Teaching as Listening: Strategies from Postman & Weingartner

     As I read Postman & Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, I was not reading as a believer. I kept arguing with the book as I read, and I really could not explain just why it was. As we had the lecture in the class from my peers, I did gain a better appreciation of the text as I saw it through the eyes of practitioners in the field. Chloe called the text complicated, outdated, but interesting. I had to set back and really think about the larger cultural context this book was written in. The expansion of public education at the tertiary level from the GI bill was petering out, it had been a decade since the Sputnik moment so that there was more investment in what we would call STEM classes now. It was also the late sixties and a visible part the boomer generation was questioning everything about the order of the system, Concurrently, we were seeing the rise of postmodernism and post-structuralism where the idea of any sole source of capital T “Truth” was in question.

That is the environment that was birthing the critical educational theorists with Freire and Postman & Weingartner that we have read for this course and I’m sure there are more whom I have not engaged with as I have not taken any pedagogy courses. Understanding the context better does not necessarily mean that I am in full support of the program.I still have several key critiques of the question-posing methodology. My main issue is that it torpedoes any sense of expertise. You as a professor have studied a topic and thought about it deeply and engaged with texts and the other experts in the field and have a baseline of knowledge in whatever subject it is that you are teaching. You might not know everything, in fact you know that you do not know everything and are aware of your limitations, but you know the process of coming to knowledge about the things that you do not know. I kept thinking about Socrates as a progenitor of this process as exemplified in the Platonic dialogs, in which we see the students in the agora coming to knowledge through an early version of the question posing form of teaching. In this, I am firmly in the camp with Aristotle in that we need some sort of empiricism as that baseline – what is it that we know and what is knowable, though that second part of epistemology does lend itself to the strategic process.

The other part that kept rubbing me the wrong way is that even though the goal of Postman & Weingartner is to allow student to become peers with their teachers in terms of taking ownership of their own education, the student is not centered in the text. We mostly see the authors focusing on the teachers and their role, but in a process like they are speaking about, it would seem to me that the students are the more important part. All the talk of teaching as a subversive activity should be overshadowed by the fact that learning is a subversive activity.

So how does one help make teaching a subversive activity? The authors share a list of eighteen suggestions in chapter eight, “New Teachers” that they state will seem “thoroughly impractical” (137). And this is where I think my frustration with the text came to a head. They start with a suggestion that we stop using textbooks for five years, then go on to having teachers teach outside of their areas of expertise, to dissolving all thoughts of a subject at all. They even have what feels like a Maoist suggestion to have teachers take a leave of absence every fourth year to do something else (139). Their list got increasingly absurd, and I did agree that it seemed impractical. I have to admit to being a bit conservative in making radical changes of this sort. Taking great risks can have great positive consequences, but I would rather make small incremental improvements than risk the huge downside risks that could come from failure.

However, the authors have a point in noting that change is needed (141), and that change is a key component of the world, but it does not feel as if it was fully embraced by educators (xiii). I think my own conservative nature regarding education is in part from the fact that the education process worked well for me. So, what I do is reflect on the classes I had and when I step into a classroom, I try to recreate the best of what I saw as a student but flip that to doing the same thing as a teacher. We see though, through years of evidence, that this does not work for all students. There are many who are disengaged for whatever reason, who resist the current paradigm, and thus “fail” in terms of how success in the system is measured.

To make this change from the lessons of Postman & Weingartner, I need a reframing of the process from how I was initially reading it. On my first reading of the text, I really read what they were doing as a denigration of all forms of expertise. As someone who has spent a lot of time in school, I value the level of expertise I have. I know things and that is important to my conception of self. What we need to do is not see the call for student-centered teaching as a denigration of expertise, but what it is a call for humility. This humility is important because to break down the hierarchy inherent in the current paradigm, it takes a mental shift from the professor. You are no longer the expert in the room, the sage on the stage, but you are a facilitator or coach as the other people in the room come to knowledge. You may be a bit further on the path of formal learning than your new peers, but they are acknowledged experts in their own lives and experiences.

