly predisposed to that kind of critique.

S: In regard to how a teacher's articulated positions enter a classroom dialogue, I like what you said in Beyond the Culture Wars Jerry: the problem is the distinction between "(1) raising political questions in a classroom, (2) endorsing a particular answer to those questions in a way that leaves the discussion open for disagreement, and (3) `using the classroom to impose a specific ideology on students'" (148-49). I think we have to be sensitive to those three possibilities. So one thing I'm very eager to find out is how comfortable students are disagreeing with me, and I tell them in the beginning that, first, if they don't talk much then I'm not going to talk very much, I'm not going to feel comfortable saying a lot. Secondly, I say that I won't feel free to say what I believe unless they feel free to say what they believe. I need to be reassured that they feel that they can disagree and say what they think or else they won't hear what I think. I also point out in class those A papers that disagreed completely with what I think, reassuring the students that there is no penalty for disagreeing with the teacher. I always treat people who disagree with me with special respect, don't interrupt them, and encourage them to extend their remarks. I don't act impatient or peremptory or send dirty looks in that direction. At the end of class I go up to them and I thank them for disagreeing with me. If I don't make special efforts to people who disagree with me, then I don't feel comfortable saying what I believe in.

G: It may, however, be hard for students to believe us when we reassure them that they should disagree with us when we don't present a model of disagreeing with our own colleagues in front of students. I've been arguing that students would be more likely to disagree with us if they saw us disagreeing with one another more frequently. That is, if we practiced the sort of open debate that we preach. The risk of doing this is that students might be silenced again because teachers would hog the discussion, but I think that's a risk we have to take and try to allow for.

S: Jerry, you say that having several colleagues from different positions present their different points of view on a text or an issue will authorize students to feel more comfortable about disagreeing with us because they're witnessing colleagues disagreeing with each other. They're getting a model of disagreement.⁵ I think that's helpful and useful, but I think it bypasses some other processes of development. I'd like to start the course by considering the students, rather than my colleagues, to be the "unofficial" authorities. Instead of using official academic texts as counter-authorities to each other, I'd want to start out with authorizing the students to behave as counter-authorities to the teacher, the discipline, the institution, the society, etc.

G: It's a tricky problem because, on the one hand, as you imply, some students may not feel ready to be counter-authorities, given the authority gulf between the student and the teacher, and bringing in the teachers as counter-authorities can just deepen that kind of withdrawal. On the other hand, I have seen successful instances where these models were mixed, that is, where you had, say, a panel on "What is good writing?": with two profs, one TA, two undergraduates. This is one way of overcoming the authority gulf. But it depends a lot on local conditions.

Ira, you've mentioned the need for a new structure that would be broader, wider than the small classroom—this idea you were talking about yesterday of interdisciplinary classes that bring together broader issues. Do you think we might evolve a new structure in which we learn how to negotiate this gulf between student discourse and teacher discourse by participating together in public forums that are set up in such a way as to appeal to those students that are comfortable with them? Of course then we would have to worry about deepening the gulf between the students who are already members of the academic club and those who aren't. But don't we need to evolve new curricular structures that will allow a new kind of discourse to emerge?

S: I think one of those structures is what you suggest: that we should have an organizing principle of teaching the conflicts, with in-class forum debates part of the routine ways of curriculum. I want to suggest another way of thinking in an interdisciplinary way about reconstructing the college curriculum.

Here's what I have in mind: instead of this vast, subordinated enterprise called "freshman comp," we would recover writing as a rhetorical and social act of making meaning, constructing the self in society, producing culture. Concretely, when students come to campus, their writing requirement is to affiliate with a project. That project could be called "Feeding the Homeless," or "Christian Ministry," or it could be called "The Young Democrats," or it could be called "The Yearbook," whatever on-campus or off-campus group interested students, who could also form new groups if they wanted. They would get academic credit for participating in a project involving rhetorical activities of writing, reading, debating, and speaking, for which they keep a log and write analyses, and for which faculty serve as mentors, guides, and the assessors of that activity. Any groups willing to sponsor writing internships for students will be available to students for academic credit for being the chroniclers, rhetors, and ethnographers of these projects (tenants' unions, adult education projects, people with AIDS newsletters, etc.). Anywhere that there's a project or group underway students take part as rhetorical interns who do ethnography, produce newsletters and journals, write up the reports, keep the minutes, send flyers, proposals—whatever language activities are required. We no longer consider freshman composition or basic writing as a disembodied language activity. Instead, writing would be taught as making meaning of experiences and discourses through discourse. I see this "project" model of rhetoric accompanying the purposeful writing-in-the-disciplines approach, that is, situating discourse in ongoing curricular discourses as well as in extra-curricular organizations.

