Revolutionary Multiculturalism

Pedagogies Of Dissent For The New Millennium

Peter Mclaren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813325712
• eBook ISBN: 9780429977220
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This work by one of North America's leading educational theorists and cultural critics culminates a decade of social analyses that focuses on the political economy of schooling, Paulo Freire and literacy education, hip-hop culture, and multicultural education. Peter McLaren also examines the work of Baudrillard as well as Bourdieu's reflexive sociology.Always in McLaren's work is a profound understanding of the relationship among advanced capitalism, the politics of knowledge, and the formation of identity. One of the central themes of this volume is the relationship between the political and the pedagogical for educators, activists, artists, and other cultural workers. McLaren argues that the central project ahead in the struggle for social justice is not so much the politics of diversity as the global decentering and dismantling of whiteness. This volume also contains an interview with the author.

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Writing from the Margins: Geographies of Identity, Pedagogy, and Power

Peter McLaren
and Henry A. Giroux

The excess of language alerts us to the ways in which discourse is inextricably tied not just to the proliferation of meanings, but also to the production of individual and social identities over time within conditions of inequality. As a political issue, language operates as a site of struggle among different groups who for various reasons police its borders, meanings, and orderings. Pedagogically, language provides the self-definitions upon which people act, negotiate various subject positions, and undertake a process of naming and renaming the relations between themselves, others, and the world.

Educational theory is one of the discursive faces of literacy, pedagogy, and cultural politics. It is within theory and its concern with the prohibitions, exclusions, and policing of language along with its classification, ordering, and dissemination of discourse that knowledge becomes manifest, identities are formed and unformed, collective agents arise, and critical practice is offered the conditions in which to emerge.

At the current moment of dominant educational practices, language is being mobilized within a populist authoritarian ideology that ties it to a tidy relation among national identity, culture, and literacy. As the cultural mask of hegemony, language is being mobilized to police the borders of an ideologically discursive divide that separates dominant from subordinate groups, whites from Blacks, and schools from the imperatives of democratic public life.

Current attempts at providing a language for examining the process of schooling, for conducting research in educational settings, and for gaining greater access to a more critical understanding of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of learning have been less than satisfactory. In fact, they have been gravely inadequate, especially in this current era of postnational identity formation and the globalization of capitalism. Educational research needs a new theory that takes seriously how language and subjectivity intersect with history, power, and authority. The absence of such a theory is evident not only within the domain of mainstream research on schooling but also in the failings of critical educational theorists. As a group, we have failed to develop a comprehensive understanding of language, identity, and experience and their relation to the broader power-sensitive discourses of power, democracy, social justice, and historical memory. It is true that feminist, poststructuralist, and postmodern theories have greatly expanded how we understand the relationship between identity, language, and schooling; but all too often these discourses collapse into a dehistoricizing and self-congratulatory emphasis on articulating the specifics of ethnographic methodologies and the ideological virtues of asserting the importance of naming one’s location as a complex discursive site. As essential as these theoretical forays have been, they often abuse their own insights by focusing on identity at the expense of power. Language in these texts becomes a discursive marker for registering and affirming difference but in doing so often fails to address how they are related within broader networks of domination and exploitation. In part, this may be due to the ahistorical quality of this work. Lacking a historical context, they fail to engage the political projects that characterized older versions of critical pedagogy and end up failing to locate their own politics and its value for larger social, political, and pedagogical struggles.

In effect, by downplaying the importance of the historically constructed relationship between language and power, critical educators have failed to develop a discourse that articulates issues of identity, place, pedagogy, and history with a language of vision and public life. (This is developed in Giroux, Border Crossings, 1992, and McLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture, 1995.)

The first section of this chapter outlines the current crisis in critical pedagogy which we describe as an inability to move beyond a language of critique and domination. In the second section we examine the relation of language to the formation of subjectivity and praxis and try to persuade the reader that the choice of language we make as educators in describing, interpreting, and analyzing social reality is a crucial factor in educational and social change. In the third section we move from a discussion of how language works to socially construct and mediate reality, and how language interacts with experience to shape subjectivity, to the current debate among critical educators regarding whether or not the language of radical educational theory is too abstruse and impractical. Lastly, we outline provisional elements of a critical pedagogy for classroom use that offers the potential for helping to create an active, critical citizenry of learners in the current age of postmodern media knowledges.

Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis Within the Language of Theory

Radical pedagogy as it has been developing in both England and the United States for the last decade has drawn heavily upon particular forms of political economy, ideology critique, and cultural criticism. Its main task—and important achievement—is that it has challenged what can be loosely termed the ideology of traditional educational theory and practice. Traditional educational research attempted the paradoxical feat of depoliticizing the language of schooling while reproducing and legitimating the cultural and political authority of dominant groups. In opposition to the traditionalists’ attempt to theoretically suppress important questions regarding the relations which obtain among knowledge, power, and domination, critical educational theorists were able to develop new theoretical languages and modes of criticism to suggest that schools were largely (though not exclusively) agencies of social, economic, and cultural production. At best, public schooling offered limited mobility to members of subordinate classes but, in the final analysis, served primarily as a powerful instrument for the reproduction of capitalist social relations and the dominant legitimating ideologies of ruling groups.

