I love it when College English and CCC come in the mail. I’ve been getting better with these journals, dropping whatever I’m doing and at least looking at the table of contents. This is an improvement over when I taught middle school and just didn’t even time to flip through the English Journal that came to my apartment every other month.
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.
