Culture and Pedagogy in Teacher Education

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Culture and Pedagogy inTeacher EducationRonald Soetaert , Andre Mottart & Ive VerdoodtPublished online: 16 Aug 2010.

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Culture and Pedagogy inTeacher Education

Ronald Soetaert, Andre Mottart, andIve Verdoodt

CULTURE OF EDUCATION

If, as Raymond Williams has asserted, culture is ‘‘one of the two orthree most complicated words in the English language’’ (Williams1976, 76) then education probably is one of the other two or threemost complicated words. If culture can be conceptualized vari-ously as ‘a way of life’, as cultivation of the mind, or as learnt be-haviour it becomes also clear that both words share a lot of‘meanings’. In his work, Giroux described culture as the site whereidentities are constructed: it is ‘‘the site where young people andothers imagine their relationship to the world; it produces the nar-ratives, metaphors, and images for constructing and exercising apowerful pedagogical force over how people think of themselvesand their relationship to Others’’ (Giroux quoted in Kellner2001, 233). Hence, culture is intrinsically pedagogical.

Describing what cultural studies or what pedagogy is all aboutis very complex because there are many contradictory perspectivesand paradigms in both disciplines. There is no single object ofstudy, no unified body of theory, no one-and-only methodology thatdefines cultural studies or pedagogy completely. As far as culturalstudies is concerned, Hall argues: ‘‘Cultural studies has manymultiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. . . .It includes many different kinds of work’’ (Hall 1992, 278).

Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, we find it difficult if notdangerous to attempt to provide a unified or coherent definitionof either cultural studies or radical education. Yet, in our dailywork in the Department of Teacher Education, and the Depart-ment of Pedagogy and in special courses about language teaching,we are confronted with the problem of addressing the distinctionsand relationships between cultural studies and education. Wedo not teach a separate cultural studies course, but we introduce

The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

and Cultural Studies, 26:155–174, 2004

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DOI: 10.1080=10714410490480421

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perspectives and concepts from cultural studies as foci in existingcourses.

In this article we focus on our work in teacher education. Ourstudent-teachers are studying or have a degree in history, litera-ture, linguistics, or the arts. So they don’t come innocent or illiter-ate in our teacher training department. They all come with a wealthof previous knowledge and experience in their particular disci-pline. Each bring a mixture of personal, social, educational anddisciplinary perspectives to the teacher education department.Our course can be described as a site where different disciplinarytraditions are confronted with each other. It is also a site wheretheory and practice intersect because we are forced to addressnot only the theory of teacher preparation, but also teacher prac-tice as well as the issues that confront our current teachers.

The following is how we would describe ourselves: one is in hisfifties (the writer), one is in his forties (the teacher or the do-er),one is in his thirties (the researcher) and the others—their namesare not mentioned here—are the younger assistants in theirtwenties (researchers but also film-musicians and especiallycomputer-geeks=specialists).

In what follows, we describe and problematize a few centralconcepts in teacher education: cultural literacy, representation ingeneral, and disciplines as representations in particular. We focuson the curriculum as a representation or as a contact zone. And weillustrate the theory with some practical vignettes on the represen-tation of teachers and literacy, environmental literacy, and theliterary canon. As a result of this confrontation of theory andpractice in teacher education we try to describe new roles forteachers inspired by cultural studies. We end with the question:what did we learn?

CULTURAL LITERACY

Where do we begin our teaching? We have introduced the conceptof literacy as a main perspective to start our reflection about whatis happening today in education. Indeed our students will be con-fronted with what is worth teaching and learning. But what exactlydo we mean when we talk about cultural literacy?

We start by introducing traditional conceptions of cultural lit-eracy. However, rather than presenting these as given, we proble-matized traditional concepts utilizing advances from such fieldsas cultural studies and with multiliteracies. Both perspectives haveproblematized our ideas about traditional literacy. The debate canbe summarized as a conflict between conservative and progressive

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perspectives on the curriculum or by the question: what is worthteaching (skills and content)?

