Daring the Imagination: Unlocking Voices of Dissent

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Daring the imagination: Unlockingvoices of dissent and

possibility in teaching. Theory Into Practice, 34, (2), 107-116.

Michael O'Loughlin

Daring the Imagination: Unlocking Voices of Dissent and Possibility in Teaching

I AM THE GUARDIAN OF THE GATES and since you 1 demand to see the Great Oz I must take you to his palace. But first you must put on the spectacles." "Why?" asked Dorothy. "Because if you did not wear spectacles the brightness and glory of the Emerald City would blind you. Even those who live in the City must wear spectacles night and day. They are all locked on, for Oz so ordered it when the City was first built, and I have the only key that will unlock them." He opened the big box and Dorothy saw that it was filled with spectacles of every size and shape. All of them had green glass in them. The Guardian of the Gates found a pair that would just fit Dorothy and put them over her eyes. There were two golden bands fastened to them that passed around the back of her head, where they were locked together by a little key that was at the end of a chain that the Guardian of the Gates wore around his neck. When they were on, Dorothy could not take them off had she wished, but of course she did not wish to be blinded by the glare of the Emerald City, so she said nothing. (Baum, 1900/ 1985, pp. 84-85) The fanciful Land of Oz that I recall from my childhood reading was a green and pleasant place. It seemed quite removed from oppressive regimes such as that in Orwell's (1946) Animal Farm. The romanticism of the Land of Oz and the bumbling benevolence of its leader failed to awaken my political consciousness. No doubt, the most effective forms of propaganda are those that naturalize reality, contriving to make Michael O 'Loughlin is associate professor of education at Hofstra University.

it seem like common sense, so that nobody feels the slightest urge to question it. In this regard, the apparatus of public schooling appears to be a crucial mechanism in the naturalization of the status quo. Although teachers might be uncomfortable with the notion, in many respects, like the Guardian of the Gates, they are functionaries assisting in the preservation of a larger system of knowledge and culture.1 State bureaucrats and local school boards hand down decisions about the regulation of curriculum, for example, via testing requirements, textbook selection, and state and local policies, and teachers effectively become the distributors of the spectacles through which children come to see all aspects of their society. Things take a decidedly sinister turn, though, if we continue with the analogy and inquire whether children are locked into seeing things only through the single set of lenses provided for them by their cultural guardians. Sociologists Basil Bernstein (1990) and Pierre Bourdieu (1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) argue that the primary role of schools in society is, in fact, to reproduce the existing culture. Thus teachers are guardians of the status quo. Note, however, that the Guardian of the Gates in The Wizard of Oz not only distributed the spectacles, he alone possessed the key to the golden bands that held the spectacles fast. Were he to become conscious of the need to liberate the citizenry from the tyranny of the singular view of authority and culture imposed by the lenses, he had the means at

THEORY INTO PRACTICE, Volume 34, Number 2, Spring 1995 Copyright 1995 College of Education, The Ohio State University 0040-5841/95$ 1.25

