Books college students SHOULD read?

Newest look at what college students should read.

Banned Graphic Novels

From the ALA: 10 Banned Graphic Novels

Critical Pedagogy, Critical Literacy

Critical Pedagogy, Critical Literacy—“Working against Myths that Deform Us”

The grounding of this argument for challenging genre by infusing our literature study with comics and graphic novels includes critical constructivism (Kincheloe, 2005a) and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1993, 1998, 2005; Kincheloe, 2005b). This grounding establishes a central recognition of my discussion:

[P]roponents of critical pedagogy understand that every dimension of schooling and every form of educational practice are politically contested spaces. Shaped by history and challenged by a wide range of interest groups, educational practice is a fuzzy concept as it takes place in numerous settings, is shaped by a plethora of often-invisible forces, and can operate even in the name of democracy and justice to be totalitarian and oppressive. (Kincheloe, 2005b, p. 2)

And from critical pedagogy and critical constructivism comes the essential pursuit of critical literacy.

Before defining comics and graphic novels, I will here briefly consider how critical pedagogy, critical constructivism, and critical literacy inform my discussion and contribute to the sorts of classrooms I envision where children are offered invitations to empower themselves through rich literacy experiences that challenge our assumptions about genre, literacy, and being.

In my discussion, the term critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2005b) refers to the practices and stances taken by the teacher to provide a learning environment and opportunity for all students. Critical pedagogy stands in contrast to the dominant assumptions and practices of traditional bureaucratic schooling (most school settings of the twentieth and twenty-first century)—behaviorism, positivism, accountability, and objectivity. I offer this brief outline of some of the central ways in which critical pedagogy presents an alternative to traditional teaching:

– The teacher takes an authoritative stance, not an authoritarian one, in which the teacher exhibits one level of expertise for students to consider for their own evolving expertise.

– The teacher rejects the possibility of an objective stance (Thomas, 2010); instead, the teacher reveals her/his informed stances, emphasizing that students are not expected to conform to those stances simply because the teacher holds them.

– The teacher sees assessment as an opportunity to provide the student feedback in order to support learning, avoiding evaluation, judgment, and labeling when­ever possible. The teacher also provides students supportive conditions for self-assessment as well.

– The classroom is acknowledged as a politically contested space, with the teacher and the students holding varying degrees of power as well as negotiating for that power in an environment of collaboration instead of competition.

– Knowledge is viewed as organic, not static, and never value-free. Credible knowledge and stances are evidence-based, but the teacher models for students that all knowledge and understanding is contextual, dependent on time and place. And credible knowledge today may be rejected tomorrow as the evidence changes.

– The classroom is viewed as a workshop where the students are active partici­pants in their learning, choosing their learning with the teacher facilitating. The classroom is a place for risk taking, and all behaviors are as authentic as possible.

– The classroom must be intellectually and physically safe, and the teacher retains responsibility for both, although the ideal classroom includes students who can monitor that safety without the aid of an adult.

– The teacher is not responsible for passing on to students the norms of the culture, but to help students gain the skills to identify, analyze, evaluate, and act upon those norms—particularly if that action calls for change.

– The teacher rejects a deficit view of students as well as a blank-slate view of the human mind. The classroom is not a place to identify student errors, not a place to “fix” students. While the traditional classroom often seeks compliance from students, critical pedagogy requires teachers to foster student empowerment.

– The teacher honors the cognitive, the affective, and the psychomotor aspects of human learning.

– The teacher recognizes that learning is a social behavior, rejecting traditional concerns for isolation in school.

– The teacher honors intrinsic motivation and avoids the behavioral assumptions of the traditional classroom and Western society.

– The teacher invites students to seek goals that are open-ended, respecting the value of questions (instead of the fixed nature of answer-driven traditional schooling).

Critical constructivism (Kincheloe, 2005a), as I use the term here, refers to the nature of learning—or more clearly, the theory of learning that I believe is most conducive to an educational setting designed for (and respectful of) free people. Critical constructivism is both a theory of learning and a rejection of behaviorism, as I will use the term throughout this discussion. Critical constructivism, then, en­compasses these claims:

– All humans deserve classrooms that honor human dignity and intellectual curiosity. That all humans can learn (as an idealized and often trivialized mantra) is replaced by the recognition that the human condition is a learning condition; in other words, it is not that all humans can learn, but that learning is an inseparable part of the human condition.

– Human learning is contextual, including the given state of any human’s current knowing (that person’s mind, including the biological given of that mind, the accumulated learning of that mind, the broad life experiences that impact the knowing, and the cultural context that informs how that mind views knowing and experiences—all of which are interacting as an organic state that can never be static). Thus, critical constructivism rejects any “blank slate” view of the mind and is highly skeptical of behaviorism’s claims against human agency or free will (although those stances are valuable contributions to a vibrant debate about the human mind, the human condition, and the art and science of teaching/learning).

– Learning is placed in the context of human freedom and empowerment, not as capital in a market, not as a set of discrete skills required of a consumer/worker dynamic.

– Learning thrives in an environment that encourages risk, and then honors the value of both error (experiments that do not succeed or emerging manifestations of expertise) and success.