Thinking through this reframing and humility allows you to work through the process with your students. You can meld the process of learning with the thing that you are learning. You cannot be learning any particular “subject,” but instead be focusing on one small node in the larger web of everything that is possible to be learned and to be creating new threads in that web. We can talk about what it is that we know and how we know it and how it has effects on our life outside of the classroom. We can learn not just things but the questions that we ask to learn those things (23). You as a teacher can use this question posing, open-ended process in a generative way, and that is reflected toward the end of the book in Chapter 12 as the authors are looking at applications of the process. It is here they are humbler themselves than what we saw in the earlier chapter, knowing that there are larger structural limitations in place. One suggestion is to “Listen to your students” (194). Here is a radical idea, emphasizing that you need to be really listening as a psychologist and not just being reactive. This humanizes your students and helps level the playing field, ensuring that you can see your students as humans with their own agency. It is in this chapter that we see the cumulation of the critiques and suggestions in the book and allows everyone to see education as an ongoing process and not some predetermined endpoint (205).

To make it more concrete, I will try to outline the process of  identifying strategies from Postman & Weingartner’s book would I use to implement changes from my experience as a writing instructor. We did not have control over the larger curriculum. The students were supposed to write and revise five papers, three of which were selected to be reviewed by my peers and professors to make sure we all were grading to similar standards. However, we were given a lot of leeway. In this new context, I would work through the process with my students. I would come on the day the unit started, and I would introduce the constraints within which we were working. We would talk about how we would want to respond. One of the interesting things is that it was a writing class so we had to write about something, so we would talk about what it was that was interesting to us at that point. We would then start asking what we think we know about the subject. We would examine why it is that we think we know it. We would ask what it is that we do not yet know, and we would come back and talk about what we learned as we tried to learn more about the topic. From here, we would start shaping our writing, and putting the paper we were assigned to write together. We would shape the arguments and make our claims and respond to objections – objections from our peers and anticipated ones from our assumed audience. By doing this process, we would all end up with a document that met the constraints imposed by the department on me as a teacher and the students in their institutional role. All of us would start out from a place of less knowledge and experience and grow to a place where we had more knowledge and experience. We would learn research without ever having a specific lesson on research and we would learn the rhetorical triangle without ever reading the Poetics. It would not be truly subversive, but taking as much ownership of our collective education is as subversive as possible within existing constraints. 

Mostly Fiction: Reading 12.17.2023

 

The Invisibles Omnibus – Grant Morrison

The first thing I have to mention is the sheer physical heft of the book. It’s hard to read in a normal way. It makes it hard to find the time to sit down and read it because the only way I was able to read it with some momentum and not want to put it down every few minutes was propped up on a desk that I cleared of other stuff.

 

Content-wise, it was interesting. Morrison is a good writer, and the individual stories are connected to some larger arcs and there is payoff at the end, but it does feel like it takes a while for it to get there. He weaves in stuff from the situationists and mentioned memes way earlier than I had heard of them. Also, huge props to the series for including a trans character in the nineties.

 

The other thing that was weird reading the story now is that the Myan great cycle that hit the news at the end of 2012 is a plot point that is important but for a reader now it was just a quaint thing in the past (or did everything actually reset?).

 

Worth reading but I would recommend finding smaller versions because of the dang size of the omnibus book.

 

The Portable Door – Holt

 

At this point I have read a dozen books by Tom Holt. And I like Tom Holt but I’m not an evangelist for him. I heard of him at some point where I was asking for writers like Pratchett and his name came up and it was good that he’d been fairly prolific so there are a number of books one can read by him. But there’s something missing. Like all the ingredients are there but like maybe it’s too British or something. I like it for the absurdist comic fantasy that it is, and I will read more of the books, but maybe it was a detriment that his work was compared to Pratchett because it is hard to stand in that comparison. I’m still going to read the next one in this series, and well keep going from there.

 

The Red and the Black – Stendhal

If there’s one thing that I learned from this book, is that if you have women in your house, don’t invite Julien Sorel in. I had a challenging time getting into this book, as the first parts where Julian is in the provinces and then in seminary go a bit slow, but then once he’s in Paris, it picks up.

 

I didn’t see his crime coming, but it does seem to be in character because Stendhal makes this guy pretty loathsome to me. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to the other characters in the book. I think it may be a dramatic irony built in, but I am far enough removed from living in the context of the book to not really know if I should be rooting for Sorel or not, or if Stendhal likes his creation or not (or if that even matters).

 

I’m glad I read it because it is an important part of the canon but also enjoyable on its own, no matter what you make of the central character.

 

Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

Carter here creates a meditation on truth and storytelling, as she tells the story of Sophie Fevvers and the journalist who is telling her story, Jack Walser.