THEORY INTO PRACTICE / Spring 1995 Learning From Student Voices

his disposal. My purpose in this article is to inquire into those circumstances under which teachers, as guardians of culture, might be induced to define themselves not as gatekeepers for the received wisdom of culture, but rather as key-holders with the means to unmask authoritative knowledge and cultural domination. Can we develop forms of teaching that will enable teachers to value critical discourses of dissent and begin to dream of the possibilities of a reconstructed society in which principles of justice, access, and equity are given priority? Once Dorothy and her friends unmasked the bogus pretensions of omniscient authority, consciousness emerged rapidly: The Lion thought it might be as well to frighten the Wizard, so he gave a large, loud roar, which was so fierce and dreadful that Toto jumped away from him in alarm and tipped over the screen that stood in a corner. As it fell with a crash they looked that way, and the next moment all of them were filled with wonder. For they saw, standing in just the spot the screen had hidden, a little, old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face, who seemed to be as much surprised as they were. The Tin Woodman, raising his axe, rushed toward the little man and cried out, "Who are you?" "I am Oz the Great and Terrible," said the little man in a trembling voice, but don't strike me—please don't!—and I'll do anything you want me to." Our friends looked at him in surprise and dismay. "I thought Oz was a great Head," said Dorothy. "And I thought Oz was a lovely Lady" said the Scarecrow. "And I thought Oz was a terrible Beast," said the Tin Woodman. "And I thought Oz was a Ball of Fire," said the Lion. "No, you are all wrong," said the little man meekly. "I have been making believe." "Making believe!" cried Dorothy. "Are you not a great Wizard?" "Hush my dear," he said; "don't speak so loud, or you will be overheard—and I should be ruined. I'm supposed to be a Great Wizard." "And aren't you?" she asked. "Not a bit of it, my dear; I'm just a common man." "Doesn't anyone else know you're a humbug?" asked Dorothy. "No one knows it but you four—and myself," replied Oz. "I have fooled everyone so long that I thought I should never be found out. It was a great mistake letting you into the throne room. Usually I will not even see my subjects, and so they believe I am something terrible." (Baum, 1985, pp. 139-140)

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The romanticism of The Wizard of Oz suggests that political awakening is instantaneous, and that despots will yield their power once challenged. We can anticipate that the task will be considerably more difficult in our world. Mimetic Teaching: Silenced Voices Jackson (1986) describes the dominant model of Western education as mimetic, because the expectation is that students will copy the traditions and truths of the culture in order to fit into society as it is. Mimetic teaching, with its emphasis on the transmission of information from teacher to students, is a familiar part of our educational landscape. Offering chilling testimony to the absence of student voices in many of our schools, Goodlad (1984) informs us that teachers in elementary and secondary schools nationwide monopolize the conversation 95 and 99 percent of the time respectively. In the quarter century since Philip Jackson first wrote Life in Classrooms (1968), little has changed. The majority of our schoolchildren still experience "the daily grind" of boredom, waiting, and passive ingestion of information that Jackson documented as hallmarks of classroom life. Too many of our students still live in a world of fill-in-the-blank worksheets and nationally distributed textbooks that present information in fragmented, decontextualized pieces, apparently with the sole aim of preparing students for the multiple choice tests politicians and school boards demand as an index of accountability in public schools. With the lack of emphasis on ownership of ideas and personal construction of knowledge, students learn to depend on teachers and texts for answers, rather than rely on their own critical judgment and common sense.2 At the same time, the typical regimen of public schools, in which obsession with behavioral control manifests itself in everything from bathroom and hallway passes to the need for explicit permission to speak in class, denies children the opportunity to nurture tentative ideas, develop initiative, learn from their mistakes, and assume progressively greater responsibility for their own actions.3 The dominant education system locks firmly in place spectacles that filter out dissonant knowledges and voices. Mimetic teaching is oppressive in the sense in which critical educator Paulo Freire uses that term in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Freire describes

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as oppressive any educational situation in which people are treated as passive recipients of authoritative knowledge, and in which they have no opportunities to voice their thoughts and feelings in order to construct and reconstruct their own experiences critically so that they might act to change their worlds. However, even if we acknowledge the legitimacy of transmission of essential cultural knowledges as an educational or societal goal—arguing for example that all people need access to what Delpit (1988) terms "the culture of power"—mimetic teaching is still flawed because it is structured to provide differential access to the rewards of schooling for different groups. Bernstein (1990) argues that because children must be able to keep pace continually with the lockstep curriculum, mimetic teaching favors middleclass children who come to school with a head start in literacy, and are thus less likely to fall behind as the instructional assembly line starts moving at a fixed and steady pace. In addition, since mimetic teachers are usually preoccupied with "covering" the curriculum, there is little opportunity in school for students to draw upon their own narrative structures to make sense of the material for themselves on their own terms. Whatever talk and reading there is, however, is likely to be in the kind of language favored by middle-class students, thus increasing their opportunities for participation and validation, and ultimately their chances of succeeding on the school's terms, and hence on society's terms. Mimetic teaching is not necessarily to be condemned in its entirety, Bernstein argues, since its explicit rules at least make the goals and criteria of instruction clear to students. Bernstein points out that if adjustments are made in the pacing and sequence of mimetic teaching, a good many children will become sufficiently competent in the official discourses of schooling to begin to use them for their own purposes. Nevertheless, since regulation of the content and form of what is said is the sine qua non of mimetic teaching, at best, as Bernstein notes, it produces conventional thinkers who think solely within the parameters laid down by teachers and textbooks. Mimetic teaching thus promotes uniformity of world-views and deference to authority, and limits the access of marginal people who come to school less well versed in the middle-class discourses of schooling. Through its role in limiting access to the mainstream, mimetic teaching serves a social system

