Ah-Young Song is a PhD candidate in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has taught English at the secondary level for seven years and is interested in multiliteracies, critical pedagogies, and sociocultural theories of learning.
[Slide 1] It has been well-established that American democracy is a fundamentally flawed project, whose origins trace back to a history of exploitation and racial terror that has continued through “a process of systematic exclusion rather than inclusion in the polity” (Torres 422). The instrumentalization of violence is inextricable from Foucauldian regimes of truth advanced by hegemonic impositions in politics, media, and even classrooms. The challenge in proceeding faithfully as educators in 2018 is complicated not only by the proliferation of deliberate omissions, misrepresentations, and acts of collusion normalized by powerful actors but also in the misguided search for an objective, rational, and singular truth. In essence, a student’s inability to identify manufactured falsehoods is certainly troubling, but in following Horkheimer and Adorno, I want to push for a collective interrogation of the mythologies we have fashioned as a nation, including the elegant narrative of meritocratic education for all.
[Slide 2] The act of close reading in the tradition of the New Critics is often informed by standardized linguistic practices and a dominant discourse that Asao Inoue associates with a “white racial habitus,” in a nod to Pierre Bourdieu (17). Indeed, as a student of long-established New England institutions, I have cultivated an identity as a learner and educator that is inextricable from the mechanisms of whiteness, from which I have benefited even as a woman of color. Having been credentialized, I have reinscribed elite speech in classrooms that have reified this habitus. When educational institutions are grounded in rewards-based incentives, disciplinary discourse practices, the policing of human bodies, and the suppression of multiliteracies, how can we sufficiently respond to the New London Group’s call for the active recognition of pluralistic lifeworlds (The New London Group 70)?
I want to pose some possibilities, posited as questions, to invite further dialogue, push-back, or momentum forward:
[Slide 3] Firstly, and perhaps most urgently, how can teachers disrupt commonplace notions of English? Critical media literacies, according to Kellner and Share, is an imperative that “deepens the potential of literacy education to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information, and power” (60). Certainly, the novels, plays, media, art, and social worlds that our students encounter should be examined closely, but we should also ensure that we are making space for them to be recognized as artists and creators in their own right. We might disrupt institutional norms and invite students to draw, act, dance, musicalize, perform, design, play, code, and find other entryways into literature. I would love to imagine how modes of production like memes, digital videos, blogs, and musical scores can be used to pluralize expressive possibilities in the English classroom.
[Slide 4] Secondly, how might non-Western practices and ways of being help inspire us to center the dignity, humanity, and intersectionalities of our students? I am thinking, for instance, about naikan, or the method of mindful self-reflection centered around introspective questions regarding what we have received, given, and caused in others’ lives. In particular, those who have had greater access to unearned privileges need to engage in such moments of critical self-reflexivity and praxis. Additionally, while I am by no means an expert on daoism, I am also intrigued by the notion of wú wéi, or the emphasis on effortlessness and the “immediacy of the aesthetic experience” (Ames and Hall 51). I wonder how deemphasizing industrialized output and polished material products might allow for greater spontaneity, non-normative play, and discursive experimentations.
[Slide 5] Finally, what does it mean for students to engage in forms of meaningful expression that affirm their multiple and shifting identities? Gloria Ladson-Billings has noted, “Stories provide the necessary context for understanding, feeling, and interpreting” (13). To write ourselves into being and to read the writing of our peers can activate radical self-love and deep compassion for others. Storytelling requires a community of vulnerable and generous artists, and my hope is that students will not just be critically literate but highly attuned to the ways we can honor underrecognized voices, such as those of youth. Ultimately, as an educator, I remain optimistic because of the commitment that I see in students to the recovery of an underpinning pluralism that inhabits our shared future.
Works Cited
Ames, Roger, and David Hall. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995.
Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor W. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Inoue, Asao. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015.
Kellner, Douglas, and Jeff Share. "Critical Media Literacy is Not an Option." Learning Inquiry 1.1 (2007): 59-69.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “Just What is Critical Race Theory and What's It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 11.1 (1998): 7-24.
The New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (1996): 60-92.
Tanaka-Matsumi, Junko. "Cultural Factors and Social Influence Techniques in Naikan Therapy: A Japanese Self-observation Method." Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice 16.4 (1979): 385.
Torres, Carlos Alberto. "Democracy, Education, and Multiculturalism: Dilemmas of Citizenship in a Global World." Comparative Education Review 42.4 (1998): 421-447.
Presenter's website.