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Radical Love: Toward the Transformation of Everyday Composition Teaching and Learning (2014)
A paper delivered at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Indianapolis, IN, March 2014.
Radical love is a necessary but often missing component in the development of “critical literacies” in composition pedagogy (Ira Shor, 1999; bell hooks, 1994). The concept of “radical love” follows from the work of Jesús Gómez, primarily in El Amor en las Sociedad del Riesgo (2004). Lilia Bartolomé (2008) draws upon Gomez’s work to better “understand the ideological and political dimensions of caring” (p. 2). Radical love enables composition teachers to avoid deficit models of education, such as those still dominant in “basic” writing instruction, and furthers the critical project by enabling us to treat people as humans by increasing our awareness of the historical and political challenges which face us all in trying to do so. Radical love extends the possibilities of “Living-English Work” (Lu, 2006) and other critical approaches to composition teaching which contest “ethical binaries” (Valentine, 2006).
Speaker 2 locates description and discussion of radical love in the pedagogy of basic writing classes across three education sites—an urban research university, a private university with a religious affiliation, and a four-year art and design school—to demonstrate radical love’s transformative power in the relations between students and teachers and both to learning. Focus is placed particularly on how teaching practices are adapted to each local context, providing examples and handouts to facilitate attendee’s responses during question and answers.
This is a paper about the necessity of love in composition teaching, specifically in the pedagogy of basic writing classes, as locations filled with people rarely left untouched by other narratives. Jim Corder reminded us that “often, we don’t learn to love” (27) and nonetheless urged us to “insist that argument—that rhetoric itself—must begin, proceed and end in love” (28). I agree with both these claims and would like to extend where I see Corder going, from love as an attitude in our discourse practices to love as a way of being, to an ontology. For love to flourish thus, Corder wrote, in “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” we need to “abandon authoritative positions” which “cannot be achieved” anyway, “except in arrogance, ignorance, and dogma” (29). “As each of us is an argument” (18), Corder says, so this is how we work with the narratives we tell ourselves, how we manage ourselves as sets of congruent arguments or sets of conflicting arguments. Corder says,
We cannot without potential harm shift from the past of one narrative into the present and future of another, or from the past and present of one narrative into the future of another, or from the future we are narrating into a past that is not readily ours. How can we take that once chance […] and learn to change when change is to be cherished? How can we expect another to change when we are ourselves that other’s contending narrative? (19)
He meant for us to abandon these subject positions in a flow of argument, for to love is to change our rhetorical discourse to more readily account for new narratives and embrace invention as “an unlimited universe of meaning” with which we engage in a process of “opening to invention, closing to speak, opening again to a richer invention” (29).
Although this is a somewhat mechanistic dialectic, a thesis-antithesis-synthesis conception of meaning and argument, I think it goes in the right direction, away from our field’s still-dominant idealistic notions of language and language users, and toward fully opening ourselves to a different ontology that is necessarily coupled with a new way of knowing. If Corder provides a new stance, a new place from which to be, for the epistemology I then turn to Min-Zhan Lu’s conception of living-english work, in which she discusses U.S. composition teaching as necessarily located within the framework of English-only instruction as currently shaped by capitalist social relations. Living-english users are people who transform english for their purposes; they are the actual storytellers in a language against which the standardized and authorized narratives are employed.
Lu’s argument, in brief, locates four “lines of inquiry” she sees running “against the grains” of composition teaching which are available for english language users who 1) examine the promises of our language instruction with the actual outcomes of real users; 2) who must bear the forced standardization of authorized language use and yet locate their own particular experience within it and through it; 3) who argue for our rights to transform a living language; and 4) continue to submit standardized english to our many varied uses as its price to pay for world domination (608-11). I’ve generalized these lines, which Lu demonstrated with specific references to actual living-english users, so I can further my point about love, which begins with what Lu says, that a living-english user is “acutely aware of the pressure to function as an english-only user but also attentive to the capacities, rights, and necessities of change in all living things: people, their lives, society, culture, the world, and the language itself.” My point is that we are all living-english users, who like both Lu and Corder need to cherish change, even though as composition teachers we are positioned as english-only users, offering contending narratives to our students, those with whom we come into daily contact in our classrooms. They are living-english users, as well; our students who, as Lu says, keep english alive by their “many different ways of using it, each of which is itself a living process in-the-forming: informing and informed by the specific, different and dynamic, historical and social contexts of individual acts” (608). This is where love becomes radical; in disposing, as Corder would have us, of that arrogance, ignorance, and dogma which informs and upholds dominant English use, and can be used instead to oppose and eventually dismantle the dominant social frameworks in which people are hierarchized: categorized and sorted, tested and dismissed. Radical love must be communicated through this authentic, living-language use, with its materialist conception as a language used by people but not entirely of their own choosing. To accept this organic premise of a living language is fundamental to creating the condition of caring, for actual people, in our classroom practice, “to speak a commodious language,” as Corder put it, to create “a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities” (31).
