This week’s readings presented several different philosophies of teaching which can be located at various points on the pedagogy-spectrum . For example, in Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature, I was surprised to read of Bonnie Zimmerman’s (University of California at San Diego) approach to pedagogy: “I believe in telling students what they ought to think. I tell them, ‘I’m going to preach to you, because I want you to think about the meaning of books and I believe that literature makes you a better person,’” (Showalter 51). Remember that reading response that I mentioned getting destroyed over my first year in my Master’s program? I think I said something like that. Now, I can see why statements like Zimmerman’s (and mine) are rather fraught and contentious. The idea of looking for “meaning” is a statement that needs to constantly prefaced and qualified over and over again to students, if the term is going to be used (which Zimmerman may do, I don’t know). But even more problematic was the idea of literature making students “better” people. Whose notion of ethical/moral progress is being used at the standard to measure “better” in this sense? Is each student able to decide what “better” means to them, or is there an underlying current of morality which Zimmerman cultures throughout the semester?
I wonder if there is a connection between Zimmerman’s pedagogical philosophy and the idea of “social constructionism” in composition studies, where politics tend to enter the classroom in a concrete (often socially liberal) way, and individual ideologies are often transferred from the instructor to the students, with the hope that students will then enter the “real world” and make a lasting political impact. Humanities departments often have more politically liberal tendencies, but I was under the impression that we’ve moved on from attempted “indoctrination” to focusing instead on texts and what they say about the cultures in which they were written. But this does make me look at my own curriculum, texts, and project assignments and ask myself, “am I promoting an ideology in my composition classroom implicitly, in the sense that I might not even be aware of it?” For example, my students’ next project is a “rhetorical analysis” paper in which they will watch a documentary and analyze how it works to persuade the target audience. But in looking at the list of recent documentaries I provided, they are almost ALL more liberally inclined. Some are relatively neutral, and one is more conservative (Mitt), but most advocate for some sort of left-leaning political agenda. This can be taken both ways, as the documentary will be critically interpreted and students will have to decide if the film manipulates the viewer with its use of rhetorical appeals or if it’s fair-minded, but someone could make an argument that I am trying to indoctrinate my students, given the list of documentaries I provided (I’d argue in my defense that most of them I chose because they are on Netflix and many students already have access to Netflix, but still, a convincing argument could be made). I’ll have to think about this even more carefully as I begin to construct my syllabus for my poetry class this summer. I’m wondering if it will be easier to avoid political persuasion in a literature class as opposed to a composition class, where the idea of speaking and writing in real-life discourse communities is such a concept of emphasis. I guess I’ll find out.