We meet the characters in London and follow them across Europe to Petersburg and then to Siberia. Sophie is part human and part swan, or is she? Jack follows and falls in love with her, and they end up in a train accident in Siberia and meeting an exiled piano teacher. It’s weird and really peaks after the first third of the book where the characters have met in London and Sophie is telling her back story. But it is also beautifully written so even though it felt like it was spinning out and I was waiting for some resolution it was worth reading.

 

Think Python – Downey

 

I used this book as a supplement to a class I was taking in Python. It was good as a supplement, but I do worry that it would not be sufficient for someone who was only using this book or someone who had not had a bit of a background in doing some programming stuff. The exercises are also made for someone who has a decent understanding of math and personally I stopped trying the exercises after the first few chapters because of that, as well as having other problems that had been assigned to me for the course I was taking.

 

Camp Damascus – Chuck Tingle

 

I had only known Tingle as the author of the seemingly silly titled erotica but having followed him on social media for a while, I know the person behind the façade is an interesting and thoughtful writer. So, I was interested to see that he was making a more mainstream book.

 

Camp Damascus is a horror novel with a queer female teen protagonist who seems to have some sort of autism spectrum disorder. She is in a family in a town that is strongly centered on the titular camp that is run as a conversion camp. It is not giving too much away to say that hijinks ensue. The characters, especially the main one, are beautifully written and developed and the action flows really well. If you were raised around or within the evangelical movement, you might find that Tingle hits some notes perfectly. It feels almost like a backhanded compliment to say that the book is really professionally written and to note that I have already pre-ordered the next “serious” title, but you really should read this book if you like religious themed teen horror. It’s really well done and not even something that is in my normal wheelhouse.

 

Giants in the Earth – Rolvaag

 

My wife’s family is from the northern plains – Scandinavian immigrants to the Dakotas and Nebraska territories, and the story of their ancestor’s descendants is broadly the story told here. Rolvaag tells the story of a group of settlers and the dangers and trials they face trying to tame the empty wilderness and make it their own. If you have ever driven through the plains, you know the barrenness and emptiness of the landscape, but also, its wide-open beauty as the land is just an open ocean all around you.

 

Our heroes face locusts and snowstorms and wandering cows, as well as the natives (though I was surprised how little the people that the settlers were displacing on the land came into the narrative) to make the land their own.

 

The book made me think of how important the relationships you build were in the settlement process. You only had your family and your immediate community, and often you were on your own. The book it reminded me of most was Steinbeck’s East of Eden, not just because of the settlement aspect of it, but also there is the same sort of edge of misogyny in the female characters. The main character’s is Per Hansa and his wife is drawn almost as if she has clinical depression from the move to the prairie and Per Hansa doesn’t address her needs – ignoring them to his detriment.

 

There’s also what felt like a weird lack of tragedy in the book for a set of characters who are facing hardship – right up until the last chapter (spoiler alert). It’s well-written and made me feel like I was part of the settlers. I would call it an engrossing read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Graphic Novels and Protests: Recent Reads 10.28.2023

 The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott

 

I came to this based off of Thorogood’s newer text. It’s a more straightforward narrative than that one. It’s good though. It’s about friendship and mort importantly, the urgent need to create art. She’s certainly an artist to watch as her career grows. 

 

Monica

This was an interesting book because in structure, it’s a lot like the kind of graphic memoir that you can come across easily. But there is also this supernatural thread that Clowes weaves throughout the narrative. It’s beautifully weird, and then there’s this incredible payoff on the last page. Totally worth your time and attention.

 

If We Burn

“Bevins has a new book coming out,” I said to myself, “I’m pre-ordering that no matter what it’s about.” That’s how good the Jakarta Method was.

 

With “If We Burn,” Bevins moves into more recent history as he explores the protests that swept the world in the 2010s, some of which he was a part of, and interviewing other people who were firsthand witnesses. What struck me most was how he described so many of them taking their cues from recent past and contemporary movements. Protests in the social media age developed a whole vocabulary of action and reaction from both the protesters and authorities.

 

Also, of note is how he covers the emergence of leaderless protests. They can express real dissatisfaction, but they can also have no real (or shifting) demands or possible end states. They can also be co-opted as Bevins shows how some of the protests in Brazil and Egypt evolved.

 

Overall, as someone who wants to see the world develop towards a society of greater equity and citizen rights, the mood is somber. The protests covered here were ineffective for the most part in creating any change that was durable. Perhaps we need a new vocabulary or need to revisit old paradigms.