Like many of you, as I work with community college students in composition courses, I wonder if what we're doing really matters. Many of our students lead extraordinarily harried lives; some are attending school at great sacrifice. To those already overburdened, the time commitments required by a composition class are substantial; I question whether one or two classes can make any difference in students' educations or lives. But, like other critical theorists and feminists, I have hope that the emancipatory pedagogies we're struggling to practice may play a small part in helping students work toward creating and actively participating in a democracy. In this paper, I detail some my efforts to work toward these ends in my English 101 courses. I group these practices into two categories: first, questioning dominant narratives and, second, exploring positioning. As critical pedagogues usually do, I need to emphasize that I'm not posing these practices as a prescriptive model for others to follow. Others' stories of actual classroom practices have helped me to question my own practices and to envision new possibilities; I add to these stories.


Questioning dominant narratives in education

The first narrative requiring debunking is the transmission or banking narrative of education, in which students' knowledge and experience are valued less than official knowledges. As Ira Shor suggests, a pattern I use throughout the semester is to ask students to brainstorm about a topic and then to share the knowledge thus created--before we read the text and before I present any additional materials. For example, as part of a unit on narrative writing, I ask students to observe and describe storytelling practices in their own communities (you can see this assignment as #1 on my handout). Sometimes doing this encourages students to think critically about the limited ideas on storytelling and good writing in our text.

An equally important narrative that's a candidate for debunking is the idea that community college failure is primarily students' fault. Few community college students are familiar with theories of what Burton Clark calls the "cooling-out" process, whereby students' aspirations are gently lowered while their belief in the openness and meritocracy of the American dream is sustained. All community college students should be aware of the astronomical attrition rates and low number of transfers to four-year colleges and universities--despite their initial plans to continue. Although failure and cooling out occur at all levels of higher education, these processes are most powerful at community colleges--partly just because the students are at a community college. Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel argue that community college students, when matched with students of similar backgrounds and testable abilities at four-year colleges and universities, still are "significantly less likely to obtain a bachelor's degree" than those students who begin their higher education at a four-year school (Brint & Karabel 236-37). Certainly experiences students have in classrooms and in seeking academic counseling contribute to the cooling out of their dreams. I believe that this cooling-out process--and the roles language plays in it--should not be covert, but rather should be visible to all students (Brint & Karabel 231).

One way I attempt to make this process more visible is to work with students in creating what William Bigelow and Linda Christensen call "collective texts" (Bigelow 438). I've asked students to share stories of schooling, such as worst and best teachers, times they experienced prejudice or acted in a prejudiced way, and struggles and sacrifices that have been required of them. Some semesters I ask students to observe and describe discourse in their classes, focusing on who does the majority of the talking in both large and small group discussion and whose ideas seem to be most important. To help make visible underlying assumptions about education, I've developed a group assignment on "Metaphors of Education," which usually provokes critical discussion about the appropriateness and efficacy of these metaphors (this assignment is #2 on the handout). Open discussion of the conflicts associated with grading, especially with grading writing, can also encourage students to see school failure as a social phenomenon and to critique this practice. In addition to discussing problems and encouraging students to relate and discuss relevant experiences, we discuss ways in which success or failure in school depends on individual students, and ways in which circumstances outside their control affect them.

But in all this, I am cautious. A year and a half ago, in a wonderful summer evening class, I shared my concerns about these issues with my 101 class of mostly middle-aged working adults. In the resulting discussion, a number of the older students in the class attested passionately to the difficulties and problems resulting from starting school as a part-time community college student. Just as class was almost over, a young, articulate, intelligent woman of color sitting attentively in the front row of class burst out as she shoved her books into her bag and stormed out of the class, "So what's the point anyway? Why should I even bother trying?" I and the other members of the class murmured some lame you-can-do-it type comments; I was stunned. She punctuated her point with erratic attendance over the next few weeks. Although she eventually did achieve well in the course, I was guilt-ridden over how that discussion had affected students. Now, as we discuss these issues, I ask students to consider what a possible re-visioning of our educational system might look like, and how, individually and collectively, we might effect change. Stories of people collectively struggling for change in education, such as those in the recent issue of Rethinking Schools describing Milwaukee charter schools and the "Living Wage" gained by Milwaukee Public School workers might help us be hopeful and active. Still, this trying to encourage hope and agency is sometimes difficult for me, as I'm not always convinced myself that such hopefulness is warranted and that the necessary educational and social reforms can occur in the current political climate.

The dominant narrative of composition instruction in students' previous schooling and in our district is another candidate for debunking. About halfway through the semester, I give students a copy of our district-mandated course description, outline, and competencies; I believe these materials may encourage a skills-based, fragmented, product-centered curriculum. As a class, we discuss how these materials might encourage instructors to structure their courses in ways much different from my course. As is common, over a third of my students this semester are repeating English 101 for the second or third or fourth time. Their experiences in other courses, and all students' previous experiences, allow them to discuss our course critically if they have space in class to do so. Some students usually assert that they would prefer a "banking" type course in which I simply teach them rules they memorize and illustrate in five-paragraph essays, without all the so-called deep thinking and painful revision my course entails. Others, probably for a variety of motives, defend the course I'm teaching. Regardless of how they feel about my pedagogy, I hope these dialogues encourage students to link the problems they have in courses to social and pedagogical issues, rather than simply individually internalizing blame for failure.

