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Active Citizenship > Choice and Voice: Democracy, Participation,
and Critical Literacy in the English Classroom
Choice and Voice: Democracy, Participation,
and Critical Literacy in the English Classroom
By Barry Gilmore
A recent class I taught read
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, in which
we came across this passage:
Winning an election—that was Belgium’s idea of fair
play, but to people here it was peculiar. To the Congolese (including
Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets
fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first wins altogether
and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people
will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that’s
left halfway unhappy you haven’t heard the end of it. There
is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line. (Kingsolver, 1998,
p. 265)
The discussion of the passage brought up a recent election we’d
had for homeroom representation—you know the kind: a heads-down,
hands-up, blind vote between about six candidates, and the winner
received maybe two more votes than the first runner-up. That’s
democracy in action, right?
Yes and no. The class wasn’t at all certain that the Congolese
approach described later in the novel—total consensus, no
matter how long it takes to get there—would have worked
in our election, though it’s also democratic. The discussion
that followed was one of the most engaging we’d had in class;
it balanced methods of voting, participating, and making decisions
together. It explored democracy.
It’s not every day that a passage of literature has such
an immediate effect on the choices we make in school and life.
Yet that sort of effect is often exactly what language arts teachers
aim to achieve. Using literature, we attempt daily to immerse
students in discussions about moral choice, to offer narratives
that promote active participation and standing on principle. Ask
any student who ever wrote about the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird
or The Scarlet Letter; English classrooms resound with examples
of the difference between the bystander and the “upstander.”
Practicing critical literacy and critical thinking of the sort
that we, as English teachers, encourage ought to lead students
toward reflection on their own choices and the choices of their
society. What’s more, it ultimately ought to offer students
access to alternate points of view and belief systems, empowering
them to evaluate the merits and deficiencies of either system
or both. This critical stance should enable students to find new
ways to approach a problem and even to initiate new paths of action.
These outcomes are desirable for any teacher. We should also be
aware, however, that encouraging this kind of critical questioning
can often reveal some of the deep ironies of American schooling:
as much as we assert the value of democracy and civic participation,
many schools and many teachers shy away from actually including
them in policies or classrooms. A new type of election for homeroom
representative may be a start but should not be the end of this
line of questioning; ultimately, the study of civic participation
in literature may demand of us the reevaluation of participation
in our schools and even our syllabi. Learning about freedom and
voice is not the same as being free or using a voice; our students
deserve to participate as well as to read about participation,
and a literature class is a natural place for the discussion and
choice that participation demands to begin.
To illustrate the disparity
between what we typically teach and traditional classroom techniques,
here’s an exercise to try on your own or with students:
list as many works of fiction as you can that include models of
abusive or oppressive governance. Several dystopian novels ought
to spring to mind fairly quickly: Lowry’s The Giver,
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave
New World, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale; the list goes on. Historical
novels and plays—Wiesel’s Night, Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sophocles’ Antigone, Miller’s The Crucible—might follow. And because I asked for governance,
not government, novels in which positions of leadership are abused
in a systematic fashion also count—Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for instance, or even Rowling’s
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (If your students haven’t
read a wide range of works, try this with movies—anything
from The Lion King to Star Wars will work.)
Got your list? Now ask a couple of quick questions:
What do the protagonists have in common?
What’s the message of these works?
Unless you’ve got a lot of oddballs (Macbeth, for instance)
on your list, your answers will probably run something along these
lines: the protagonists are the ones who resist oppression; the
message is that one must stand up for what is right. It’s
a positive message, one English teachers tend to reinforce again
and again.
Now ask this question:
Which of these works most closely mirrors the school in which
you teach?
Or, if you’re willing:
Which most closely mirrors your classroom?
Schools and classrooms, no matter how they operate, are by nature
little dystopias. In theory, teachers, students, and parents (and
even administrators, politicians, and other rule-makers) share
a common goal—for students to learn; and the classroom should
be organized in an optimum manner to help everyone reach that
group goal. The reality, of course, is far different—not
just because students don’t always necessarily share an
instructor’s goals but also because of numerous exterior
forces and limitations. As a result, far too many of our classrooms
(I include my own) tend to resemble the very systems we encourage
students to resist. “Implicitly,” write Becker and
Couto in their 1996 book Teaching Democracy by Being Democratic,
“teaching democracy also entails encouraging students to
question authority, including the teacher’s, and to dissent
appropriately, that is, as a citizen of the classroom” (p.
4). Alfie Kohn, as quoted by Susan Dunn, agrees: “Students
should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow
up; they should have a chance to live in one today” (Dunn,
2007, p. 1).