Let us take a concrete example from language and literatureeducation. The traditional perspective is embedded in a classical-humanist view of education deeply inspired by the model of Latinand Greek: studying grammar and vocabulary in order to read=translate the classical texts. This formula was translated formother tongue education: traditionally we teach the national stan-dard language (focus on book-culture), the national history, andthe national canon. Teachers teach students a cultural memorypretending it is their memory, that students should share and evenlove their past—the best of the Nation.

The teacher transfers the culture of the past known by theadults to a younger generation. This transmission is also basedon the idea that culture is homogeneous and coherent. The teacherknows what culture is, the students do not and are even willing toaccept the cultural norms of the adults. So the pupil appears as anempty vessel and knowledge as fundamentally realist.

REPRESENTATION

What did we learn from cultural studies or—better—from the cul-tural and linguistic turn? Probably that cultural memory is alwaysmediated in representation as delegation or as description. In thecase of representation as delegation we are confronted with thequestion of ‘‘who has the right to represent whom in instances inwhich it is considered necessary to delegate to a reduced numberof ‘representers’ the voice and power of decision of an entiregroup’’ (da Silva 1999, 9).

In the case of representation as description, we are confrontedwith the question of ‘‘how different cultural and social groups areportrayed in the different forms of cultural inscription: in the dis-course and images through which a culture represents the socialworld’’ (da Silva 1999, 9). Of course both dimensions are linked:‘‘Those who are delegated to speak and act in name of an other(representation as delegation) govern, in a way, the process ofpresentation and description of the other (representation asdescription). He who speaks for the other controls the formsof speaking about the other’’ (da Silva 1999, 9).

More and more we problematize the authority of represen-tation. Cultural memory has become a site of struggle, in Freudianterms, for some, a trauma, in Marxist terms for others, a (false)ideology, and so on. The most important thing is that we realizethat what we teach is a representation and construction. If it is

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constructed, then it is subject to manipulation. And if we realisethis manipulation we can change things for the better.

So, what is represented and who is representing whom, inwhat ways, for what purpose, and with what outcome, havebecome central issues. Teachers have to wonder—together withGerald Graff: ‘What should we be teaching—when there is no‘‘we’’?’ (Graff 1988, 149). And ‘we’ can even wonder ‘whose cul-ture’? (Frith 1998). If teachers argue that they bring their pupilson higher grounds, they have to wonder: ‘‘whose higher grounds?’’(Bruner 1986, 142).

These questions also penetrate the discourse of our institu-tions leading to: ‘‘Whose university? Whose museum?’’ (Danto2000). It becomes clear that these critical question marks compli-cate and trouble theory and practice.

DISCIPLINES AND REPRESENTATIONS

Let us focus again on our concrete example of language andliterature teaching. As we have argued, the literary canon isan interesting case-study to test our thinking about cultural literacyin general. Some of us still believe in the nineteenth-centuryArnoldian discourse: the canon is indisputably ‘‘the best thathas been thought and known in the world’’, or at least ‘‘the best ofthe West’’. Cultural Studies—amongst other disciplines—problematizes this grand narrative and confronts us with a morepluralistic, democratic definition of culture. Cultural studiesteaches us that culture is ordinary, culture is a whole way of life(Williams 1958).

Sociology teaches us about the so-called neutral definition ofculture. Bourdieu,—for example—insists on issues of power inculture, makes us realize that culture is distributed unequally.Anthropology makes us aware of the fact that there is no suchthing as human nature independent of culture (Geertz 1973, 49).Discourse analysis teaches us that language makes no senseoutside discourse and there are different discourses (Gee 1996,ix) or cultural practices (Fairclough 1992) in, and with which,we create meaning. Poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonialtheories criticize the dominant discourses and plead for spacesfor confrontation and emancipation.

Critical or radical pedagogy raises questions about how cultureis related to power, calls for resistant readings, oppositionalpractices. There is also a call for teachers to become ‘‘resistantintellectuals challenging symbolic violence’’ or ‘‘transformativeintellectuals,’’ ‘‘to insert teaching and learning directly into thepolitical sphere by arguing that schooling represents both a


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struggle for meaning and a struggle for power relations’’ (Girouxand McLaren 1986, 215). Empowerment is the inspirational guide:the need for people to speak affirmatively and critically of theirown histories, traditions, and personal lives.