In spite of its success at developing insightful theoretical and political analyses of schooling, radical educational theory suffered from some serious flaws, the most significant being its failure to move beyond the language of critique and domination. That is, radical educators remained mired in a language that linked schools primarily to the ideologies and practices of domination. In this view, schools were seen almost exclusively as agencies of social reproduction, producing obedient workers for industrial capital. Radicals generally dismissed school knowledge as a form of bourgeois ideology, and often portrayed teachers as being trapped in an apparatus of domination that worked with a relentless precision and lockstep certainty.

Of course, the reproductive model of schooling became more and more sophisticated theoretically over time. Critical theorists used it to explore the role schools have played in capital accumulation, ideological legitimation, and production of knowledge necessary to carry on the increasing demands of a changing capitalist society. But, while the theory was extended to a set of wider concerns such as gender relations and the political economy of publishing, its underlying logic did not change. It still provides a model in which everything operates within and in response to the logic of capital. Put bluntly, the reproductive theory of schooling has in some instances become a reactive mode of analysis, one that repeatedly oversimplifies the complexity of social and cultural life. It ultimately ignores the need to create a theoretical discourse that transcends the imperatives of possibility within existing capitalist configurations of power. The major failure of this position has been that it prevents left educators from developing a programmatic language in which they can theorize for schools. Instead, these radical educators have theorized primarily about schools. Writing off schools as agencies of domination, they have seldom concerned themselves with trying to construct new, alternative approaches to school organization, curricula, and classroom social relations.

Radical educational theory has been burdened by more than the language of critique. It has also failed to explore and develop a number of important concerns that are central to a critical theory of schooling. First, as a group we have failed to develop a public philosophy that integrates the issues of power, politics, and possibility with respect to the role that schools might play as democratic public spheres. Most radical educational theorists have been so caught up in describing the reality of existing schools that they have failed to take up the question of what it is that schools should be. Lacking any substantive vision, most radical theorists have ignored the task of developing the foundation of a progressive public philosophy as a referent for reconstructing schools as democratic public spheres. In this case, educators have failed to construct a programmatic discourse for providing students with the knowledge, skills, and values they will need, not only to articulate their own voices, but to understand these voices and encourage students to transform themselves as collective social agents.

Second, radical educational theorists as a group have eschewed trying to develop a theory of ethics that can either justify our own language or legitimate the social practices necessary for defending a particular vision of what schools might become. Caught within the paradox of exhibiting moral indignation without the benefit of a well-defined theory of ethics and morality, we have been unable to move from a posture of criticism to one of substantive vision. We are caught on a shifting ground regarding ethical principles that inform such a discourse. We have rarely discussed what the moral referents might be for defending particular social and cultural practices, nor do we have a clear sense of what values need to be defended in the interest of an emancipatory vision of schooling.

Third, radical educational theory has been unable to analyze schools as sites which actively produce and legitimate privileged forms of subjectivity and ways of life. We have failed to analyze how subjectivities are schooled, how power organizes space, time, and the body, how language is used to both legitimate and marginalize different subject positions, or how knowledge not only mystifies, but also functions to produce identities, desires, and needs. In effect, as Philip Corrigan (1987) has pointed out, there is no moral and political discourse in radical education theory that interrogates how existing social forms encourage, disrupt, cripple, dilute, marginalize, make possible, or sustain differentiated human capacities that extend the possibilities that individuals have for living in a truly democratic and life-affirming society and world.

Fourth, radical educational theory has vastly underplayed the importance of redefining the actual roles that teachers might play as engaged critics and intellectuals in both the classroom and as part of a wider movement for social change. Teachers have been worked on but not included as self-determining agents of political and pedagogical change. For example, we have rarely addressed the role that teachers might play in alliance with parents and others as part of a wider educational and socio-political movement. Such alliances between teachers and the parents of Black, Latino, and low-income white children have been widespread during the Reagan-Bush era. For example, in Chicago parents joined with teachers in creating the Parent Equalizers of Chicago, headed by Dorothy Tillman. As a result of this movement, hundreds of parents were educated about the workings of the school system, how to get actively involved in the schools, and how to get elected to various levels of policymaking boards. These parents got rid of the Mastery Learning Reading Program, created Local School Improvement Councils, and have played an active role in promoting school criticism and educational reform. This is exactly the type of movement that radical educational theorists need to take into account when we write about present-day schools and the role of teachers. We have to be alert for signs of potential change in the schools, in the direction of greater democracy.

