Composition: History & Theory: 1970 - 1979
College English, Volume 34, No. 3: 1972
Description
CONTENTS
Beyond Student-Centered Teaching: The Dialectical Materialist Form of a Literature Course (Brent Harold, Brown University): “During these last few years, in which capitalist America’s barbarism has become clear to so many of its citizens, many teachers of literature have tried to make their courses into forces for social and political change…” In his article, Harold focuses on student-centered Teaching: He believes that this method usually de-emphasis of grades, exams, and lectures. Instead, student-centered teaching emphasizes the freedom and independence of students. This method of teaching is appealing to Harold because it leads to the development of political consciousness, it breaks up entrenched academic forms, it leads to the mistrust of the received world, and it increases sensitivity to and advocacy of the needs of the people. However, Harold argues that student-centered education reform has yet to produce “spectacular results for the politically conscious or anybody else.” This new emphasis on freedom and independence has lead to an unhealthy encouragement of introspection and aimlessness. Who do we blame? Harold says that it is tempting to blame the state of affairs solely on conservative administrators. It is equally tempting to blame the failure of our educational innovations on the failure of our whole economic, social and political system (inhumane and corrupt society will likely fail to produce a meaningful educational system) It is also tempting to blame the drab authoritarian models of teaching. The trouble with student-centered teaching, Harold decides, is: while it eliminates authoritarian structures, it leaves intact the dullest aspect of the traditional course. The basis of its training in status quo values and attitudes: namely, its idealism. Harold’s definition of Idealism is: the tendency to experience ideas as abstracted from the concrete, social experiences of the people holding them, as well as to abstract the people themselves from their actual classroom (and other social situations). Examples of Idealism in the Literature Classroom, according to Harold: 1) The Abstract Participants: Every teacher and Every student – depending heavily on the universal “we” (meaning all human beings experience a similar human condition). Teachers and students begin to experience themselves as abstractions. 2) Education Without Advocacy – subscribing to sacred concepts of academic neutrality and professional purism. 3) Accumulation vs. Awareness – Every student is systematically trained in accumulation of a repertoire of stances rather than in awareness of his own developing intellectual identity. 4) Abstract Subject Matter: The Tyranny of Great Works – Assuming that students who do not appreciate great works need more education. 5) Writing as an abstract Exercise – Instead of writing to all participants out of a desire to affect the course of things, the student writes as an exercise to the teacher. 6) The Class as Pseudo-Collective – The student comes to see the class as something happening to him or her. Harold’s Solution: He advocates “innovative,” “progressive,” “radical,” or “Marxist” pedagogy . The antidote to stultifying idealism in the classroom is its opposite, dialectical materialism (a method which systematically emphasizes and explores the complex interaction, interpretation, and mutual creation of culture and society, of artwork and audience, of the social experiences of the teacher and those of his students, of students of differing economic and social origins) (204). Help students become more consciousness of the political implications of their own experience (consciousness-raising pedagogy). Encourage an willingness and ability to assess the data of one’s own ife,to discover the structure of one’s experience, the relative importances of various influences (recognizes that literary scholars will likely scoff at this idea). Students have been taught that a work of literature floats above our heads (untouchable entity in the ethereal realm of art). In short, Harold advocates a teacher-structured course in the sense that the instructor establishes the method; but the method becomes the students’ as well when they choose to make use of it. Harold expresses the need to openly discuss ideology in the classroom (doesn’t hide his Marxist interests). He suggests that we restore the vitality to classroom writing by having it always make sense in terms of the human situation which the course is. Harold believes that we need to assign fundamental essays – in which the students do not write to the teacher alone but to all of the people concerned (all of the members in the class in the form of an open letter). Harold tries to disrupt the popular notion of individualism (uniqueness) and universal identification. He makes students face up to their middle and upper middle class American homogeneity. It is important to address a few material conditions of Harold’s own academic environment: His environment (Brown University) abolished letter grades (satisfactory / no credit). Harold doesn’t know how much of what he has described will apply to community colleges, large lectures, or other humanities course. ADDITIONAL TITLES: The Unalienated Teacher—Sarah Winter; Taking It All off: Teaching in the Therapeutic Classroom—Gary Margolis; How to Turn the Hip Generation on to Shelly and Keats—Leo Hamalian and James Hatch; The Politics of Reform in Higher Education—Peter Shaw; New Marxist Criticism – Richard Wasson; Questions Marxists Ask about Literature – Ira Shor; and The Great American Hunter, or, Ideological Content in the Novel – Fredric Jameson.
CONNECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS (Todd S.)
Brent Harold’s essay offers readers a window into the beginnings of radical (consciousness-raising) pedagogy. This is a great place to start if you are interested in this sort of research.
Date of Upload
3/14/09