American educators have for decades been debating what it means
to teach democratically and to teach for democracy; no one has
yet perfected the model. At one end of the spectrum reside educators
like Joanne Yatvin, the current president of the National Council
of Teachers of English, who wrote in 1971 that, in education,
“one problem is the philosophical shift in our society to
a demand for democratic process where it was never meant to apply
and to an exaltation of individuality and personal taste”
(p. 1,080); education, in other words, is meant to exist in a
non-democratic system. At the other extreme one might find schools
that incorporate democracy so fully that students have no required
classes, subjects, or assignments, and are given an equal vote
in every matter involving school life and policy, from punitive
measures to operational and financial allocation. The Sudbury
Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts is a good example:
“students initiate all their own activities and create their
own environments” so that they “are exposed to the
complexities of life in the framework of a participatory democracy.”
The Sudbury School remains a radical model despite the fact that
educators have been proposing this level of student involvement
for decades. In a 1939 article the Journal of Educational Sociology,
for instance, New York University professor S. R. Slavson proposed
much the same model:
It is necessary. . . that in view of the challenge to democracy,
the school become a training ground for democracy. This can best
be accomplished through participation on the part of the students,
not only in classroom learning, but actually in the conduct of
the schools themselves. (p. 226)
If the nature of the democratic
classroom is a recurring theme in discussions about American education,
it is also one tied clearly to historical context. Numerous articles
on the subject appear in the early forties; more crop up in the
early seventies; an entire volume of The English Journal
was devoted to the subject in 2005. If critical literacy is a
tool our students should use, it’s one that we, as educators,
should also value. What is it about war and threats to America
that cause us to reflect on the nature of our pedagogy? Is teaching
for civic participation more important at some times, for some
audiences of students, than at others?
In the end, many of us find ourselves stranded somewhere in between
those who believe that classrooms should include noiseless rows
of student desks where pupils do what they’re told and those
who advocate systems without structure. We wish to value students’
voices but know that democracy in a classroom means time, noise,
and, sometimes, failure. We live within the confines of mandated
curricula and high-stakes testing that limits choice for teachers
and students. We also know that our schools, if dystopian, are
not always tyrannical and do not always perfectly mirror the oppression
portrayed in the fiction we assign.
Teachers of literature, I believe, are uniquely suited to teach
for, about, and through democratic processes in ways that balance
student participation, subject matter, and high standards. That’s
because literature itself is well suited to discussions about
achieving just such balances.
One might argue that the very
nature of a literature class promotes the basic freedoms on which
democracy relies. Literacy itself is a basic requirement for free
and fair elections as are an informed world view and the ability
to express opinions. The difference, though, between mere literacy
and critical literacy is an important one: a voter who can simply
read the ballot cannot replace one who understands the philosophies
and histories of the candidates on it.
It is my belief that students learn citizenship—critical
participation, one might call it--in multiple ways simultaneously:
through what they read, through how they read it, and
also through how they discuss and approach that material, as well
as the course as a whole, in the classroom. In each of three sections
below, I’ll address all three of these aspects of instruction
for bodies of literature that might prove useful to classroom
teachers concerned about participation and democracy both in theory
and practice.
The texts often used to teach about democracy and participation
are not necessarily texts about democracy and participation; more
often, they’re about rebellion, non-conformity, and principled
stands against oppression. Acts of revolution are admittedly important
in the development of democracy and civil liberties; American
history, in particular, is full of revolutionaries, from Pocahontas
to Rosa Parks. The dystopian, historical, and other political
fiction I’ve listed already in this article is not only
commonplace in the classroom, but is also integral to many instructors’
courses.
There’s something incongruous, though, about instructing
students to shrug off tyranny. And, too, there’s the questions
that a work like Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities raises: Is
it enough simply to rid a society of tyranny? With what does one
replace it, if not just tyranny of a different sort?
The answer, I believe, is pluralism—the structuring of society
in such a way that diverse and disparate points of view may be
expressed freely and equally. Fortunately, helping students to
understand the value of a forum for the expression of diverse
opinions does not equate to an enormous leap for English teachers,
who generally value discussion and classroom participation in
the first place. It’s worth asking, however, how effective
our classroom discussions are and how clearly we’re sending
the message that a range of viewpoints matters. Think of it this
way: in his article “The Art of Teaching Democracy,”
Richard Cuoto describes an activity requiring a group of educators
simply to illustrate “teaching democracy.” i.e. to
depict an image of the concept of teaching democracy in any manner—abstract
or concrete, detailed or general. More than two-thirds of these
teachers included some sort of circle in their images of “teaching
democracy,” about a third depicted multiple learning environments,
and several included numerous bonds or links between the participants.
Such symbolic pictures, taken metaphorically or literally as depictions
of a classroom, unanimously move away from the notion of a single
lecturer depositing vital information into the minds of silent,
note-scribbling learners.
