When critical stances become scripted: Impediments to resonant dialogue in the education classroom

Abstract

This essay, a speculative work, suggests that educational encounters of critical theory and pedagogy are today too often hampered by an emerging form of schooled reproduction in which university learners perform critical stances in order to garner recognition rather than for reasons of intellectual or political commitment. It suggests that the performance of these stances contributes to discursive conformity and threatens the vitality of the critical university classroom. It then pursues a strand of argument that considers two emerging, interrelated paradoxes of critical classroom practice, each indicative of how scripted critical stances can function as impediments to resonant educational encounters. The first, referred to as the ‘cultural capital paradox’, suggests that where expressions of critical theory and pedagogy are prized, a danger lurks that students may perform criticality simply to garner approval. The second, referred to as the ‘linguistic formalism paradox’, takes up the politics of language usage and positions some of its current contestations as impediments to the sustenance and success of the critical dialogical sphere.

A paradox emerges for educators seeking to engage students in critical inquiry aimed at socially ameliorative ends. If at all attentive as critics, then we educators know that we are asking our students to undertake critical work within school and university systems resistant to its most radical expressions – systems that ultimately encourage and even demand of them dispositions antithetical to criticality. Systemic critique, of course, abounds within university and school classrooms. But it arguably thrives only as long as it is contained as an internal exercise that does not seriously threaten the workings of power beyond its practice. This being the case, critical educators have long observed that reproduction, not sustained critique or change, is a more transcendent educational outcome in educational systems. By the same token, all manner of students have long observed that learning to perform reproduction (intellectually, socially, culturally, discursively) is a sound strategy for achieving success in schools.

None of the preceding is novel to critical theory and pedagogy. In fact, a reckoning with it is essential to their practice. This is because critical conversations about education, held within institutions of education, are never neutral. They are informed by the politics of the space within which they are carried out, by the micropolitics of localized school life (the requisite jockeying to secure good grades, to please teachers and to negotiate the particulars of competitive school hierarchies), by the macropolitics of broader school arrangements (the sociological fact that schools reproduce broader social inequalities in their care of students, elevate the knowledge systems and cultural practices of dominant classes, marginalize school actors whose perspectives are otherwise and yet seek to legitimize myths of liberal meritocracy in their functioning), and by the interactions of these and various other political factors. All such concerns impact on schools and the possibilities for student learning within them. And all inform the critical project, whose method is to contemplate, question and dismantle these political conditions.

And yet, when speaking of questions of critical method, something of late seems amiss to me. In recent years, as an education professor with an abiding interest in critically informed scholarship and teaching, I have noted what seems like the elevation of an emerging form of schooled reproduction among university students and, I dare say, some faculty – a form that is especially insipid because it so easily and effortlessly masks itself as otherwise.

What I have noted is this: too many students of education practicably committed to social justice in their work, and intellectually committed to critical approaches in its pursuit, seem increasingly well versed – perhaps even well schooled – in saying what they are supposed to say about matters of social justice once they have claimed their disciplinary allegiance. And what they are supposed to say often feels rehearsed, as if they are accessing a script that advises its adherents on stock answers, right inclinations and even suitable emotions in response to what they imagine the discipline – and, as a result, their teachers, who presumably subscribe to it – would wish for them to say.

It is not that their conversational contributions are malicious, unsound or even unintelligent. It is rather that the stated convictions they bring to their conversational contributions – often quite impassioned – too often feel contrived. And, in a sense, why would such a suspicion not arise? For if one of the central educational claims of critical theory and pedagogy is to be believed – that school systems are in the business of social reproduction – then to the extent that the critical project of inquiry into these processes of reproduction has achieved any intellectual success and institutional legitimization (and a look at the course offerings and research backgrounds now listed in many faculties and departments of education would suggest that it has), it seems reasonable to ask: Why would students not seek to reproduce the performance of critical dispositions in contexts that value them? Why, for that matter, could some instructors not get caught up in doing the same? And, more pointedly, why should we be surprised if critical dispositions threaten to devolve into artificial or empty ‘critical speak’, given that they are being carried out in the competitive and conformist political cultures of universities and schools?

