Active Teaching, Active Learning

A common theme that I see in all of the readings for today is a tendency toward encouraging active learning, and a corresponding role for an instructor to actively teach. That might prompt some to laugh ("isn't all teaching 'active'?")--and that's not a problem for me as I love to play the fool. But it's not as simple (or simple-minded) as it sounds. One of the smartest things I've ever done is to take 8040 alongside 8010, because so much of the discussion in the former relates to the latter. I'm the only member of the cohort in 8040 and I'm the greenhorn, to be sure--everyone else has taught and they have lots of great insights into what actually happens in an English 1000 classroom. On more than one occasion someone has commented that English 1000 students regard the instructor as omniscient (or at least pretend to)--this usually reflects how they've been conditioned (from K through 12) to view the instructor. I submit that many college/university instructors, in fact, assume the role of "Teacher-God." What a critical pedagogy presumes, however (and I feel that the views and strategies outlined in the readings today compliment this view), is that, in fact, "We know that a [classroom] does not consist of a line of [ideas], releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the [Teacher]-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the [classroom] is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture" (with apologies to Roland Barthes for lifting and altering one of his best-known--because it's awesome--lines).

The strategies that Bean and Damour/Curzan outline for getting students to actively participate in class (through group activities, through discussion, through reading exercises, etc.) and the critical reflexivity orientation that Salvatori advocates dovetail nicely with the critical pedagogy that I want to adopt in my classes. Salvatori's piece is more of a call to action than a list of operationalizing strategies (like Bean and Damour/Curzan's): she asserts that "we must find ways of providing that kind of training ["developing the critical mind"] even within institutional environments that are opposed to it" (358). I whole-heartedly agree. I don't see the opposition she sees coming from cultural studies (that's perhaps due to my own naive belief in an ecumenical approach to theory) but I agree with her orientation--after all, what could speak more to the critical pedagogical approach than how Salvatori ends her piece: "Let me suggest that teaching reading and writing as interconnected activities, teaching students how to perform critically and self-reflexively those recuperative acts by means of which they can conjecture a text's, a person's, argument and can establish a responsible critical dialogue with it, as well as the text they compose in response to it, might be an approach appropriate to developing the critical mind--an approach that might mark the difference between their partaking in, and their being passively led through their own education" (358).