Punk Pedagogies

Music, Culture and Learning

Gareth Smith, Mike Dines, Tom Parkinson, Gareth Dylan Smith, Mike Dines, Tom Parkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351995801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning brings together a collection of international authors to explore the possibilities, practices and implications that emerge from the union of punk and pedagogy. The punk ethos—a notoriously evasive and multifaceted beast—offers unique applications in music education and beyond, and this volume presents a breadth of interdisciplinary perspectives to challenge current thinking on how, why and where the subculture influences teaching and learning. As (punk) educators and artists, contributing authors grapple with punk's historicity, its pervasiveness, its (dis)functionality and its messiness, making Punk Pedagogies relevant and motivating to both instructors and students with proven pedagogical practices.

1
Presenting Punk Pedagogies in Practice

GARETH DYLAN SMITH, MIKE DINES AND TOM PARKINSON

Introduction: Towards Punk Pedagogies in Practice

Punk has emphasized two political philosophies—libertarianism and anarchism—which, while adherents share some common beliefs, diverge to occupy opposing poles on the political-ideological spectrum (Sofianos, Ryde, and Waterhouse 2015, 23). Punk has often tended to lean more heavily to the left than to the right of that spectrum. As a nation whose founding philosophies emerged from radical European movements during the English Civil War (Hill 1975) such as the Levellers (Foxley 2013), and the French Revolution, the United States of America has long favoured and mythologized the “self-made man”, painting itself as a land of opportunity and entrepreneurial spirit. As such, the nation’s identity is built on the decidedly punk philosophical premise of “elevat[ing] above most other aspirations the importance of freedom, self-determinism and the removal of rules” (Sofianos, Ryde, and Waterhouse. 2013, 23).

In a New York Post article on the morning following the US presidential election in 2016, Kyle Smith suggested that Donald Trump was the “punk rock” president-elect (Smith 2016), epitomizing that American ideal for many. Trump built a property empire from scratch; he was a “reality” television star; he rose to be a presidential candidate and eventually the President of the United States of America by presenting himself as against the machine (despite pandering to big business and being a walking, talking advertisement for self-serving, late capitalist, neoliberal ideology). The aspects of punk that the author seemed, therefore, to be invoking were primarily those of DIY and anti-establishment rhetoric, while ignoring and thereby challenging the prevalent (although by no means exclusively) anarchist and socialist ideologies that inform much of punk narrative and activism. One of the most notable features of Trump’s brief political career has been the man’s lack of clear orientation towards any points of an ideological compass (Chomsky 2016). Trump thus could be seen to embody punk’s contradictions and its inherent discomfort in articulating (or inability to articulate) what it is that it stands for. As Sofianos et al. (2015, 26) note, “punk seeks to avoid the limiting qualities of, and subsequent laziness associated with, ideology. This attitude of constant challenge and determination to disrupt” is typical of that which is characterized as punk.

Punk has, however, more often than not channeled its disruptive tendencies in tandem with emancipatory aspirations for marginalized or silenced voices, towards a social justice agenda. In this vein, Ivan Illich in the 1970s pointed to the need to change fundamentally the ways in which systemized compulsory education—schooling—operates, because of fundamental flaws in the assumptions that it makes, and how inequality is thus inscribed in the system. He urges that, “rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible, we must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating, socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of the political system that promotes it”. He asserts, moreover, that:

equal opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the church. School has become the worldwide religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.

(Illich 1970, 10)

Authors in this volume mostly work in higher education, and as such have vested interests in perpetuating existing systems of education, compulsory and otherwise. We are perhaps thus reticent to embrace so (self-)destructive an agenda as to seek the total dismantlement of education systems. Through the frame of punk pedagogies, however, we seek to explore possibilities to effect change.

Our intention in curating this volume is not to say what punk pedagogy is or should be. Our aim is, even less, to attempt to define punk, a notoriously evasive and multifaceted beast. Contributing authors grapple with punk’s historicity, its pervasiveness, its (dis)functionality, its evasiveness and its messiness. Punk is dynamic and responsive, like the best of pedagogical practice. For this reason, we do not attempt to delimit, contain or constrain pedagogies in, of, for or about punk. In the context of music education, David Lines asks:

How can music teachers ensure that they do not succumb to the disabling discourses of neoliberalism, mastery, and narrow conceptions of learning? How can music students move from situations where they are treated as docile bodies in music learning production lines or mastery contexts to places of creative freedom, expression, and meaning?

