This is a call to all those of you who read the miserable draft that was my Alcott chapter. For the last week I've been walking around Andover racking my brain for a way to rethink the chapter. I've finally come to this rough formulation and now I need a bit of feedback. For those of you patient readers of the previous draft, does this seem a more promising line? I have no idea how I'll use all of my work on circulation, but in any case.....Beginning with Rousseau and continuing today, teachers have struggled with the inevitable dilemma of trying to free the child from the strictures of education based on indoctrination while simultaneously shaping her at the same time. I want to show the ways in which Bronson Alcott's early attempts at the decentered American classroom expose the stakes of this pedagogical conflict, trying as he was to elicit the child's natural intelligence and goodness without realizing the very ways in which his attempts at drawing out the child became the tools through which he too fell into a kind of indoctrination. After using Bronson Alcott's teaching as the means by which I work through the stakes of this problem, I will them turn to Louisa's pedagogy as an answer to this problem. Her janus-faced pedagogy -- both recalling her father's work and heralding progressive education -- resolves the problem of shaping the child while empowering her to control her own learning. Her pedagogical hybridity earnestly acknowledges and honors the traditional authority of the teacher and authorizes the child as a master of learning worthy of transmission to her peers. Somehow, of course, I will have to face the fact that our ardor for her pedagogy is tempered by the constraints that Bronson Alcott faced in the classroom, a space endowed with the legacy of the teacher as the central authority. It seems that the novel itself is a privileged site of pedagogical freedom unconstrained by the physical and pragmatic limitations of the schoolhouse.
Otherwise, teaching Benito Cereno and facing the above dilemma.
6 comments:
I didn't get a chance to read your old draft, but I feel like I'm familiar enough with the project that I'd comment. I think this new direction is promising - I just have two caveats or things to watch out for: (1) be sure that LMA doesn't become a pedagogical savior woman, and (2) I'm not sold on the novel as a genre that embodies pedagogical freedom. Maybe I'm just influenced by thinking about Karah's presentation a couple weeks ago, but I've been thinking a lot about _Little Women_ and the ways in which Jo is really "schooled" in the book - how her spirit is tamed and channeled as the book progresses, and esp. at the end. I guess I just feel like if LMA was really committed to what we might call today a "student-centered pedgagogical approach," she would have let the readers have their way with the ending, marrying off Laurie and Jo and maintaining their personalities and the right "wrong" match (remember Marmee tells Jo that she and Laurie are too much alike for it to work). Instead, LMA spurns reader desires (even though the reader surprisingly has liberal impulses in this case) and marries Jo off to a fatherly professor who looks over her writing, critiquing it and making suggestions. She turns in to a proper lady, more or less, by the end. Anyway, just thoughts. I'm glad you're back at it. I think this project is so interesting, and it seems to be very close to your heart in terms of your personal interest in pedagogy.
Thanks Maura. I think you're correct about Little Women. I'm focused, though, on Little Men, which I think is a very different pedagogical experiment. I'd also say that my big point is that LMA is NOT exclusively about student-centered pedagogy; instead, she points to its limitations. Her hyridity -- the way she selectively employs it while earnestly invoking traditional authority -- answers its essential problems. I really appreciate your engagement!
That sounds great. You do mention Little Women, though, right? I think you'll have to justify why you are focusing on Little Men in the chapter (if you see some development from Little Women to Little Men, etc.), just because everyone knows Little Women and you won't be able to avoid comparisons from people who aren't doing really in-depth Alcott scholarship. So just be sure to state outright why you are focusing on Little Men - what changed, in other words, between the publication of the two books. Just two more things: I know what you are trying to say - ie. that LMA is negotiating between those two ideas about pedagogy and succeeding more than her father did precisely b/c she realizes that there is a tension between student and teacher-centered authority, but that is a difficult argument to make. You'll have to start from the beginning saying that LMA wanted to balance the two, or saw that she had to, rather than positioning her originally (in your intro) as an improvement on her dad and THEN nuancing the effectiveness of her own pedagogy.
One other thing I'm wondering in all this is where the publishers are. LMA surely had pressure from her publishers for Little Men, right? How did they impact the notions of or attempts at pedagogy in the book? Were the publishers' pedagogies and LMA's at odds?
I probably seem like a freak for taking an interest in this on a blog but I know I wanted real feedback at certain points and it really helped when J would voice questions, even if they made me uncomfortable or I thought I had already answered them in a satisfactory way.
one other question (okay. I AM a freak): Does a pedagogy really "succeed" more just because the teacher realizes that she will always be the teacher at the head of the classroom even if she WANTS the class to be student-centered?
Do you personally feel "success" in the classroom as a result of your realization (which you've voiced repeatedly on your blog) that, in many ways, the student makes the class (Nick from Indonesia, Nigerian Anthony, Long Island Tawana and Athens Alexia ... ie. maybe it is that sometimes you just get good, engaged, multicultural, committed, intelligent, creative students, and sometimes you don't), or does it frustrate you even more?
A few posts ago, you said, "I think I'm beginning to accept the fact that creating such a class has very little to do with my actions and so much to do with enabling a critical mass of students to develop this sense that engaging fully is a really very cool thing to do" - Do you think that Alcott came to the same conclusion? ... If so, while that's a good connection to have with Alcott, you have to be really careful not to conflate your own desires and frustrations as a teacher with hers. I'm not sure if you are doing this, but if you really like her pedagogy, you have to be extra careful when you analyze her.
Okay. Now anyone who reads this blog will steer clear of the freako who posts long repeated comments. But you did ask for feedback.
You probably know about this book (the reviews are all over the place -- check out the one by Ann H. Harris).
Also: which should I read first, Little Men or Little Women?
First off, I didn't read a miserable draft. I did read a chapter with a lot of great ideas that was ready to be discussed and examined for the specific threads that would be most beneficial to your project as a whole.
I want to highlight Maura's uncertainty about the novel as pedagogical tool. As I've said before, it's probably my own bias, but it seems to me that you too often elide the difference between Bronson in the classroom v. LMA writing a novel. They seem to me to be radically different activities that naturally lend themselves to difference conceptions of authority. By writing a novel instead of actually teaching, LMA creates a space where it is much easier to be "janus-faced," to work through the hybridity of traditional v. progressive. Issues like time, boredom, and outside interferences can be controlled in the novel's pedagogical world whereas these and other factors can force the classroom teacher to revert to the traditional mode quite easily.
I agree with Maura's second post, that it is a difficult but important distinction between LMA and Bronson that you are trying to map out; i think you have to place the novel per se as one of the foci of this distinction. It is LMA's chosen medium, one quite different from her father's medium, and that makes the differences all the more challenging to parse out. Frankly, it's a brilliant approach to LMA, and I think you are going to end up with something really insightful and strong about the work of the novel and pedagogy.
Hope this helps...more thoughts as they develop.
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