G: This seems to me a terrific idea. Perhaps the main obstacle to it—it's what has perpetuated the isolationist model you're talking about—is the problem of administratability. The advantage of having hundreds of sections of comp is we know where everybody is on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, know where the instructors are and so forth. But we need to start thinking—and some management school kinds of thinking might be helpful here—about how to make more interesting educational models administerable. Otherwise, I can already hear people saying, "Oh, that's a great idea, but of course it's impractical because we can't administer it." It seems so normal now to go to a class and the bell rings, and then you go to another class, and of course the students get used to it and they like it because that's the routine. Changing the routine is hard because it might seem like chaos at first, but I think absolutely it can be done. One administrative structure that we do have some experience with as academics is the conference, in which people do the sorts of things that you're talking about: go out and write up observations or reports or analyses and so forth and then come back and present them. I think that we could be adapting conference-like structures to make the sort of thing you're talking about administerable and therefore practical, and probably even save money in the long run too.⁶

Q: When people criticize your pedagogies or approaches, are there ways in which each of you feel misrepresented or misunderstood?

S: Yeah, well, of course Jerry's got it all wrong! [Laughter.]

G: How much time do we have? [Laughter.]

S: Well, I would like people to take my interest in humor more seriously, because I write about comedy in every book, and for some reason the reviewers and academics seem uncomfortable that a discourse in education should have a humorous element to it. I also think that the discussions of the body are very important: body posture, body position, body feeling, the body and power relations, and its relation to empowering education. I would also like this idea of frontloading student discourse to be understood as part of a student-centered pedagogy that is not permissive or know-nothing, not do-nothing or laissez-faire. The teacher and students have responsible roles in it.

And I'd also like critical pedagogy to learn from some of the feminist critiques of it, including that we have to talk more about the ethical dimensions of what we do, and that we also have to understand the different authorities that different bodies bring into the classroom. Women bring in different authority than men, and I think that's been a helpful feminist criticism. I'd like to say that there's been some female pioneers in critical pedagogy who have not been given credit in some feminist critiques of critical pedagogy, people like Nan Elsasser, Patricia Irvine, Elsa Auerbach, Nina Wallerstein, Pia Moriarty, and Marilyn Frankenstein, and other women who I consider to be people who broke ground in this field. They were feminists and also critical pedagogues. And I'd like to name them so that critical pedagogy is not only read as a male phenomenon, a male construction.

I think the critique by feminists and others that our language should be accessible and self-critical is a wonderful idea. People should criticize any critical pedagogy that is written in inaccessible or unnecessarily complicated language. I would also like critical pedagogy to be understood as a political stance and an activist posture and not as technical wizardry. That is, it's a critical posture towards the construction of the self in society, that's interested in questioning the status quo. Whether it's a status quo of knowledge or the status quo of power relations in the classroom, we should question the existing society that shaped us a certain way, asking if it's meeting our needs or if we should design alternatives.

I also want to say that, for any person who's interested in becoming a critical educator or in transforming himself or herself, it's not an overnight process, and a lot of patience is required. Some people say, "Well, I tried it last semester and it didn't work" [Laughter].

G: I get that too.

S: You get that too?

G: My answer is, "Well, you didn't call me up and invite me in—how do you expect it to work without me?" [Laughter]

S: A lot of patience is required, and an experimental attitude.

The last thing I'll say is that sometimes we think of transforming pedagogy in an historical vacuum and don't consider that the political climate has been hostile and conservative for twenty years now. What's possible in such a political climate is less than what's possible in a more insurgent or progressive era. I'd like us to blame ourselves less for some of the restrictions or limits that we discover in experimenting and transforming, and understand that we're pushing against some powerful limits set by the climate. What we can do, we accomplish inside a specific setting in a real history.

G: Well, I've been told a lot that conflict is male and macho and so forth. Quite often I notice that those feminists who tell me that conflict is male are very confrontational in their way of saying so. It seems to me that that issue needs to be sorted out; I certainly agree that there has been in our culture, and still is, a certain strongly gendered aspect to controversy and conflict, and asymmetrical power relations play into that. I should note, however, that Beyond the Culture Wars was a book that attempted to get a general audience and to address people outside the university, many of whom were conservatives or who had been persuaded by people like Bloom and D'Souza, and consequently I failed to cover my left flank enough. I left myself exposed to certain criticisms that I am beginning more to address.

Another criticism I receive is, "Teaching the conflicts would assume a level playing field, which we don't have." My answer is if we have to wait until we have a level playing field until we can have a discussion, then we are never going to have a discussion. That's not a rationalization for a non-level playing field. Raising our conflicts to the level of public discussion and making them more prominent would not itself level the playing field, but it would at least bring that issue of the non-level playing field more out into the open for discussion. For people who identify with progressive politics, it's in our interest to create a public sphere of debate, which means engaging people on the right.