(Lines 2016, 126–127)

In response to his own question, Lines suggests that:

pedagogical action can… be taken in music education to ensure that students have opportunities to work with the subjective positions in music and, if necessary, exercise resistance to schooling discourses that negatively impact on open and creative subject positions.

(Lines 2016, 127)

This book resonates with Lines’s perspective—which he did not explicitly articulate as representing a specifically punk orientation—traversing pedagogical practice in and beyond just music, as well as in and beyond formal educational contexts.

The focus of the book is on punk pedagogies. It is not, however, a “how to” guide to applying punk pedagogies, nor is it a manual or guidebook on being a punk pedagogue. The editors share music education philosopher Randall Allsup’s (2016, 106) “long[ing] to find or create a space in which people can connect with others across difference and ability in an ongoing and unfinished way”. We seek to challenge “a symbol system… in which mere relay of information is characterized as education” (107); we are “ultimately interested in the subjectivities from which engagement in open encounters are formed and reformed” (108). We propose punk pedagogies as possessing the potency and potential to achieve these ends and more.

Punk Pedagogy: A Brief History

Punk pedagogy lies at the intersection between radical, anarchist and critical pedagogies. It looks back to the anarchist writings of Godwin and Kropotkin in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Ward 2011; Springer et al. 2016); references the works of Freire, Giroux and Shor; and explores complex tensions around punk in academia (Furness 2012). Indeed, as Springer et al. so eloquently note in The Radicalization of Pedagogy: Anarchism, Geography and the Spirit of Revolt, “in an age that is desperately in need of critical new directions anarchist geographies exist at the crossroads of possibility and desire”. They conclude that “by breathing new life into the inertia of the old, anarchism intrepidly explores vital alternatives” through the practices of “mutual aid, voluntary association, direct action, horizontality and self-management” (Springer et al. 2016, 1). Through the malleability of the radical, punk pedagogy breathes new life into analysis of decades-old philosophical, cultural and political thought (Dines 2015a; Parkinson 2016; Torrez 2012).

Punk pedagogy is not particularly “new”. Examples of its presence in scholarship can be traced back to the 1990s, with Robert Miklitsch’s (1994) “Punk Pedagogy or Performing Contradiction: The Risks and Rewards of Anti-Transference”, questioning the political stance of the teacher (the role of authority) in the classroom. The academy’s interest in punk as part of a curriculum was explored in Geoffrey Sirc’s (1997) “Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where’s the Sex Pistols?”, in which he uses punk as an opening and means for composition and writing. “The academic system left the student a bored, ignorant spectator”, writes Sirc (1997, 20), also noting that punk was a means of “articulating a more general inchoate social reality” (1997, 22) where lived experience comes to the fore (presaging Dines, explored further, below).

Sirc’s article was followed by Seth Kahn-Egan’s aptly titled “Pedagogy Pissed: Punk Pedagogy in the First-Year Writing Classroom” (1998). Kahn-Egan takes up the compositional mantle from Sirc, expanding the discussion of punk pedagogy towards a clearer, more succinct definition. He concurs that there are issues around “trying to define and explicate punk ideology”, noting that “there is no Platonic ideal of ‘punkness’ from which we can extract a definition” (Kahn-Egan 1998, 101). That said, Kahn-Egan presents five principles that, for him, define punk:

• (1) The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic, which demands that we do our own work because anybody who would do our work for us is only trying to jerk us around;
• (2) A sense of anger and passion that finally drives a writer to say what’s really on his or her mind;
• (3) A sense of destructiveness that calls for attacking institutions when those institutions are oppressive, or even dislikable;
• (4) A willingness to endure or even pursue pain to make oneself heard or noticed;
• (5) A pursuit of the “pleasure principle,” a reveling in some kind of Nietzchean chasm.

(Kahn-Egan 1998, 100)

The author clearly notes that he is “not advocating a full-blown, anarchistic, self-mutilating classroom”, but instead encourages pedagogy which “teaches students that resistance resulting from inertia is pointless, as is rebellion for its own sake” (Kahn-Egan 1998, 101).

