In Radical Departures, Gallagher writes against our commonplace notion of progressive, a term “often used unreflectively as a term of approbation” (xiii). Compositions studies, he notes, views itself as progressive in two ways: 1) as left-leaning; and 2) as progressing from a less enlightened past into a more enlightened present (xii). His goal is to “show how various visions and versions of ‘progressivism’ continue to inform the development of Composition and Rhetoric” (xiii) in order to refocus Composition and Rhetoric so that we put the “practice of pedagogy at the center of our work” (xvi). Gallagher defines “pedagogy as the reflexive inquiry that teachers and learners undertake together” (xvi, emphasis original).

In Chapters 1 and 2, Gallagher focuses on the history of progressivism in Composition and Rhetoric, discussing two major movements: pedagogical progressivism, which draws from progressive politics, especially John Dewey, and administrative progressivism, which saw schools as like businesses that needed to be more efficient. Administrative progressivism results in the de-professionalization of teachers, the development of outside experts, the incorporation of standardized tests, education in service of the marketplace, and the distrust of local Rhetoric and Composition scholars and administrators.

Of particular interest to us in an emancipatory composition course is Gallagher’s discussion of critical pedagogy in Chapter 3. Gallagher argues that the discourse of “critical pedagogy has, ironically, drawn us away from pedagogical progressivism” in various ways (70, emphasis original):

1. Critical pedagogy has created a gendered structure of authority, with male theorists, who have a critical tradition supporting their authority, and female clients, whose own theorizing in the classroom is not ignored or is not valued (72). Teachers are turned into “clients” or consumers, relying on the authority of knowledge-makers (77).

2. Critical pedagogy portrays critical literacy as a skill or artifact to be “given” to students, which doesn’t make critical pedagogy much different from other transmission pedagogies, which Freire discussed as relying on “the banking concept” (74). It also portrays students as completely naïve and fully determined by hegemony, as “culturally blind.” Teachers and students are then cast in oppositional ways: teachers as fully enlightened and students as fully duped by ideology (75).
3. Critical pedagogy often focuses on larger cultural or societal transformative change, calling for teachers to be engaged in various ways outside the classroom to bring about this change. This ignores the material conditions of teachers, many of whom are teaching hundreds of students and putting in 70 hours a week. The effect of this call is that teachers are portrayed as bad practitioners because they do not live out the prescriptions of critical pedagogy (77). Because of critical pedagogy’s call for large transformative change, smaller acts of resistance are dismissed as merely “reformist” or “cosmetic” (87).
4. It often portrays all institutions as the same: monolithic institutions that solely reproduce oppressive conditions, are not constantly changing, and need to be changed by the transformative intellectual (79).

Ultimately, “critical pedagogy has become another academic regime of truth” that “positions students and teachers in disempowering ways” and moves us away from the reflexive pedagogy that Gallagher desires to see at the center of Composition and Rhetoric (85, 73, emphasis original).

Gallagher ends the first half of his book with a call for institutional literacy: the ability “to read institutional discourses (and their resultant arrangements and structures) so as to speak and write back to them, thereby participating in their revision” (79). Drawing on Ellen Cushman’s work, Gallagher argues that counterhegemonic work is always being done, and once we reposition ourselves to our own classrooms and institutions, we can tap into this work (87-88).

Gallagher’s work reminds us that much of critical pedagogy shouldn’t be read as a “how to” guide for what to do in our particular classrooms. Instead, his call seems to me to be a call for a refocusing on particularities: who are your particular students, where are you located, what are your institutional constraints, what do you and your students know about your community and institution, and what tensions do you and your students feel in their own lived experiences? Pedagogy should be the work of reflexively learning together, as Freire and Dewey conceptualize it.

I see a few important implications from reading Gallagher’s work:

• It is important to be aware of his critiques and thus the ways in which discourses of critical pedagogy actually form our and our students’ subjectivities — that is, are we being created as clients? are our students being portrayed as dupes to hegemony?

