Can We Be Critical of Critical Pedagogy?

Author(s): Russel K. Durst

Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Sep., 2006), pp. 110-114
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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Interchanges

Editor's Note: Russel Durst has written a commentary on "Understanding Problems in

Critical Classrooms" by William Thelin, published in September 2005; I have invited

Wllliam Thelin to respond. The full text of the original article is also available at http://

inventio.us/ccc.

Can We Be Critical of Critical Pedagogy?

Russel K. Durst
University of Cincinnati
In his September 2005 article, Bill Thelin finds glaring problems with his own
critical pedagogy class. Students didn't do the work; missed many classes; broke

student-teacher contracts; learned little and felt shortchanged; and stayed

committed to reactionary, unreflective views. But in analyzing what went
wrong, Thelin will not even consider questioning the principles of critical peda
gogy. Instead, he blames himself for feeling distracted and angry. He blames
his open-admission students for being unfamiliar with the tenets of liberatory

teaching. He blames his college for not supporting efforts to create a demo
cratic classroom and the larger society for robbing students of the belief that

they could have a say in how things are run. He even blames the weather. I
don't exaggerate in calling this class a pedagogical disaster, but, according to

CCC 58:1 / SEPTEMBER 2006

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INTERCHANGES

Bill, if you're a critical pedagogue, it's okay to have a disaster as long as you
analyze the smoldering wreckage, learn from it, and make adjustments. It's
okay because you re "blundering for a change:' making mistakes while trying
to get your class to work the way Ira Shor says it should (Tassoni and Thelin).
Yet critical pedagogy has been part of composition for nearly twenty years now.

It's fair to ask. At what point are you no longer blundering for a change? At
what point are you simply blundering? I would argue that Bill Thelin exhibits
symptoms of blind loyalty to critical pedagogy; that he privileges a narrow form

of progressive teaching, dismissing critical alternatives that do not fit his tem

plate; and that he would benefit from more serious self-scrutiny of his teach

ing approach.
Thelin labels as "status quo teaching" the approach I discuss in my 1999
book Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composi
tion. That study of first-year writing classes found that most students were

career-oriented pragmatists and sought ways to avoid the political analysis

required in their critical pedagogy course, as a result missing out on impor
tant literacy work. I proposed a less-confrontational pedagogy, reflective in

strumentalism, which accepts students' pragmatic reasons for attending

college, seeking to establish common ground between teacher and student.
But the approach also strives to build social consciousness, seeing these two
goals as complementary, not mutually exclusive. Rather than support an op
pressive status quo, my approach rests on a recognition that few students are

radicalized by critical pedagogy-indeed, far more appear to be alienated by

such instruction, as Thelin, Richard Miller, myself, and others have found
and that seeds of political awareness and action are better planted through a

pedagogy that accepts students' reasonable wish to be successful in school

and career.
My book stemmed from an effort not to dismiss critical pedagogy but to
examine it more closely. Can we afford to be so committed to an approach that

we will not even reflect on its potential limits in the classroom? The critical
lens, if it is to have integrity, should not be switched on and off depending on

one's beliefs and preferences; a fully critical perspective will also examine its
own cherished views, difficult though that task may be. Yet, in reading Bill's
article, I found myself in the realm of the true believer. To provide just one
example, closely following Ira Shor's guidelines, Bill had his students make key
decisions about the class: writing assignments, grading standards, course read
ings, and classroom participation policy. But this particular group of students
proved unwilling or unable to cope with the extra responsibilities, and their

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CCC 5 8:1 / SE PTE M B E R 2 006

work broke down. As Thelin himself points out, this class was a "trailer sec

tion." The students had previously failed composition classes-some repeat

edly-and were taking a course most of their cohorts would have already
completed. But he does not consider that these students may have lacked the
confidence, commitment, and/or writing skills to take charge of their own

composition learning in the way Shor advocates and that a more teacher-di
rected approach might in this case have been more suitable. Instead, he argues
that students' very lack of familiarity with critical pedagogy is what held them

back; they couldn't cope, he suggests, with the newness of his approach. I con
sider this argument deeply flawed because a great many college courses, even
entire disciplines, are new to students when they arrive from high school, yet

most still manage to do the work and many even flourish. Students expect
college to be different and often welcome the novelty of new approaches. After

all, how many high schools offer courses in electrical engineering, anthropol

ogy, or political science, all viable college majors? And composition courses
themselves are relatively rare in high schools, where English instruction typi
cally concentrates far more on the teaching of literature, as Arthur Applebee
has found. Underneath Thelin's efforts to find external reasons why his method

did not work lurks an unwillingness even to consider possible problems with
the pedagogy itself.
He also promotes a very narrow definition of critical pedagogy, excluding

approaches that offer progressive alternatives to traditional teaching. I was

especially taken aback by Thelin's claim that "...the sections of English Com
position I taught were genuinely the only sections of critical pedagogy to which

the students could have been exposed" (p. 134), an assertion for which he pro

vides absolutely no support. I find the point puzzling because Bill taught at

the open-admissions college of the university where I teach, and I am ac

quainted with a number of his former colleagues through collaborative projects,
committees, and the faculty union. I know that several of those colleagues were

involved in approaches that they-and I-consider critical pedagogy. For ex

ample, Jonathan Alexander, who had an essay on transgender rhetorics pub

lished in the same issue of CCC as the Thelin article, regularly teaches
composition courses around the topics of AIDS, sexual orientation, and ho
mophobia, in which students critically examine discourses surrounding these

subjects and consider possibilities for public action. Would such a focus not
constitute critical pedagogy? Lesbian feminist Michelle Gibson uses the work
of bell hooks and other radical pedagogues in her composition courses to have
students explore matters of politics and society from a left perspective, an ap
proach discussed in a 2000 CCC article by Gibson, Marinara, and Meem. Sharon

