We need more from social movements than the clarion call to fight. We need opportunities to organize inquiries into those social problems dividing us. –David Coogan

This semester, the textbook I am using to teach second year composition students is called Technology. So far, when questions are centered around understanding the text, some students start checking out. When I ask students to return to what was said in the text, how it applies in the author’s views, or what the author would think about an issue—I notice a reticence to answer. But the classroom blossoms with valuable contributions and surprising insights as the students engage each other and analyze the world around them when the topic is allowed to wander, when we generalize the text and apply it to our lives in a variety of ways.

When we use the texts to talk about their lives, students come to life. And this isn’t really a surprise.

More than a Push

In the introduction to his article, David Coogan calls critical pedagogy a “university-led social movement.” Our students are made up of a diverse group of individuals that are more likely to hold the common beliefs of a wider culture, and the critical perspective is asking them to change their minds. It creates a contradiction in which the university pushes students to critically engage with the dominant ideologies that many of them hold even as many of the students are expecting to build a better understanding of the ideology. There is a conflict in perspectives, and more importantly a conflict in goals.

Both teacher and student, in this view of critical pedagogy, wind up occupying the same space without quite understanding the other in much the same way Coogan explains that college students do not know the local population “beyond the abstractions of ‘race.’”

When the university is pushing a narrative, students feel the pressure to accept views that do not match their own. Learning and being empowered involves a process of development and reflection. Getting students to open up about their own lives and their own views is the great task of critical pedagogy.

There seem to be no limit to the ways can get our students engaged in their communities. Gwendoly D. Pough offers us insight into her approach to teaching literacy skills to her students. Her students, she explains, were not only more engaged in the class, but “they actually moved to social action after taking the course” (467). A class that inspires in such a way is certainly worth examining, and is likely worth emulating. But I want to think it through some more.

For Pough, brining in consequential and powerful material, like the documents related to the Black Panther Party, creates a space in which the content being discussed represents the community. This certainly works to complicate the view that Ellen Cushman has of the community and the academy as distinct spaces, as Pough points out (468). The open and passionate forum that we create in our classrooms can be a space where we are engaged in consequential actions—speech acts are, after all, acts. But even so, our students may not be so ready and willing to accept our view of the world.

As I think about the powerful and controversial material that I have read in my own education, I can’t help but think about how much of it was lost on me. Fredrick Douglas went through hell, and I skimmed over his story between classes. Martin Luther King had a dream, and I had a snack. War crimes filled the news while I found my first job washing dishes in a family owned Mexican restaurant. Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlighted the constant state of civil war and the influence of corporations on local communities while I marveled at his combination of the magical and the real.

Coogan tells us that just because “social movements can sponsor dialogue across difference does not mean that they will. Students need more than a shove toward the street. They need task-oriented projects that center on writing and the relationships that writing can form with community partners.” This emphasis on relationships helps us see that what we are wanting for our students is the opportunity to encounter more perspectives in meaningful ways. It is not enough to tell our students about the world, they need to see it.

Help them See

As writing instructors, we ought to be very interested in the ways we empower our students. Anne Marie Todd ends her essay by reflecting on what it means to our students to include activism in our pedagogies. She writes, “activist learning is more than service: it is asking students to find their own mode of active civic engagement.” It is not enough to tell them what projects to work on, what problems need solved, what solutions they should try, how they should think about power, or any other plain statement of our own perspectives. Our perspectives are hard earned, earned through our own experiences and educations; we owe it to our students to ensure they have the opportunities to develop their own relationships with the world so that they too may own an informed perspective. What matters in this is that students understand that they have the power to be involved. What they are involved in, and how they view the problems they face, is for them to figure out.