• We need to remember that we and our students are knowledge-makers, and that we make knowledge through reflexive exploration together. This seems most true to Freire’s ontological message, that we are in the process of becoming through world-making together.
• It seems important that we share what we practice in our classroom, not as a prescriptive “this is what works and will work in your classroom as well,” but instead as theory-making itself. Gallagher’s intraludes seem most useful in this aspect, because they help to build praxis theory: reflecting on and discussing classroom practices. This also helps us to understand that the theory/practice dichotomy is a false binary; praxis is theory/theoretical/theory-making as well.
• We should focus on the particulars of the situation, including institutional missions; our own material and bodily limitations; what knowledge and experiences our students bring to the classroom and what they care about; and who our students are and who we are.
• We must be in the moment yet also be hopeful for (faithful in) a better future. Change happens gradually, and we might ourselves never see the effects of what happens in the classroom. When we pay attention to the moment, I think, we listen to our students, ask questions, and don’t get caught up in grandiose visions of classroom results and become dismayed when those results don’t happen.

Overall, I find Gallagher’s account very persuasive. However, these are the questions I am struggling with:

• What does Gallagher’s concept of institutional literacy mean for our composition classrooms here at Penn State?

• What are the dangers of focusing on resistance to hegemonic forces? Arguably, resistance often doesn’t result in any change at all (the cliché of Vader that “resistance is futile”).
• What does this mean for our own research/theorizing on pedagogy? Do the conclusions Gallagher draws result in a demand for a “pedagogical turn” in our own essays?

rating: 2 of 5 stars
As I read Greenbaum’s Emancipatory Movements in Composition, I was struck with a problem of genre and purpose. I picked up the book expected a new argument that would offer me new insights, but instead I found a book that largely synthesized movements in composition students. Greenbaum does have somethings to add to the conversation, especially around “Bitch” pedagogy and her own experiences dealing with race in the classroom, but largely, I found this book to be more of an overview of (aspects of) the field. As reviewer Barbara Schneider put it in her CCC review, this book is great for new graduate students looking for an introduction to how cultural studies, sophist rhetoric, feminism, and postcolonialism have been integrated into composition studies.



But, like Schneider, I found the research and ideas to be too thin. I was struck that while Greenbaum discusses sophist rhetoric, she quotes Protagoras’s belief that rhetoric makes one a “better man,” but then doesn’t discuss the rather in-depth argument between Socrates and the Sophists about what makes one a better man. For a book so concerned with ethics and justice, this seemed like an missed opportunity. Additionally, the term “justice” seems used rather unproblematically, especially if we remember that many Sophists described justice as a matter of strength and might.



I enjoyed Greenbaum’s polemical take, and her frank honesty with racism in her classroom and her stance that we need, for the sake of women, agonistic rhetoric were refreshing and helpful. The book is ambitious, trying to synthesize four critical traditions under one umbrella, something that I admire. However, for this book to have more impact and not read like an overview of these fields, the book would have to expand beyond its 110 pages (plus preface and notes).



This could be done through more theoretically sound explication of what Greenbaum means by various terms. She spends a while at the end of the book asking “whom are we liberating and from what?” (84), concluding that this is “ideological liberation” (100). My concern, though, is the connection to her subtitle, “Rhetorics of Possibility,” and whether we shouldn’t be talking about liberation as a “freedom to” rather than a “freedom from.” Additionally, Greenbaum uses the term “liberal” to describe her and other critical pedagogues, leaving me to wonder whether she has thought through the use of this term and its various meanings. To me, the term connotes the ideology of liberalism, which, on an ontological level, seems contrary to the Freirean mission Greenbaum attempts to adopt.



With that said, I think this book has real value as an introduction to cultural studies, postcolonialism, feminism, and neo-sophistic rhetoric in composition studies. I wish I had read it a couple years ago when I was first starting in the field, and I certainly got a lot out of it reading it currently. I’m looking forward to class discussion around it.



(See also Barbara Schneider’s review in CCC 55.2 (December 2003): 369-371.)


View all my reviews.

Giroux, Henry A. “Who Writes in a Cultural Studies Class? or, Where Is the Pedagogy.” Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy. State U of New York P, 1995. 3-16.

Ringer, Jeffrey M. “Liberating ‘Liberatory’ Education, or What Do We mean by ‘Liberty’ Anyway?“ JAC 25.4 (2005): 761-782.