– The role of the student in learning includes student choice, authentic consequences, and learner action—with the teacher providing the context of that action and assuming the role of expert-in-process.

– Exhibits of learning (assessments) are guided by the learner; those learners are encouraged to develop their self-assessment abilities in the context of assessments and evaluations imposed on the learner for external authorities (teachers, mandated assessments).

– Assessment is best when the performances of students are authentic and holistic, instead of analytic testing that asks little of the learner other than marking responses within the parameters determined for them.

Critical literacy (Freire, 1998, 2005) describes the role of literacy in a person’s learning and living; it also guides how teachers implement and view language use in both educational and life situations. Critical literacy encompasses these views of language usage:

– Language is an essential aspect of being fully human, and as such, an essential aspect of human empowerment, freedom, and dignity.

– All humans continually write and rewrite, read and reread the world.

– Children deserve educational experiences that foster their own empowerment through their evolving language.

– What learners read and write are their choices, and students denied those choices are being denied their basic humanity.

– Language usage conforms and works against cultural norms and conventions of language use that reflect power and assumptions by that culture. References to the grammar of a language best serve learners and teachers when the term refers to a description of the conventional patterns of the language (as opposed to seeing grammar as a prescription for proper language use).

– All language is contextual and political; no human language can be objective.

– Language is both a path to learning and a goal of educational and personal growth by every human.

These critical stances are supported by foundational beliefs found in the work of Freire (1998, 2005). A critical stance is a paradoxical stance. A critical perspective involves an ideology that rejects the static tendencies of ideologies. Thus, both teachers and students who are critical are always vigilant to avoid becoming dogmatic, accepting simultaneously things as they are now and the ever-evolving nature of what we know, perceive, and understand. As Freire (1998) warns while acknowledging the inevitability of subjectivity:

I am not impartial or objective; not a fixed observer of facts and happenings. I never was able to be an adherent of the traits that falsely claim impartiality or objectivity. That did not prevent me, however, from holding always a rigorously ethical position. … It is an error when one becomes dogmatic about one’s point of view and ignores the fact that, even if one if certain about his or her point of view, it does not mean that one’s position is always ethically grounded. (p. 22)

As Freire explains here, to claim some fixed and objective argument about a thing called literature is itself a false claim; no objective parameters do or even can exist that distinguish A Tale of Two Cities from Watchmen, except when that does happen, the distinctions are in fact arbitrary and bound by context and assumptions—and driven by some power structure that may or may not be fair.

So to ask students to reconsider and explore both different types of literature as well as their assumptions about literature and genre is a critical act that is seeking students making new conclusions for themselves—not an act to manipulate students to reach conclusions we have already decided for them. As Freire (1998) adds, “If education cannot do everything, there is something fundamental that it can do. In other words, if education is not the key to social transformation, neither is it simply meant to reproduce the dominant ideology” (p. 110). Here is a critical argument for seeing our ELA classes as opportunities for exploring and discovering literacy, literature, and genre—not places to pass on stale and authoritarian prescriptions for literacy, literature, and genre.

Now, to consider and reconsider the texts we bring to our classrooms and the texts we honor when our students choose them is also challenging our perceptions of writing. In other words, literacy is the interplay of all aspects of human communication—reading, writing, speaking, and listening—and how all of these acts interact. Freire (2005) rejects mechanical views of literacy: “The truth is that writing is not a mere mechanical act preceded by a greater, much more important act: the act of thinking in an organized manner” (p. 1). But in school, we have and often do reduce all aspects of literacy to mechanical acts, something the student performs simply to fulfill the prescription of the teacher in order to be compliant, in order to receive credit. And thus, literacy is rendered meaningless for students:

If studying were not almost always a burden [emphasis in original] to us, if reading were not a bitter obligation, if, on the contrary, studying and reading were sources of pleasure and happiness as well as sources of the knowledge we need to better move about the world, we would have indexes that were more indicative of the quality of our education. (Freire, p. 45)

And finally, it is my critical argument that viewing literacy as mechanical and fixed, thus making literacy and learning experiences in school “always a burden,” is nearly the same as denying our students access to literacy and empowering literacy growth. And Freire (2005) speaks eloquently to this:

One of the violences perpetuated by illiteracy is the suffocation of the consciousness and the expressiveness of men and women who are forbidden from reading and writing, thus limiting their capacity to write about their reading of the world so they can rethink about their original reading of it. (p. 2)

If our prescriptive approaches to literature, literacy, and genre are closing off those worlds from our students, we are failing them in profound ways. Expanding the literature curriculum to include comics and graphic novels is but one step toward opening that door, inviting our students to embrace and enjoy the most basic aspects of being human, language and freedom.

Literacy practices in traditional settings are not empowering, but indoctrinating, and thus we are not honoring the human minds we claim to value:

[A]s we put into practice an education that critically provokes the learner’s consciousness, we are necessarily working against myths that deform us. As we confront such myths, we also face the dominant power because those myths are nothing but the expression of this power, of its ideology. (Freire, 2005, p. 75)

Rosenblatt

The Significance of Louise Rosenblatt on the Field of Teaching Literature

by Gladdys Westbrook Church

from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 1997, 71-77

© Copyright 1997 Virginia Community College System