Deconstruction Zone

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

                                                                                            -Lt. Col. John McCrea, 1915

I thought this poem was timely for both the time of year and the subject matter of this week. There is no doubt that the imagery and sentiment of this poem are beautiful. I don't think I have ever attended a Remembrance Day ceremony where it was not read. Moreover, the story of the poem is as beautiful as its words. Written by an army doctor after his dear friend was killed, McCrea supposedly discarded the poem in the trenches, only to be recovered by his fellows. It was McCrea died a few years later while serving in France. The poem has since become one of the most recognizable World War I poems in the world, and a national treasure in Canada.

For years I thought of this poem as a solemn ode to peace. However, as I grew older and became a more sophisticated reader, I realized that the last stanza takes a sharp turn. What began as a requiem turns jingoistic and warmongering with the line "Take up our quarrel with the foe." I suspect that most high school students have never thought critically about this poem. I think it is a very accessible first step into the troublesome waters of deconstruction. 

The accessibility of the poem for high school reader is part of its appeal. Its widespread use is another. However, the ease with which the poem can be read does not entail its simplicity. An astute reader might suggest that McCrea has chosen the words "quarrel" and "foe" instead of "battle" and "enemy." This could lead to the interpretation that the "foe" is war itself, and not the armies of the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and Ottomans -- an now we find ourselves waist-deep. 

I believe that post-modernism is the most important lens that students can be taught. Appleman shows that there are dangers to this approach, as Jessica experienced. But, if students like Jessica struggle with deconstruction, it can only be to their benefit. I believe that one of our goals as educators should be to empower students with the skills to critique the world around them. Many high school students (in grades 11 and 12 especially) are already questioning the power structures and hierarchies that they have lived under. Deconstruction gives them the ability to dismantle meta-narratives, including the ones mentioned in other literary theories -gender, class, race, etc. - and to realize that they are all constructions. 

By giving students the tools to safely disassemble these meta-narratives they can be empowered with the knowledge to rebuild their own narratives. One way or another, this is often what happens when students leave high school. Successful students (whatever "successful" means) realize that the things that were important in high school no longer matter. The narratives and binaries that constrained adolescent life begin to fall away. This is liberating if it can be embraced. To utilize the power of post-modern theory, students require the kind of scaffolding that Critical Literary Theory (and Critical Theory) supports. In fact, once students embrace the concept of deconstruction, re-applying critical theories to constructs such as race, gender, and class becomes much easier. In a way, the high school student who internalizes deconstructionism is starting their education anew. 

Postcolonial Catan

My friends and I often play the board game Settlers of Catan. If you are familiar with the game, you know that it is an harmless way to pass an evening with good company... or is it? The last game we played I thought, "wait a minute. Isn't it likely that an island as bountiful as Catan would have indigenous peoples inhabiting it?" My roadbuilding took on a whole new meaning...

I mention this mostly as a joke, but it is an honest feeling that has emerged in me (I hope) as a result of exposure to decolonizing discourse.

Two quotes stood out from me from Appleman's book this week. The first is from Appleman herself, who states that "Africa and East Asia [were] the primary geographic targets of European colonialism" (p. 88). This is a curious claim. It certainly makes one wonder why the Americas are excluded from the list, considering the largest ever genocide of indigenous peoples took place in the "New World." Only a few paragraphs further down the page, Appleman writes of a "Western society that wishes to make peace with its own history but is unwilling to acknowledge its own exercise of idealogical suppression." It seems by omitting the colonizing of Amerindians from her list, Appleman herself is committing a form of ideological suppression.

The second passage that caught my attention was quoted from Peter Barry:

     "If we claim that great literature has a timeless and universal significance, we thereby demote or
      disregard cultural, social, regional, and national differences in experience and outlook, preferring        
      instead to judge all literatures by a single, supposedly 'universal' standard." (p. 89)

When reading this, I immediately thought of reading To Kill a Mockingbird in high school English class. For me, this novel simply did not connect with my experience. I had no shortage of exposure to racism (although never the subjective experience) growing up in the inner city of Saskatoon. However, this experience was not reflected in the pages of Harper Lee's novel. The racism I observed in "the alphabets" of Saskatoon in the 1990s did not connect with the racism described in 1930s Alabama. The context of oppression makes these cases fundamentally different. Moreover, reading the text through a postcolonial lens can change Atticus finch from a noble, omniscient father, to another bearer of the white man's burden, saving those who cannot save themselves with the power of superior white intellect.