I’ll continue our exploration of the need for radical love by backing up a little, and state directly that during my 14 years of teaching I have been pursuing ways to further invoke composition’s founding credos and populist claims in the service of a more revolutionary pedagogy. These founding principles of composition studies are derived from statements such as the Students’ Right to Their Own Language and from the radical pedagogical writing of Paulo Freire, among others, even though such writing is often “denatured,” as Patricia Bizzell once put it, stripped of its radical content and purpose for use in our field. As I speak today of radical love, I am drawing on a larger set of writings and research in which I have examined the concept of reflection as a central trope for working those sets of dichotomies, such as theory / practice, reading / writing and students / teachers on which our field was founded. Julie Jung, in her recent CCCs article, states that reflection is one of composition’s “sacred pieties,” what I have called in previous 4Cs presentations and in my larger study an uncontested way to work the theory / practice dichotomy. In that study, I found that our views of reflection as typically theorized and practiced are idealist constructions, separated from any useful sense of action, therefore of writing. In developing a radical materialist understanding of reflection in both my scholarship and in my teaching practice, I needed to grapple with a materialist understanding of language; in order to invoke these conceptions in my classroom practice, I found myself questioning everything from our field’s pretension to professional practice to my own subject position as teacher. Through this work, I have finally come to an understanding of a radical love as a necessary part of my pedagogical practice linking critical literacy and materialist dialectics, which conceives of the items in each of those just recited dichotomous pairs as inseparable parts of the same processes. The practice of “radical love” that I invoke was initially drawn out of, and expanded from, the work of Jesús Gómez, a Spanish anarchist, activist and professor at the University of Barcelona. In his 2004 book El Amor en la Sociedad del Riesgo, Gómez describes exercises in communication and dialogue “linking love to equality” (154) in a scientific exploration of love which questions many of our notions of romantic love but also many attempts to trivialize the power of love. Others in U.S. education, such as Lilia Bartolomé, have drawn upon Gómez’s work to better “understand the ideological and political dimensions of caring” (“Authentic Cariño” 3).
This scholarly work on the pedagogical condition of “caring,” as developed from Nel Noddings to Angela Valenzuela to Patrick Camangian’s recent article in Research in the Teaching of English, has encouraged teachers to reexamine simple notions such as their often professed “love for students” as idealistic, and therefore problematic and potentially damaging, approaches to the educational process and as these notions may merely mask teachers’ deficit views of students. Valenzuela’s notion of authentic caring, and similarly Bartolomé’s of “cariño,” differs from that of an “aesthetic caring,” or what Valenzuela calls the condition in which teachers are “concerned first with form and non-personal content and only secondarily, if at all, with their students’ subjective reality” (Valenzuela 22; qtd in Camangian 181). Or, as Camangian puts it, “Authentic caring highlights the personal in the pedagogical, calling for teachers to create classroom conditions that value students’ cultural experiences [….] In other words, authentic caring is best communicated by the ways we apply it in our pedagogy” (Camangian 181). Taking this a bit further, I add that the way to create the condition of authentic caring is through adopting and applying the practices of radical love; if “authentic caring” is an attitude and an emotion which creates similarly positive conditions for learning, then radical love is the tool for their implementation, a set of practices which demonstrate this care to students. As I use it, radical love enables teachers to work through deficit models of education, such as those still dominant in “basic” or developmental writing instruction, and furthers the critical project by showing how to treat people always as people, which means with love, but with an awareness of the historical and political challenges which face us all in trying to do so. Radical love in this way begins through reimagining “basic writing” classes as simply those filled with living-english users. Radical love, then, is a materialist practice, and when coupled with an understanding of critical literacy has the power to transform everyday teaching and learning to serve human needs, rather than those of business and disciplinary knowledge or the inorganic conditions of standardized english use.
