War, lies, and pedagogy: teaching in fearful times.

[The editors of this issue posed some questions for Ira Shor. Here they are, with his responses.]

EDITORS: Staten Island has sent many young people to Iraq, and many have died. Many people from Staten Island also died on 9/11. How do you encourage an essentially conservative student body at the College of Staten Island to discuss the war in Iraq critically?

IRA: Many thanks for inviting me to dialogue with you and your readers. Undergraduates at Staten Island are more female, more non-white, and more immigrant than some years back, as has happened in most mass urban colleges (while the Ivy League remains majority male). On Staten Island, White conservative Republicans still dominate the economy and politics, while racial segregation persists. But my classes are diverse in color, ethnicity, age, and majors, requiring me to learn each class's profile and offering one of the few multi-racial "contact zones" to test critical learning in our society.

Here, conditions for teaching and learning are worse now than in 1971 thanks to incessant budget cuts and to administrative seizure of greater authority over teaching, testing, scheduling, class size, hiring, etc. Also, for working students and families, conditions for living are worse now in New York City than they were 35 years ago when CUNY was a tuition-free, open admissions university. As the terms for working, living, and learning worsen, students become more stressed and withdrawn, cynical, distracted, and impatient. Hard times mean it's harder to learn and to teach. Student and teacher expectations have been significantly lowered since the activist 1970s, and the lower the expectations, the harder I have to work as a critical teacher. Teachers and students feel more vulnerable, more isolated, less civic-oriented, less patient with the risk and responsibility of questioning the status quo.

Regarding 9/11: Of course, that terrible day has an enormous local profile. Millions of us witnessed the Towers burn and collapse, me from my roof in Brooklyn, in ghastly astonishment. Who knows how long such a trauma takes to dissipate? Staten Island lost 78 firemen that day, memorialized in local murals, honored for martyrdom. But, in some ways, the grasp of that day is slowly eroding as politicians shamelessly exploit it to justify bad policies, like the war in Iraq. In addition, NYC business leaders have fought for years over the spoils of the priceless 16 acres of Ground Zero; smarmy politicians jockey over who will claim the most credit for building the heroic monument. This local spectacle of wealthy developers sucking dollars from tragedy joins the picture of national leaders producing catastrophic blunders like Iraq and Katrina, that repositions 9/11 in memory. In the months after the attack, Ground Zero was cordoned off and opened only for celebrities who drove up in limos. Thousands of ordinary people were kept behind barricades and walls hiding "the pile" from view. I would pose this problem in class: Who should have access to Ground Zero? Celebrities only or the people of the City generally? I brought in articles reporting this situation and asked students to write and debate the official policy of access, which afforded first Mayor Giuliani and then Mayor Bloomberg many picturesque photo ops with the rich and powerful who came to pose heroically among the smoking ruins.

EDITORS: Is the patriotism (nationalism, if you prefer) that our leaders have fired up a main factor in your classes, now? Whether yes or no to that, how do you work with the feelings and ideas your students have about the United States?

IRA: Staten Island's White neighborhoods are flag-displaying areas much like the White working-class enclaves of New York's other boroughs and also like the White suburbs. Affluent White areas can be just as patriotic, but while working-class habits favor showy displays, elite manners disdain overstatement. Patriotism, then, on Staten Island, is a visible White activity mostly, a bundle of identifications with power, conquest, and heroism.

Patriotism and patriarchy converge to ignite the appeal of such rituals. Hollywood films and TV specials display the distinctly macho appeal of war. To many young men, whose bodies teem with energy and desire, war is a place to go wild or to blow off steam with apparent public license. What can especially thrill boys and young men about war and parades is a combination of moral righteousness (we are the good guys) and violent male bonding (brotherhood of risk). War and parades also disrupt the boring core of everyday life, like a fire drill at school, breaking up regimented routines. This complex foundation for patriotism is different in the case of women, I would say, and for dark-skinned men (whose subordinate status makes identification with White male power problematic), though women and minorities serve in large numbers in Iraq and also join the ranks of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

For critical teaching to compete with the subjective appeal of patriotism, it has to assert affective and cognitive intensity, some emotional and intellectual daring, something at stake in the problem-posing. In addition, the unexamined ideals and ideas underlying patriotism (we are the good guys, conquest is good) have to be questioned so as to complicate student identification with this spectacle.