This, however, provokes another kind of criticism: "We don't want to debate the right because that would be playing into their hands. They specialize in cheap sound-bite communication, and they would have an advantage over us." I don't think these are very good answers. I think not debating conservatives in effect just lets them win. I think engaging the right publicly, in public forums, is a way of getting some of their power, displacing their dominant assumptions, and a way of winning over third parties. I don't want to start talking a rhetoric of blame against the left—I've done a lot of that already anyway—but what I've been criticizing lately, and some of my critiques of critical pedagogy go in this direction, is the left's in-groupism and insularity. As David Damrosch has pointed out recently in We Scholars, the academy has always been structured around various kinds of in-group discourse. In some ways that's been very good for the academic left, making possible an academic Rainbow Coalition with a solidarity that couldn't have been built if it weren't for this in-group dynamic. But while the power that the left has achieved on campus has been facilitated by this in-group dynamic, there comes a point of diminishing returns, where you're talking to yourself all the time.

For example, nowadays the students who are already predisposed to left politics often congregate within the Women's Studies class, but the ones who really need to hear that "the personal is the political" are not there. I see teaching the conflicts as a way of coming out of our foxholes. The right has been very clever about how to win over the middle, and if the left is going to contend more effectively for the middle it has to be willing to take the risk of losing the debate. There are no risk-free positions here.

S: I would add that we on the left might do very well with the middle if we had access to the middle. And that access to middle America is blocked by the massive corporate control of the media over its outlets. There isn't an opportunity to see how the left would do with the mainstream. We are not allowed access. Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives have immense access to mainstream media. No wonder the left wing seems just sectarian, ideological, academic, incomprehensible, inaccessible, dogmatic, doctrinaire, out of touch, whatever! [Laughter] Dogma, doctrine, sectarianism, polemical weirdness also exist on the right. It's just that they're allowed an enormous number of media outlets to develop their political assets and rhetoric. So until people left of center have equal access to middle America, we really don't know what our success or failure will be, and it's something that I would like to find out, if only ABC would give me a talk show.

G: The arena to which we do have "access" is education, which is a major mass-medium. But what I'm suggesting is a rethinking of the Sixties strategy. The Sixties strategy was, if I can sum it up, we create an alternative, progressive academic culture and gradually broaden it, and at some point it makes significant inroads on the wider society. And I wouldn't disparage this strategy—it has been effective up to a point. The Sixties changed the whole culture, and critical pedagogy and multiculturalism have influenced further significant changes, which is why the right is so angry about them.

S: Exactly.

G: Yet, I would also say that we should start rethinking the Sixties culture in a conservative age. In the sixties, it made sense to try to radicalize the country by radicalizing the curriculum. I don't think that strategy any longer makes sense, nor is it ethically defensible, although the right certainly has no scruples about the conservative radicalization of the curriculum. It's more in our interests to try to create the debate first, engage the right, and thereby seek to win over the middle ground of students rather than trying to radicalize them directly. I don't think, Ira, you do try to do this, but one gets the idea reading some theorists of radical pedagogy that they're still following the sixties strategy: we'll radicalize the students and they'll radicalize the country. I don't think it's likely to happen that way.

S: The sixties are over. Someone tell Gingrich! [Laughter.] What we're doing in education is remarkably sensible given the restraints under which we're doing it. For example, there is no program in the United States where you can get a critical pedagogy degree at any level. So if you want to become a critical teacher, you have to work hard at finding avenues of experience, you have to seek out the publications, you have to seek out the conferences, you have to write to the people in the field. Under these limits it's very hard to promote your own development, and that's not good. . . .

G: I'd have to admit I'm not too keen on the idea of a critical pedagogy degree, which seems to me would narrow the scope of radicalism by making it a certified degree track. Giroux uses the phrase "alternative public spheres." I think we've got enough alternative public spheres and need to get at the big public sphere.

S: Well, I agree with that, but, like Mary Louise Pratt writes in "Arts of the Contact Zone," we also need "safehouses" where people have institutional space to develop themselves.

G: I don't think there is a safehouse, I guess.

Q: Two last questions. First: Do you trace your politics to any sort of personal source, such as your background, your family, your education, your life experience, or your work?

S: I grew up in the working class, and coming from the working class has had a powerful influence on my thinking and my politics and my feelings. And when I got my Ph.D. I wanted to teach at a white working-class college, to go back and work among students who came out of the same class and background as I did, so that's important to me. I'd say the 1960s, when I was a student, was very important to me; I was a very idealistic young person taking part in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and then the women's rights movement. And then I came to City University as a young professor, and moved into a new battle in the Seventies for open admissions and free tuition at the City University of New York. Then I worked with Paulo Freire for a good number of years. All these experiences have helped push me that way.