We also critique the master narratives our mode-centered text promotes. This text, like many composition texts, includes a long section on logic, including discussion of logical fallacies; the powerful use of pathos, empathy and ethos receive much less emphasis. And although narrative and descriptive writing are two of the modes described, neither the discussions of these modes nor the sample essays mention the genres of journal, diary or personal letter writing. Instead, journal writing is relegated to the realm of freewriting--not real writing; personal letters are not mentioned. In addition, the idea that narratives are a simple form of writing which students need to move beyond, and that analysis is more intellectually complex, is a common academic (mis)conception that our text may promote. As many feminists have argued, presenting these genres as less intellectual and less important than other genres of writing is a political move which denigrates forms of writing often associated with women. Making visible prejudices against the emotional and subjective and examining the roles pathos and storytelling play in students' lives may help them begin to question these biases and even to approach other coursework critically.

The dialects and conventions of English that we validate are another aspect of the master narrative of education that is of central importance in a composition class. Sharing with our classes the conflicts we face in attempting to both value nonstandard dialects and to teach standard English can help raise students' consciousness about language and power. Asking students to describe and then evaluate from a critical standpoint their experiences learning (or not learning) standard English can be powerful. As one student concluded in our on-line bulletin board, "Our constitution should really read, `All men are created equal, as long as you don't sound stupid when you talk.'" Additionally, I emphasize that all dialects of English follow systematic rules, that each is equally capable of expressing complex and poetic ideas, and that decisions about dialects are political. Despite sometimes impassioned discussions of these issues, many students still believe that their home dialect is "`Bad English'" and that my job is to imbue them with "`Good English'" (Lemke 163).

The solution for many liberatory pedagogues is to attempt to teach standard English and a critical attitude toward it, while also valuing other dialects. I'm not sure this is possible because the bias toward standard English is so strong in academia, because for many students this means overcoming attitudes inculcated over years of schooling, and because when I do grade students on such formal aspects of language, it is on their use of standard English, not on their use of nonstandard dialects and conventions.

Most critical pedagogues also talk about showing students examples of people successfully bringing about change through collectively organizing against hegemonic practices. In terms of language changes, such examples might come from the trend to eliminate much obviously sexist language, or the trend away from emphasis on conventions in on-line communication, or the changes that some nurse practitioners are making in the power relations in doctor-patient discourse. The idea is to show students possibilities for hope and change; all this while also teaching survival skills in standard English. A difficult prospect.


Positioning

Exploration of positioning and subjectivity can also help lead to an understanding both of how we are constructed and how, individually and collectively, we can exercise agency. Calls for teachers to examine their own positioning abound in discussions of feminist poststructural pedagogy. As a start at this, I've put on my syllabus an attempt to articulate my present assumptions about English 101 (and this is #3 on the handout). However, some students have been mystified by my doing this, and thus my attempting to be explicit about my beliefs may simply create more distance between us and may serve to increase my authority. Coming back to these assumptions as the semester progresses does seem to help clarify them for students and myself, and articulating them has been illuminating--and demanding--for me. However, I am constantly reminded that nothing is essentially liberating.

In addition to examining my assumptions for the course, I try to encourage students to do the same. For example, I ask students to examine positioning in the narrative writing they do early in the course (you can see an example of this kind of assignment as #4 on the handout). Beginning with a description of themselves and with a discussion of the many-sided, even contradictory voices that compose poststructural concepts of identity, students explore why they have emphasized particular voices in their writing. In one class, after a number of students promoted an authentic voice theory of self, asserting that they were simply writing to express their true selves, several began to explore how their public and even private identities are constructed. For example, one woman wrote:

In my narratives, my main character usually has the most power. My main character has the most control because I have the control over him/her. When I write, I usually write about the way that I want things to be, because for once, I have the power. I believe that life has a lot of very unwanted aspects, and so in my writing I either throw out those aspects, or I get rid of them while I write. When I write, the world around me is lost, and MY world comes alive.

Another option is to have students explicitly write about power, and race, class and gender after having shared stories with each other. (Examples of two such writing prompts are in section #5 on the handout.) Doing this writing on our computer bulletin board system, where students can read each others' writing but are anonymous to each other, helps demystify these ideas and provokes some fascinating discussion. For example, a young white woman recently claimed,

I . . . believe that race is not important, unless you are talking about your culture. . . . I have never discriminated against anyone, therefore I have never been discriminated against. As for social classes, who needs them---Yeah, so what some people have a lot of money and some people don't.