Even though I call it a pedagogical practice, “radical love” is more an ontology, a way of being that disabuses us of the notion that we can overcome our dichotomous thinking through increased professionalism, through the managerial theories of writing program administration scholarship and through our mistaken understandings of reflection. While these theories and other disciplinary tropes do help us navigate complex institutional and bureaucratic systems, they do nothing to actually change them. To change them we must adopt a different ontology, a way of being with others that acknowledges how teaching and learning are dialectally linked practices, which means that each is inseparably contained with the other in the educational process. Materialist dialectics cherishes changes; identifies it as the one constant in all our narrativizing. We must begin to truly engage this process with the understanding that all people involved are both teachers and learners, which of course is not as simple to carry out as it is to point out, but in doing so, we will accomplish a necessary step toward the emergence of love in composition—and beyond. We must refuse to dichotomize teachers from students, and see them as co-investigators in education, in a process of inquiry, working together with us in and through a living language.
But instead, we tend to separate out some institutional function of teacher, to look at this role as the management of others, of students, removing the teacher as a participant in the educational process and treating her as a mere functionary in the bureaucratically organized university of academic capitalism. The teacherly role is sometimes seen as modeling or leading, and increasingly as managers of human capital. In this way teachers do not share what they know in joint efforts with what others in the educational process know; teachers “leading” in this way does nothing but domesticate and stifle critical development, smother love and arrest change.
I address all of this in my larger study, which I’ve organized under the title Radical Reflection: Toward the Transformation of Everyday Composition Teaching and Learning. But to better set out ways to continue theorizing radical love specifically here today, I want to talk through claims on handouts I’ve provided on the NCTE Connected Community [no longer active; handout available here], and offer a fairly mundane example from a recent classroom observation by the writing and humanities department chair at a college for art and design where I am an adjunct faculty member. From here I hope to share alternative practices which would inform and are informed by radical love.
The college provides bachelor of fine arts degrees in a number of majors. I teach the only section of “basic” writing at the college; a two-course stretch model that directly substitutes for the required freshman English course. Unlike the models at many other schools, the courses are taken for graduation credit and the students are not required to subsequently take the mainstream composition class upon completion of the basic writing sequence. As an aside, this has been a refreshing experience for me overall, and it’s evocative of Corder’s repeated call for all courses to extend over two terms, with a “content-only” first semester and a second semester devoted to explorations of structure and style in using that content. The course I teach demonstrates faculty commitment to student success at the college, but is also all the more frustrating because it demonstrates that the progressive ideas which circulate in our field do get adopted—yet remain undercut by the same attitudes structuring the rest of the curriculum.
After the observation, during the customary talk and review of the notes, the chair pointed out that some of my students (I only had four in this course) seemed unprepared for class. The chair acknowledged that this group of students is a “particularly struggling subset” of a first-year class that is similarly struggling overall with academic requirements. With a student-faculty ratio of 15 to 1 for the entire college, such assessments are fairly easy to make and not too difficult to find ways to quantify. And my own work with these four students indicates that indeed they are struggling, failing to make deadlines and coming unprepared for class. They complete the work, but rarely on time and, being art and design majors, they tend to focus on completing their work in other required courses such as Understanding the Visual, photography and even the text-heavy art history, often only turning to work in other humanities courses such as our writing studio after putting in long hours on campus doing art work in labs. Yet in many ways, these users of living-english, like nearly everyone in the institution of basic writing everywhere, are doing amazing things and they do indeed use the languages they know in creative ways. If they weren’t, they wouldn't have made it into the selective art school in order to be sorted and tracked into a developmental writing class.
The day of the observation, students came to our class meeting having read a chapter from art historian James Elkins’ book The Object Stares Back; the tasks they did not complete were the note taking and the printing off of the text to read from in class. Instead, two students referenced a .pdf copy on their laptops and we spent considerable time during the meeting developing a new, shared text of thoughts and notes in what I’d call a “raw form,” rather than working through their understandings of the text through sharing notes from their reading outside of class as I had requested. Acknowledging these students continued difficulties with academic tasks such as note-taking, the department chair asked me to perform something more akin to “tough love” than radical love: telling these students that they were unprepared for class the next time they arrived without having completed all the required tasks and essentially barring them from participation or from receiving some sort of participation grade.