“Pedagogy Pissed” is useful because it begins to unpack and interrogate what may be considered “punk pedagogy”. Kahn-Egan’s writing advocates a curriculum that encourages students to question authority, thus planting seeds of critical thinking and debate. Furthermore, Kahn-Egan situated his own reflexive practice in the same framework, whereby the course challenged him, as a teacher, “to keep from over-institutionalizing the very individuality [he] wants to foster”, thereby exploring tensions between the author’s “desire to teach active subversion and [his] institutional bonds” (Kahn-Egan 1998, 103). It is these tensions that are explored further in Estrella Torrez’s chapter, “Punk Pedagogy: Education for Liberation and Love”, in Zack Furness’s edited volume, Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower (2012). Torrez explores the philosophy around the notion and definition of a “punk pedagogy”, drawing on her experience of teaching a course on youth subcultures’ linguistic cultural practices as forms of resistance. Torrez’s punk pedagogy is positioned through the delivery of subject matter with an attempt at facilitating and engaging with the students at a critical level, exploring individual and social responsibility in “heal[ing] an ailing society” (Torrez 2012, 137). She asserts, “while punk philosophy frames how we interact with outside society, it likewise shapes our position as educators and the manner by which we construct the classroom… as a learning environment”. She also explains:

It is [through] this particular pedagogical approach, influenced by our lived realities as punks, that we are able to establish a punk pedagogy. Punk pedagogy is a manifestation of equity, rebellion, critique, self-examination, solidarity, community, love, anger and collaboration. It is a space where the teacher-learner hierarchy is disavowed and the normative discourse of traditional education is dissembled.

(Torrez 2012, 135–136)

Whereas Torrez, Kahn-Egan and Sirc examine punk in formal educational contexts, Mike Dines explores punk pedagogy outside of the classroom. In “Learning Through Resistance: Contextualisation, Creation and Incorporation of a Punk Pedagogy” (2015a) and “Reflections on the Peripheral: Punk, Pedagogy and the Domestication of the Radical” (2015b), Dines looks at how subcultural membership becomes a learning environment: “Drawing upon the autobiographical… punk is treated as the educator—the facilitator—that provided a framework of enquiry, questioning and interrogation” (Dines 2015a, 21). He notes how, for many, “punk became a source of expression that made more sense than those in the classroom” (Dines 2015a, 28), and thus “it meant that individuals like [himself] found subcultural membership synonymous with being politically and socially aware” (Dines 2015a, 29).

While recognizing the influence of radical pedagogies on the birth and development of punk pedagogy, Dines also raises concerns over what he calls “reification of the radical, a domestication of theory and practice, paradoxically underpinned by adherence to the politics of freedom and conformity” (Dines 2015b, 134). In other words, for Dines, “punk has become domesticated by its striving for the radical [which] encourages inclusivity, but only if that identity adheres to the conformity of the ‘punk ethos’” (Dines 2015b, 134). He draws comparison with the observation of pedagogue and academic Peter McLaren, who found critical pedagogy to have become a haven for posturing academics, shifting from its critical core. If punk pedagogy is to continue to develop, it needs to be self-critical and not, as he notes, a “sanitized study” of subculture (Dines 2015a, 138).

Jessica A. Schwartz (also a contributor to this volume) takes punk pedagogy in another direction. Her essay for the journal Punk & Post-Punk explores the “ways in which early punks’ intellectual history and views on education informed their musical thoughts” (Schwartz 2015, 142). Schwartz endeavours to look less at “practitioners’ rebellion” and more at the “creation of alternative educational spaces that are reflected in philosophically informed musical aesthetics” (Schwartz 2015, 142), a notion that provides depth to the examination of ideological stance in punk, providing further insight into the complex marriage between punk and pedagogy.

Structure and Content of the Book

Although in no way exhaustive, the thirteen remaining chapters in this volume give some sense of the scope of approaches to, and current thinking about, teaching and learning that emerges from the union of punk and pedagogy. Just as punk runs a vast ideological and aesthetic gamut, confounding attempts to hem it into a tidy and coherent definition, punk pedagogy resists codification as a singular teaching strategy, toolkit or curriculum. Moreover, one punk pedagogical approach might be anathema to those who uphold another view, or could be seen to enshrine values that run counter to the spirit of punk, however the latter might be understood. Yet, as the chapters here attest, the utility and power of any manifestation of punk pedagogy lies in the conviction of its exponent and inspiration that the individual teacher or learner takes from their own unique interactions with counterculture. For some, the ideological associations of a particular punk scene form the basis of an ethical code that supports a values-driven pedagogy. For others, the form and aesthetics of a punk genre directly inform the modalities of their teaching and classroom ...