Describing what all of these disciplines are doing, makes usrealize, on the one hand, how difficult it is to synthesize an essen-tial mission and on the other hand, how all these disciplines sharecommon ideas. You can test this empirically by presenting apaper—the same paper—in conferences of all these disciplines.The only thing you have to do is (with your word processor) ‘‘find’’and ‘‘replace’’ your central concept (for example using literacy, cul-ture, or discourse as the buzzwords). You should of course adoptyour rhetoric to the context, refer to other founding fathers=mothers (although all these disciplines share a lot of FoundingFathers: Foucault, Bourdieu, and Barthes, for example, can beused everywhere).

The boundaries of all these disciplines have become unclear.They operate in a contested space somewhere between the liberalarts=humanities and the social sciences. They share something:a linguistic, cultural, anthropological, sociological, ethno-graphic, and semiotic . . . turn. These adjectives are more or lesssynonymous.

RHETORIC

If we had to choose from all these adjectives, the best way to syn-thesize all these turns could be to refer to the rhetorical turn. Wethen have to take into account that there is also a turn in rhetoric:a turn from ‘‘a pejorative to an honorific term’’ (Enos and Brown1994, ix, quoted in Fleming 1998, 169). In comparing rhetoricwith educational practice, Fleming observes the relative failure ofthe rhetorical revival at the level of undergraduate education: ‘‘asa coherent and attractive course of study, ‘rhetoric’ remainsunrevived’’ (1998, 169).

Indeed, all of us (well, people-like-us) have become a kind of‘‘homo rhetoricus’’ becoming self-conscious about language. Prob-ably a lot of us could agree with Burke’s saying: ‘‘a way of seeing isalso a way of not seeing’’ (Burke 1935, 49). Rhetorians—likeBurke—have taught us that all orientations, ways of looking atthe world, can be considered rationalizations. All human actionsare driven by rhetoric or the use of language and symbols ‘‘for pur-poses of cooperation or competition’’ (Fleming 1998, 170).

For teachers this implies that they have to develop a meta-awareness of dominant cultural practices of their own and others.Teachers should learn to ‘‘denaturalize and make strange what


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they have learned and mastered’’ (New London Group 1996, 86).What does that imply for the curriculum?

In what follows we will discuss the kind of curriculum thatemerges from the perspectives we discussed focusing on the cur-riculum as a contact zone.

CURRICULUM

What should the new curriculum look like? The simple idea—thecurriculum teaches the facts—should be fundamentally problema-tized. Indeed, we can be enlightened by using a CS spotlight: thecurriculum itself is a representation of facts. For this reason, thecurriculum should be revised in the light of the crisis of represen-tation and interpretation. A postmodern crisis: ‘‘an uncertaintyin the very centre of the epistemologies that once governed withsuch confidence the modern project of domination: of nature,of the world, of society’’ (da Silva 1999, 7).

The curriculum and the classroom becomes a site of struggle.We should problematize the old curriculum and the knowledgeand pedagogy it suggests. Indeed, if we teach literature, art or his-tory, part of teaching these disciplines implies ‘‘teaching the con-flicts’’ in these fields ‘‘to recognize the existence of such conflictsand try to foreground whatever may be instructive in them withinthe curriculum itself’’ (Graff 1987, 252). For example, teaching theliterary canon inevitably confronts us with the question: ‘‘how dowe institutionalize the conflict of interpretations and overviewsitself?’’ (Graff 1987, 259). A possible answer could be to re-organizethe curriculum as a contact zone.