I’m reminded of some of my writing I did on another blog about homophobia, sexism, and the cultural act of “being annoyed” and how it led to great discussions at an open mic I attended around those issues and how it (might have) changed the mind of a friend who found people who were “very gay” very annoying. We used literacy and language to communicate to each other and come to a better understanding. I think I’m going to expand on this story and use it in my thesis.

Cushman points to an important distinction that I would like to keep in mind: “the difference between missionary activism, which introduces certain literacies to promote an ideology, and scholarly activism, which facilitates the literate activities that already take place in the community” (13).

Another issue I have found at stake is that of the dialogues around “false consciousness.” Cushman notes that critical pedagogues can label students and citizens as having false consciousness and then dismiss them. “Yet,” she writes, “the many scholars who do immerse themselves into the daily living of people find, predictably, hidden ideologies — belief systems that contain numerous, clever ways to identify and criticize onerous behavior” (23). The engagement in society that Cushman calls for would allow us to understand that there is resistance in the population to dominating forces, that everyone isn’t caught up in “false consciousness” (or perhaps, totally caught up in it), and thus should not be dismissed.

(I’m reminded of the Grimshaw article I blogged about a few weeks ago that argued against the “autonomous self” that liberalism so loudly touts.)

Cushman also quotes from Freire, that “To affirm that men are persons and persons should be free, and yet, to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce” (24, quoting Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed 35). Cushman believes tangible to mean activism and questions if the cultural studies’ and critical pedagogy’s stress on “critical consciousness” is activism. “My sense is that we’re not doing enough because we’re acting within the role of the teacher that has been perpetuated by the institution, and thus keeps us from breaking down the barriers between the university and community” (24).

Vitanza has written and spoken about the “cynics” that cultural studies might be creating because perhaps working for “critical consciousness” is not enough. This is largely due to the flow of desire and how analysis often does not do enough to confront and change desire, to change the way our bodies function (remember to go back to Alcorn’s book).

Cushman, Ellen. “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change.” CCC 47.1 (February 1996): 7-28.

She works from the theories of Sartre and John Deigh on shame. Quoting Sartre, she writes that “To be ashamed is to be in the position of ‘passing judgment on myself as an object that I appear to the Other” (227). Thus, shame is the recognition of yourself as an Other’s object. “Shame,” Bartky writes, “is the distressed apprehension of the self as inadequate or diminished.” John Deigh says that we should “conceive shame, not as a reaction to a loss, but as a reaction to a threat, specifically the threat of demeaning treatment one would invite in giving the appearance of someone of lesser worth” (qtd in Bartky 227).

Bartky notes that shame becomes a “cringing withdrawal from others” (228).

This is interesting in light of a 2004 USA Today article which states:

At bottom, shaming punishments are wrong because they constitute an unhinged assault on the shared and exalted moral status — the dignity — all human beings possess simply by virtue of being human.

Dartky argues that a pedagogy of shame for women is particularly damaging because they have been shamed throughout their educational career (and, I might add, throughout their lives as a whole), but it seems that shaming is inherently wrong because it is an assault on the dignity of others, and because it reduces other people to our objects. When you feel shame, you realize that you are someone else’s object: you do not live up to their judgments (or their perceived judgments).

It is worth nothing that shame and guilt are two different things. Dartky writes that “Shame, then, involves the distressed apprehension of oneself a lesser creature. Guilt, by contrast, refers not to a subject’s nature but to her actions: typically, it is called forth by the active violation of principles which a person values and by which she feels herself bound” (229).

Bartky, Sandra Lee. “The Pedagogy of Shame.” Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. 225-241.

Grimshaw, Jean. “Autonomy and Identity in Feminist Thinking.“ Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy. Ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1988. 90-108.

In “Autonomy and Identity in Feminist Thinking,“ Jean Grimshaw deconstructs the feminist assumption that there is a core self if we strip away the way we have been constructed — that underneath our false ideologies is a true autonomous self (93).

She notes that this feminist thought makes four assumptions:
1. There is a potential unitary, rational self that is aware of its interests;
2. Splits in the psyche are caused by the interference of patriarchy;
3. Undoing conditioning is solely a rational process of undoing socialization;
and 4. There is an autonomous self that originates within the self (95).