Another adjunct who teaches the mainstream writing courses at the college has often complained of what he calls a “hand-holding mentality” among the faculty, especially the full-time, tenure-track members who design most of the curriculum, which includes making certain accommodations for differently-prepared students and ensuring they don’t fail while also attempting to adhere to academic standards. Some students, who my colleague calls “apathetic,” have taken and failed Writing 120 (the FYC course) four times. At first, it might be difficult to see how the suggested exercise in “tough love” comes from the same philosophical premises and set of pedagogical approaches that inform “hand-holding,” but upon closer examination we can see that sending this message in the guise of teacher authority, even if ostensibly from a position of caring, only reinforces that damaging social relationship. While in limited cases sending this message might have some short-term benefit for the students, depending on how they’ve been conditioned to receive it, enforcing such rules simply because there are standards to maintain ultimately comes at too high a cost in their overall educational process. The development of critical thinking is not encouraged through adherence to a status quo ideology upholding teachers’ authoritarian actions, even if those are meant for the “betterment” of students overall.
I share this story because it begins to depict the difficulties for teachers in deliberately adopting a new ontology of being with students. Even without department chairs suggesting to teachers that they invoke a more traditional teacherly stance in the classroom, teachers themselves have difficulty not resting on authority and following patterns which separate the work and the conditions for that work of students from their own. Radical love would have students and teachers questioning together the overall structure informing their performance as students. If students performed poorly in high school, as the students in my so-called “basic” writing courses have, we would examine how they developed as students in dialectical relationship with the structure of their previous and current schooling and other social demands. Asking them to treat how they respond to course work as a student performance, one which they learned and helped to shape even though they were not initially responsible for its existence, makes apparent both the social forces shaping their performance and their own role in its perpetuation. But it also demonstrates to them the power of their own agency to change and to develop new roles. Interrogating with students their past responses to reading and writing and questioning together the uses and values of literate practices, those uses demanded by higher education institutions and those which students may value differently, should be the point of any “basic” writing course. Exercises along these lines for my students, or other participants with me in the writing studio as I prefer to refer to them, do include some direct confrontation over issues in performance but not as an authority or adversary. It would be preferable in the educational process for everyone to have written out their thoughts on Elkins’ text that day, but the fact that they didn’t and may not continue to do so in other classes cannot prevent a critical educator from moving forward with the work planned for that day. Comparisons of subsequent papers from participants who took notes, writing more, earlier and more often than their peers, demonstrate to these writers themselves the potential value of these practices more than anything I would ever say from the “just do it” teacher position, or even one that attempted to discuss note-taking but as a requirement with arbitrary penalties for failure to perform.
Approached as a contextualized practice, note-taking skills, and other academic practices, take on the meaning they need to be useful within the narrative of schooling that students are going to tell themselves. The meaning students give these practices may not match the meaning we have assigned them, but to impinge our narrative outside a practice of love, denies both the right of students to use a living-english and merely expects them to accept a contending narrative without providing that embraceable space that makes Corder’s commodious universe that place we must teach the world to want, that place of “time for care” (31).
[Here, I’ll work through the handouts as time permits; talking about my larger project.]
Works cited in the presentation and this handout:
Bartolomé, Lilia. “Authentic Cariño and Respect in Minority Education: The Politics and Ideological Dimensions of Love.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy (2008): http://freire.education.mcgill.ca/ojs/public/journals/Galleys/IJCP003.pdf
Bizzell, Patricia. “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies.” Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Ed. Patricia Harkin and John Shilb. New York: MLA, 1991. 52-68.
Camangian, Patrick. “Starting with Self: Teaching Authoethnography to Foster Critically Caring
Literacies.” Research in the Teaching of English 45 (2010): 179-204.
Corder, Jim. “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.” Rhetoric Review 4 (1985): 16-32.
Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’ War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket, 2014.
Gómez, Jesús. El Amor en la Sociedad del Riesgo: Una Tentativa Educativa. Barcelona: El
Roure Editorial, 2004.
Kohn, Alfie. “From Degrading to De-Grading.” High School Magazine. 1999.
Lu, Min-Zhan. “Living-English Work.” College English 68 (2006): 605-18.
Noddings, Nel. The Challenge to Care in Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992.
Shor, Ira. “What is Critical Literacy?” Journal for Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice 4 (1997).
Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Spec. issue of College Composition and
Communication 25 (1974): 1–32.
Valentine, Kathryn. “Plagiarism as Literacy Practice: Recognizing and Rethinking Ethical
Binaries.” CCC 58 (2006): 89-109.
Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of
Caring. New York: SUNY Press, 1999.
Radical love is a necessary but often missing component in the development of “critical literacies” in composition pedagogy (Ira Shor, 1999; bell hooks, 1994). The concept of “radical love” follows from the work of Jesús Gómez, primarily in El Amor en las Sociedad del Riesgo (2004). Lilia Bartolomé (2008) draws upon Gomez’s work to better “understand the ideological and political dimensions of caring” (p. 2). Radical love enables composition teachers to avoid deficit models of education, such as those still dominant in “basic” writing instruction, and furthers the critical project by enabling us to treat people as humans by increasing our awareness of the historical and political challenges which face us all in trying to do so. Radical love extends the possibilities of “Living-English Work” (Lu, 2006) and other critical approaches to composition teaching which contest “ethical binaries” (Valentine, 2006).
Speaker 2 locates description and discussion of radical love in the pedagogy of basic writing classes across three education sites—an urban research university, a private university with a religious affiliation, and a four-year art and design school—to demonstrate radical love’s transformative power in the relations between students and teachers and both to learning. Focus is placed particularly on how teaching practices are adapted to each local context, providing examples and handouts to facilitate attendee’s responses during question and answers.
This is a paper about the necessity of love in composition teaching, specifically in the pedagogy of basic writing classes, as locations filled with people rarely left untouched by other narratives. Jim Corder reminded us that “often, we don’t learn to love” (27) and nonetheless urged us to “insist that argument—that rhetoric itself—must begin, proceed and end in love” (28). I agree with both these claims and would like to extend where I see Corder going, from love as an attitude in our discourse practices to love as a way of being, to an ontology. For love to flourish thus, Corder wrote, in “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” we need to “abandon authoritative positions” which “cannot be achieved” anyway, “except in arrogance, ignorance, and dogma” (29). “As each of us is an argument” (18), Corder says, so this is how we work with the narratives we tell ourselves, how we manage ourselves as sets of congruent arguments or sets of conflicting arguments. Corder says,
We cannot without potential harm shift from the past of one narrative into the present and future of another, or from the past and present of one narrative into the future of another, or from the future we are narrating into a past that is not readily ours. How can we take that once chance […] and learn to change when change is to be cherished? How can we expect another to change when we are ourselves that other’s contending narrative? (19)
He meant for us to abandon these subject positions in a flow of argument, for to love is to change our rhetorical discourse to more readily account for new narratives and embrace invention as “an unlimited universe of meaning” with which we engage in a process of “opening to invention, closing to speak, opening again to a richer invention” (29).
Although this is a somewhat mechanistic dialectic, a thesis-antithesis-synthesis conception of meaning and argument, I think it goes in the right direction, away from our field’s still-dominant idealistic notions of language and language users, and toward fully opening ourselves to a different ontology that is necessarily coupled with a new way of knowing. If Corder provides a new stance, a new place from which to be, for the epistemology I then turn to Min-Zhan Lu’s conception of living-english work, in which she discusses U.S. composition teaching as necessarily located within the framework of English-only instruction as currently shaped by capitalist social relations. Living-english users are people who transform english for their purposes; they are the actual storytellers in a language against which the standardized and authorized narratives are employed.
Lu’s argument, in brief, locates four “lines of inquiry” she sees running “against the grains” of composition teaching which are available for english language users who 1) examine the promises of our language instruction with the actual outcomes of real users; 2) who must bear the forced standardization of authorized language use and yet locate their own particular experience within it and through it; 3) who argue for our rights to transform a living language; and 4) continue to submit standardized english to our many varied uses as its price to pay for world domination (608-11). I’ve generalized these lines, which Lu demonstrated with specific references to actual living-english users, so I can further my point about love, which begins with what Lu says, that a living-english user is “acutely aware of the pressure to function as an english-only user but also attentive to the capacities, rights, and necessities of change in all living things: people, their lives, society, culture, the world, and the language itself.” My point is that we are all living-english users, who like both Lu and Corder need to cherish change, even though as composition teachers we are positioned as english-only users, offering contending narratives to our students, those with whom we come into daily contact in our classrooms. They are living-english users, as well; our students who, as Lu says, keep english alive by their “many different ways of using it, each of which is itself a living process in-the-forming: informing and informed by the specific, different and dynamic, historical and social contexts of individual acts” (608). This is where love becomes radical; in disposing, as Corder would have us, of that arrogance, ignorance, and dogma which informs and upholds dominant English use, and can be used instead to oppose and eventually dismantle the dominant social frameworks in which people are hierarchized: categorized and sorted, tested and dismissed. Radical love must be communicated through this authentic, living-language use, with its materialist conception as a language used by people but not entirely of their own choosing. To accept this organic premise of a living language is fundamental to creating the condition of caring, for actual people, in our classroom practice, “to speak a commodious language,” as Corder put it, to create “a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities” (31).
