107 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
107 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
## Generous Argument
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### Critique, Community, Pedagogy
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---
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##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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##### http://kfitz.info/presentations/mla20.html
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Note: Ethical questions with respect to pedagogy abound, and more seem to crop up every day. For instance: how do the technologies that claim to make our teaching lives easier -- learning management systems, plagiarism checkers, attendance and attention monitors -- subject our students to non-stop surveillance, and what can we do to counteract such surveillance? How does our departments' reliance on contingent teaching labor -- which, at institutions like mine, frees tenured and tenure-track faculty from undesirable burdens by shifting them onto others -- not only subject our colleagues to untenable working conditions but also leave our students insufficiently connected to the institution in ways that will impact their future prospects, and what can we do to rectify things?
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## pedagogy
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Note: But the ethical questions that we must address aren't driven solely by new technologies or by neoliberal economics. There are aspects of our most basic pedagogies -- assumptions that are at the heart of professionalization in our fields -- that it would be worth asking ourselves some hard questions about, to ensure that the goals and outcomes we're working toward in our teaching actually align with the values we'd like to espouse and world we hope to create.
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## seminar
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Note: Here's the scene that first got me thinking in this direction, a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that for me came to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
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## silence
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Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me -- and then was confirmed over the course of the semester -- that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
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## they say / i say
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Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well one of the lessons often extrapolated from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's _They Say, I Say_: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
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## conversation
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Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in _They Say, I Say_ is in fact a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any Thanksgiving dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely *listen*, but instead *react*. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
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## individualism
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Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments.
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## zero-sum
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Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
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## competitive thinking
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Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by _They Say, I Say_ has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the quest for academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
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## institutions
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Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions separate themselves from quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that we'll likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more productive.
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## teaching
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Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethics and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. We are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions increasingly structured around testing. Perhaps students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
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## wrong
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Note: Wrong means failure. Wrong brings shame. And so as Kathryn Schulz has explored, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid acknowledging their wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility -- indeed, somewhere along the line, the inevitability -- of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
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## <u>you're</u> wrong
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Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
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## critique
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Note: This is the upshot of our misapplication of _They Say, I Say_, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed our students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. Our reading of _They Say, I Say_, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
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## critical thinking
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Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to push new ideas forward, not to think critically. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite.
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## generosity
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Note: So what I want to ask today is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those with whom we most disagree.
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## we say
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Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. A more generous model of argument might emerge, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. Generous argument might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on higher education as a means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit.
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## generous assessment
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Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
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## us
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Note: If we're going to bring this mode of generous thinking, of generous argument, of generous assessment to bear on our classrooms, of course, we'd be well served by bringing it to bear on our work together first. We need to think seriously about how all of the processes that structure our professional lives -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might help to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today, and the environment within which our students learn.
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## thank you
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---
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##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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Note: Many thanks.
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