English Education

 

    I agree with Yagelski’s main argument that the purpose of English Education is to re-examine teachers’ daily practice and work towards change that can improve our students’ vision democracy and our world; however, I find his argument lacking in specific examples and solutions. Yagelski’s experience teaching at the secondary level consists of his three years of teaching 11th and 12th grade at the private upper class boarding and day school, the Vermont Academy, so Yagelski’s ethos comes from his work in English Education at the theoretical level, and not from having taught in America’s public schools or referencing his own practices as a teacher and professor. As a secondary English Educator working in public schools, I felt I could better relate to and find inspiration from bell hooks and her first chapter from Teaching to Transgress, “Engaged Pedagogy” because her perspective as a teacher, students, and black woman speaks more persuasively to the argument that Yagelski attempts to build off of from Friere that the transgressive power of teaching comes first and foremost from our attention and use of language.

 

  Yagelski proposes the purpose of English Education is to improve our democracy by relying on Friere’s praxis as “fostering a certain kind of subjectivity and encouraging a certain kind of being-in-the-world” in our students (308). Clearly, fostering this kind of critical perspective in students would involve re-examining many traditions and practices of schooling and calling into question their limitations. Yagelski calls teachers to action by recognizing these “‘limit-situations... facing American students today...driven by a global, technologically sophisticated, and pervasive culture whose power makes Orwell’s Big Brother seem almost amateurish by comparison” (309).  In my opinion, this part of Yagelski’s argument is the most passionate and as he goes on to emphasize America’s “limit-situations” of capitalization, consumption, and climate change with specific examples about SUVs and high mortgage rates for solar-heated homes. While these problems are real and troubling, where are his specifics in how pre-service teachers can learn how to build such “utopian” relationships or create “utopian” classrooms? The fact that Yagelskis uses the word utopia to describe his mission statement for pre-teachers seems to me like a lack of understanding of the daily obstacles teacher and students encounter daily. We aren’t seeking perfection; we are seeking bridges of clear communication in which to share and learn from our differences.

More reasonably, hooks recognizes that changing education begins with changing the teacher and the teacher’s relationships with students.  I am fascinated with hooks’ discussion of her own public schooling in the introduction to her Teaching to Transgress, when she describes how damaging desegregation was to her personal education because she was forced into a classroom where the white teacher did not attempt to know her and did not understand her culture or background. This still happens today, even in an era when schools (most superficially) value multicultural and diversity, or claim to value these ideals as pillars of students’ education. In order to truly foster a healthy environment in which multiculturalism is celebrated, teachers must work towards taking care of themselves so we are able to find sameness with our students and better care for our students.  hooks describes this process as “self-actualization,” which is “a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasize[s] wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit” (14). I appreciate how hooks offers a more specific approach to achieving this improvement by reflecting on her own experiences as an activist, teacher and student.  Most importantly, she goes on to define “engaged pedagogy” as focusing on wholeness and well-being:

“Teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that ‘the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher or any helping professional should be directed toward his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people’”(15).

Thus, hooks values and provides the solution of active and engaged pedagogy as one way to heal our schools, teachers, and students and rewrite American schooling in ways that are liberating for students.

An anecdote: Looking back, I remember a point during my freshmen year of college at UWEC when I sought critical engagement with my saxophone teacher from high school, Sue Orfield.  As an interview assignment for Theresa Kemp’s 200-level Women’s literature course that Spring, I needed to find a female in who had made and impact on my life and ask about her views on feminism. I chose a direct approach, and I asked Sue, “What are your thoughts on feminism as one of the only professional female jazz and rock saxophonists in the Midwest and country?” To my dismay, she quickly answered that feminism had nothing to do with it, ever. She had only ever cared for the music, and that her experiences were largely shaped by her life as a musician, and not as a woman.  At the time, I didn’t recognize that her answer might have been her choice to encourage me, but I already knew and had felt barriers as a jazz musician due to my gender. In this example, I learned a lot about myself and the kind of thinking I wished to pursue. For Dr. Kemp’s class, I wrote about how I wanted to pursue the question of why my gender seemed to bother me so much in the music field; I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied blindingly striving ahead and ignoring the complexities of this. In this way, through Dr. Kemp’s assignment, I demanded engaged pedagogy, and even began to work toward my own self-actualization as a student by recognizing I needed more time to think about gender and society, rather than rehearsals and private saxophone lessons. Sure, I could have pursued both, but at that time I needed a more safer home and I chose to pursue English.

It is difficult to ignore the conditions under which public schooling in many states exits and the public image of public schools and their teachers. With atrocious cuts to funding and demoralizing legislation that devalues teachers as professional, it will take all teachers building authentic relationships with their students to fix America’s schools in the public’s eye. hooks goes on to describe further ways in which teachers can empower students, and many of these I feel school administrators and school boards should use to empower teachers and citizens: “empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks...most professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit” (21). Our culture and American politics resist this philosophy, but hooks reminds us that progress demands taking risks and building sites of resistance.  These sites of resistance must become our school as centers of engaged pedagogy.