2027 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Race, Literacy and Pedagogy

Race, Literacy and Pedagogy

April 20, 2006

Brandt, Deborah. “‘The Power of It’: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives.” Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 105-145.

April 20th 2006 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American

At large, this study traces the changing aspects, practices, and effects of literacy in the 20th century United States through the analysis of more than 80 case histories ranging from 1895 to 1985. The chapter annotated here is concerned with the different challenges and techniques in literacy sponsorship encountered by African Americans due to issues of class and institutionalized racism.

Brandt’s overarching thesis is that “in twentieth-century America, literacy became increasingly reliant on economic sponsorship and grew increasingly vulnerable to the lack of it” (106). Her investigation in this chapter reveals that the history of African American literacy in the twentieth century both supports and complicates this thesis. (Read the article)

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September 19, 2005

Race, critical pedagogy, literacy/composition studies, and higher education bibliography

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Class and Pedagogy, The Academy
260f

This bibliography, a selection of texts appropriate to this category but which have yet to be abstracted for the site, is a work constantly in progress and should be considered partial. Suggested additions are not only welcomed, but solicited. The title of the bibliography intentionally addresses multiple categories on the RPP site since these three categories are so closely linked. Some of these texts will inevitably cross over into additional categories as well. As titles are abstracted and posted as a separate entry on the RPP site, they will be removed from this list. (Read the article)

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hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, The Academy

In this indispensable and highly influential book, bell hooks (the writing persona of Gloria Watson) writes essays in the varying forms of feminist personal narratives and/or dialogues, based on her experience as a black woman (both student and teacher) in an educational system dominated by a white male ethos. The essays all strive to break down that structure of domination. “Multilayered, then, these essays are meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness to education as the act of freedom.” (11)

Hooks’ work is informed by both feminist pedagogies and the Marxist critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (see his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, abstracted on this site). In the introduction hooks discusses where these pedagogies took her and also the point at which she believes they failed. They lent her the tools to eschew the submission to authority and rote memorization occurring in what Freire calls the “banking system of education” and to practice in their place critical thinking and a democratic classroom engagement with the object of knowledge. But hooks suggests that even these critical systems fail to acknowledge the radical value of the pleasure of learning, particularly in higher education. (Read the article)

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September 16, 2005

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Linguistic Utopias.” The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature. Eds. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987. 48-66.

September 16th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Starting at Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities (1983) along with related theories of speech/discourse communities and subcultural communities (for which shared languages are an important identifying factor), Pratt argues for an understanding of community as partaking in a “linguistics of contact.” While those other theories are correct to suggest that imagined communities contribute to the formation or reinforcement of utopian and idealized systems, practicing a politics of exclusion which perpetuates modes of domination, what they fail to do is “see the dominant and the dominated in their relations to each other.” (56) Pratt argues that there is always a fluid interrelation between all such totalized communities through “contact zones,” or the places in which different discourse communities interact. Though Pratt does not say it here, one of those spaces is certainly in the classroom. (Read the article)

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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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September 13, 2005

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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September 3, 2005

Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

September 03rd 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy

Focusing on the practice and theorization of narrative strategies, Gutiérrez-Jones engages many of the most influential texts in the recent race debates-including The Bell Curve, America in Black and White, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and The Mismeasure of Man. In the process, Critical Race Narratives pursues key questions posed by the texts as they work within, or against, disciplinary expectations: can critical engagements with narrative enable a more democratic dialogue regarding race? what promise does such experimentation hold for working through the traumatic legacy of racism in the United States? Throughout, Critical Race Narratives initiates a timely dialogue between race-focused narrative experiment in scholarly writing and similar work in literary texts and popular culture.

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Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

September 03rd 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, The Academy

Cultural Capital challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in a new theoretical framework. The result is a book that recasts not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over “multiculturalism” and the ongoing “crisis in the humanities.” Employing concepts drawn from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups in the canon than as a question of the distribution of “cultural capital” in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.

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September 2, 2005

Macedo, Donaldo. “Introduction (to the 30th Anniversary Edition).” Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paolo Freire. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 2000. pp.11-27. 21a2

September 02nd 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Macedo’s essay is published after Freire’s untimely death in 1997. Macedo, Freire’s closest collaborator in the North American academy, recounts how his discovery of Pedagogy of the Oppressed altered his own life and career both as member of a colonized and oppressed people and as an educator. “This offered me – and all those who experience subordination through an imposed assimilation policy – a path through which we understand what it means to come to cultural voice.” (12) He goes on to make several critical arguments about the misunderstanding and misuse of Freire’s ideas and to defend those ideas from their most prominent critics. (Read the article)

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August 31, 2005

Jay, Gregory and Gerald Graff. “A Critique of Critical Pedagogy.” Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities. Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson, eds. New York: Routledge, 1995. pp. 201-213.

August 31st 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Jay and Graff argue that critical pedagogy is problematic because it claims to liberate students but in fact only reinforces the “banking” dynamic by forcing progressive ideologies upon students, enforcing a predetermined outcome based upon an assumed true position on the part of the teacher. Oppositional pedagogy makes the same mistake. Instead, the authors recommend a method of “teaching the conflicts,” where the unilateral teacher’s authority in the classroom is balanced by a “counterauthority,” thus opening the possibility for multiple points of view, all of which are laid open to critique. Suggestions for practical application follow. (Read the article)

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