I’ll continue our exploration of the need for radical love by backing up a little, and state directly that during my 14 years of teaching I have been pursuing ways to further invoke composition’s founding credos and populist claims in the service of a more revolutionary pedagogy. These founding principles of composition studies are derived from statements such as the Students’ Right to Their Own Language and from the radical pedagogical writing of Paulo Freire, among others, even though such writing is often “denatured,” as Patricia Bizzell once put it, stripped of its radical content and purpose for use in our field. As I speak today of radical love, I am drawing on a larger set of writings and research in which I have examined the concept of reflection as a central trope for working those sets of dichotomies, such as theory / practice, reading / writing and students / teachers on which our field was founded. Julie Jung, in her recent CCCs article, states that reflection is one of composition’s “sacred pieties,” what I have called in previous 4Cs presentations and in my larger study an uncontested way to work the theory / practice dichotomy. In that study, I found that our views of reflection as typically theorized and practiced are idealist constructions, separated from any useful sense of action, therefore of writing. In developing a radical materialist understanding of reflection in both my scholarship and in my teaching practice, I needed to grapple with a materialist understanding of language; in order to invoke these conceptions in my classroom practice, I found myself questioning everything from our field’s pretension to professional practice to my own subject position as teacher. Through this work, I have finally come to an understanding of a radical love as a necessary part of my pedagogical practice linking critical literacy and materialist dialectics, which conceives of the items in each of those just recited dichotomous pairs as inseparable parts of the same processes. The practice of “radical love” that I invoke was initially drawn out of, and expanded from, the work of Jesús Gómez, a Spanish anarchist, activist and professor at the University of Barcelona. In his 2004 book El Amor en la Sociedad del Riesgo, Gómez describes exercises in communication and dialogue “linking love to equality” (154) in a scientific exploration of love which questions many of our notions of romantic love but also many attempts to trivialize the power of love. Others in U.S. education, such as Lilia Bartolomé, have drawn upon Gómez’s work to better “understand the ideological and political dimensions of caring” (“Authentic Cariño” 3).
This scholarly work on the pedagogical condition of “caring,” as developed from Nel Noddings to Angela Valenzuela to Patrick Camangian’s recent article in Research in the Teaching of English, has encouraged teachers to reexamine simple notions such as their often professed “love for students” as idealistic, and therefore problematic and potentially damaging, approaches to the educational process and as these notions may merely mask teachers’ deficit views of students. Valenzuela’s notion of authentic caring, and similarly Bartolomé’s of “cariño,” differs from that of an “aesthetic caring,” or what Valenzuela calls the condition in which teachers are “concerned first with form and non-personal content and only secondarily, if at all, with their students’ subjective reality” (Valenzuela 22; qtd in Camangian 181). Or, as Camangian puts it, “Authentic caring highlights the personal in the pedagogical, calling for teachers to create classroom conditions that value students’ cultural experiences [….] In other words, authentic caring is best communicated by the ways we apply it in our pedagogy” (Camangian 181). Taking this a bit further, I add that the way to create the condition of authentic caring is through adopting and applying the practices of radical love; if “authentic caring” is an attitude and an emotion which creates similarly positive conditions for learning, then radical love is the tool for their implementation, a set of practices which demonstrate this care to students. As I use it, radical love enables teachers to work through deficit models of education, such as those still dominant in “basic” or developmental writing instruction, and furthers the critical project by showing how to treat people always as people, which means with love, but with an awareness of the historical and political challenges which face us all in trying to do so. Radical love in this way begins through reimagining “basic writing” classes as simply those filled with living-english users. Radical love, then, is a materialist practice, and when coupled with an understanding of critical literacy has the power to transform everyday teaching and learning to serve human needs, rather than those of business and disciplinary knowledge or the inorganic conditions of standardized english use.
