Listening Up: reinventing ourselves as teachers and students. (Reviews).

Listening up: Reinventing ourselves as teachers and students.

By Rachel Martin. Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 2001.

This book is about the evolution of one teacher's pedagogy, and about the relationship between listening and radical teaching. Based on Rachel Martin's work with emerging readers and writers in a variety of adult and teen programs, the book follows her growing discomfort with Freirian pedagogy as she observes that it does not adequately describe her own experience or the students she teaches. We follow her on this journey as she examines the ideas that initially guided her work through the lens of her experience and through the poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories that helped her frame a new perspective.

An earlier version of this text has actually been circulating in the adult education network for many years. Teachers treasure dog-eared, third generation xerox copies of a manuscript that took ten years to reach publication. It is the recognition that critical pedagogy has not adequately named who we are or who our students are, that has deeply resonated with so many progressive adult educators--educators concerned that they may be imposing a new "critical" reality rather than engaging students in the more transformative process of reflecting on what they believe and why.

Freirian pedagogy holds that education is not neutral-it either reaches people to adapt to social relations as they exist (to fit in) or to analyze the social forces that are shaping their daily reality (and which can be changed). Freirian teacher/facilitators foster the latter by prompting students to problematize their collective experience so that they can act with greater social awareness and agency in the future. Martin's critique is that such a pedagogy positions the teacher/facilitator as a being with an already-raised consciousness who is helping less-enlightened students raise theirs.

By treating uneducated people as less "developed," critical pedagogy unwittingly complements the common portrayal, by the media and the literacy establishment, of these adults as dysfunctional-lacking in "self-esteem," intimidated by the world, and unaware of their own limitations. (In 1991, for example, the National Adult Literacy Survey [NALS] determined that about 22% of the adult population [approximately 44 million people] scored at the lowest literacy level where "they lack a sufficient foundation of basic skills to function successfully in our society." The fact that 93% of all adults assessed themselves as reading "well" or "very well" was nor considered reason to call the survey conclusions into question.) Martin describes the efforts by both radicals and conservatives to define what the marginalized need as two sides of the same coin.

In addition to a growing concern about its contradictions, Martin was also becoming interested in questions that went unaddressed by critical theory--questions such as, "Since the people in my class do think critically much of the time, ... what keeps them, and me, from always acting on that critical knowledge?... What accounts for the contradictions between their consciousness and their actions--and my own?" (42) And what, despite clear evidence to the contrary, keeps deep-seated myths (about race, class, etc.) alive and well?

Finding her old Freirian framework inadequate, she looked to other theoretical explanations to better address her evolving questions. Poststructuralism, for example, introduced the notion that we each live within multiple, socially-constructed identities, which may co-exist uneasily or even be at odds with one another. This insight invites us to see ourselves in a web of relations, neither simply oppressor or oppressed, and very likely ambivalent about making social change. Martin notes that these ideas help us get beyond the impossible task of proving the correctness of our beliefs, to instead deconstructing "how we come to know what we know," and to consider why, in the face of clear injustice, we are still prone to inaction.

Though in this early section of the book, Martin is still laying the theoretical groundwork for her later descriptions of practice, the implications of poststructuralism are already very clear. Not quite so for the following discussion of psychoanalytic theory, which Martin finds helpf ul for explaining a psychic need to "otherize" those who are different from ourselves. While this may be true, it leaves us somewhat at a dead end, as she doesn't offer the guideposts that would make true the claim that psychoanalysis itself might become a useful teaching tool.

But what follows--several chapters of teaching strategies based on honing the ability to "listen up" and analyze what we hear--is useful for teaching. The strategies are inherently motivating because, "once people are engaged with reading and writing, using literacy to root out answers to questions they have identified, in an investigation they have structured, believing there are people who will collaborate with them in the study and listen while they think out loud," (154), students can trust that the process is about discovering new ideas and not about "fixing" them. And what becomes possible is powerful. The intensity of the explorations that Martin recounts is palpable; the tension that builds as adults approach a new or difficult discovery through text is gripping.

However, the most striking thing about these illustrations of teaching that is based on relationships of inquiry rather than fear is the way they offset the insidiousness of many common teaching practices. We see, in a newly stark contrast, the ways that educators, through our attitudes, approaches, and techniques, position adult students as "less than" ourselves--intellectually, developmentally, even potentially-- despite claims that we are all peers "co-learning" with and from each other. In fact, Martin relates a painful list of examples of the exact opposite: of the over-enthusiastic applause at every sign of competence, of the penchant for asking students how they "feel" rather than what they "think," of the projection of our own ineffective techniques Onto "unmotivated" and "learning disabled" students, and the myriad ways we convey to adults that we're interested in the form but not the content of what they say.

These are attitudes of the superior toward the inferior, and they are mirrored at the policy level where, in this age of accountability; adult education programs are being forced to justify their performance by documenting individual outcomes--monitoring the behaviors and actions of the poor to make sure they are putting their learning to what those making decisions consider socially productive use. Couched in the language of adults "meeting their own goals," these efforts have the effect of pushing programs toward more individualized instruction that prioritizes short-term functional gain over the larger educational project of deepened understanding about the world, how it came to be organized as it is, and how it might change.

One way this book can be misunderstood, since Martin's own teaching is grounded in the examination of race, class, and gender as social constructs that shape our thinking, is to see it as a book about teaching for social change. Yet Martin is clear that the pedagogy she has come to is about "expanding our understanding of ourselves," so that whatever change may come is anchored in a greater awareness of our own ambivalence, multiple positions, fears and desires. She says, "If we view one of our main goals as deconstructing how we come to know what we know, it may help make moot the question of whether we impose our ideas of social change, a question that so often preoccupies discussion of radical education."

One thing Martin shares with Freire is an understanding of the power in naming one's reality, of being the definer rather than the defined. It is clear from the book's opening quote ("Poverty in an age of affluence is being unable to write and having others write about you" [Sister Stanislaus Kennedy; Dublin, Ireland]) that she is interested in us "listening up" to the words and written texts of people who are seldom invited to describe the world. And she offers us both theoretical and practical assistance to help us open our ears. I remain hopeful that, in the din created by the current climate of pre-determined goals, products, standards, and countable outcomes, we will be able to hear.

Andy Nash coordinates teacher development projects at the New England Literacy Resource Center (NELRC), where she currently works with practitioners who want to integrate civic participation and community action with the development of literacy and language skills. Over the past 15 years, her teaching and writing have focused on participatory approaches in adult education. She most recently edited "The Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook" for adult educators, available from NERLAC.