To do this in my diverse classroom--males and females of differing ages, majors, colors, and ethnicities--I pose problems instead of lecturing, choosing to frontload student positions and to backload my own commentary. I must take this approach if I want to include students in the making of knowledge, rather than handing knowledge ready-made to them. I put student discourses first to invite as many students as possible into debate, so that they become stakeholders in the learning process because of their verbal investment.

Here is how I most recently approached the Iraq War as a theme for problem-posing. On the first day of my comp classes, as part of an exercise in which students self-define the current writing process, I asked everyone to write a 20-minute "brainstorm" on any topic they want. For those unable to find a topic, I provided nine different themes, the Iraq War among them, asking "How is the war going? Why did it start? How will it end?" for prompts. Reading all their brainstorms at home, I discovered that a few wrote passionately on Iraq, but most didn't. For the next class session I prepared a ballot listing the themes students wrote about most often and most passionately--five or six in all, Iraq among them--asking students to anonymously circle their three top choices. I then handed out an anonymous survey on the War to find out what the group knew and felt about the conflict, and to educate me on the shape of this issue in their perception, in case Iraq makes the cut for student-selected themes. Adding up the ballots, I discovered that "Gay Marriage" was the most popular topic, but that the Iraq War came in second or third, thus authorizing me to include it. For the next class, I prepared a study packet for in-class activity and two research packets for students to take home. As they write more about the War, I will use their texts as reading matter for class debate, thus relieving me of the task of lecturing them on the War and enabling me to join in a student-based dialogue instead. This process is gradually exposing a chunk of students opposed to the War but reluctant to say so, along with another chunk of students who admit to having no idea of what the war is about.

Often, the less I say, the more students want to hear from me. Students are often eager to know what the teacher thinks, some because they want to mimic the teacher's values and language to get a good grade, some because they legitimately respect the teacher's opinions. In any event, in my conservative, working-class college, should I begin units with my lectures on what things mean and what to think, most students would ignore me, resent me, copy my words to get a good grade, or just daydream about sex. So far, I've found students divided about Iraq but cautious about publicly debating it. Multiple exercises and contexts are needed to ease into this troubling topic.

EDITORS: As progressive academics confront attacks from the Right, do you think we should stand with the AAUP and such organizations on the ground of professional standards and autonomy, won over the last hundred years? Or should we be deepening our critique of conventional professionalism, while seeking allies among adjuncts, K-12 teachers, and nonacademic workers?

IRA: Conventional professionalism is part of the market system, based in individualism, careerism, managerial control, political policing of dissent, and the "normal" dominance of elite white men in all fields. Mostly female schoolteachers are the bottom rank of education, its least-empowered managers, implementing policies and practices invented by more powerful professionals in research universities, state departments of education, school boards, and central administrations. Professionalism as we know it has a friendly fit with the structure of inequality already in place. The job of professionals is to maintain the hierarchy of society, fitting each new generation into the unequal status quo, into gender, race, and class positions already laid out. Professionals are not trained to rock the boat or rewarded for doing so once in service. In addition, professionalism includes divisions of full-timers and part-timers, teachers and scholars, teachers and administrators, science versus humanities, with privileges accumulating on one side of each division. A community-based, democratic model of professionalism is surely a good idea. Teachers as allies of parents and students to win funding equity and to undermine inequality is the professional ideal some of us prefer.

EDITORS: How do you counter the privatization of higher education? (Local example: this year, CUNY student governance supported a tuition increase, probably influenced by the fact that two of the leaders were from the Honors College and paid no tuition. Students were told that their education would be worth more if they paid more because there would be more money for technology and new faculty.)

IRA: Shame on the Honors College in CUNY and on the honors students who voted for a tuition increase. Honors programs are ways to funnel more privileges to the already-privileged, to tilt the budget so that the top echelons get disproportionate aid, to filter out lower-class applicants. Harvard is the model of honors advocates. Harvard's $25-billion endowment and its $550-million in annual girls hegemonize higher education, setting the standards of elitism for colleges elsewhere. What servile drivel to model historic CUNY after such an elitist place. Until 1976, CUNY was called "the Harvard of the working-class" for its tuition-free policy for all students. The Honors College is the worst betrayal yet of this legacy. With an Honors College for a privileged few in this mass university, we will become not Harvard, but rather Harvard-lite, a little White Harvard cupcake. Fewer Black students are now enrolled in CUNY's senior colleges since the new elitists took over. The new Honors College offers $7500 spending accounts and free tuition only to a handful of the so-called 'best and brightest,' as well as free laptops and privileged access to courses. With a $5-billion-dollar surplus in its treasury, New York City can afford free tuition for all CUNY students, period. With a $2-billion-dollar surplus in its treasury, New York State can afford to buy laptops for all CUNY students when they begin college, period.