In sum, I wonder if some of critical study and pedagogy’s limited educational successes – ever hard fought, ever under threat in the context of broader social arrangements antagonistic to their aims – have given rise to emerging paradoxes of practice that are worth paying attention to, paradoxes rooted in the shadow cast by forces of discursive conformity masked as otherwise, and so in need of address in the exercise of recovering the vitality of classroom discourses committed to educational critique. More so, I wonder if these paradoxes of practice are somehow hardest to see in educational spaces where critical pedagogy is most ascendant precisely because, in the tradition of Foucault (1980) and, by now, many others, these discourses maintain and circulate their power as a result of being masked – this is to say, maintain and circulate their power so effectively because they are embodied in the normalcy of what passes for sanctioned social critique rather than positioned as being against its aims. In this case, it seems to me that if critically informed scholarship and teaching practices can more resolutely commit to trying to name instances of this discursive conformity where it appears, if only as a process of revealing it, they could better support a mode of criticality that is more open, responsive and allegiant to emerging educational questions and concerns rather than to imagined disciplinary allegiances masked as conformities – not to mention engage students in the same.

This essay is a think piece. The views I present are speculative, based on much time spent in observation, reflection and conversation with students and colleagues. These views are, as such, not presented with any allusions to empirical verifiability. My more modest aim is to communicate an aspect of critical classroom practice that similarly located teachers and learners might also have observed and reflected on, but not begun to attempt to fully articulate.

To this end, what I wish to identify and pursue here is a strand of argument that considers two emerging, interrelated paradoxes of critical classroom practice. I name these the ‘cultural capital paradox’ and the ‘linguistic formalism paradox’. Both of these are indicative of the onset of the critical script I describe above in the way that they function as impediments to resonant critical dialogue. Yet both are paradoxical in that they arguably support arrangements of social and intellectual conformity even as they attempt to take up important ideas and interventions aimed at the opposite.

A necessary provisional note seems apt in the context of framing what follows. As I write this, in the summer of 2017, it is increasingly not an overstatement to suggest that we are in a historical moment where real threats to social justice and the spirit of social critique are ascendant, and where those peoples and arrangements that may variously carry them out have been emboldened by recent political outcomes. In many ways well documented, projects of social critique – in education systems and otherwise – face substantive pressures. And yet an important part of what underlies the ideas presented here is that none of these pressures should preclude the notion that critical classroom practices must always turn their critiques in on themselves as an important aspect of maintaining their viability. I write this essay in that spirit.

The cultural capital paradox

Could it be that educational cultures which encourage students to critique dominant sociopolitical arrangements sometimes work against their own interests by nature of the structural politics that underlie their asking? Put differently, how disruptive is it to critique dominant sociopolitical arrangements from within educational cultures and contexts that reward doing so? Could these rewards get in the way of the substance and sincerity of critiques that emerge in these contexts?

The ‘cultural capital paradox’ refers to the question of how seriously an instructor should take the idea that critical work is going on in their classroom when the imperative that underlies this work is supported by a classroom culture which is predisposed to favouring the political and intellectual stances of critical theory and pedagogy. It refers to the idea that in classrooms where expressions of critical theory and pedagogy are prized, students may be motivated to say things to try to win esteem – even sensible, plausible, sophisticated things – not to mention be rewarded in this pursuit by instructors and peers, rather than by any theoretical or actionable commitments.

The implication is that a spectre of corruptibility always lurks in classroom practices of critical theory and pedagogy, in which a form of cultural capital is attainable to participants who can learn well how to give voice to endorsed discourses but who have little stake otherwise . ¹ Worse still is the social and intellectual inertia that this portends, in which the classroom exercise of performing critical stances can become self-sustaining and collaboratively rewarding while remaining unresponsive to life and politics beyond its practice, or in which multiple classroom participants can together tacitly credit themselves and each other for their critical engagements in response to each other’s performances but take their engagements or thinking no further.

This is not to say that to be a critically committed actor in pursuit of socially just educational relations, on the one hand, and to be a seeker or willing recipient of cultural capital for holding such views, on the other, are necessarily mutually exclusive orientations – there are assuredly students and scholars undertaking this work in pursuit of both. And yet the paradox I wish to evoke here holds regardless: that, put crudely, it would be a good thing if critical conversations – no matter the motivations behind their practice – were finding space in institutions of education where they once did not, but a bad thing if critical theory and pedagogy’s increased institutional legitimacy was giving rise to a class of critical students well versed in empty critical speak devoid of broader commitment.

