Fecho's "Why Are We Doing This?"

Fecho, Bob. “’Why Are You Doing This?’: Acknowledging and Transcending Threat in a Critical Inquiry Classroom.” Research in the Teaching of English 36:1 (2001): 9-37.

Finally, a truly rich article that offers a comprehensive theoretical basis for inquiry-based pedagogy!  It also situates inquiry within current research, demonstrates what rigorous inquiry looks like in the classroom (hint: it’s not just allowing student-selected paper topics), and recognizes a teacher’s internal doubts in addition to the challenges presented by the unenlightened.  Further, it offers a useful discussion of teacher research, a topic I have long wanted to pursue.  Throughout, an extensive network of references provides me a rich reading list for the future. 

Fecho’s article presents a series of vignettes that emerged from teacher research he carried out during his last year teaching high school English.  He collected data related to an inquiry-based project that asked students to deepen their understanding of conflicts between Jewish and African- and Carribean-American citizens in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  The common thread between the vignettes is a feeling of threat—within a colleague, Fecho’s student teacher, a pair of students, and so on. 

While the vignettes are informative, the literature review and theoretical grounding had the most to offer me at this point in my studies.  Fecho grounds critical inquiry most deeply in the work of  Freire, but also addresses “feminist critique of his work” as presented by hooks and Luke and Gore (11).  He then overlays the work of Dewey, Bakhtin, Rosenblatt, Foucault, and Vygotsky as having informed the practice through which he enacts Freire’s theory.  Finally, he presents Delpit, Gee, and others as influences specifically on his teaching of literacy.  In short, the lit review in this article includes everyone I’ve ever heard of in my doctoral studies (I’m exaggerating only a little!). Fecho’s sweeping coverage gave me a significantly better sense of how these writers and thinkers relate to one another and how a coherent pedagogical stance can grow out of so many theorists’ work without any one of them having voiced it.  I also found great value in his metaphor of learning: “it’s all rather like Sisyphus—what one comes to more clearly understand is the rock that invariably rolls into a new state of disclarity” (12).  Sounds like grad school to me.

Finally, although Fecho’s teaching environment—an inner-city Philadelphia school of 100% African- or Carribean-American students—seems as far as possible from the independent, college-prep, suburban, Southern school at which I teach, and from its privileged (although more racially diverse) students, I found many striking similarities.  Most notably, many of my students dwell comfortably in a world that they think they understand, and they are very likely to perceive any inquiry into their position as a threat.  I’d conjecture that at least 80% of them identify with the dominant culture and race, with 90% of them identifying with the dominant socioeconomic class (including a large number of well-heeled international students).  Like Fecho’s students, mine are characterized in many ways by homogeneity, which exacerbated perception of threat in his classroom.  Further, while Jewish and Black stakeholders in his situation felt threatened by inquiry into racial conflict, Fecho cites Freire and Macedo to point out that “such inquiries particularly cause those students in mainstream cultures to feel threatened as their privilege comes under scrutiny” (12).  Fecho’s discussion of threat helped me conceive of a curriculum for our students that uses Freirian theories to do more than “take a food and festivals approach to multicultural issues” (31).

Segal's "Pedagogies of Decentering and a Discourse of Failure"

Segal, Judy Z. “Pedagogies of Decentering and a Discourse of Failure.” Rhetoric Review 15.1 (1996): 174-91.

Segal uses the term “the decentered classroom…as a catch-all phrase for pedagogies that maximize student involvement in learning” (175).  Inspired by a decentering failure, Segal sets out to taxonomize published responses to such failure.  The responses she finds include the following: blame the student, blame the teacher, blame the institution, blame the theory, construct a metatheory, and theorize resistance.  The first four types of response are self-explanatory; Segal’s descriptions offer some subtlety within them, but the literature on the topic is so scarce that no more than three authors demonstrate each.  In the fourth category, Chordas, Tuman, and Gore reveal how every attempt at shifting power away from the teacher simply dominates students in a different way; for example, circle seating, intended to give everyone equal power and voice, removes a choice from the student who has reason not to want to speak or be seen.  Finally, theorizing resistance seems to circle back to blaming the student; purportedly the difference is that here authors explain why students resist decentering, but Segal’s prime example of blaming the student, O’Reilly, did so, too.  The distinction seems to be that O’Reilly explained students’ resistance through their personal situations or challenges, while here resistance is actually a student’s exercise of power.  That is, a student’s failure to participate fully in or even attend a decentered class might be a statement that she wants a banking model, wants a teacher to be at the center of the lesson, and doesn’t recognize the value of a more participatory model.

The culmination of this taxonomy is Segal’s genre theory of the lecture; she believes that the lecture (and the banking model for which it is an agent) is a social action that is not easily displaced in the university, so much so that a decentered classroom doesn’t exist as an alternative to the lecture genre but within it, because the ceremony of lecture has been enacted so extensively that students define their roles by it.  They bring the lecture with them.  Thus, instructors hoping to decenter must make explicit how to benefit from the pedagogy. 

Often I find the most value in theory that explains why a technique works for me; that is the case here.  Within the first few days of class, I explain that students should “say something stupid.”  It goes like this:

Say there’s a topic on the tabe.  No one says anything.  You have an idea, but there’s a 50/50 chance you’re way off.  You speak up, and as you talk, it becomes clear that your idea isn’t solid.  But wait!  Your shaky idea prompts thinking in two other people, who offer their ideas, and that leads a fourth person to clearly articulate a concept that many find valuable.  If you’d never "said something stupid," no one would have learned anything.

This explicit description of pedagogical goals seems to me an enactment of Segal’s theory.

The article's obvious weakness is the scarce literature on the topic; a taxonomy of it may have little meaning.  On the other hand, the paucity is in many ways Segal’s point.  The greatest strength, however, is that Segal offers constructive next steps toward successful decentering, relieving what was at times a discouraging picture of the ways a teacher’s attempts might fail.