The consequences of these assumptions are many. First, it provokes a derogatory attitude towards “inauthentic“ people (96). Second, it cannot see value in the ways women currently live their lives; it divides women into two camps, those who have shaken off patriarchy and those who haven’t. Lastly, it presents a normative (emphasis Grimshaw’s) image of “this is what a feminist looks like“ (97).

The feminist view that there is a core self fails in the following ways:
• It does not understand the appeal of romantic “images“ that are criticized by feminist criticism.
• It does not understand that it is possible to disagree with imagines “in one’s head“ but not to change one’s desire (100).

We cannot assume, according to Grimshaw, a “coherent“ self, and people must instead negotiate “contradictory or conflicting conceptions of themselves“ (101-102).

Grimshaw concludes:

It seems to me that there is a sort of dialectic we need to preserve when thinking about autonomy. There is no authentic or unified ‘original’ self which can simply be recovered or discovered as the source of ‘autonomous’ actions. But we are often faced with the experienced need to make ‘sense’ of our lives and our feelings and goals, to relate confused fragments of ourselves into something that seems more coherent and of which we feel more in control. We are often also faced, however, with the need to tolerate contradictions, not to strive for an illusory or impossible ideal, and to avoid self-punishing forms of anxiety, defense and guilt (and feminist guilt can be as punishing as any other kind). The dialectic of autonomy s one in which a constant (but never static or final) search for control and coherence needs balancing against a realism and tolerance born out of efforts to understand ourselves (and others) better. (106)

Alcorn offters “a third model for change… esentially a psychanalytic model, [that] suggests that discourse or language is, in itself, a highly heterogeneous substance. On one hand, it can operate as coded information, able to influence political identity largely in terms of the old liberal categories of knowledge and truth” (20).

In order to change oneself, one has to, according to Alcorn, reduce the unconscious conflict within oneself. Alcorn notes that “ideology works best when it manages to keep such conflcited libidinal experiences fully repressed” (22). “Subjects will develop freedom and rationality only to the extent that they are encouraged to discover, recognize, and take responsibility for the unconscious libidinal codes of desire and repression that underwrite their own subjectivity. This freedom requries work that analysts call grief work…. The giving up of libidinal attachments is always a form of mourning” (23, 27).

Drawing on Freud, Alcorn notes how we are beings of attachment, and that we remain attached to things, people, and events even if they cause suffering, because removing ourselves from those attachments is also painful (26-27). Here I am reminded of counseling theories that discuss how one does not change behavior or thought until the pain surrounding the current situation becomes greater than the fear surrounding the change.

Alcorn calls for a teaching that is both political and personal: “Because ideology operates at the level of personal and emotional experience, it needs to be explored at that level” (28).

Alcorn, Marshall W., Jr. Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Construction of Desire. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.

In this issue of College English there are essays on “What Should College English Be?” I skimmed a few, but I read all of Thelin’s article, which posits a critical pedagogy classroom that isn’t about the pragmatism of preparing students for jobs (143). Drawing from Henry Giroux and Donald Lazere, Thelin argues that we need to contextual events within economic, global, and historical forces.

Thelin is also concerned with teacher-centered critical pedagogy classes that impose political wills on students. Instead, we can have student-centered classrooms where we begin with what our students are interested in. As Ellen Cushman has pointed out, “individuals cultivate counterhegemonic ideologies in and from their everyday lives” (qtd in 144). Thelin adds, “the injustices the students routinely see and encounter have sown seeds of resistance and decency that can take us in productive directions in our classrooms” (144).

Thelin discusses his classroom where he has had students look at the top-ten list of world dictators listed in Paradise, research those dictators, research other dictators, look at information about the United States, and critically engage the political, historical, and economic genesis of some of these dictators. He asks students to develop and defend their own top-ten list of dictators.

I love this classroom up until that one last sentence. I am having increasing problems with the ranking of suffering. For example, a friend of mine is in a biomedical ethics course, and they were asked to rank which medical problems they felt should get budgetary priority. He and I both found the assignment unethical, because we should not rank suffering. In this case, the myth of scarce resources has ingrained in us that we must prioritize, when really, if we stop and look at the larger picture, we could easily put a lot more money and energy into health (if we take it from, say, war).