Even though I call it a pedagogical practice, “radical love” is more an ontology, a way of being that disabuses us of the notion that we can overcome our dichotomous thinking through increased professionalism, through the managerial theories of writing program administration scholarship and through our mistaken understandings of reflection. While these theories and other disciplinary tropes do help us navigate complex institutional and bureaucratic systems, they do nothing to actually change them. To change them we must adopt a different ontology, a way of being with others that acknowledges how teaching and learning are dialectally linked practices, which means that each is inseparably contained with the other in the educational process. Materialist dialectics cherishes changes; identifies it as the one constant in all our narrativizing. We must begin to truly engage this process with the understanding that all people involved are both teachers and learners, which of course is not as simple to carry out as it is to point out, but in doing so, we will accomplish a necessary step toward the emergence of love in composition—and beyond. We must refuse to dichotomize teachers from students, and see them as co-investigators in education, in a process of inquiry, working together with us in and through a living language.
But instead, we tend to separate out some institutional function of teacher, to look at this role as the management of others, of students, removing the teacher as a participant in the educational process and treating her as a mere functionary in the bureaucratically organized university of academic capitalism. The teacherly role is sometimes seen as modeling or leading, and increasingly as managers of human capital. In this way teachers do not share what they know in joint efforts with what others in the educational process know; teachers “leading” in this way does nothing but domesticate and stifle critical development, smother love and arrest change.
I address all of this in my larger study, which I’ve organized under the title Radical Reflection: Toward the Transformation of Everyday Composition Teaching and Learning. But to better set out ways to continue theorizing radical love specifically here today, I want to talk through claims on handouts I’ve provided on the NCTE Connected Community [no longer active; handout available here], and offer a fairly mundane example from a recent classroom observation by the writing and humanities department chair at a college for art and design where I am an adjunct faculty member. From here I hope to share alternative practices which would inform and are informed by radical love.
The college provides bachelor of fine arts degrees in a number of majors. I teach the only section of “basic” writing at the college; a two-course stretch model that directly substitutes for the required freshman English course. Unlike the models at many other schools, the courses are taken for graduation credit and the students are not required to subsequently take the mainstream composition class upon completion of the basic writing sequence. As an aside, this has been a refreshing experience for me overall, and it’s evocative of Corder’s repeated call for all courses to extend over two terms, with a “content-only” first semester and a second semester devoted to explorations of structure and style in using that content. The course I teach demonstrates faculty commitment to student success at the college, but is also all the more frustrating because it demonstrates that the progressive ideas which circulate in our field do get adopted—yet remain undercut by the same attitudes structuring the rest of the curriculum.
After the observation, during the customary talk and review of the notes, the chair pointed out that some of my students (I only had four in this course) seemed unprepared for class. The chair acknowledged that this group of students is a “particularly struggling subset” of a first-year class that is similarly struggling overall with academic requirements. With a student-faculty ratio of 15 to 1 for the entire college, such assessments are fairly easy to make and not too difficult to find ways to quantify. And my own work with these four students indicates that indeed they are struggling, failing to make deadlines and coming unprepared for class. They complete the work, but rarely on time and, being art and design majors, they tend to focus on completing their work in other required courses such as Understanding the Visual, photography and even the text-heavy art history, often only turning to work in other humanities courses such as our writing studio after putting in long hours on campus doing art work in labs. Yet in many ways, these users of living-english, like nearly everyone in the institution of basic writing everywhere, are doing amazing things and they do indeed use the languages they know in creative ways. If they weren’t, they wouldn't have made it into the selective art school in order to be sorted and tracked into a developmental writing class.
The day of the observation, students came to our class meeting having read a chapter from art historian James Elkins’ book The Object Stares Back; the tasks they did not complete were the note taking and the printing off of the text to read from in class. Instead, two students referenced a .pdf copy on their laptops and we spent considerable time during the meeting developing a new, shared text of thoughts and notes in what I’d call a “raw form,” rather than working through their understandings of the text through sharing notes from their reading outside of class as I had requested. Acknowledging these students continued difficulties with academic tasks such as note-taking, the department chair asked me to perform something more akin to “tough love” than radical love: telling these students that they were unprepared for class the next time they arrived without having completed all the required tasks and essentially barring them from participation or from receiving some sort of participation grade.