that perpetuates the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities across generations. Things were a lot simpler in the Land of Oz, where citizens gained access to the official culture of society simply by donning a pair of green-tinted spectacles! Liberal Teaching: Middle-class Discourse Jackson (1986) points out that tension has long existed between mimetic forms of teaching and transformative approaches, which place primary emphasis on the activity of the learner as constructor of understanding. In contemporary educational discourses this philosophy, which might loosely be termed constructivist, underlies popular liberal approaches such as the whole language and writing process movements in elementary education, problem-solving and hands-on activities in mathematics and science, and developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood education. Advocates of these approaches are unanimous in their condemnation of the "drill-and-kill" techniques of the traditional curriculum. They argue for a curriculum in which children are actively engaged in the construction of their own understanding. Concepts such as student voice, learning through experience, meaningfulness, student centeredness, and the construction of humane and affirming learning communities loom large in the rhetoric of these groups. The image of children busily engaged in inductive learning and intense intellectual exchanges is essentially the same romantic image that has driven progressive education since its inception. While much can be said for a model of learning that emphasizes student voice, ownership, and meaning making over rote learning, the liberal model is severely limited when it comes to issues of social change, as George Counts (1969) recognized some 60 years ago.4 In his critique of the progressive education movement, Counts argued that the movement was flawed because its proponents failed to consider the political nature of their work as teachers. He pointed out that progressive educators have confined discussion to the process of education, ignoring the social and political contexts in which teaching occurs, as well as the content of the curriculum. They have thus lost an opportunity to articulate an activist form of teaching that would allow students to critically examine themselves and their worlds and subsequently act to improve their lives.

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Counts argued bluntly that progressive education was a middle-class form of teaching, designed by middle-class intellectuals, to meet the needs— and hence preserve the interests—of middle-class children. I believe that contemporary liberal approaches, despite a laudable concern for student engagement and ownership of ideas, are vulnerable to similar criticisms. In his analysis of the pedagogical structures underlying what might be called middle-class, liberal approaches to teaching, Bernstein (1990) offers a related argument. Liberal teachers, Bernstein notes, devote much of their energy to constructing appropriate environments so that students may do the learning for themselves. Thus, individualized learning centers abound, as do opportunities for inductive learning or discovery, and opportunities for self-directed and collaborative learning activities. Bernstein characterizes these approaches to pedagogy as invisible because the direct influence of the teacher is hidden from students. As Bernstein says, the student-teacher relationship is one "where power is masked or hidden by devices of communication" (p. 67). Bernstein argues that the indirectness of the communication characteristic of these approaches is likely to pose particular problems for children who have not had cultural experiences with middle-class styles of discourse in their homes. Heath's (1983) comparative study of home discourse patterns of working-class, African-American children and the children of their White middle-class teachers bears this out. While middle-class forms of discourse were routinely used as a self-regulatory device for discipline purposes, and as a rhetorical device for teaching purposes in the homes of the White middle-class teachers, other discourse types prevailed in workingclass, African-American homes. Encountering middle-class discourses for the first time upon entering school—where they were the only styles of discourse available—working class, African-American children were often bewildered. For those who failed to adapt rapidly, it inhibited their absorption into the school community with its academic culture and goals. Bernstein and others (e.g., O'Loughlin, 1992c; Walkerdine, 1984, 1988) argue that liberal-constructivist pedagogies are based on a middle-class construction of the child as autonomous, self-regulating, and naturally capable of self-directed learning, given the proper environment. This middle-class construction 770