G: I'm a sociological stereotype. David Reisman's book about the other-directed generation of the fifties, The Lonely Crowd, described me perfectly. In the Sixties I became radicalized along with a lot of others and got swept up in the anti-war movement. But I think of myself as part of an in-between generation: if I were a little younger I would have been a more unequivocal radical; if I were a little older, I might be a neoconservative. I think many people of about my age—I'm 58—have an ambivalent relationship both to the radical left and the counter-culture and to the neoconservative reaction to it. So I'm often in an odd position: I'm a leftist who mainly has written very critically of the left, temperamentally feeling more comfortable taking an oppositional attitude toward the oppositionists.

Q: And now a final question. You've both been teaching for a long time. In the time you've been teaching, how have things changed: in what directions do you think you've seen American higher education go, and where are we going next? What are your hopes and fears?

G: Well, the changes have been mind boggling, especially in English and the Humanities. When I started there was a certain conception of what counted as professional work, and of how one was supposed to write. As a graduate student, you tried to learn how to sound like you were eighty years old, like Edmund Wilson, or Douglas Bush, people who sounded as if they knew everything. I think one reason why things could change abruptly is that the old models had reached a kind of impasse by the sixties.

As for where things are going, I don't know. I hope that they're going in the direction I've been pushing for, but who can say? The fact that so many long-suppressed conflicts are now out in the open creates an unpredictable situation. And it is fascinating to watch the culture try to deal with such a new situation, where basic values, things that were taken for granted for so long, now can't be taken for granted, and anyone you meet may well think your assumptions are crazy or dangerous and vice-versa. I don't think the culture knows how to deal with such a climate—certainly it's dealing with these conflicts very badly. I'm not exempt from such neurotic reactions, but I think that at some point we're going to have to recognize that if we don't learn how to argue about these conflicts out in the open, they're just going to get uglier and uglier. I don't know if that's optimism or pessimism, but I'm kind of optimistic.

S: Well, I think the situation is very threatening and very promising at the same time—sometimes I feel hopeful and sometimes I feel menaced by the way things have evolved, as if the academy and the nation are moving right and left at the same time, a long period of polarization.

Personally, I've learned a great deal since I began teaching in the early 1970s, teaching remedial writing to open admissions, working-class students in the City University of New York at Staten Island Community College. For the first decade or two I primarily focused on critical pedagogy, critical teaching methods, student-centered approaches and so on. Recently, in the last five years, I have become more preoccupied with democratic process. And my new book, The Siberian Syndrome, will be about an experiment in power-sharing, in a very detailed narrative and ethnography of a classroom experiment in shared authority. That's become important to me: to face the ethics and the politics of the learning process itself.

I'm also extremely impressed at the tenacity and ingenuity of feminists, multiculturalists, deconstructionists, and critical teachers in developing themselves despite the depth of what I've called the "conservative restoration" of the past 25 years. The PC campaign raises such ridiculous alarms about the academy being taken over by the left; to call it an overstatement is charitable. We're under a lot of pressure, a lot of political scrutiny, and yet despite the resistance of the status quo, cultures of difference and dissonance have been making progress. The interest in critical pedagogy around the country is strong and growing—more things are being published, I get more letters and phone calls. I feel a second generation is emerging that's interested in these alternative questions and pedagogies.

Now, what worries me is that the social contract of America is being written unilaterally by the corporations, and education at all levels is implicated in the new corporate plan for the future, the new plan to maximize profits. You know the famous words "restructuring, globalization, downsizing" and so on. Capitalism is interested in erasing the borders that interfere with the flow of labor, commodities, services, and capital itself. So in a sense, while postmodernism has talked about erasing borders, capital is way ahead on that score.

G: Absolutely.

S: It's been erasing borders since it first invented the multinational corporation in 1961, and that invention involves a more dramatic difference between the rich and poor, and a growing gap between the authority and the options of the ruling elite and that of working people. The public sector is deteriorating and declining terribly, and privatization as it's being applied to all sectors is just a continued extension of the capitalist ethic and enterprise, to transfer wealth to corporate needs from public needs. The school system may be privatized in many places, and we're going to have private security forces, private walled neighborhoods with private guards at the gates, and private hospitals with private doctors who will be the only place you can get good healthcare. The public sector will become the dumping ground for the immiserated working class and the poor, and the top twenty percent will have the private universities for their kids, which are in very good shape, the private beaches that they can go to, private parks and resorts. All of us who are in different territories called women's rights or tenants' rights, health care or gay rights or environmentalism or critical pedagogy or multiculturalism, all of us need to find common ground to build a coalition that can reinvent the economy of which education is a very troubled part right now.

Q: Is that the last word, or do you want it, Jerry?

G: I agree with Ira. But I think to have a chance to "reinvent the terms of the economy" we have to stop demonizing corporations, business people, and the media, and start looking for our potential allies (and financial backers) there. A sociology student who studies right-wing groups put it best: "we should locate those media people and others whom they denounce as `liberals' and bond with them."