Comments on: Contradictions of authority in radical pedagogy https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2009/01/09/contradictions-of-authority-in-radical-pedagogy/ critical anthropology of academic culture Mon, 03 May 2010 13:13:32 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.1 By: decasia: critique of academic culture » But you ARE the professor… https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2009/01/09/contradictions-of-authority-in-radical-pedagogy/#comment-970 Mon, 03 May 2010 13:13:32 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=303#comment-970 […] anecdote that reminds us of the pedagogical contradictions of radical pedagogy (which I’ve covered before): But my favorite story about him [one Andrew Levine] concerns the first class he ever taught. It […]

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By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2009/01/09/contradictions-of-authority-in-radical-pedagogy/#comment-969 Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:21:52 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=303#comment-969 quick clarification — by ‘deference’ i don’t mean having good manners or even tending to acknowledge that someone else is better read and more experienced; by ‘deference’ I mean more like a self-disrespecting abdication of intellectual and pedagogical agency.

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By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2009/01/09/contradictions-of-authority-in-radical-pedagogy/#comment-968 Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:16:13 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=303#comment-968 In reply to supervalentthought.

nice to hear from you, though I may have to think differently about this blog now that your comment provides evidence of it having a readership! Of course you are right — as a matter of empirical fact students come in all shapes and sizes, with different, divergent, even contradictory desires, expectations, interests, solidarities… and in keeping with this, I think that no, non-solidarity isn’t just an effect of false consciousness distorting some purportedly “actual” or even “material” ground for solidarity. I would read non-solidarity as more an expression of the real state of student social (non)relations, and the achievement of student solidarity not as the retrieval of what should have been there all along, but as an emergent outcome of a new set of social relations generated internally in the classroom. At least, that seems to be what happened in the PAR class here.

So whatever the prior interests are, it seems that they ought to be transformed through the pedagogical process — and although I take your point also, completely, that there are different kinds of classrooms, I am very skeptical that a graduate seminar can be something that comfortably accommodates an authoritarian banking model of education. Even on an old-fashioned Humboldtian ideal, it seems like the basic pedagogical presumption of a seminar is one of intellectual equality in inquiry on the frontiers of current scholarship. (William Clark has an article on the origins of the research seminar, I should re-read.) OK, so there are times when students just want to assimilate a body of literature — if they’re grad students I would argue that they don’t need a *seminar* to do that since they ought to be able to teach themselves, or do a reading course. Also, I’ve seen some students invert their sense of intellectual inferiority into a kind of fantasy of the genius professor who knows everything, a person whose very presence is intellectually sanctifying even as it constantly reconfirms the impossibility of being like them. Not sure that that kind of “student interest” is something to encourage!

I agree that there’s something inadequate about my basing my analysis of why pedagogy isn’t more radical on regimes of deference alone. Incidentally, I don’t think that deference expresses anyone’s interests very effectively at all, other than the incredibly pessimistic interest of navigating an already authoritarian status quo without changing it. Sometimes I think deference can be a vestigial adaptation from other, more authoritarian contexts that lingers and obstructs; sometimes it expresses other kinds of uncertainties and social dynamics (eg, anxieties over departmental/disciplinary membership). Haven’t worked through this at all yet.

But do you think that the variation in student interest, as legitimate as it is, ever *ought* to entail traditional, authoritative pedagogy? That seems like something you might be saying. And I’d love to hear you expand on the “few exceptions” in which students are interested in metapedagogical experimentation. I want to add something more also about my personal attachment to this kind of pedagogical utopianism — and btw I actually do think there are settings where hierarchy is effective and relatively unproblematic, theatre production for instance — but anyway, I recognize that generalizing my desire may be problematic, but I feel like I can’t help wanting to.

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By: supervalentthought https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2009/01/09/contradictions-of-authority-in-radical-pedagogy/#comment-967 Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:40:32 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=303#comment-967 Great post. I want to raise here an issue we’ve talked about elsewhere, which is your tendency to see the cleavages in authority that obstruct a genuinely equally distributed relation of knowledge-power in a classroom as a consequence of student/faculty expectations of deference. Implied but not explicit in this discussion is student non-solidarity with other students. Do you think that’s just false consciousness? Do all students have the same interest? Do we need to pushing a bit what a class and a classroom are for, and not presume that they’re for the same things?

My experience (with a few exceptions) is that students are not interested in metapedagogic experimentation unless it will advance their career aims. Just installing a rotating chair is a nightmare, and has to be enforced top down (top down democracy is very unpleasant, as your anecdote suggests).

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