CONTACT ZONE

Pratt (1991) argues that the contact zone can be a space to breakdown the marginalization of the non-dominant literacy=culture. Inthe contact zone ‘‘cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such ascolonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in manyparts of the world today’’ (Pratt 1991). Pratt also refers to the contactzone as ‘‘models of community thatmany of us rely on in teaching andtheorizing’’ (ibid). What do the ‘‘pedagogical arts of the contact zone’’imply? They imply a shift from theory to narratives, from one GrandNarrative tomultiple narratives: ‘‘exercises in storytelling and in iden-tifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others;experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in thearts of critique, parody, and comparison (including unseemlycomparisons between elite and vernacular cultural forms; the


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redemption of the oral; ways for people to engage with suppressedaspects of history (including their own histories); ways to move intoand through rhetorics of authenticity; ground rules for communi-cation across lines of difference and hierarchy that go beyondpoliteness butmaintainmutual respect; a systematic approach to theall-important concept of cultural mediation’’ (Pratt 1991). The domi-nant power structures avoid the contact zone because it threatens thehierarchy that maintains their imaginary community’s dominance;in a contact zone the dominant literacy=culture is challenged by theclash with the ‘‘Other.’’

Bizzell (1994) introduced the concept of the contact zone inthe teaching of literature, thereby challenging the traditionalchronological-linear organization: ‘‘Studying texts as they respondto contact zone conditions is studying them rhetorically, studyingthem as efforts of rhetoric’’ (Bizzell 1994, 168). This reconceptua-lization involves bringing texts and perspectives together to orga-nize a productive dialogue (Bizzell 1994, 165). In other words,students learn from understanding another person’s point of view,and come to ‘‘see’’ their culture not only from their own perspec-tives but also from the perspective of outsiders. In the contact zonestudents can ‘‘examine texts which foreground and critique differ-ent cultural groups’ attitudes toward a common issue. . ..’’ (VanSlyck 1997, 155). We organise a dialogue between differentdiscourses as Bakhtin suggests: dialogism does not allow theauthority of one’s speech but confronts it with other voices. Thecontact zone could be close to the ‘‘Third Space’’ of Homi Bhabha(1994, 206): a space for ‘‘enunciation of cultural difference’’—not based on the ‘‘exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity ofcultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’shybridity’’ (Bhabha 1994, 38).

We can also refer to the borderland theories or border pedago-gies introduced by Giroux: ‘‘The pedagogical borderlands whereblacks, whites, latinos, and others meet [and such sites] demon-strate the importance of a multicentric perspective that allowsteachers, cultural workers, and students to not only recognizethe multilayered and contradictory ideologies that construct theirown identities but to also analyze how the differences within andbetween various groups can expand the potential of human lifeand democratic possibilities’’ (Giroux 1999, 175).

Whether conceptualized as contact zones, a third space, or theborderland, in such zones we can problematize our representa-tions and thematize these problems in the curriculum. What thismeans is that our profession has to redefine its object of studyand use its techniques to interpret and evaluate ‘‘a variety ofcultural texts’’ and zones (Berube 1998, 25).


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We are cognizant of the fact that considerable work remains tobe done to develop materials and an approach that is appropriatefor undertaking pedagogy as work in the contact zone. In our tea-cher training we are in the process of developing such a curricularapproach (and there are of course lots of other examples all overthe world). We became aware that the model of pedagogy we areevolving is creating a turn in education at the site at which wework, a turn ‘‘From comfort zone to contact zone’’ (Gaughan2001, 1).

In what follows we present a few vignettes based on projectswe developed for and with teachers—inspired by the ‘cultural orrhetorical turn’ focusing on the following themes: the repres-entation of teachers, environmental literacy and the literary canon.

VIGNETTE: TEACHERS AND LITERACY REPRESENTED?

One of the possible ways to make students aware of the politics ofrepresentation is to confront them with the ways—for example—inwhich ‘teachers’ are represented in literature, movies, advertising,television, and so on. In our teacher training course we invitestudents to collect material from different media in whichteachers and literacy practices and events are represented.