Next, the claim that the higher the tuition, the more prestige a college degree will have, the argument of the protuition, pro-Honors clique at CUNY: briefly, high-tuition colleges have been selective private campuses for the wealthy which filter out most applicants because of income and SAT/ACT scores. Low-tuition and non-selective campuses have historically been public colleges accessible to poor and middle-income families. Has high-quality, then, always been synonymous with high-tuition? Forty years ago, the private universities of New York State were being outcompeted by its public universities which were then low-tuition and better-funded thanks to steady tax support. At that time, high-achieving students in NY readily chose tax-funded, low-cost public universities, whose reputations then were on a par with many private campuses despite not having high tuition. Adequate public funding sustained the academic quality of these desirable public campuses. However, the private colleges and universities were unhappy.

With Governor Nelson Rockefeller in Albany for 15 years (1958-1973), the private campuses successfully campaigned to change the funding equation in their favor, by increasing tuition at public universities and increasing aid to private universities. At the same time, an aggressive campaign against free tuition and open admissions at CUNY was underway, which included ridiculing the students and faculty at these campuses. Eventually starved for funds, public universities fell in quality and appeal, and began passing on more of their costs to students and their families, while private universities prospered from public subsidies (about $100 million in some years in New York) and by launching successful capital campaigns among their wealthy alumni and corporate friends, who came largely from selective campuses themselves. The moral of this class and race war in higher education is simple: high tuition was not needed to enhance the prestige or academic quality of SUNY or CUNY as long as public funding was sustained.

EDITORS: Are there ways in which our teaching can foster resistant activism, in this time of repression?

IRA: When we teach critically, questioning the status quo is the central orientation, which is then translated into a syllabus, a lesson plan, etc. Questioning the status quo is more likely to encourage activism when the themes are local, relevant, legible, and contemporary, and also when there are activist groups off-campus with welcoming profiles. A local subject matter takes the syllabus from the classroom into the surrounding community life. A relevant subject matter means choosing a theme that matters to students while also intersecting with larger questions of power in society. A legible subject matter means that the theme is presented or posed in an idiom hospitable to student culture, age, level of academic development, and language. A contemporary subject matter means that the problem-theme posed to students is currently in contention, an ongoing issue or conflict or concern which can be tracked in real time during the class and which can be intervened against by any who feel moved to civic action. In another case, as I mentioned just above, critical teaching for activism may be more productive if it draws on activism already underway and builds a syllabus or lesson unit around an ongoing campaign. For example, some communities may have antiwar coalitions already in the field. In other areas, perhaps community campaigns have been organized around pollution, or lack of playground space, or traffic endangering children, or lack of mass transit, or inadequate garbage collection, or the takeover of public land by private interests,

Another kind of critical teaching can use ethnography as the learning process to invite students to become researchers/reporters on the community. I've used an ethnographic model in writing classes through which students choose off-campus sites about which they write successive drafts of reports. In addition, in class I present various exercises about research methods, as well as various texts about life and conditions in the City. In another approach, I ask students to imagine a project in their locale that would improve community life. I did this in a sophomore-level course reported in detail in my book, When Students Have Power. Sometimes I've asked students to name and explain three changes that would improve their undergraduate experience. For colleagues in k-12, I'd recommend the work of Bob Peterson, Linda Christensen, and Bill Bigelow, from Rethinking Schools, as three extraordinary critical teachers who focus on activism.

EDITORS: Should we reconsider assumptions that have guided progressive pedagogy for four decades, now that the Right is putting some of them to work against the academic left and center? These assumptions include empowering students through Freirean and other student-centered practices that challenge teachers' authority and professional standards, seen as "elitist." They encourage a multicultural polyphony of voices in classrooms, imagined as "safe spaces" where students (especially female, minority, and working class) would feel at ease to contest issues and "negotiate meaning". As we actively confront these conservative forces, should we also be rethinking our commitment to egalitarian academic relations? How should progressives re-imagine student empowerment now?

IRA: Many senior teachers like me began careers in a time of mass activism when conservative attacks were emerging but not widespread. Any progressive educator whose classroom practices are targeted and demonized by conservatives must defend herself against these attacks. The rest of us should join her in this defense. We're in a political war, and such conflict requires creative, versatile maneuvering to deal with hostile conditions.