has come to dominate "liberal-progressive" educational practice despite the presence of dissident voices documenting its class-boundedness and political unconsciousness and protesting its deleterious effects on the prospects of children on the margins.5 According to Bernstein, the litmus test for the accessibility of an educational system is the degree to which the instructional language and teaching practices match the unofficial teaching practices and informal communication systems of the students' homes and communities. It would appear that if we are to hear students' voices, we must be willing to explore culturally relevant forms of teaching. This is not to suggest that instruction should proceed exclusively within the parameters of students' home discourses. Authentic student voices, however, provide the critical starting point for a progressive approach to teaching that maximizes the potential of pedagogy as a device for social change.6 It is sadly ironic that in the name of progressivism we are presented with constructivist pedagogies that appear to favor one social class, and that, inexplicably, fail to address the role of teachers as agents of social change. In creating more student-centered, friendly schools, in which students appear more engaged, but in which we fail to examine the fundamental role of schooling as guardian of received culture and authoritative knowledge, are we not exacerbating the problem of indoctrination by concealing its repressive characteristics? However well intentioned and student centered they may be, liberal teachers may still find themselves in the business of dispensing spectacles that privilege their own singular, middleclass perspectives on the world. Critical Teaching: Multiple Discourses Suggesting that instruction begin with authentic student voices is deceptively simple. Too often we reduce the notion of voice to mere verbalization or the kind of decontextualized reasoning embodied in "critical thinking" activities in schools.7 A richer notion of voice emerges from recent work in narrative and discourse theory. From birth, as narrative and discourse theorists note,8 children are part of ongoing cultural narratives and discourse practices that provide the norms by which they learn to conduct themselves in various social contexts. Thus, when children come to school they come as storied beings, living out their lives and interpreting

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their experiences through the narratives and discourses that have been part of their upbringing as members of families and communities. Rather than possessing a single identity or voice, students are constructing multiple perspectives on their emergent identities as a result of their social and cultural experiences as members of racial, ethnic, gender, social class, economic, and sundry other communities, each of which provides its own system of cultural apprenticeship into ways of being in the world (cf. Gee, 1990). Acknowledging the culturally constituted nature of students' lives has important implications for how we teach, as outlined in the following paragraphs: 1. A pedagogy grounded in experience. Learning ought to be grounded in students' autobiographical stories of their life experiences (Tappan, 1991). Telling their stories allows students to become conscious of the extent to which they are storied by their life experiences in particular contexts. By sharing their stories and by engaging with diverse life experiences (e.g., through listening to each other's stories and through explorations of diverse fiction and autobiography), students gain a sense of how their familial and cultural values shape their world-views, while simultaneously encountering alternate lifestyles and world-views that allow them to imagine other ways of constructing themselves in relation to the world. The goal, as Tappan (1991) notes, is to enable students to develop a sense of authorship over their own views as they begin to examine views that were previously implicit and taken for granted. To reach this goal, teachers must commit to the notion—long espoused by radical educators such as Paulo Freire and Myles Horton—that critical reflection on the historical and cultural origins of personal experience and cultural norms is crucial to the development of social consciousness and political awareness (see Freire, 1970; Horton, 1990; Horton & Freire, 1990). 2. A pedagogy of multiple discourses. As the preceding discussion of Bernstein's work suggests, schools are not neutral places but, rather, sites that privilege certain voices and discourses. Discourse theories suggest that it is fruitful to consider classrooms as sites where different cultural narratives and discourses encounter each other in a situation in which there is a severe asymmetry in power relations. Teachers come to the learning setting with significant authority. This authority springs in part from the institutional discourses of school, discourses