However fascinating the responses to these prompts, many students initially approach them perfunctorily, dreading doing another of my weird assignments. Their attitude is much different in other types of writing. One type of writing I almost always assign includes assignments such as "describe a memorable experience," or "create a metaphor for your life." Through cultural feminist pedagogy, such as that based on the work of Carol Gilligan and Mary Belenky and her colleagues, I can justify assignments such as these. Allowing students to tell stories of what is important to them is a way of validating their experiences and knowledge and is also a way of allowing space for trust and friendship to develop. However, with such stories there are two possible pitfalls: first is the potential for perpetuating racism and sexism. Simply celebrating individual stories may conserve the status quo without recognizing the liberatory potential of stories (Ellsworth 302; Simon 61-62). But asking students to analyze or critique stories of personal experience can be problematic for a number of reasons, which leads us to the second problem, the potential for emphasizing analysis over narrative that I discussed earlier. And sometimes we can solve both of these things through the same way--by backing off.

I ask students to anonymously share narratives with their peers on-line and then to compare their stories and look for common themes and types of stories (you can see an example of this type of assignment as #6 on the handout). As they do this, sometimes students also begin to explore how their experiences, perceptions and selves are constructed and positioned. Some wonderful insights appear during creation of such collective texts. For example, after reading other students' descriptions of themselves and of some of their memorable events, one student wrote: "I am surprised that Race and Ethnicity matters so much to so many people. I never thought it mattered much." That such an important realization came not through any analysis guided by me, but through simple "unproblematized" sharing of stories, leads me to question assertions that individual stories must be analyzed and critiqued. Sharing the stories alone may act as more powerful consciousness-raising than any analysis I can guide students in.

I do encourage students to examine their positioning through continuously modeling this process in looking at class texts, the media, familiar and new arguments, and well-known stories. For example, we have fun comparing traditional, Disney and feminist renditions of fairy tales. Disrupting cultural "obviousnesses" in myths such as Snow White and Cinderella may encourage students to take a similar revisionist approach toward their own cultural texts and discourses (Davies).

This examination of positioning is extraordinarily difficult, and I occasionally find myself missing such opportunities because I am uneasy about making students uncomfortable. For example, in posts in which students introduced their penname persona, one woman told a quirky little story about how she and her female best friend call each other "Horn" because of something to do with one of them being rude about the other being able to find a bicycle buried in a crowded storage room. After class, this woman introduced me to her friend, who had been waiting for her; I then left while they remained at school, reading and writing on the electronic forum. When I got home and read the entries by modem, she had changed her penname, writing the following new explanation:

Hi my name is HOPE 7. I chose this name because I am extremely attracted to KEVIN JOHNSON of the PHOENIX SUNS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! xxxxxxxx oooooooooo. I HOPE to marry him and have 7 children with him.

I also question my use of authority: Should I work to persuade students to see the world through the socio- constructivist lens that underlies my beliefs about language and power and social relationships? I believe so: I use my authority in selecting assignments and discussion topics toward these ends, because for me these theories offer great promise for democracy. Should I push students to recognize inequity, such as classism and sexism and racism, in others' and their own lives? Education for democracy requires this. However, I recognize that this use of my authority could be coercive, and that I may not insist that students agree with me nor base my evaluations and caring on whether or not they learn to think like I do. The "extraordinary balancing act" this requires is easier in theory than in praxis (Davies 63).

For example, just a few weeks ago, in one of my classes' on- line bulletin boards, a white, male student, just back from a trip to Germany, wrote a long tirade against what he called the "illegal immigrant problem," specifically complaining about undocumented Mexican workers. I waited a few days for someone to rebut his arguments, but only white students wrote on the issue, all agreeing with him. Angered by what I saw as racism and fearing that insensitivity to Hispanic students in the class was contributing to their silencing, I wrote a short rebuttal under the penname students recognize as mine. The result was complete silence about the topic for several weeks, until a few days ago when that same student asked me if I would be offended if he researched and wrote about immigration. With the rest of the class listening, I tried to tactfully explain to him the conflicts I faced between allowing students freedom to disagree with me and, through my own silent complicity, seeming to endorse attitudes I see as racist and thus possibly silencing other class members. I'm not sure he had any clue what I was talking about.

Using our authority to open up discussions and to provide space for diverse and even conflictive voices is intensely challenging. When I face resistance from students while also dealing with numerous institutional constraints, I recognize that my own power to effect social change through the classroom is limited. I like the way William Bigelow describes our position: "Until the economic system requires workers who are critical, cooperative, and deeply democratic, teachers' classroom efforts amount to a kind of low-intensity pedagogical war" (447). However, just because at times, this war does seem and may even be futile, I still, in some ways, have the opportunity to choose between working for democracy or accepting the status quo. I do believe that more practitioner-level dialogue about these pedagogies is part of the resistance process (let me hint that my e-mail address is included on my handout). I also want to express my own hope in the collective power of educators to effect social change, albeit small. As critical theorist David Purpel says, "I continue to have . . . faith that schools . . . can actually contribute to the creation of a more loving, more just, saner world" (x). It is this faith which motivates my continual struggles to practice critical and feminist pedagogy. But regardless of how hopeful--or hopeless--I may feel at any particular moment about whether what we're doing matters, for myself I choose to teach for democracy.

Simon, Roger I. Teaching against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1992.