Thelin asks his students to rank dictators. Yes, this is a critically engaged skill. But doesn’t it sort of represent, as Adorno has pointed out, the way competition insidiously invades everywhere? Why rank suffering? Isn’t it enough that it is suffering? Is one genocide more atrocious than another? We could speak in numbers; we could discuss how we are more disgusted by one type of brutality over another; but in the end, I don’t think it ethically sound to rank dictators.

Thelin, William H. “Student Investment in Political Topics.” College English 69.2 (November 2006): 142-149.

Habermas, Jürgen. “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism“ and “Social Action and Rationality.“ Translated by Thomas McCarthy.

Marcuse, Herbert. “Liberation from the Affluent Society.“ in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 276-287. New York: Routledge, 1989.

A classmate began Tuesday’s class with the question that we hard largely left unanswered at the end of the previous week: where can we find resistance in today’s society, according to Herbet Marcuse’s vision? The class discussion that followed was a really good discussion, and as Orosco pointed out, was one that has been held among Marxists for quite a while. However, I was extremely frustrated during this discussion. The class, for the large part, seemed to want to focus the discussion on whether we should focus on reform or qualitative change, and how, and what acts constituted which. I thought this discussion was fruitful, but I was frustrated because I didn’t feel that we were enhancing our understanding of Marcuse’s vision of resistance and qualitative change, but rather continuing the debate between those in class who I might identify as liberals and those in class who are or have been radical.

I wanted to hear about, in particular, the ways in which we can change the ways our bodies function and move in society. How can we focus on desire and changing what/how we desire so that was can create qualitative change? I felt that this was central to Marcuse’s vision of qualitative change, and I even quoted it in class to try to move the conversation that way, but no one else wanted to go that way.

And I am left wondering why. I have three formulations to answer that why: 1) I am stressing Marcuse’s focus on bodies more than I should be; 2) everyone had moved on mentally to Habermas and his more reform-oriented model (at least more reform-oriented than the other theorists we have read); or 3) the class hasn’t actually undergone transformative change because this class hasn’t undergone bodily changes, only mental ones. If I am wrong in stressing Marcuse’s passages on the body, then I would greatly appreciate correction; however, I feel, after reviewing the text a few times, that I am correct in my reading. I would refer to the text now, in this moment, but I have left my book at home. As for the second formulation listed here, I don’t know if I believe that one because I had a hard enough time understanding Habermas, and this focus on reform in class discussion was occurring before the shift to Habermas.

So, I’m left with the third: this class hasn’t changed the way students’ bodies function, so the learning is all knowledge and not bodily. I’m reading a great book by Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., titled Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire, which discusses the way supposedly transformative cultural studies composition courses don’t incorporate changes in desire. Of teaching new knowledges and ideologies, Alcorn writes: “Such knowledge will always be used in accordance with existing ideologies and their respective desires and identities. In order to use knowledge for social progress, desire must bee mobilized to use knowledge. Desire itself must be altered if knowledge is to be effective in solving social problems“ (5).

As I write this, I worry that it might come across as a critique of the course, and I suppose it is, but more of transformative courses in general. Mostly, as I write this, I am trying to answer the question: why would we read all this, understand the way Western society works in a more complex, critical way, and still only call for minor reforms and not envision a society without suffering? And the only answer I can come up with is that our desires haven’t been altered. We still desire the restaurant down the street, to get an A and a degree instead of actually transformative experiences, to get a job when our degrees are over, to date and have relationships in the same way we did ten weeks ago. We still desire the same privileges that we have been desiring before the class. And when I consider who I think is grasping the material the best, based on my observations during discussion (I’m trying not to be too hubristic and assuming that I grasp it all), are those who have less invested in dominant culture: the queers and Dave (?), who seems pretty anarchist in his viewpoints. (An aside, as I think about it, I realize I could probably only name half my classmates’ names. Hmm… how could this class be more of a community, changing the way we function as students?) Well, this observation of who I think gets it is based on mostly Marcuse’s work, I think.

What would a classroom look like where desire was shifted? That I do not know. Perhaps and hopefully Alcorn’s book will help me address that (he comes from a Lacanian perspective, something I have little familiarity with). But I think I’m starting to formulate what I want to write my paper on for the course: transforming desire in the critical pedagogy classroom, drawing from Critical Theory.