that confer on teachers considerable powers of surveillance, discipline, and evaluation. In addition, teachers derive power from their knowledge of the specialized discourses of their fields (e.g., math, science, art). There is also the formal— and often formidable—discourse of textbooks and the actual language of instruction to contend with. And, of course, teachers, too, are products of cultural socialization with their own unique positionings with respect to ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Teachers, therefore, by virtue of their positionings within the dominant culture, are always privileged in their relations with students. Students, for their part, come to the learning setting with their own emergent identities, influenced by their membership in particular cultural" groups, gender, sexual orientation, and social class.9 One possible outcome of the encounters between student discourses and the discourses of schooling is that students are forced to give up their own frameworks of meaning in order to learn school discourses on the school's terms. Alternatively, teachers could recognize the multiple intersecting discourses of the learning setting and create opportunities for personal ownership and negotiation of meaning. For this to occur, students need opportunities to talk about new concepts, using their own words and frames of reference. In addition, students need practice using unfamiliar discourses to analyze everyday experiences and events. Teachers and students thus create dialogues in which existing narrative modes and new discourses are talked about interchangeably, but without the weight of privilege accruing to the formal discourses of teachers and schools. However, teachers must come to terms explicitly with the asymmetry inherent in power relations between the school and home discourses of students, particularly of students who are not White and middle class. Teachers need to acknowledge these power differentials publicly with their students and make every effort to renegotiate as much of that power as possible. Alternative approaches to assessment, in which students choose their assignments and are allowed to engage in self-evaluation of their learning, for example, offer opportunities for such a renegotiation to take place. Finally, as advocates of culturally relevant pedagogy note, teachers are more likely to be successful in this type of teaching if they possess knowledge of, and empathy for, the cultural narratives

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and discourse styles underlying their students' lives and are willing to draw upon them as primary sources of curriculum.10 3. A pedagogy of dissent and moral possibility. A curious paradox is implicit in the foregoing: While students' life stories and voices provide the essential starting point for a grounded pedagogy, they are also likely to be the greatest obstacles to the opening up of critical and moral possibilities for students. After all, cultures such as ours ensure their reproduction much more subtly than did the regime in Oz. Instead of resorting to heavy-handed indoctrination by mandating the wearing of ideologically tinted spectacles, we create systems of cultural apprenticeship in schools and mass media that sanction certain ways of seeing as right, obvious, and common sense. Dissonant interpretations literally become unthinkable (Bernstein, 1990; Bourdieu, 1977; Gee, 1990). Therefore, as Ira Shor notes (personal communication, May 15, 1994), we must resist the temptation to glamorize student voices, and recognize that the multiple voices students bring to the classroom, while potentially possessing some elements of resistance and transformation, are likely to be deeply imbued with status quo values. The challenge of critical teaching is to create a climate that is safe enough for the expression of students' voices and experiences, but that is also sufficiently politically conscious and critical to allow for the examination of these experiences within larger frameworks of morality, equity, and the formation of knowledge and culture suggested by critical, feminist, and post-structuralist writers." An Illustrative Story As part of my work I teach an introductory education course for undergraduate students who wish to become teachers. This is a particularly challenging experience because the course sets out to unmask many years of social conditioning about the purposes of education and strives to engage students with the kinds of issues discussed immediately above. Readers of Perry's (1970) study of the trauma many Harvard undergraduates experienced, some 40 years ago, when they first encountered dissonant viewpoints will not be surprised to learn that many of our current students experience similar difficulties when their deeply held views of teaching are called into question. The following brief story describes the responses of a group of students who experienced this difficul772