In terms of texts we have engaged students in discussions onBernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and its Hollywood version, My FairLady. Both works can be described as literacy narratives: storiesin which people become culturally literate. Such stories haveexplicit images of schooling, of the relation between teacher and stu-dent, of the confrontation of teachers’ culture and youth culture,and so on. In Pygmalion, Shaw thematizes, dramatizes, and in-deed problematizes the whole process of literacy acquisition, con-fronting us with a central problem of literacy today, namely, whichof the divergent conceptions of literacy, conservative or progress-ive, are to be utilized in teacher education. Eldred and Mortensencapture the contrast cogently when they observe that ‘‘the rightoffers a vision of literacy programs that make assimilation secureand complete. Conversely, the left posits a version of literacy that,short of political revolution, always results in the unfinished, thedisplaced’’ (Eldred and Mortensen 1992, 534).

Popular culture is apparently fascinated by the culture ofteaching and learning in general and the relation between teachersand students in particular, as is evident from the production offilms such as Educating Rita (a 1983 film by Lewis Gilbert, show-ing another pygmalion adaptation), Dead Poets Society, Danger-ous Minds, Good Will Hunting, and so on. All these moviescreate literacy myths and a kind of Hollywood Curriculum:


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‘‘. . . good teachers are projected on the screen as bright lights inschools of darkness.’’ (Dalton 1999, 22). Representations of howteachers and students behave are created in literacy myths. It isnot because some of these movies are popular that we shouldn’ttake them seriously. On the contrary, Giroux argues, ‘‘it is preciselybecause of its popularity and widespread appeal that it warrantsan extended analysis’’ (Giroux 2002, 147). For a lot of cultural stu-dies critics, popular film creates a kind of public pedagogy inwhich behaviour and attitudes are created—consciously or uncon-sciously (Giroux 2002, 11).

We wanted to make our student-teachers aware of the culturalconstructions of their profession. They collaborated in an on-lineenvironment discussing a lot of examples of scenes in whichteachers—literacies—are (re)presented in films, novels, cartoons,and so on.

Linked to this project on literacy narratives, we invited our stu-dents to also discuss articles in mass media—in newspapers andmagazines—about ‘‘cultural literacy.’’ Again, we created an on-lineforum discussing issues of literacy. The main aim was to recon-struct the public debate about the future of literacy. Whose repre-sentations are dominant? Whose interests are served by suchrepresentations and such readings? Our students were confrontedwith a ‘‘culture of complaint’’ about the level of literacy in schools,the level of literacy of their pupils, the level of their own literacy,and so on. It seems an ongoing debate between conservative(back-to-basics) and progressive perspectives on education.

VIGNETTE: ENVIRONMENTAL LITERACY

In this project we focused on environmental literacy or on the dis-course and rhetoric (main focus on art, fiction) in which natureand the environment is constructed and represented. The crisisof representation can be described as a result of the conflict aboutwho is entitled to define what we mean when we refer to an en-vironmental crisis. The idea that nature is a social constructiondefined by relations of power among discourses and communities(biology, economics, arts, etc.) confronts us with questions suchas: Whose Nature? Whose Sustainability? (Soetaert and Mottart2003); and: ‘Whose Knowledge? Whose Nature?’ (Escobar 1998).

Nature is described as a contested site, ‘‘a vast network of sitesand actors through which concepts, policies, and ultimately cul-tures and ecologies are contested and negotiated’’ (Escobar1998). In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams (1973)makes us aware of how different times have constructed different


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perspectives on nature or have created ‘‘environmental rhetoric’’ or‘‘environmental discourse.’’

We developed teaching material focusing on the construction ofnature in art and fiction (using novels, painting, movies, touristbrochures, etc.): the construction of national landscapes (forexample the English landscape), the construction of the ‘coast’ asa tourist resort, and so on (Soetaert, Top, and Eeckhout 1996;Bishop et al 2000).

Each culture, region, country, and language-community seemsto foster a construction, a stereotype of a typical landscape. So weintroduced a new kind of Landeskunde, Cultural Studies inlanguage teaching deconstructing the traditional, romanticizedrepresentations (Soetaert and Van Kranenburg 1998).

