Teaching in the Middle: An Ordinary Revolution

Questions about Teaching and Power

<1> We teach in the humanities. We teach encounters with the Other. And yet, what do we want from an encounter with the Other?

<2> We command (some say, "ask") our students to go through this rite of passage to the land of the Other - believing some old anthropologist's myth about looking outward to find something inside. But the more profoundly we gaze upon this Other, the more we confirm our suspicions about power, anxiety, exploitation, and inequality inherent in our relationships. Like a conspiracy theory which fits itself neatly over all manner of ugliness (colonization, war, sexism, racism, homophobia, ageism, classism, and etc.), this educational safari hides a relationship between subjects (the lookers) and objects (the looked upon).

<3> When considered alongside a rhetoric of liberating young minds, an emancipatory, Othering pedagogy emerges and muddles these simple power relationships. Do the students learn from the teachers about something outside of the classroom? Do the teachers learn from students about something outside of the classroom? Do the teachers learn something about their students? Do the students learn something about their teachers? Or is the classroom simply a place where we all learn how to be inside of a classroom? Is the subject a "who" or a "what"? Does the object have presence, here and now (a thing), or is the object a goal, either a destination or a future state of being? And what happens when subjects and objects trade places?

<4> But given what we profess to know about things like privilege and inequality, we can no longer absolve ourselves in a wash of compassionate centrality like some "civilized" colonizer. And we can't quite pretend that the proliferation and dispersion of questions about power is the same thing as the annihilation of power itself. We cannot abolish power in something over which we have control, except by the exertion of some sort of power. Instead, it is better to consider the question of power an open-ended one - a question which changes with every moment and in every context.

Who is the Other

<5> As teachers (and students) we occupy positions in relation to specific knowledges which are necessarily different. The act of teaching, no matter what terms we use to describe it or what methods we employ, is an encounter with the Other: I as Other, You as Other. Whether we work by using our authority to provide spaces for learning or we issue grades and punishments like tyrants, we do this because it is in our power to do so - even when the students have volunteered to learn under the pretense of free will. All of our fishbowls, small group discussions, and anti-Socratic methodologies are but masks of the power we wield which issues forth from Othering. On day one, we are not like them. We and they are Others. And if we succeed, on the final day they will have become a little less like those who have yet to learn what they have. They will have learned a thing or two about Othering.

<6> This Othering is easy to see when eavesdropping on professional teachers, especially in our beloved humanities which are often concerned with social and cultural issues: "Why don't the students write better?" "Why do they resist the material?" "Why can't they be more like I was when I was in school?" "What do I want them to accomplish?" All of these appear as innocent questions - which deserve to be answered, but as part of that conspiratorial mask, rarely are. All are questions that can provide clarity and purpose, and can lead to greater sensitivity in the classroom. But without reflection and introspection, these questions can easily be transformed into exclamations: "The students can't even put together a sentence!" "The students are brain-dead zealots!" "I can't stand them!" "What do I want the students to accomplish?" becomes an expression of raw power: "I want to __________ them!" (Fill in the blank). By this time, a student's true power is buried underneath a heap of institutionalized righteousness, and they become effigies for some other power over which they hold less control (white, male, straight, middle-class, and/or etc.).

<7> Too many times around this go-round makes one not so merry. Cynicism, smugness, dullness seep in. If we make this our pedagogy - consciously or not - we become the star of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the teacher that students hate to hear and love to ignore. We become the Other that we imagined students to be; we become the thick, stubborn, and arrogant aliens. And as the teacher, we have the power and privilege to do so with impunity.

<8> But there is another way to take the encounter with the Other - as a process of communication across difference. Kenneth Burke writes:

As for the relation between "identification" and "persuasion": we might well keep it in mind that a speaker persuades an audience by the use of stylistic identifications; his act of persuasion may be for the purpose of causing the audience to identify itself with the speaker's interests; and the speaker draws on identification of interests to establish a rapport between himself and his audience. So, there is no chance of keeping apart the meanings of persuasion, identification ("consubstantiality") and communication (the nature of rhetoric as "addressed"). (191)

Sexist use of pronouns aside, Burke's discussion of identification and persuasion is still relevant for the contemporary classroom. Forget for a moment the erotics of power that floods the sphere of cultural theory. Forget the war metaphors with the talk of teaching strategies. Maybe the classroom is not a dungeon or a battlefield. Perhaps it would be better considered a civil sphere - a public sphere - that needs to be cultivated at a time when dissent is so easily viewed as a threat and when, to quote the spectacular movie theater slogan, silence is golden.

<9> Since silence too often registers as a fetish for consent, we can never forget just how horribly lucrative it can be when a privileged few choose to fatten themselves on the bread of the hungry while a silent majority casts its gaze elsewhere. We should think about the sickening nature of the either-with-us-or-against-us polemics that have both declared "war on terror" and that have us locked into both war and terror as long as this rhetoric persists. We should feel the sting of failure if our students sit quietly through our classes all semester long.