ty particularly painfully. The story illustrates many of the issues I discuss in this article, including the power of students' preexisting cultural narratives, the consternation some students experience when asked to tell their life stories or engage in critical reflection on their lives and histories, and the ever-present power relations that intrude constantly as we attempt to set up egalitarian communication situations in classrooms. On the first day of class, I asked students to draw pictures of school. After the usual buzz students got down to the task with crayons and sheets of yellow paper. Janet,12 one of 19 White women and one White man in this class of college juniors, drew a picture of students sitting in rows gazing at a teacher, engaged in some kind of didactic activity at the chalkboard. Janet is typical. About 80 percent of the students drew pictures that were almost identical to hers. In the ensuing discussion, most of the students acknowledged that in 14 years of schooling they almost never experienced a teacher who gave them opportunities to voice their opinions or develop their own ideas. The first strand of our course—the very first education course these elementary education majors take— focuses on autobiography, and so we spend a lot of time talking about our life stories in small and large groups and in writing and sharing vignettes from our stories. Students also read a work of fiction of their choice dealing with aspects of childhood experience. Some were surprised when, in response to their query as to what kind of book report was required, I invited them to read for pleasure and personal reflection. Janet grew increasingly uneasy. She was all worked up about being a teacher and she thought this class would really get her started on the road to doing just that, but why waste all this time talking about our childhood? Some students expressed similar sentiments in their weekly letters to me and my former graduate assistant, Marta, who was in the class for research purposes and as a coteacher. We invited them to examine their own purposes by doing shared reading and discussion of autobiographical pieces from the writings of African-American feminist writer bell hooks, in which she explores her own struggles with voice, silence, and marginality. We also read from the works of Maxine Hong Kingston, Tillie Olsen, Flannery O'Connor, Adrienne Rich, and various feminist poets.13 Some students wondered aloud why we have to read Black authors since they cannot see how this "Black stuff is relevant to their lives. Around the fourth week the students began their weekly participant observing experiences in two adjacent schools. Janet was ecstatic. Her initial fears of not being accepted by the children or teacher evaporated the first day. The children loved her and the teacher took her under her wing. In class, we spent

O~Eoughlin Unlocking Voices of Dissent much time now exploring culturally diverse children's literature and talking about how they might use books such as these to initiate interesting dialogues in their classrooms. Janet's doubts increased. She showed our rather nonlinear lesson planning guide to her teacher and the teacher laughed at it. Welcome to the real world, girl! She confided in two aunts who are teaching and they laughed too. I went out of town to a conference and Janet and others usurped Maria's plans for the day and voiced their concerns: "How do we do a basic lesson plan?" "I don't even know where to start with my lesson plans." "How will the things we are doing in this class help me when I am in the classroom?" "I don't think we could really use those books [culturally diverse literature] that we are shown in class in a place like Park Avenue [almost all-White suburban school]. I think the parents would have a problem with that." "Yeah, why can't we use stories from French or English cultures." "I don't think the children would really understand those stories we are being shown. It would confuse them." "I think Michael has his own philosophy and it doesn't matter what I say because he may listen to me but he does not want to hear what I'm saying. He wants me to believe in his philosophy." "I wish you two would tell us what you believe and then we could talk about it." "Although you say this is an open and free classroom, I know I have to watch what I say because it could affect my grade. I have spoken to people who have taken this class before and they advised me, to get an 'A' just agree with everything that Michael says." [Marta responds: "Is that what this is about, getting an 'A'?"] "Writing our autobiographies and reading these books is very nice, but how will that help us when we are in the classroom?" "I showed my teacher at the Early Childhood Center [school in a poor community with diverse faculty and 100 percent of children from an African-American and Latino community] the lesson plan format you gave us and she told me that we would never use something like this here. She said this is a joke! This is not your basic lesson plan. I know this is your philosophy, but why can't you teach us both ways?" "I don't think I'm getting anything out of Thursday's class. I'm tired of seeing books and books. Aren't we going to be doing anything else in our classrooms besides reading to the children?" "I don't see what reading novels and doing our autobiographies has to do with becoming a teacher in a school setting. I'm not sure what questions to even

ask when I'm out there. How does what we're doing in here apply to what's going on out there?" "I believe that we should know what's being used in the schools. We are not being prepared for that." [Marta interjects: "I believe what we are doing right now is quite beneficial. I am really glad to hear what's on your minds . . . ] "Yeah, maybe beneficial for your research, but I just don't see how what we are doing in here is really going to help me out there."