Negotiating this paradox for instructors necessitates supporting the former while mitigating against the latter. But what I wish to emphasize here is that negotiating this paradox might also involve enhancing one’s recognition that scripted critical stances may appear in classrooms and other educational spaces one inhabits in ways that are not always easily or obviously perceptible – ways that may get in the way of developing alternative possibilities for engagement and depth.

Increasingly, familiar signposts tend to influence my own cognizances that scripted critical stances are potentially lurking. There is the employment of seductive and popular stock answers to any and all problems arising: that neo-liberalism is to blame; that capitalism is vulgar; that unearned privilege permeates all around; that unjust marginalization persists as a result. Yes, yes, yes and yes – and resoundingly so. But stating as much as an interchangeable discourse strategy without any depth or responsiveness to particular problems – let alone finding oneself in groups that reward each other for doing so or, worse, realizing that one is engaging in these same processes of discursive reward-seeking – mirrors the thoughtlessness that these stances aim to contest.

More so, there is the evocation of presumed criticality as a set of recycled utterances designed to please through their simplicities (an offence I am not immune from having committed), so that stances like championing ‘equity over equality’ or ‘student voice’ or constructivism take the form of mythical and unquestioned doctrine (as if moving to the conceptual space of ‘equity’ or ‘voice’ does not leave just as much to think about in terms of supporting socially and educationally just relations amongst each other). And there is likewise the catch-all intervention of suggesting that individual acts of discrimination and violence need to be also recast as social and political acts of discrimination and violence. Of course they do.

The point here is that none of these sorts of perspectives are at all unimportant on their own. But I wonder what it signals about our collective intellectual potentials, as well as our capacities to address a range of social and educational problems, if we can count on similar kinds of taken-for-granted commentary to keep reappearing, with enthusiasm, in classrooms we aim to call ‘critical’ (even and especially our own classrooms), no matter the issues at play.

I wonder even more what it suggests if, as I have surmised about my own experience, we believe that we find ourselves encountering larger numbers of young people who are intellectually satisfied with this arrangement in one part because of having been rewarded by the instrumentalities of the school system they have moved through and, in another part, in terms of how it might get in the way of social critique that, if up to the task of being responsive to its targets, would be more difficult and uncomfortable than any scripted articulation could ever presume to be – difficult and uncomfortable in the sense of encouraging students to encounter a range of issues that are non-amenable to scripted stances. This could alternately involve working to uncover the ways – seen and unseen – that one is personally implicated in supporting unjust social relations. It could involve elevating the partial, the localizable and the specific when undertaking inquiry or analysis of a given set of problems rather than settling for critique that thoughtlessly and peripherally applies to any and all problems. And it could involve seeking to come to grips with the full range of complications invoked by another’s ideas while resisting the urge to fall back on familiar interpretive gazes. None of these incitements are novel, but all come under assault when the spectre of scripted critical stances lurks.

Such an assault likewise extends to the workings of an additional issue that is antagonistic to resonant critical dialogue in the education classroom – an issue linked to the cultural capital paradox in that its entanglements evoke scripted stances that put into play analogous relations of power, yet standing apart from it in that it has arguably taken on a particular intensity worthy of its own scrutiny in the current moment.

The linguistic formalism paradox

I call the second paradox I wish to highlight the ‘linguistic formalism paradox’ (Žižek, 2017). It refers to the scripted politics of naming, to the boundary work that can occur as a by-product of this scripting, and to the challenges that this scripting poses to the critical dialogical sphere. ²

It seems uncontroversial to suggest that, in public spaces at least, social actors – educators included – are on the whole much more aware than they used to be about the meanings, purposes and implications of the language they use. Precaution is often taken to name people according to the identity markers of their choosing, as well as to use socially endorsed racial, cultural, ethnic, gender, sexual, ability and other speech markers when speaking about groups of others. And all of this is for good reason. To not do so is to uncritically adopt determinist structures of categorization and being – structures located in relations of power far removed from considerations of the agency and welfare of individual peoples and groups. Conversely, to adhere to the particularities of language is to partially address these oversights – doing so supports acts of social and self-determination. And yet, in the context of supporting resonant dialogue in the critical educational classroom, a paradox again lurks.