<10> Fortunately, there is a type of power which can be both productive and pleasurable. This synergistic force surges through Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the "assemblage":

One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects what it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity... Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. (3-4)

If the knowledge contained within a work of Literature can arrange itself as a peculiar assemblage of disparate lines of power which can create for people lines of flight, it is hardly a stretch to imagine that the classroom can also benefit from this wisdom. We should do everything we can to create a place where polarities can meet and dissent can be considered a function of healthy interpersonal communication that can flourish as a process in itself.

<11> In a classroom that is multiple, we must also remember that teaching is an encounter with a "whom." The roles that we imagine the class is comprised of ("subject/object" or "teacher/student," for example) need to provide enough space for complex beings. First and foremost, students are people. They deserve respect, especially when we can't understand them. Similarly, we must remember that teachers are people - not simple relay stations or regurgitators of information - but human beings with frailties, prejudices, talents, and, most important, character. As Elizabeth Ellsworth tells us, it doesn't really even matter what we teach or how we teach, but it is "the who" we teach that matters (40-41). Perhaps this is an extreme statement, but it cuts to the immediate encounter as a singularity and the essence of teaching as an adventure in communication. Students assess the who we offer in relation to all the other whos swirling around them, and our Other either entices them to enact it or we fail as they pass into the numbing and numbed mass at the middle.

Some Tentative Conclusions

<12> We have to start in the place where we are stuck standing; we have to begin in the middle of things: in our own and Others' numb spaces. Surely, there is much good work being done on the margins of society. And there are surely things that those who imagine themselves in the middle ought to know about the fringe. But because we understand (as both Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser have taught us) that the margins tend to be policed by force, and the center through culture, it is important that we teach in a way that allows the people in the so-called middle to understand that they are part, whether they like it or not, of a political, historical, and cultural process. They - we all - are created in all ways, always.

<13> Some people call it apathy, some call it conservatism, but perhaps it is best considered a form of ethical "agnosticism" (from the Greek, meaning without knowledge). The crisis that our political system faces is one in which citizens say, "I do not know. I do not care. I do not care to know." It is a form of vacant, generalized skepticism - one without experience - about virtually anything (justice, world hunger, racism, etc.) that refuses to even engage in a discussion about a particular issue. It is a form of non-debate in which people of all political persuasions pretend that their position is the only one worth knowing, and that casts aspersions on all who stand in the way of segregated - separate but equal - radical individuality.

<14> But in this, we do not have the right to our own opinions! We do not have a right to be comfortably numb, ignorantly complacent merry-go-rounders. Until we - teachers and students alike - shoulder our political birthright, whether we agree or disagree with each Other's explicit views, we cannot expect democracy. Until we, ourselves, walk in the middle, we are suspect and democracy wallows in lameness. In refusing to step into the middle and into dialogue, we destroy public life by eroding the basis for communication. In this, we don't even have to acknowledge that we deny the Other a place at the table, because we disallow that the table even exists at all.

<15> A good teacher does not have to find a way around it. A good teacher can't afford to ignore what the students know. And they do know - a great deal. A good teacher has to jump right in the middle of it, and negotiate a position in which students are willing to get involved. We must provide them the strange encounter of the ordinary: we must offer some critical estrangement from what is not Other. This might mean personally tolerating unsavory viewpoints, waiting for other students to respond, and maybe issuing a critical response that is open enough to lead into further discussion. This means demonstrating our own Othering, our own struggles, trials, and setbacks. This means treating them as equals in relation to the curriculum for the course. This means a critical engagement with, no matter what the course, popular culture - not just the grass roots, but the mass media; not just the titillatingly subversive, but the mundane, as well (from fiction and comic books to club culture, from conspiracies to computer games). This means sometimes being a minority voice in the classroom. This means giving something up to the students. Communication across difference demands a return of a difference - not in opposition, but in opening up multiple positions.

<16> While we might not all teach primarily middle-class students at a state university in a small Midwest American town with a reputation for being a bit "middle of the road," we should understand that shock tactics and the romance of the radical don't usually work anymore. Our students have evolved past resistance. In turning the middle into grounds for dissent, debate, and discussion, we teach the students that there is a public sphere for them to enter into. And, as we all know, the more people that imagine daily life as a place where public political displays can exist, the more available this public becomes to Others.

<17> The middle is an interesting place to be. So long as we imagine that "real" politics happens only at the edges, we will have none in the middle. Of course, there is always a risk in letting people have their own say. We might find ourselves Othered. But we were once students, we became teachers, and we turned out alright. Isn't this what we want for our students, for them to become a little more like us? If teaching is all about the "who," what "who" are we offering our students? What me/I am I offering them to enact? That is the first question we must answer as teachers.

Davin Heckman and Patrick Vrooman

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. On Symbols and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1987.