Critical approaches to teacher education assume that if we engage prospective teachers in a critical literacy of teaching and learning, they will become engaged participants in the struggle against the stealthy totalitarianism and public intolerance of pluralism and dissent that seem to be gaining the upper hand in American political discourse (McLaren, 1991). This task is made more difficult because we rarely have the opportunity to select teacher candidates with a predisposition toward activism or social change. Much of the success of the Highlander Folk Center in educating civil rights and union activists, for example, can be attributed to the center's ability to select for training only people who had already demonstrated deep commitment to those movements (Horton, 1990). Teaching, on the other hand, often seems to attract people who either enjoyed the experience of schooling and want to become teachers so that they can continue to reproduce those pleasurable feelings, or people who envied the authority and control their teachers seemed to exercise, and want to emulate them. The challenge, then, is to engage the imaginations of such students with forms of teaching that legitimate dissent and encourage the construction and enactment of critical possibilities. Although the particular group described above was somewhat atypical in the vehemence of their reactions, the narrative highlights some of the complexities and contradictions of critical teaching. Most notable, perhaps, is the irony of working to develop a vanguard of educational change from among students who appear to choose teaching because of their comfort with its reproductive and controlling characteristics. As their pictures of school revealed, most of these students had traditional conceptions of pedagogy. Their demand for how-to methods, and the dissonance they experienced when they did not receive exactly what they expected, suggest that for them philosophical questions were settled. Their discomfort with autobiography and open-ended discussion reveals their 113

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preference for instrumental thinking over introspection and exploration. The resistance to works by authors of color, and the fears that surfaced concerning the uses of culturally diverse children's literature in classrooms, point toward the powerful cultural scripts within which the students were operating. Glib solutions such as placing students in culturally diverse settings, or offering courses in "multiculturalism," are unlikely to prove sufficient to unearth and address the deeply rooted constructions of racial "otherness" that these students had developed, growing up in largely segregated White communities on Long Island. Dilemmas of power appear also throughout the narrative. Is it not telling that, in a class that was almost totally female, the students raised these issues only when I, the male and senior authority figure, was absent? Yet they refused to engage the same issues upon my return. In addition, driven by their instrumental concerns and their previous experiences of how power works in classrooms, students demonstrated tremendous distrust of the grading process. Although grading criteria were quite transparent from my point of view, and were the subject of many classroom discussions and detailed information on the syllabus, the fact is that success in the course demanded of students risk-taking, sharing, collaborative learning, and new forms of knowing. For students who had never before experienced such responsibilities, this caused considerable anxiety. It is ironic that while we, critical teachers, aspire to create opportunities for empowerment among our students, we rarely appreciate the explicitly powerful statements students make when they exhibit passive resistance in our classes, or attempt to push us back behind the lectern because they feel more in control when they know the rules. In situations like this, the teacher walks a fine line between, on the one hand, alienating students by making demands on them beyond their current capacity to give and, on the other, meeting their expressed needs, when meeting those needs involves perpetuating the relationship of dependence that caused them to feel that way in the first place. In addition there are within-group power dynamics. In this case the dissident voices appear to have effectively drowned out other points of view. Finally, the narrative illustrates perhaps the greatest challenge we face in creating opportunities for student teachers to engage the critical possibili114

ties of teaching. Students come to us with embodied conceptions of teaching and learning—ideas they have built up not from learning about these topics intellectually, but from experiencing them over many years of schooling (cf. Britzman, 1991). Prospective teachers do not think teaching should be done a certain way; they know it from their lived experience. Appeals to reason, the posing of critical questions, and the creation of a learning community in which students can experience self-directed critical learning, can certainly plant seeds of doubt. However, since the students have learned from experience, we must be willing to provide them with powerful counter experiences if they are to take seriously the critical possibilities we advocate. The sad reality in most teacher education programs is that we exhort student teachers to be transformative, and then we place them with traditional teachers who denigrate reflection and confirm student teachers' deeply felt impulses about teachers' work. At best, it seems, we cultivate an ethic of individualism and furtiveness, urging our students to seek solace in the fact that they can teach the way they want behind the blanked-out glass of their classroom doors. A central tenet of critical teaching is the need for praxis—critical reflection that leads to action. We have failed in our responsibility to our students if we unveil possibilities for them, yet deny them opportunities to reinvent their teaching philosophies in action by seeing and doing the kinds of teaching we advocate. Democracy and Education The health of a participatory democracy depends on the ability of citizens to voice dissent and to participate actively in the critical reinvention and enactment of democratic processes. Teachers have a powerful role to play in the process of developing an active, critical citizenry. As gatekeepers of culture, they are also uniquely positioned to become revolutionary usurpers of culture in the interests of enhancing critical possibilities for social change. However, as activists in the civil rights movement and the early struggles over the control of Head Start programs in Mississippi found out, standing up to the power structure requires courage, solidarity, and conviction. It is a lot to ask. Those of us in teacher education must expect no less from ourselves, if we are willing to place