That’s not to say that every teacher reading this article
should suddenly rush back into his or her room and start hauling
desks around into different configurations (though sometimes that’s
not a bad approach to improving the quality of discussions). It’s
also not to say that lectures are never worthwhile. But to demonstrate
real pluralism, one must organize classroom discussions in such
a way as to maximize interaction between students and the willingness
of those with minority opinions to voice them.
Here’s an example: during a recent class discussion of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—a novel the students had
already suggested might be compared to other works describing
abusive governments—I asked groups of students, working
in pairs, to suggest some of the “big questions” posed
by the work. Two of these in particular became topics of conversation:
the first was, “Are some of the means of control used in
the novel actually legitimate and reasonable?” and the second,
“Are some of the means of control more effective than others?”
The problem with the discussion, I quickly noticed, was that it
was being conducted mainly between the two students who posed
these questions, while I was serving as moderator--the rest of
the class had not yet weighed in.
I decided to reorganize the discussion as a grid activity. The
prep was easy. On each of four pieces of paper, one of which I
then taped to each wall, I wrote one of the following: “means
of control are effective and legitimate,” “means of
control are effective and illegitimate,” “means of
control are ineffective and legitimate,” “means of
control are ineffective and illegitimate.” Then, as I cited
(or allowed students to cite, if they wished) scenes and actions
from the novel, every participant (to make the exercise even more
democratic, I included myself) moved to the quadrant of the room
that corresponded to his or her individual feelings about each
scene or action. One student, for instance, brought up a scene
in which the patients are allowed to vote about watching baseball
on television but are defeated because the “Chronics”
are included in the vote:
McMurphy is on his feet.
“Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch. You mean to tell me
that’s how you’re gonna pull it? Count the votes of
those old birds over there too??”
“Didn’t you explain the voting procedure to him Doctor?”
“I’m afraid--a majority is called for, McMurphy.
She’s right, she’s right.”
“A majority, Mr. McMurphy; it’s in the ward constitution.”
“And I suppose the way to change the constitution is with
a majority vote.”
(Kesey, 1962, pp. 124-125)
The students and I split up, at least one person standing at each
wall of the room. Some thought a vote that includes everyone was
legitimate, some didn’t. Others thought the vote was effective
because no one could argue the point; others disagreed. Other
scenes and actions from the novel raised similar debate—the
practice of group therapy, for instance, which the narrator describes
in this way: “the goal of the Therapeutic Community is a
democratic ward, run completely by the patients and their votes”
(p. 48). And then, at the suggestion of a student, we used the
same categories to discuss aspects of our own political system
such as the electoral college and nationally televised debates.
Finally, we moved on to issues of school governance, such as the
way students choose their courses each fall.
The great benefit of an exercise like the grid is that it encourages
students to speak out and defend their positions; it also encourages
them to think about other possible positions. If no one is standing
in one quadrant of the room, students will usually work to figure
out what the argument for that position might be. In such an exercise,
where various points of view are visually clear before discussion
even begins, students become eager to speak and eager to listen.
And at the end of such a discussion, I always ask students how
the discussion model itself relates to the work we’re studying.
Generally, they pretty quickly realize that we’re putting
pluralism into practice—that we are, in short, doing what
the oppressive systems in our texts refuse to. This technique
can be used alongside many novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and
several newer works like We, The Last Town on Earth, and American Youth.
Still, democracy and citizenship
are not only about nonconformity and disagreement; civic participation
in a democratic society does not require constant revolutionary
acts, only a constant willingness to challenge assumptions and
engage in decision-making. Take this passage from Lord of the Flies, shortly after the boys are stranded on the island:
The dark boy, Roger, stirred at last and spoke up.
“Let’s have a vote.”
“Yes!”
“Vote for chief!”
“Let’s vote—”
This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch. Jack started
to protest but the clamor changed from the general wish for a
chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None of the
boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence
had been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader
was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph that marked him
out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely,
yet most powerfully, there was the conch. (Golding, 1954, p. 22)
A few pages later, Ralph begins to institute laws, the first of
which is a fundamental sort of parliamentary procedure in which
the speaker must hold a symbolic conch. “We’ll have
rules!” Jack shouts in response, “Lots of rules! And
when anyone breaks ’em—” (p. 33). Unlike the
passage from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest above, there
is no pre-existing authority in this group decision; the boys
are creating their social order from scratch. Other instances
of such group decision-making crop up fairly frequently in high
school literature: there’s a vote taken by a group of soldiers
in O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, a town meeting
in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, a civic meeting of a
gated community in Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain.
Such scenes serve as interesting focal points for a discussion
of how and why we read and work as we do in the classroom.
“Imagine,” I say to my classes, “that you enter
a three week unit in a literature class with no prescribed syllabus,
reading list, assignments, or grading system. Imagine that I left
it entirely up to you to tell me what we would read, how we’d
study it, and how the grades—if any—would be assigned.
What would you do?”