Do dialogic pedagogy and student-centered teaching make teachers more vulnerable by weakening the teacher's authority? Do we need now to fall back on traditional teacher-centered methods because democratic practices only embolden conservative students to harass us? In my case no, but I would ask progressive teachers to answer the last questions for themselves, based on their assessment of risk in their settings.

Conditions for teaching and learning at my college have declined dramatically over the decades, compelling me to adjust my practice to a changing situation. In this adjustment, I haven't yet had to abandon problem-posing dialogue or student-centered knowledge-making. But my position is not generalizable. I carry distinct markers of authority that support and oblige my risk-taking: my mature age, my maleness, my whiteness, my tenured senior position, my native American Northeast urban accent, my tallness and thinness, and my expensive dental work. These markers confer authority on me that is not available to all critical teachers. The economy of authority is of course unequal in this patriarchal, racist, sexist, nativist society. If some critical teachers cannot assert or claim enough authority to command respect for certain kinds of oppositional practice, then those colleagues need to assess what risk and conflict they can sustain in the face of conservative threats. This self-and-social-assessment of risk, fear, and punishment is another dimension of situated politics, I would say, through which we measure as best we can the degree of opposition possible, the kind of opposition possible, and the outcomes of our opposition.

I should add a proviso about student-centered methods, dialogic problem-posing, and power-sharing--practices of critical-democratic pedagogy which are in question here as possibly increasing teacher exposure to conservative students hijacking the process. As Freire insisted a number of times, critical pedagogy is not a laissez-faire, anything-goes process that invites students to say or do anything they want at any time. The social relations of democratic discourse are not permissive. I can't permit any student to dominate the discussion or to take over the process, so should any exploit the dialogic setting for such purposes, it's my right and responsibility to stop it, because that student is denying discourse rights to others in class. I have routinely used my authority to restrict domineering students over the years and see my role as enforcing democratic relations, but then again, my body or person usually brings enough authority into the classroom to enable that (I've had to call security to class only once at my college.)

Freire also proposed that his "pedagogy of the oppressed" cannot be fully or generally implemented as long as oligarchic powers remained in command of society or of state institutions like mass education. Dominant authorities police society against alternatives to their status quo. In nonformal adult education, as Freire practiced in Northeast Brazil, there is a greater distance from oligarchy than there is in public schools; there were also large popular movements then supported by some regional officials; so in this moment of opening, Freire negotiated enough open space to develop his methods, until the coup of April, 1964 violently closed all such projects. With the experience of the coup behind him, Freire acknowledged that the pedagogy of the oppressed is best practiced when state power changes hands from the oligarchy to popular forces or when liberated zones have been cleared of the forces of oligarchy. Short of these conditions, degrees of oppositional practice are certainly possible, what Freire called "projects" of "cultural action for freedom," but he never lost sight of the risk and fear, saying that "transforming society is not a weekend on a tropical beach."

In each situation, we learn by practice the degree of open space. Discovering open space means testing local limits, not theorizing them prior to or far from actual work on the ground. The question is, how far we can go against the status quo given who we are and the tools we have in the time and place we are working? Who are allies for questioning the status quo and who are enemies supporting the way things are? What tools work best--texts, themes, lessons, etc.? This research is an activity of "praxis"--developing theory from practice--and also what Freire called "untested feasibility," the discovery in practice of the actual means and space for opposition in a given situation.

EDITORS: Doesn't a sound education especially at the elementary and secondary levels, necessitate a certain level of banking of factual knowledge, of basic political vocabulary and opposing ideological or partisan positions, which precede any effective cultural/political critique?

IRA: I think that educators have multiple and conflicting definitions of a sound education. I don't use such a phrase but rather speak of "critical-democratic teaching and learning" which I place in opposition to traditional methods that fail to question the status quo or to promote civic activism. Pushed by your question, I'd go as far as saying that there is no such a thing as "a sound education," just as there are no such things as "basic education," "basic skills," or "basic writing." In addition, I'd add my disagreement with the notion of a "core curriculum" or "general education." My sense is that these phrases are code words to disguise or to deny that all education is politics, that all pedagogies are ideological, that all curricular choices are value-laden, and that stunningly different outcomes emerge from schooling based on the income of a student's family. Angelic or neutral terms like "basic," "sound," and "general" are God-words that rhetorically disguise the inequities and ideologies of the status quo. If something is labeled as "sound" or "basic," then it lays claim to the status of the inevitable and the unarguable. But, I propose that all forms of education are socially constructed and that none can be neutral. Rhetoric that codes any method, fact, or skill as "basic" or "sound" seizes the moral high-ground, to locate a certain political position as above politics--pretending that its social practice is natural, normal, rational, fair to all.