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this burden on teachers. Are we willing to examine our own practices critically? Are we willing to usurp the status quo in our schools of education in order to provide cohesive, critical, yet also practical courses that allow our students to gain practical ownership over critical pedagogical practices? Are we willing to be honest about our politics? Are we willing to be honest with our students about the consequences of challenging entrenched power structures? Are we willing to work with them to develop effective political strategies and the kind of solidarity needed for effective social change? It is hard for me to see how those of us who share a vision of education for justice and social change can advance our mission unless we begin to come together across our differences to talk out the practical and political complexities of the task ahead. Notes The author wishes to thank Jon Davies, Rob Estrine, Penny Oldfather, Marta Serra, Ira Shor, Alan Singer and the editorial staff of Theory Into Practice for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. 1. While my use of The Wizard of Oz as an analogy is quite limited, readers may be interested to know that there has been considerable discussion of the allegorical uses of this tale, of which Littlefield (1983) is perhaps the most notable. 2. See Haberman (1991) and Smith (1986) for a critique of mimetic teaching practices and curriculum materials, and Fine (1991) for a disturbing illustration of the results of these practices. 3. Nasaw (1979) places schools' obsession with control in historical context in a book aptly entitled Schooled to Order. 4. I owe thanks to Jennifer Vadeboncoeur for pointing out the relevance of Counts's essay to my argument. 5. For illustration and discussion of incongruities between school discourses and children's home and community discourses, see Delpit, 1988; Dyson, 1993; Gallas, 1994; Gee, 1990; Heath, 1983; Lemke, 1990; O'Loughlin, 1992a, 1992c; Reyes, 1992; Walkerdine, 1984; Willinsky, 1988. 6. See Lipka (1991), Ladson-Billings (1994), and Osborne (1991) for discussions of the possibilities and practices of culturally relevant pedagogies. 7. See Paul (1990) for a defense of rationalist approaches to critical thinking, and Ahlquist and O'Loughlin (1992) for a critical response. 8. For recent work on narrative and story, see for example Bateson, 1989; Bruner, 1990; Coles, 1989; Heilbrun, 1988; Patai, 1988; Polkinghorne, 1988; Tappan, 1991; Trinh, 1989. Much of the work on discourses is grounded in the writings of Bakhtin (1981, 1986). See, for example, Britzman, 1991; Lemke, 1990; Tappan, 1991; Wertsch, 1991.

9. See Ellsworth (1989) for a discussion of the complexities caused by the multiple positionings students and teachers bring to the learning setting. 10. See notes 5 and 6 above. The discussion in Lemke's book (1990) as well as Bourdieu's (1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) writings on the processes through which societies control access to cultural capital provide theoretical background for the discussion here. 11. For post-structuralist, feminist, and critical perspectives, see Lather (1991); see O'Loughlin (1992b) for further references. 12. Janet is actually a composite. The quotes are real, drawn from the notes of Marta Serra, and the text is reproduced here by permission of students participating in an ongoing collaborative project with Marta Serra and myself describing their experiences in our program. 13. Copies of the syllabus, describing the course philosophy and structure, and listing suggested readings, as well as copies of the lesson planning guide, are available from the author, 113 Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11550.

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