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INTERCHANGES

Dean and Floyd Ogburn were among the earliest English faculty in the coun
try to incorporate service learning and critical interrogation of that experi
ence into college composition classes. While a culturally progressive topic does

not necessarily translate into critical pedagogy, these instructors were con
sciously using methods consistent with such an approach.
The problem, I believe, lies in Thelin's quite limited definition of critical
pedagogy, a reductive view in which students must carry out such acts as choos
ing their textbook, coming up with the grading policy, and designing their own
essay assignments in order for a class to qualify as what he calls "a true critical

pedagogy" (117). I personally doubt the existence of such a purified instruc

tional practice and prefer a more inclusive definition less tied down to a pre

scribed set of classroom activities. Further, I believe that this perspective

excludes many teachers who are working hard to heighten students' political
understanding, enhance their critical consciousness, and increase their level

of civic action.
Finally, I find problematic the very notion of "blundering for a change" in

hopes of building a more effective critical pedagogy. I believe this idea of blun
dering to be flawed in much the same way as Thelin's "true believer" analysis
of his class, in which none of the manifold problems could be traced back to
his teaching approach. A pedagogy that celebrates blundering may sound con
genial to those adherents already safely in the fold, but it rings false to outsid

ers. Certainly, good teaching involves trial and error and the taking of risks.
However, when we consider that, as composition teachers, we bear direct re
sponsibility for the learning of our students, the idea of blithely blundering
toward pedagogical insight seems, frankly, a little self-indulgent. As critical
teachers, we can-and should-do better. Why is it important, then, for com
position teachers to take seriously the failures of classroom practice and even

to question prized methods and beliefs? What more could we have learned
from Bill Thelin's blunders, and our own? Perhaps one answer is that we do
well to dislodge from our ideological comfort zones sometimes, have our out
looks complicated by discordant ideas, just as we try to move students toward
more varied and complex ways of seeing in classes guided by critical pedagogy.

Works Cited
Applebee, Arthur N. Curriculum as
Conversation: Transforming Traditions
of Teaching and Learning. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1996.

Durst, R?ssel K. Collision Course: Conflict,

Negotiation, and Learning in College
Composition. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1999.

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CCC 58:1 / SEPTEMBER 2006

Gibson, Michelle, Martha Marinara, and
Teaching for Social Change. Chicago: U
Deborah Meem. "Bi, Butch, and Bar ofChicagoP,1992.
Dyke: Pedagogical Performances of
Tassoni, John Paul, and William H. Thelin,
Class, Gender, and Sexuality." CCC 52
eds. Blundering for a Change: Errors and
(2000): 69-95.
Expectations in Critical Pedagogy.
Miller, Richard. "The Arts of Complicity:
Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 2000.
Pragmatism and the Culture of School
Thelin, William H. "Understanding
ing." College English 61 (1998): 10-28.
Problems in Critical Classrooms." CCC

57 (2005): 114-141.

Shor, Ira. Empowering Education: Critical

William H. Thelin's Response to Russel Durst

William H. Thelin
University of Akron
I knew when writing "Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms" that I

was risking the type of backlash represented in Russel Durst's comments. In

admitting to teaching such a disastrous section of composition, I made my

self-and perhaps critical pedagogy in general-vulnerable to sweeping gen

eralizations about the efficacy of implementing it in the first-year classroom.

Yet, discussing this particular section seemed far more important than ana
lyzing and reporting on a classroom that produced much stronger results. As I
noted in my introduction, some articles and books have rejected critical peda
gogy in whole or in part because of such difficult classroom situations or at

least unmet expectations. My article's goal was to scrutinize a problematic

classroom to complicate the easy reaction of, "This doesn't work."
I felt confused throughout my read of Russel's remarks, as he is not cri
tiquing my findings as much as he is criticizing me and my interpretation of
critical pedagogy. He wants me to conclude from the data, I'm assuming, that
critical pedagogy is not an effective classroom approach. Clearly, my students'

comments in their essays do not support such a claim. I was a little unsure,
then, how to proceed in responding to Russel. I have chosen to ignore his un
generous representation of the concept of blundering and will point interested
readers to a full discussion of blundering in the introduction of Blunderingfor

a Change: Errors and Expectations in Critical Pedagogy, as I think it is best

here to reexamine a key point of my study then talk about the definition of
critical pedagogy. First, though, I would like to address the many errors, over

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