Teaching and Activism

Yes, it's been a long absence. And now I'm pulling a cheap move just to keep some momentum on the blog rolling. I'm double-posting a comment I left on the blog for our cultural studies class. I want to work on this idea some more, as it's something I've continued to think about this past week:

I’m positing two rather extreme and overly-simplified positions on teaching (which I’m sure are a bit reductive of the views people have expressed), then deploy some of our CS concepts as an alternative to these two poles.

1. The first pole is a hopeful, though not complacent, view of the social impact/function of university instructors. From this perspective, universities may produce all sorts of status-quo boosting effects (training workforce, all the other points listed in Matt’s first comment) and their state or private funding may even be based on such justifications, but still they are loose enough structures so that classrooms are not entirely determined by such structural forces. Teachers, in this view, have the opportunity to appropriate the space and resources of the university for progressive or even radical ends through leading students to critical thinking and to question ideologies.

2. The second pole, which I think is close to Matt’s fear of the absolute cooption of university, denies that individual professors (or programs) can effectively fight against the ways in which universities are overdetermined by these structural forces/relationships. From this perspective, even if teachers are able to help students learn critical thinking skills and incite their resistance to accepted ideologies, the net effect of this effort may really just enhance capitalism by creating a class of more valuable creative workers, more nuanced in their understanding of culture. Under this view, students might become “critical” of capitalism, racism, sexism, etc on an ideological level, but so what? Their ideological conversions will have no effect on the ways in which these oppressions are played out through institutional means. You can love Marx and voice as much dissent as you want on an ideological level, but end up working for an ad agency, employing your cultural sophisication for capital, if that’s the “best” opportunity you see for your career.

I believe both 1 & 2 have a lot of validity. However, I think a better alternative can be described through thinking about education as a practice in CS and materialist terms: education as the possibility of creating new subject positions. From this angle, educators have a stake in subject positions students come to identify as. These subject positions are not only nominal categories, like “educated liberal,” “queer liberationist,” etc, but they are articulated to specific practices enacted outside the classroom. For example, I think education can be (though certainly not always!) good at producing the position of the “educated liberal” who renounces the practices of vulgar prejudice, such as making racist jokes or displaying intolerance for certain cultural differences. Another subject position could be articulated to economic practices such as not shopping at Walmart or buying from fair trade vendors.

The question of effects is not such much over how much student’s ideological outlooks might change through class but what kinds of practices will be linked to their new subject positions. A great limitation on teaching, however, is that the articulation between beliefs-as-subject-positions and practices aren’t often forged in the classroom. These types of articulations depend on a broader cultural matrix of opportunities. What kinds of practices will be articulated to new subjects positions is beyond the control of the teacher. Much of it is fortuitous. If there is a strong anti-sweatshop movement on campus making demands on students to take part in actions or not, then teaching Marx, leading students into some sort of “marxist-sympathetic” subject position, is likely to be articulated with organizing, protesting or other practices that are part of that movement. If such a movement does not exist on campus, then the same class could win students identity as marxist-sympathetic subjects but in a way that is not articulated with any practices contesting labor policies on campus.

So do I think teaching is a hopeless endeavor for contributing to progress or radical causes unless the cultural opportunities are ripe for students to articulate new conceptions of themselves with political practices? In a way, yes. Perhaps the content being taught in American universities in the late 60’s wasn’t any more radical or revolutionary than content being taught today but the cultural matrix at the time articulated educated subjects to more overt political practices. I know from my own experience college seemed to take on a whole different tone when the whole campus was shaken by protest over Iraq sanctions, Kosovo, etc.
The challenge for committed educators, then, in times that are not fomenting with political unrest is to create this political culture outside of the classroom. We need to work with allies outside the university. The excuse of doing enough for the cause in the classroom doesn’t cut it, at least not unless the conditions are right for classroom efforts to be articulated with extracurricular practices.