For all the new openings that language can create, these are always and inevitably accompanied by new closures. New language can emancipate, but new language also fixes new meanings into place. And while adopting a common language can enable and support an important sense of community for the initiated, those in-group members who subscribe to, endorse and/or aim to reify emerging linguistic identifiers often do so at a pace that far exceeds those on the peripheries of their deliberations. That this would be the case is wholly unexceptional, but my interest here concerns what happens when both of these segments – in-group members at the frontline of new uses of language and outsiders on the peripheries of these conversations – come together to have critical conversations in education classrooms, a common enough occurrence in my teaching contexts and in those of many of my colleagues at various universities. And my concern here is that too often I see outsiders isolated from these conversations. They are isolated for a variety of reasons. These might range from the wilful or tacitly discriminatory disavowal of the usage and legitimacy of new terminologies, to silent support but linguistic discomfort with using said terminologies. In either case, I wonder what a critical classroom accomplishes if it cannot find a way to appeal to or invite these outsiders into conversation.

I see this paradox emerge in my classrooms and peripheral educational spaces I find myself in all the time, at times in iterations that signal its worst excesses. A member or ally of an in-group uses critically innovative or progressive language that signals some sense of an insider status, and in the process erects a barrier with those not versed in this language. In a recent instance, I saw a colleague aggressively taken to task for using the arguably liberal term ‘multiculturalism’ in a context the speaker claimed was disrespectful to the critical constituency she imagined she was speaking for. In another, a seemingly well-meaning speaker used the term ‘special needs’ to the consternation of others, apparently oblivious to the fact that ‘exceptionalities’ was the more apt term within the conversational culture that she was at that moment a part of. And, in still another, the term ‘at risk’ and its speaker were named as culprits of anti-criticality.

I do not want to minimize the importance of lexical interventions to speakers who believe in them for well-thought-out reasons. Nor do I want to advocate for the thoughtless use of words, in which case any critical studies instructor can attest that students who embrace an ethic of thoughtless word choice, particularly when questions of identity are involved, present their own kind of especially insidious challenge. But when appeals to rigid linguistic formalism are used as a means to isolate rather than to invite or to educate, and worse still when they are used to enhance the cultural and intellectual capital of the linguistic formalist, this is, for me, a cause for concern.

This concern holds even if I can conjure the very worst characteristics about the non-formalist: that they are wilfully abdicating their responsibility to know and respect others; that they are committing acts of tacit or purposeful discrimination in their refusal to linguistically encounter others; that in their linguistic disavowal they are unfairly placing the burden for social change on the marginalized peoples advocating for these linguistic changes; that in their linguistic disavowal they are attempting to deny these same peoples an important means of community-making and social recognition; or that they are simply intellectually lazy. In each case, their absence from a conversation that might have included them had a formalist speaker attempted to move beyond linguistic orthodoxy, and that might have had peripheral effects in its various extensions beyond the space of the conversation, remains intact.

What accounts for linguistic formalists who are rigidly inflexible and even aggressive toward those not versed in the formalisms they value, particularly in terms of how this inflexibility negates the kind of critical dialogue that might have occurred in its absence? While certainly not the disposition of all or even most linguistic formalists, I have of late noticed enough of this iteration of linguistic formalism to take notice. I wonder if the aggressiveness I sometimes observe in linguistic formalists signals an unacknowledged conceit that there are more significant issues at play on the periphery of said discussions (Žižek, 2017) – big problems, like structural inequality, that remain untouched and unarticulated, no matter how well linguistic formalism is policed. And so linguistic formalism operates as a stand-in for said problems, affording speakers the opportunity to exercise the illusion of limited control over a seemingly impossible problem, yet paradoxically obscuring an invitation into awareness, discussion and address of this problem on the part of others who are dissuaded from entering these conversations before they have ever begun.

In anticipation of difficult conversations carried out against the increasing spectre of linguistic formalisms that might hinder these, in my own teaching I have increasingly taken to urging my students – at the outset of our classes and throughout – that we must have these conversations, knowing that we will probably make mistakes of language, and knowing that we will probably say things we wish we had not said in the process of exchanging and learning from each other’s points of view, but that it is imperative that we agree to forgive each other, often, for our inevitable mistakes. In this case, the only rigid imperative that matters in committing to our conversations is that the end of discourse impoverishes us all.