Throughout Deeper Reading, Gallagher references the "universal truths" (p. 39, for example) that must be uncovered when reading literature. The term "universal truths" always makes me cringe, not only because I do not believe there are universal truths that are pan cultural, but also because the alleged existence of "universal truths" has lead the vanguard of justifications for brutal and enduring colonization.

A Queer Omission

The discussion of reading through a gender lens in today's class, and particularly the video we watched made me think of this advertisement. It's worth a look, and only takes 60 seconds.

The ad was made in 1995, and it was never aired. It was considered, at the time, to be too shocking.

I thought about this ad as I was reading Appleman's chapter on the feminist theory, or as she often calls it, gender theory. For a chapter based around the social construction of gender and the dominance of patriarchal discourse, there is a puzzling absence of any mention of homosexuality. Appleman mentions issues of homosexuality in her chapter on reader response, but the words "gay", "lesbian", "queer" or "homosexual" are absent from the chapter on reading through a gender lens.

This leaves the gender lens as a bifocal, and misses an opportunity to expand the scope of the discourse to deconstruct binary notions of gender. The chapter from Deeper Reading this week outlined the benefits of second draft reading for deeper comprehension. I have done precisely this with the Harry Potter series after author J.K. Rowling revealed in 2007 that Dumbledore was gay. Rereading the book and seeing the character through this lens gives new, deeper meaning to portions of the story. An (small) exercise like this would be interesting to bring to a classroom, but Appleman doesn't seem to consider such productive pedagogy within the context of gender construction. This might mean that the lens we use to be more inclusive and to deconstruct oppressive patriarchy might actually serve to deepen gay and lesbian students' feelings of oppression and isolation. 

Stay Classy

Appleman's chapter on "Reading Literature Through the Lens of Privilege and Social Class" was easy to relate to my classroom experience. At the high school I have been placed at for student teaching, which I will refer to as Dartmouth, there is a unique socio-economic dynamic. Dartmouth is located in what, in Saskatoon, is referred to as the "core-neighbourhoods". This is a euphemistic way of saying "inner-city". However, Dartmouth also has an International Baccalaureate (IB) program. This creates a rare mix of privileged and underprivileged students. 

There is a large cohort of Aboriginal students at the school, some of whom are highly academically successful. Yet, many of these students face the cultural, social, racial, and economic barriers that disproportionally affect the Aboriginal residents of this province; this is the maddeningly unjust reality in which we live. 

On the other end of what we might conceive of as the "spectrum of privilege" are the students in the IB program. These are the classes I have been working with. This group consists of about half Caucasian students and half students of colour. Of the students who are visible minorities, none are identifiable as Aboriginal. This group is comprised of students with African, Asian, and Polynesian origins. Many of these students were not born in Canada. The fact that they are racial minorities is something they share with the Aboriginal students of Dartmouth; although, they may have more dissimilarities than similarities in their experience of privilege. 

The students in the IB program have experienced a kind of privilege that many of the Aboriginal students have never known. Anthropologist John Ogbu terms these two kinds of groups "voluntary minorities" and "involuntary minorities". The former group, the IB students, have come to be in their position by choice. Often they were born outside of Canada, and their families moved here for work, or opportunity, or both. Though they speak English as a second language, they speak the prevailing arcolect with far more proficiency than most Aboriginal students. Conversely, the Aboriginal students would be considered "involuntary minorities". They belong to a systematically oppressed people, and have suffered a legacy of institutionalized racism that they in no way chose. The opportunities available to these two groups of racial minorities are bipolar.

The salient point here is that the students -white and non-white- in the IB program are united by class and privilege more than the white IB students and Aboriginal students would be united by Canadian citizenship or speaking English as a first language (although a significant number of Aboriginal students may speak an indigenous language as a first language). The fact that many or most of the students in the IB program come from middle class, highly educated households may be a stronger unifying force than race. However, in the halls of Dartmouth, the IB students do not interact with other students, particularly those relegated to the underclass based on their oppression of their people. 

So far this is all rather abstract, but reeling the rhetoric in for a moment I simply wonder what it would be like for students in the IB class to do an exercise in reading through a social class lens. I wonder where the students in that course, particularly the voluntary minorities, would place themselves on the five rings that Michael used with his students. It would be intriguing if these students would identify with their social class over their racial or ethnic identity. I wonder if a student not born in Canada would realize that they still experience privilege here to a degree that Aboriginal peoples seldom do.

