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.