The first responses are predictable: we’d read nothing,
or almost nothing, and do nothing. It’s not long, though,
before the class agrees that the consequences of such a course
might not be worth it. (What if an administrator decided he or
she needed to fire me, take over the class, and assign a research
paper in light of the failure of the class to produce any work?)
The next reaction, generally, is a feeling of unease about how
the students would come up with a worthwhile curriculum plan.
This is the same reaction described by Jeffrey Wilhelm (1997),
who recreates two students in a discussion about choice in reading:
“Hey, when you go to a restaurant, you can choose a dessert,
but only from the desserts they have.” Another student joined
in with, “Yeah, if you could choose any dessert in the whole
wide world you might never make up your mind. . . .” (p.
47)
In the end, students often come up with a plan that I put into
action—I provide options, and they choose between them.
Sometimes this results in group work where each group chooses
its own reading, creates assignments and a timetable of when those
assignments are due, and constructs a rubric for self-assessment.
Sometimes it results in independent reading and work by individual
students. Sometimes we enter a class project with elements of
student design. Usually, I get where I wanted to go anyway, but
with a much higher level of investment from the class.
Again, I often employ such tactics when the work we’ll study
includes models of self-governance (or a lack of it) to begin
with; thus, the process of the classroom either directly reflects
or refutes the processes portrayed in our novel, opening up another
dimension for discussion and connection.
In Veil of Roses, a recent novel
that works well with young adult readers (especially with young
female readers), author Laura Fitzgerald’s narrator is an
Iranian woman residing in the United States on a three-month visa
who frequently carries her camera with her:
I snap a picture of our three coffee cups, their round rims on
the round table, the lack of hard edges. The rim of Eva’s
cardboard cup is splashed with sheer red lipstick; she has made
her mark. I take a picture of Eva from the waist down—the
thigh-high black boots and the leather miniskirt. Then I take
one of my new white running shoes, chaste and cheery.
(p. 133)
A page later, a new acquaintance of the narrator attempts to understand
her choice of subject matter:
“You are looking for freedom in all its often overlooked
details. You want to document some of the little choices that
free people make. . . you are photographing tiny acts of everyday
rebellion.” (p. 134)
Fiction in which outsiders observe democracy and participation
with a fresh perspective can be profitable vehicles for classroom
discussion; the passage from Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible at the start of this article is a good example. Others I’ve
taught include LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Allende’s
Eva Luna.
Such works get to the heart of an approach involving critical
literacy. It’s important, of course, for students to ask
critical questions about authorship and readership in any work
that’s being used to examine governance--students may develop
greater insight if they investigate Huxley’s stance on eugenics
or Conrad’s views on British imperialism as opposed to Belgian—but
reading a work like Laura Fitzgerald’s makes students into
critical questioners by necessity, examining decision-making and
citizenship through other lenses even as they read.
We practice participation in our classrooms every day. Sometimes
it’s as obvious as an election; sometimes it’s implicit
in the way we make an assignment. Helping students to read about
participation is a first step in helping them to become active
participants in society, but it’s not the only step. Students
also need to be critical readers and critical learners. We, their
teachers, must in turn, be critical educators. We must question
our own pedagogy, our own modeling, and our own motives. In so
doing, we do not just instill students with a fervor for a democratic
society—we help them to construct one they can actually
exist in every day.
BARRY GILMORE teaches English
and social studies at Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis, Tennessee.
He is the author of four books for teachers, including the recent
publication Is It Done Yet?—Teaching Adolescents the
Art of Revision (Heinemann 2007). He also serves as president
of the Tennessee Council of Teachers of English.
Becker, T.L. & Couto, R.A. (1996). Teaching Democracy by Being Democratic. Westport: Praeger.
Couto, R.A. (1998). The art of teaching democracy. Change. Retrieved
April 25, 2007 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1254/is_n2_v30/ai_20520578/pg_1
Dunn, S. (2003). Professional resources in support of student
choice. Alan Review. Retrieved May 1, 2007 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4063/is_200310/ai_n9253895
Fitzgerald, L. (2007). Veil of Roses. New York: Bantam Dell.
Golding, W. (1954). Lord of the Flies. New York: Perigree Books.
Kesey, K. (1962). One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York:
The Viking Press, Inc.
Kingsolver, B. (1998). The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper
Collins.
Slavson, S.R. (1939). Group education for a democracy. Journal
of Educational
Sociology, 13 (4), 226-235.
Sudbury valley school. Retrieved May 7, 2007 from http://www.sudval.org/
Wilhelm, J. (1997). Of cornflakes, hot dogs, cabbages, and king.
In J. Wilhelm
Reading Stephen King: Issues of censorship, student choice, and
popular literature (37-50). Urbana: NCTE.
Yatvin, J. (1971). Things ain’t the way the used to be—in
the English classroom. English Journal, 60 (8), 1080-1085.
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