I wrote in an assignment early in this term that class has become nearly irrelevant to the generation in high schools now. I posited that class discourses had been swallowed by gender-based, racial, ethnic, religious, and other discourses. Class is not something on the minds of today's youth. I though this was not necessarily a bad thing as I started my career as a teacher candidate. I thought of class as anachronistic. I believed that the social justice battles of the 21st century would be fought on the fields of race and sexuality. I believe I believed incorrectly. 

Seeing how class is still tied to privilege and how it can still create social stratification in a high school, I think it is something that needs to be taught. Exercises like reading Hamlet through a class lens are essential to getting students to recognize that class is not dead, is not irrelevant. It is alive and it has great influence on interaction in classrooms and schools. Acknowledging this fact, and getting students to acknowledge it is essential if we truly want to teach for social justice.

Connection

In my university career I have had the great privilege of working for the University Learning Centre in the Learning Communities office. We have often talked in the office and in presentations about that formative educational experience first year university students have when they realize common threads running through all their classes. What a student learns in Psychology 121 might have great overlap with what they learn in Philosophy 133, which in turn has deep connections to what they study in Physics 115. Learning Communities seek to strengthen these connections because they can be powerful tools for learning.

Both Gallagher and Appleman emphasize this same kind of connection. Although, in the case of a secondary classroom it is often a connection between the reader's experience and the text that is explored rather than an interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) link. Gallagher emphasizes that links must be made to past experience to make text meaningful for students. He cites several examples of how scaffolding can and must be used to prepare students for reading, suggesting that "[a teacher's] job is to be a tour guide through the complexity of great books." 

Appleman goes further, suggesting that links between the while links between the reader and the text can yield meaning, it is the connections between text and theory can be revolutionary. Theory can enrich the meaning of text by moving what Hannah Arendt calls the "Archimedian Point" beyond a particular worldview. In the sociology of science, Thomas Kuhn calls this a paradigm shift. In a high school English classroom, we call this moving beyond a Reader Response model. Applemen emphasizes the importance of this movement, quoting Bonneycastle: "If each of us only pays attention to individaul experience, the communal basis for the discipline will disappear." Students must connect the literature not only to their own experiences, but also the the experiences of others (and the theory arising from experience of others, e.g. feminism, critical race theory, etc.) . 

I want to suggest two more connections we can add to the list. Students must connect their reading to their writing and to their speaking skills (including rhetoric and dialectic). After all, these are also part of what we teach in secondary ELA. 

This week I stumbled across what I think is a spectacular article on teaching writing to high school students. It is an American article, but quite applicable. It can be read in its entirety here. The article hits on several points that Appleman makes. Among these are the argument that typical approaches to ELA such as Reader Response represent "a pedagogical pendulum that has swung too far, favoring self-­expression and emotion over lucid communication." The article,  argues that we need to return to the structural elements of language -grammar, particularly syntax and parts of speech- to ensure that students are actually understanding what they are reading and are able to structure sound, logical  responses to it. The central principle of this approach is to make sure students understand the purpose and use of things like conjunctive adverbs, which are used to... you guessed it, connect arguments.

This week I was also able to attend a lecture and workshop with Sarah Georing, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington who specializes in using philosophy in primary and secondary classrooms. The way in which she is able to do this is remarkable, and is very similar to what an excellent teacher might do in secondary english class. The activity was as follows: do a group reading of a children's book; complete a think, pair, share; categorize the questions as a group; and have a group discussion moderated by Dr. Goering's probing questions. The results were incredible. I was shocked by the remarkably high level of discourse sparked by a children's book among teachers, professors, administrators, undergraduate students, and grad students, both trained and untrained in philosophy.

The thing I want to pull from this activity is how Dr. Goering suggests facilitating the group discussion. She advocates having a list of prompts for students written on the board. Every time a student is called on to enter the discussion, they must start with one of the prompts. These prompts are taken almost verbatim from the prompts in the article I linked to; they are: "I agree/disagree with _____ because..., I have a different opinion..., I have something to add..., Can you explain your answer..."

These prompts serve to connect students' oral arguments to their writing; they must speak in a way that they would write. The prompts also encourage students to acknowledge, process, and engage directly with other points of view. The activity is completed with a reflective writing piece, connecting all the elements that we as successful english teachers should be empowering our students with. By facilitating an activity that connects reading, writing, and speaking, we create a whole learning experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. As with Learning Communities courses, by focusing on the overlap between these skills, the learning of all three is enriched and reinforced.