Freire, Giroux, Apple, Anyon, and other critical educators insist that all pedagogies are unavoidably political because none can escape their social contexts, functions, choices, and impacts. Every learning method takes place in a social context of unequal conditions which include different monies invested in different students and the painful fact that many kids come to school without breakfast. Further, every pedagogy functions inside a complex web of power relations, from the principal down to the teacher's aide, from the principal up to the state superintendent of education and the governor. Many regulatory bodies and laws are in place to control the inputs and outcomes of schools and colleges. Outside of education, there is a powerful corporate world whose policies and job market dramatically affect curriculum. Inside classrooms, each syllabus or lesson plan represents choices made by teachers and their supervisors about which subject matters, texts, and learning methods will be deployed and which not. Finally, education is a long-term, labor-intensive social experience that helps form human beings into this or that kind of person. Education is value-laden, simultaneously affective and cognitive, and organized prejudicially so that no level playing-field operates within it; there are unequal budgets and outcomes at every level. How is it possible to describe one or another pedagogy as "basic" or "sound" or "general" under such predatory and unequal conditions?

The promotion of "a sound basic education" has been the crux of conservative reform since the bogus Literacy Crisis was declared in 1975. Core curricula, general facts, and basic skills have been proposed by various pundits as foundational to advanced learning, among them Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, and William Bennett. E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (1987) is perhaps the most famous and widely-read book to come out of this position. In my field of composition-rhetoric, a learned debate has been going on for a number of years to critique the notion of "general writing skills instruction" (GWSI), a notion that underlies basic skills pedagogy, basic writing courses, freshman comp, grammar instruction, etc., as the necessary starting points from which complex thought and writing evolve. The weak performance of the vast English enterprise in American education has not discouraged belief in the basics. The argument against specific skills or specific facts as keys to cognition goes back a century to Dewey and proceeds through Bruner and other learning theorists. I can't argue the case better than they did, that learning, cognition, intelligence, and development are complex social and holistic activities that can't be based in transferring a single body-of-knowledge or a single set of skills.

In conclusion, I could add that Freire was not hostile to lecturing per se or to informational learning. (He urged me to lecture more.) Freire was opposed to "banking," by which he meant a scholastic monologue notable for remoteness of form and content, an extended academic utterance whose delivery, idiom, and content are so detached from student thought and interests, so alien to their ways of knowing and expression, that students were put to sleep, expelled from knowledge-making, or caught up in a ritual of mimicking teacher-talk to get a grade. In the past 30 years, books on education reform have agreed that "teacher-talk" is destructive in mass schooling (Boyer, Goodlad, Sizer, Silberman, etc.). Freire had a different kind of lecturing in mind, a critical lecture, what I've also called "a dialogic lecture," to displace "banking." The critical or dialogic lecture dramatically engages students in a problem, text, issue, or theme. It emerges from and feeds back into a context related to student concerns, addressed to them in an idiom that mobilizes their creative intelligence, their desire to learn more, their willingness to challenge the lecturer with questions and comments. Freire also acknowledged a second kind of "lecture" which he called a "technical session." By this he meant a certain moment in problem-posing dialogue when the critical inquiry reaches an impasse or sticking point where to move ahead students and teacher need to know something they don't know. At that point, the group or class looks for expert sources to infuse specialized knowledge into their inquiry, perhaps a database, perhaps a book or two about the subject, perhaps some journal in the field, or perhaps a human expert who is invited to lecture the group relating her expertise to the problem. This is certainly "a lecture," because an expert is addressing a group in extended comments on a topic, but this lecture is not "banking" because it has been called into the process by the group itself and is disciplined democratically by their own evolving concerns and their recognition of missing knowledge.

Finally, what is at the heart of our work in education? For me, it's learning for civic activism, knowledge-making that orients people to question their society, classes that address students as critical thinkers and lovers of life who can remake their troubled world. War, lies, and fear make these hard times to dream and to teach in this country. Please dream on, dear friends and colleagues. I am dreaming right now of a society at peace with itself and all the peoples of the planet.