A long-time writing program administrator and well-respected iconoclast, Irvin Peckham is strongly identified with progressive ideologies in education. However, in
Going North Thinking West, Peckham mounts a serious critique of what is called critical pedagogy--primarily a project of the academic left--in spite of his own sympathies there. College composition is fundamentally a middle-class enterprise, and is conducted by middle-class professionals, while student demographics show increasing presence of the working class. In spite of best intentions to ameliorate inequitable social class relationships, says Peckham, critical pedagogies can actually contribute to reproducing those relationships in traditional forms--not only perpetuating social inequities, but pushing working class students toward self-alienation, as well. Peckham argues for more clarity on the history of critical thinking, social class structures and teacher identity (especially as these are theorized by Pierre Bourdieu), while he undertakes a critical inquiry of the teaching practices with which even he identifies.
Going North Thinking West focuses especially on writing teachers who claim a necessary linkage between critical thinking and writing skills; these would include both teachers who promote the fairly a-political position that argumentation is the obvious and necessary form of academic discourse, and more controversial teachers who advocate turning a classroom into a productive site of social transformation. Ultimately, Peckham argues for a rereading of Freire (an icon of transformational pedagogy), and for a collaborative investigation of students' worlds as the first step in a successful writing pedagogy. It is an argument for a pedagogy based on service to students rather than on transforming them.
GOING NORTH, THINKING WEST
The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing InstructionBy IRVIN PECKHAMUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-804-6Contents
Acknowledgments..........................................................vii1 Intersections..........................................................12 Social Class...........................................................16Absence of Class.........................................................16Ontology of Class........................................................23Objectivity of Class.....................................................253 Language, Class, and Codes.............................................28Working-Class English....................................................28Bernstein's Analysis of Class Codes......................................30Objections to Bernstein..................................................34Working-Class Students' Rights to Their Own Language.....................39Middle-Class English and Freshman Composition............................434 Critical Thinking......................................................49Historicizing Critical Thinking..........................................50Cognitive Strand.........................................................53Social Strand............................................................605 Arguing................................................................66Social Class and Argument................................................676 Cultural Studies and Composition.......................................86Central Contradictions...................................................91False Consciousness......................................................103Prescribing Critical Thinking............................................1057 The Teachers...........................................................112Critical Thinking in English 102.........................................115Difference and Diversity.................................................123Allodoxia: Putting the Blame Elsewhere...................................1288 The Professors.........................................................143Hubris or Humility.......................................................145Good Practice............................................................1529 Going West.............................................................159Making a Difference......................................................161References...............................................................166Index....................................................................175About the Author.........................................................177
Chapter One
INTERSECTIONS
This book is about teaching, which is far more than a simple act of transmitting knowledge from those who know into those who are learning—or even of initiating the young into our matrix of discourse communities. The classroom is where community happens, the site of cultural reproduction and revolution, of parroting and creating, of being and not-being. It is the site of power struggles between social classes through the agency of language, where we sort students and distribute privileges, where we train students to accept the kind of life they will most likely have as adults. It is also the place where we were trained to be teachers and where we are constantly being retrained through our praxis. Looked at this way, the classroom is a very interesting place.
This book is also about writing. Writing is a fundamental act of literacy, of naming the world and writing one's way into it. But writing, like teaching, is far from simple. Words, which form the fabric of writing, remove us from primary experience. They shape our understanding and identities. In a literate society, words are a primary agency of exchange. Words, even more than weapons, are consequently the tools of power. Words form webs of aggression and deceit. Through words, we sort people, create and maintain hierarchies, and distribute privilege. They are the way we do things—and they are the agency through which things are done to us. They are the vortex of culture, which is why words and literacies are also very interesting.
My interest in the intersections between writing, teaching, and social class is personal because I have changed my identities, allegiances, and ways of thinking as a consequence of my career. I was born into a rural, working-class family. I am now urban and excessively middleclass, although ineluctably carrying my working-class origins with me. I began working as a high school teacher; I now teach, research, and write in a doctoral intensive university. I used to think that educational institutions functioned to encourage students to learn. I now see them as functioning in part to create failure. The primary agency of failure is language. Although this conflicted interpretation of education may be obvious for postmodern language theorists with a liberatory bent, it is a far cry from what I imagined when I was a high school student, a college student, or an idealistic high school teacher who imagined writing as the road to satori.
I also have to consider that I am an agent of the social reproduction project institutionalizing failure for the majority of working-class students, a disproportionate percentage of whom are women, African-Americans, and Hispanics (Zweig 2000, 31-33). What's worse for me, writing plays an important role in that project. In some cases, writing leads to knowledge, but in others, it is one of the best ways of sorting people. This is not a particularly surprising claim when one considers some of the common ways in which we use language to identify ourselves and the social groups to which we belong. Consequently, an analysis of writing instruction as a sorting mechanism bends back to what I do. Although I do not consider myself to be a radical writing teacher hell-bent on restructuring society through the agency of my students, my sympathies lie in this direction, so I am particularly concerned about classroom strategies that I and other progressive teachers might be employing that contribute to the reproduction of social class relationships in spite of our intent to challenge them.
Marxist in origin, social reproduction theory has been expanded, refracted, and complicated by Althusser (1984), Gramsci (1971), Durkheim, and more lately, Freire ([1970] 1995), Berger and Luckmann (1967), Bowles and Gintis (1976), Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), and a host of other writers in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s (Shor 1980; Anyon 1980;Apple 1982; Katz 1971; Clark 1960; Aronowitz 1997, Gee 1997; Macedo 1993; McLaren 1989; Giroux 1993, Berlin 1987, to name some of the more widely cited). The foundation of social reproduction theory seems fairly commonsensical. Societies are framed by social structures that define and maintain the relationships among various groups within the society. Among industrialized societies, in particular, these relationships are characterized by a hierarchical distribution of wealth, status, and privilege. Some groups at the top of the hierarchy receive significantly more wealth, status, and privilege than those at the bottom. In the United States, this difference is bracketed by corporate executives whose average salaries (including stocks and other compensations) are about 10.9 million dollars a year (AFL-CIO 2009) compared to a minimum wage earner who makes about...
