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Archive for September, 2005

September 16, 2005

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.

September 16th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Internet

Faigley addresses the place, meaning, and purpose of composition studies in the wake of postmodernism and the breakdown of the concept of a unified subject. While maintaining a fundamental faith in composition studies and literacy training, Faigley utilizes postmodern theories of the subject to critique and modify pedagogical strategies in those fields. According to Faigley, composition studies has proven commensurable with postmodernity in most ways. However, there has been conflict over one issue: “where composition studies has proven least receptive to postmodern theory is in the surrendering of the belief in the writer as an autonomous self, even at a time when extensive group collaboration is practiced in many writing classrooms.” (15) (Read the article)

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Giroux, Henry A. “White Noise: Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Whiteness.” In Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997: 89-136.

September 16th 2005 Posted to Whiteness Studies

This chapter argues for a rethinking of “whiteness,” especially as the term is engaged in educational settings. Giroux finds existing scholarly treatments of whiteness too inclined to simply collapse people who identify as white with the projects of domination and racism. According to Giroux, this tendency leads white students toward guilt and/or resentment, and undercuts the ways in which whiteness could function in an anti-racist fashion. In short, complicating our understanding of how whiteness operates can greatly enhance the anti-racist pedagogy project. (Read the article)

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September 15, 2005

Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “Educating Native Americans.” Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education. James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, Eds. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2001, 331-347.

September 15th 2005 Posted to Native American

In this article Lomawaima sketches a history of the education of Native Americans over the course of the past two centuries. She then addresses a variety of issues related to the challenges faced by Native American students in the U.S. education system, ranging from the high drop-out rates of Native American students to unique learning and interactional styles to curriculum development. Lomawaima draws from a large body of research published in the past thirty years, providing several useful summaries of cornerstone studies. (Read the article)

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September 14, 2005

Class, Race and Pedagogy Bibliography

September 14th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy

Anyon, Jean. “Social Class and School Knowledge.” Curriculum Inquiry.
11.1 (1981) 3-42. (Read the article)

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Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Basic Books, 2000.

September 14th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Initially published in 1905, this text radicalized Western understandings of sexuality, neurosis, and civilization. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is divided into “The Sexual Aberrations,” “Infantile Sexuality,” and “The Transformations of Puberty,” and by linking his essays together in this single text, Freud implicitly draws a connection—uncomfortable to some and ignored by many to this day—between “aberrations” and more “normal” sexual development. As Nancy Chodorow writes in her “Foreword,” Freud begins with “what ‘we’ have traditionally believed” and subsequently “marshals every argument and all the evidence in his power to puncture the conventional assumptions” (vii). While the book as a whole is, as a monumental contribution to twentieth century thought, worth detailed consideration, this abstract will only address the first essay on “The Sexual Aberrations.” Insofar as it attends to the psychic construction of masochism and sadism, Freud’s first essay on the theory of sexuality is valuable background for many of the works abstracted in The Pleasures of Teaching Race. Freud does not attend to race in this book, but his theorization about the connection between sadism and masochism has led to numerous analyses of race and its relation to psychic structures of pleasure and pain. (Read the article)

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September 13, 2005

Bryson, Mary and Suzanne de Castell. “Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect.” Canadian Journal of Education 18.2 (1993): 285-305.

September 13th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

“What difference does it make–being queer in the classroom? What would that mean, anyway–being queer?” ask Bryson and de Castell in their article, “Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect” (3). Because the tension between post-structuralist concepts of subjectivity and essentialist understandings of identity is, according to Bryson and de Castell, at least theoretically resolvable, the authors turn their analysis instead to the complex and contested ground of “pedagogical practice” (1). Describing the particular context of an undergraduate lesbian studies course co-taught in 1991, the writers describe the development of a “‘queer pedagogy’—a teaching against-the-grain” (4). (Read the article)

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Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud and Donald Morton. “Theory Pedagogy Politics: The Crisis of ‘The Subject’ in the Humanities.” Theory/Pedagogy/Politics: Texts for Change. Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, eds. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. 1-32.

September 13th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Class and Pedagogy, The Academy

The authors offer a critique of the humanist pedagogical tradition in the wake of post-structuralist theory, arguing that humanism has either failed to acknowledge post-structuralist theories of the subject or has used critical theory to reinforce a notion of the unified subject. The concept of the unified subject position denies the importance of race, class, and gender in the construction and formulation of the partisan or ’split’ subject as it is theorized by post-structuralism. The authors’ critique has implications both for curricula and for pedagogical techniques. (Read the article)

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Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.

September 13th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

In this important contribution to contemporary theory, Sandoval offers a “method of oppositional consciousness” that stands in contrast to the “neocolonizing mode of globalization” infecting the postmodern world (2). Arguing with Jameson’s bleak dismissal of any resistance to neocolonization, Sandoval points to U.S. third world feminism as an example of “oppositional political activity and consciousness in the postmodern world” (43). Rather than focusing on pedagogy in particular, Methodology of the Oppressed suggests a theoretical frame for wide-scale social change. (Read the article)

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Sarris, Greg. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

September 13th 2005 Posted to Native American

This collection of eight essays offers a rare perspective on the issue of cross-cultural communication. Greg Sarris is concerned with American Indian texts, both oral and written, as well as with other American Indian cultural phenomena such as basketry and religion. His essays cover a range of topics that include orality, art, literary criticism, and pedagogy, and demonstrate that people can see more than just “what things seem to be.” Throughout, he asks: How can we read across cultures so as to encourage communication rather than to close it down? Sarris maintains that cultural practices can be understood only in their living, changing contexts. (Read the article)

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September 12, 2005

Race, Gender, and Sexuality Bibliography

September 12th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

Bernstein, Sharon. “Feminist Intentions: Race, Gender and Power in a High School Classroom.” NWSA 7 (Summer 1995): 18-34. (Read the article)

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