Motta Sara C. - Acts of knowing : critical pedagogy in, against and beyond the university

Acts of Knowing

Critical Pedagogy In, Against and Beyond the University

EDITED BY

STEPHEN COWDEN AND GURNAM SINGH

WITH

SARAH AMSLER, JOYCE CANAAN AND SARA MOTTA

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com

First published 2013

Stephen Cowden and Gurnam Singh, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Acts of knowing : claiming critical pedagogy for higher education / Edited by Stephen Cowden and Gurnam Singh ; With Sarah Amsler, Joyce Canaan and Sara Motta.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4411-5975-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4411-0531-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Critical pedagogy. 2. Education, Higher Philosophy. I. Cowden, Stephen, editor of compilation. II. Singh, Gurnam, editor of compilation.

LC196.A27 2013

370.115 dc23

2012039253

ISBN: 978-1-4411-6672-2

On the Critical Attitude

The critical attitude

Strikes many people as unfruitful

That is because they find the state

Impervious to their criticism

But what in this case is an unfruitful attitude

Is merely a feeble attitude. Give criticism arms

And states can be demolished by it.

Canalising a river

Grafting a fruit tree

Educating a person

Transforming a state

These are instances of fruitful criticism

And at the same time instances of art.

BERTOLT BRECHT

We dedicate this book to our children and grandchildren, who like all children represent the hope of the future Jatinder Kaur and Daya Singh, Jude, Keir and Emmet Cowden, Laylah Simone Delkhasteh, Sujey Antoinette and Jaiya Celine Mera-Motta and Katherine Girling-Rogers, Keith Rogers and Lucas Alec Rogers. And to all those teachers and students who are and will go on to fight for an education which is genuinely free

CONTENTS

Stephen Cowden and Gurnam Singh

Stephen Cowden and Gurnam Singh

Sarah Amsler

Sara C. Motta

It is necessary to clarify what teaching is and what learning is...

For me teaching is the form or the act of knowing, which the

educator exercises; it takes as its witness the student. This act

of knowing is given to the student as a testimony, so that the student

will not merely act as a learner [rather] teaching is the form that the

educator possesses to bear witness to the student on what knowing is,

so the student will know instead of simply learn.

PAULO FREIRE, 1990

This books starting point is a deep and profound concern about the commodification of knowledge within the contemporary university. This is a process which has been going on for some time, but is presently reaching levels which threaten to fundamentally distort the very point and purpose of teaching, learning and knowing. This book aims to provide readers with a means of understanding of these issues from the perspective of Critical Pedagogy; an educational philosophy which believes that knowing must be freed from the constraints of the financial and managerialist logics which dominate the contemporary university. We see Critical Pedagogy as important for three key reasons; first it conceptualizes pedagogy as a process of engagement between the teacher and taught, and secondly that that engagement is based on an underlying humanistic view about human worth and value, and thirdly that the knowing which can come out of this engagement needs to be understood essentially as exchange between people, rather than a financial exchange.

In much of the post-war period universities were criticized for their remoteness from the real world. These struggles culminated in the late 1960s which represented a moment in which students demanded that learning be democratized and that the curriculum be developed to reflect important developments which were taking place in the world; the changing place of women, struggles of workers, the hidden history of the people of former colonies, the visibility of gay and lesbian communities and people excluded from society through disabilities. It was a radical demand for relevance which took as a given the idea that education was a social good, and one which needed to be made as accessible to the many rather than the few. In the contemporary world this language of relevance lives on, but in a radically changed context. The state now demands that the university live in the real world but what this means now is that universities, like the state itself, become beholden to a financially driven logic in which the demands of the market are paramount. Within this ideological universe, the acquisition of knowledge is presented primarily as commercial transaction, driven only by the benefit to an individual in terms of their position in the labour market. The argument presented in this book is that this commodified logic distorts and impoverishes the fundamental purpose of teaching and learning for students and teachers. In seeking to pose an alternative to this, we argue that it becomes all the more important to re-articulate the demand for a dialogue-based pedagogy, the practice of which itself represents a reclaiming of democratic educational space. In making this argument we take the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire as a vital and radical starting point; radical in that it goes back to this fundamental question of what teaching, learning and knowing really are.

The current economic recession is already having a profound impact across universities in the developed capitalist world, just as it is across the remainder of the public sector. Slavoj Zizek has characterized our present period as one of Permanent Economic Emergency, in which after decades of the welfare state, when cutbacks were relatively limited with the promise that things would soon return to normal, we are now entering a period in which an economic state of emergency is becoming permanent (2010:86). In a time like this consent comes to be secured for the continuation and development of neoliberal economic strategies through what Naomi Klein has called the shock doctrine (Klein, 2007). We see therefore, alongside swinging cuts to public services and institutions, an ideological attack on the very purpose of public institutions. This denigration of the achievements and possibilities within public institutions not only facilitates their ongoing handover to corporate capital, but simultaneously undermines those attempts which have been made in recent years to make Higher Education more inclusive and democratic. We are therefore seeing alongside an essentially financially driven agenda by University managers, the return of elitism, and taken together these two elements result in what Charles Thorpe has called the complete subordination of intellectual life to instrumental values and, most brutally, to the measure of money (2008:103). We see this in terms of the ongoing project of neoliberalism, and we use this term to very specifically characterize the nature of the project of social transformation to which elites in the state apparatus and powerful transnational corporations have been and are continuing to impose. In this sense the things which are taking place within Higher Education are not isolated, but are part of a wider imposition and restructuring of the public sector according to the logic of finance. We argue that it is crucial to understand these wider linkages, as well as appreciating that there are at the same time very specific consequences which this doctrine generates in educational institutions. We characterize these as a crisis of thinking, feeling and doing.