╨╧рб▒с;■  ■                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   ¤   ■   ■    ■     !"#$%&'()*+,-./01234567A9:;<=>?@■   BC■                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   R        CompObj    jWordDocument             `1Table            8■                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           ■       └FMicrosoft Word Document MSWordDocWord.Document.8Ї9▓qA@Є б&\`Є&Default [ `ё  CopymH CJ(]@( Default SSCJ(^`ё( Default TB,_`ё",Header$5CJ``ё2Body(a`ёB(Footer$6(b`ёR(FootnoteCJ0c@a0Footnote IndexH*╨&\     vQаQ)*ЪQаQ+,аQ- #!Ї ХА╥&╥&╨&@GРTimes New Roman5РSymbol3РArial;РHelvetica"AМ╨h*Л&+Л&Г!е└┤┤А0F the same end, or in partnershipье┴G ┐аQbjbjО┘О┘ !\ь│ь│╛&      ]░░░░░░░№№№─8№№oЄ00000000ZZZZZZZaЇUZ░FFFFFUU░░FFFFFF ░F░FFFFFFFFFFFFFF░░F$ рИХ·╝№№P Talk on radical teaching, Minnesota conference, 4/12/08 R. Ohmann The university we have now differs a lot from the one many of us knew 20 or 40 years ago. The change feels like crisis. My aim over the next few minutes is to characterize that crisis, talk about the conditions and chances for radical pedagogy during ir, and glance ahead. When I speak of pedagogy, I will draw upon points made by several contributors to a forum on radical teaching now, that I am editing with Jackie Brady for an upcoming issue of Radical Teacher. Here goes. Higher education is changing profoundly. I see its transformation as both economically and politically driven, by forces that are mutually reinforcing and sometimes hard to disentangle. On the economic side, the university is becoming more a cluster of profit centers than a publicly funded good. Familiar examples: research is undertaken to produce knowledge the university can patent and sell, or is done with corporate funding toward the same end, or in partnerships of various sorts. The curriculum is tailored to the needs of local companies and international corporations, and packaged for sale to students in the form of certificates and other credentials that can be traded for employment or advancement. In this scheme, students are customers. More and more of their teachers, as everyone knows, are temp workers with no security and few benefits, a pool of labor power for universities to hire and manage on the most exploitative possible terms. The academic profession has lost much of the control it had a when I entered it: over the university s central activities, over the conditions and aims of academic labor, and over the profession s own future. Instead, an ever-growing corps of managers runs the place, using measures of productivity, regimes of testing, benchmarks, best practices, accountability, outcomes assessment, and so on--all the apparatus of a profit-making business. No surprise, then, that a larger and larger portion of higher education is run by profit-making businesses, picking up most of their workers on the contingent market. This transformation is happening pretty fast, as such things go. The Fordist university we remember lasted through the 75 years or so of he Fordist epoch, then changed when Fordism gave way to turbo-capitalism. On the political side, when the New Right began its assault on the welfare state, it also undertook an ideological offensive against the social movements of the sixties and seventies. The public university had been since WWII a major welfare state institution, and became later a beachhead of sixties critique and resistance. So, conservative think tanks working to privatize public goods and push back against egalitarian ideas whacked the university on two fronts. The Right s stigmatization of movement ideas made it easier to justify cutting the university s funding; tight budgets put the squeeze on new programs and dissident teachers. Let this thumbnail sketch set the context for my remarks on progressive teaching. Clearly, such culture warriors as Dinesh DeSouza, Lynne Cheney, and David Horowitz were and are out to discredit the intellectual advances that sixties movements effected in many academic fields. And, as Lynne Cheney s place in that pantheon can remind us, the Right also tried with some success to shift funding away from left, feminist, queer, working class, and anti-racist projects, and toward expressions of traditional patriotism. (9/11 gave that effort a big boost.) As many contributors to the RT forum note, there are no movements  outside the university stirring a ruthless critique of all things existing. But the changing economic basis of higher education may have done even more than culture wars and post-9/11 repression to put progressive teaching and learning on the margins. Understanding critiques of capitalism does little to advance one s career at GE. You may not want to itemize your proficiency in queer studies on your resume. You may not even want to take time away from certificate work in water purification to study feminist theory. If you ve already made it into Harvard, you can risk such adventures; less so at the community college where you ve returned to get a credential in physical therapy. As for the proprietaries: the University of Phoenix offers no radical courses in the several programs I checked out on line. And since fdor-profits maintain tight managerial control over student-teacher relations, I doubt they are hospitable to Freirean pedagogy. Still, all but two of our forum writers see good work for radical teaching to do. One of the two skeptics thinks it  immoral to foster left thought or activism. The other points out that in the 60s, radicalization proceeded furiously with little help from established leftists on the faculty, and  today, with perhaps tens of thousands of faculty members who consider themselves radicals. . . campuses are mostly quiet. He wonders if  differences between good teaching that is radical and just plain good teaching are . . . as stiking as we once thought. At perhaps the other end of a spectrum, several writers call for teaching to remedy  the long-time exclusion of democratic socialist perspectives from American public and educational discourse, and many want progressive teachers to teach how  our society is structured in dominance. Capitalism has changed in 30 years, but  radical pedagogy goes to the root: the imperative for students to grasp the inhumanity of a system based on profit. . . .  