Language and Reality: Conceptual Underpinnings

In order to address some of the problems we have underscored in the previous section, we want to focus on the need for a more comprehensive theoretical language that is capable of conceiving schools as complex sites which cannot be understood solely within the modalities of reproduction or resistance theory. Part of the project of transforming our understanding of schooling is how we talk about the process of schooling itself. This, in turn, involves a struggle over the theoretical and ethical vocabulary we employ in analyzing how schools work and function in our society. We want to argue that the purpose of developing a critical language of schooling is not to describe the world more objectively, but to create a more ethically empowering world which encourages a greater awareness of the way in which power can be mobilized for the purposes of human liberation. Critical educational theory needs a language that understands how experience is produced, legitimated, and organized as a central aspect of pedagogy. We need to examine language and its production as a form of historical argument; furthermore, we need a language that is critical about its own mechanisms of authority. The critical educational language which we envision is one in which difference is seen as a site of both affirmation and remaking, as a negotiated and complex critical practice in which the possibility of democratic public life becomes a central referent of both critique and possibility.

To better understand schooling as a culturally complex, political enterprise is to recognize the social nature of language and its relationship to power and forms of knowledge. This relationship is critical for understanding the limitations of the way we currently interpret the role of schooling in our society. But before we explore this issue, it is important to know something about the way in which language functions as a mediator and as a constitutive factor of what we take to be reality. The first point we wish to emphasize is that language constitutes reality rather than merely reflects it. Language in this case is not conceptualized as a transparent window to the world but rather as a symbolic medium that actively refracts, shapes, and transforms the world. That is, language is the primary medium through which social identities are constructed, collective agents are formed, cultural hegemony secured, and emancipatory practice both named and acted upon (Fraser, 1992). Language is not some conduit to an immutable order of coherence and stability but is generative of the reality which it evokes and to which it speaks. It is the arche syncope, which means that language is always distorted and distorting; it invites rather than resists a variety of interpretations and readings (Parker, in press). Knowledge in this view is a social construction, which means that the world we inhabit as individuals is constructed symbolically by the mind (and body) through social interaction and is heavily dependent on culture, context, custom, and historical specificity (McLaren, 1988, 1989). What this means, according to Richard Brown, is that we must give up the bifurcation of the literal and objective from the metaphoric, symbolic, and subjective. Brown (1987, p. 118) has pointed out that “the realities to which symbols refer are also symbolic—that is … they are intended by human actors and within some shared frame of vision.” For Brown, as for us, this suggests that words are not signs for things, but rather things are signs for words, since there is no social reality that is not experienced through a social matrix of discourse. While language is not the only source of reality (clearly there is a non-discursive world outside of language), it is largely through language that meaning is created.

This means that there is no ideal, monolithic, autonomous, pristine, or aboriginal world which can be understood outside the social nature of language and to which our social constructions necessarily correspond. There is always a referential field in which symbols are situated and this particular referential field (e.g., language, culture, place, time) will influence how symbols generate meaning. As Bakhtin (1981) has noted, language is always populated by other people’s meanings, since it is always “shot through with intentions and accents” (p. 293). Consequently, language is unqualifiedly intersubjective. Language stamps the world with a social presence that is never neutral or unproblematic. Language does not reflect an untarnished image of reality “out there”; whatever image or object or event it attempts to render, it does so through refraction and distortion. This amounts to saying not that knowledge is always false but rather that it is never complete. We can say, therefore, that language produces particular understandings of the world: i.e., particular meanings.

When meaning is produced through language unreflectively to the extent that it gets sedimented into common-sense knowledge—which we call ideology—it tends to masquerade as “fixed truths” or “existing facts” about the social world, as if such facts were immune to particular relations of power or material interests. Language, however, is always situated within ideology and power/knowledge relations that govern and regulate the access of particular interpretive communities to specific language practices. And this is no less true of the language that we, as educators, employ in order both to understand theoretically our own work with students and to teach them. Meanings of any event or experience are only available through the language selected by the particular interpretive community wishing to render such events intelligible. Language is always located in discourses or families of ideas and the range of discourses is always limited or “selective” since the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: Fashioning Los Olvidados in the Age of Cynical Reason
• 1 Writing from the Margins: Geographies of Identity, Pedagogy, and Power
• 2 Liberatory Politics and Higher Education: A Freirean Perspective
• 3 The Ethnographer as Postmodern Flâneur: Critical Reflexivity and Posthybridity as Narrative Engagement
• 4 Jean Baudrillard’s Chamber of Horrors: From Marxism to Terrorist Pedagogy
• 5 Gangsta Pedagogy and Ghettocentricity: The Hip-Hop Nation as Counterpublic Sphere
• 6 Global Politics and Local Antagonisms: Research and Practice as Dissent and Possibility
• 7 Provisional Utopias in a Postcolonial World: An Interview with Peter McLaren
• 8 Unthinking Whiteness, Rethinking Democracy: Critical Citizenship in Gringolandia
• Epilogue—Beyond the Threshold of Liberal Pluralism: Toward a Revolutionary Democracy
• Afterword—Multiculturalism: The Fracturing of Cultural Souls
• Credits
• About the Book and Author