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).