Another adjunct who teaches the mainstream writing courses at the college has often complained of what he calls a “hand-holding mentality” among the faculty, especially the full-time, tenure-track members who design most of the curriculum, which includes making certain accommodations for differently-prepared students and ensuring they don’t fail while also attempting to adhere to academic standards. Some students, who my colleague calls “apathetic,” have taken and failed Writing 120 (the FYC course) four times. At first, it might be difficult to see how the suggested exercise in “tough love” comes from the same philosophical premises and set of pedagogical approaches that inform “hand-holding,” but upon closer examination we can see that sending this message in the guise of teacher authority, even if ostensibly from a position of caring, only reinforces that damaging social relationship. While in limited cases sending this message might have some short-term benefit for the students, depending on how they’ve been conditioned to receive it, enforcing such rules simply because there are standards to maintain ultimately comes at too high a cost in their overall educational process. The development of critical thinking is not encouraged through adherence to a status quo ideology upholding teachers’ authoritarian actions, even if those are meant for the “betterment” of students overall.
I share this story because it begins to depict the difficulties for teachers in deliberately adopting a new ontology of being with students. Even without department chairs suggesting to teachers that they invoke a more traditional teacherly stance in the classroom, teachers themselves have difficulty not resting on authority and following patterns which separate the work and the conditions for that work of students from their own. Radical love would have students and teachers questioning together the overall structure informing their performance as students. If students performed poorly in high school, as the students in my so-called “basic” writing courses have, we would examine how they developed as students in dialectical relationship with the structure of their previous and current schooling and other social demands. Asking them to treat how they respond to course work as a student performance, one which they learned and helped to shape even though they were not initially responsible for its existence, makes apparent both the social forces shaping their performance and their own role in its perpetuation. But it also demonstrates to them the power of their own agency to change and to develop new roles. Interrogating with students their past responses to reading and writing and questioning together the uses and values of literate practices, those uses demanded by higher education institutions and those which students may value differently, should be the point of any “basic” writing course. Exercises along these lines for my students, or other participants with me in the writing studio as I prefer to refer to them, do include some direct confrontation over issues in performance but not as an authority or adversary. It would be preferable in the educational process for everyone to have written out their thoughts on Elkins’ text that day, but the fact that they didn’t and may not continue to do so in other classes cannot prevent a critical educator from moving forward with the work planned for that day. Comparisons of subsequent papers from participants who took notes, writing more, earlier and more often than their peers, demonstrate to these writers themselves the potential value of these practices more than anything I would ever say from the “just do it” teacher position, or even one that attempted to discuss note-taking but as a requirement with arbitrary penalties for failure to perform.
Approached as a contextualized practice, note-taking skills, and other academic practices, take on the meaning they need to be useful within the narrative of schooling that students are going to tell themselves. The meaning students give these practices may not match the meaning we have assigned them, but to impinge our narrative outside a practice of love, denies both the right of students to use a living-english and merely expects them to accept a contending narrative without providing that embraceable space that makes Corder’s commodious universe that place we must teach the world to want, that place of “time for care” (31).
[Here, I’ll work through the handouts as time permits; talking about my larger project.]
Works cited in the presentation and this handout:
Bartolomé, Lilia. “Authentic Cariño and Respect in Minority Education: The Politics and Ideological Dimensions of Love.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy (2008): http://freire.education.mcgill.ca/ojs/public/journals/Galleys/IJCP003.pdf
Bizzell, Patricia. “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies.” Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Ed. Patricia Harkin and John Shilb. New York: MLA, 1991. 52-68.
Camangian, Patrick. “Starting with Self: Teaching Authoethnography to Foster Critically Caring
Literacies.” Research in the Teaching of English 45 (2010): 179-204.
Corder, Jim. “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.” Rhetoric Review 4 (1985): 16-32.
Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’ War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket, 2014.
Gómez, Jesús. El Amor en la Sociedad del Riesgo: Una Tentativa Educativa. Barcelona: El
Roure Editorial, 2004.
Kohn, Alfie. “From Degrading to De-Grading.” High School Magazine. 1999.
Lu, Min-Zhan. “Living-English Work.” College English 68 (2006): 605-18.
Noddings, Nel. The Challenge to Care in Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992.
Shor, Ira. “What is Critical Literacy?” Journal for Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice 4 (1997).
Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Spec. issue of College Composition and
Communication 25 (1974): 1–32.
Valentine, Kathryn. “Plagiarism as Literacy Practice: Recognizing and Rethinking Ethical
Binaries.” CCC 58 (2006): 89-109.
Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of
Caring. New York: SUNY Press, 1999.