Teachers in this camp, directly in the lineage of those who came to academic work from 60s movements, want to denaturalize hieerarchies of class, gender, race, sexuality, and so on, undeterred by the now familiar charge that this is a string of cliches. They see their charge as constantly renewing the  mantra ; exploring with students the linkage of oppressions; making the  genesis of their indifference and alienation the subject of the course; and showing how modes of thought and conduct  that seem embedded in human nature are in fact historically produced. The work of contesting mainstream ideology goes forward in these familiar ways, despite obstacles and barriers, including some new ones such as  the intensive testing regime of high school, which has  fundamentally changed the educational landscape. For pedagogy too, as well as ideological work. In pedagogy, too, some aims and practices from the 1960s remain central: treat students respectfully, the encounter with them as  magical. Encourage them to challenge teacherly authority, along with other kinds of dominance. (Two contributors do speak of reasserting some kinds of authority they had given up in heady days of no grades, peer grading. amd the like;  I invite radical thinking but demand correct apostrophes ). Help students find their own paths of learning. Understand learning as a collaboration. Work toward a democratic classroom.  We play at boundaries; collectivity is rehearsed. And so on: one writer remarks that  established radical pedagogies will continue and evolve. Radical teaching is itself a tradition, lodged in corners of many academic fields, and salient in a few, such as women s studies and writing instruction. Many who wrote for this forum still insist, too, that pedagogy be tied whenever possible to activism.  Critique must be accompanied by struggle for a better day.  Teachers have to be intellectual activists, modeling civic courage and social justice organizing, in part to let students know critical skills can be put into action;  take our expertise and use it to speak truth to power, as another teacher puts it. And,  The best moments on my campus were when teachers and students shared activism--blocking the privatization of the University s book store, fighting for day care on campus, and such. It s equally interesting to me how many of our contributors stressed the importance of bonding with like-minded colleagues.  One key to survival is finding a network of support, or, as another puts it,  reconstitut[ing] our radical educators culture as a communal, informed push for social change. Her felt urgency comes from the scarcity and fragmented condition of progressive movements, now, compared to when she got her first job.  Mass movements back then, says another contributor, were  enormously supportive for young, dissident teachers. I ll quote this writer at some length, to help me toward my final point:  In these conservative times, he says,  radical teaching. . . is much harder than before, and  the need to support young radical teachers is especially urgent. . . .  High on our list should be . . . mentoring for them --what we should think of as  cadre development.  Aggressively conservative periods like now make it hard for radical groups to grow into mass movements. . . . Such movements can emerge rather quickly when. . . a major crisis disturbs the status quo (like a lost war or like an economic collapse) . . . . When the time to grow large once more opens, we ll grow faster and smarter if we enter that period with consolidated groups of activists used to working together . . . .  It s critical to look at what s next in history, as well as and in the same sweep of vision as at what happened before. Of course what s next is not so easy to see I concede, too, that lefties have often spied the final crisis of the social order just around the next historical corner. But  a lost war or . . . an economic collapse sound realistic to me, now. Joined with peak oil and climatic disaster, they will deepen social pathology and seem sure to demand and drive radical political action. And education. I end with this question: what should radical teaching be like, in a time of broad social crisis, or collapse?  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(Two contributors do speak of reasserting some kinds of authority they had given up in heady days of no grades, peer grading. amd the like;  I invite radical thinking but demand correct apostrophes ). Help students find their own paths of learning. Understand learning as a collaboration. Work toward a democratic classroom.  We play at boundaries; collectivity is rehearsed. And so on: one writer remarks that  established radical pedagogies will continue olidated groups of activists used to working together . . . .  It s critical to look at what s next in history, as well as and in the same sweep of vision as at what happened before. Of course what s next is not so easy to see I concede, too, that lef