The questions we can ask from the perspective of the socialsciences and the arts are: how environmental discourse isproduced and circulated through mass media, how nature isrepresented in art, how landscapes are changed through thetourist’s gaze (Bishop et al 2000; Soetaert et al 1996).

One of the most interesting ways to study and illustrate theanthropological turnwe have been dealing with is to focus on ‘travel-ing’ and ‘tourism.’ Indeed, the anthropological perspective can bedescribed as a result of the fact that Europeans, as Europeans,travelled to other parts of the world, they had two different butinterrelated responses to the other cultures and peoples theyencountered. One of those responses was to regard the new loca-tions and peoples as ‘‘resource’’ to be exploited through coloni-zation. The other was to face and attempt to address the fact that‘‘culture’’ is plural, that the cultures of the people they encounteredwas substantially different from theirs and that this difference hadto be engaged. The concerns of anthropology emerged in theRenaissance, transformed into a discipline in the 19th centuryand today has become an anthropological turn influencing allhuman and social sciences.

In contemporary times the discourse and praxis of the encoun-ter with difference has shifted from colonialism to tourism. How-ever, the play on difference and the other as exotic remains. Theanthropological turn was an important part of our project as evi-dent in the fact that a central concept we engaged was the ‘gaze,’with a special focus on the tourist’s gaze—the changes in the nat-ure of travel and leisure in tourism (Urry 1990). We focused on‘traveling’ and invited our students to develop teaching materialin which different perspectives on and in traveling were thematized(in a webquest project: Make Your World). Special attention wasgiven to photography as a social and cultural practice. The cameramay not lie but it certainly constructs ‘‘reality.’’


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VIGNETTE: CANON

In this last vignette we focus on a topic we already mentioned—theteaching of language and literature. Our central idea in this aspectof the project—based on the theoretical perspectives discussed inthe introduction—is that the teaching of literature can benefit froma reconceptualization. Rather than taking for granted the notionand workings of the canon, the very idea of a ‘‘List of Great Books,’’is to be critiqued and problematized from a cultural studiesperspective.

We developed material around canonical works such asRobinson Crusoe and Don Quixote—works that play an importantrole in our cultural memory. A whole network of ‘re-writings’ and‘re-readings,’ adaptations, and interpretations has been wovenaround these works. Many readers were socialized into the literaryculture by these stories. And very often—we learned from ourresearch—they have not read the original but rather only knowthe stories in the form of adaptations such as children’s stories,film, cartoons, and songs.

In our project we worked with our students to reconstruct anetwork of references, adaptations, and re-writings; this entire net-work consists of drawings, paintings, music, film, video, and car-toons that all play a central role, adding meaning to the writtentext. We also researched what pupils know about these canonicalworks from their own (very often popular) culture. For example,Robinson Crusoe cannot be read properly apart from the children’sstories, the popular stories and films that play upon the theme ofmen or women deserted on an island, a desert, the sea . . . even ‘inspace.’ The robinsonade has become a literary genre in itself. Thenovel can be described as a contact zone because Robinson Crusoehas become a vehicle for philosophical discussion about the majorthemes in our society: capitalism (Marx uses the story to explaincapitalism), feminism (there was no place for women, except forthe ‘typecast mother’), multiculturalism (there was no place forFriday, the savage in themargin), education, and so on. This perspec-tive can be combined with the postmodern literary phenomenon ofrewriting Western classics, thereby questioning their ideologicalpremises. Thus, the French author Michel Tournier (1967) ‘reverses’the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and his servant Friday,and the South African author J. M. Coetzee (1986) introduces amuteFriday—bereft of his ‘tongue.’ And we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to‘high’ cultural: there are Disney-esk versions of Robinson Crusoeand even computer games inspired by the story (Myst).

By creating a contact zone we can problematize the canon andthematize critical questions about the novel confronting high and


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low culture, words and images. . . . Even the island itself can bedescribed as ‘‘a site of contact between three cultures (English,Carib and Spanish) where his protagonist Crusoe finds meansto dominate all who land on it’’ (Fulton 1994, 2).

One of the central goals in our project was to help studentscome to the realization that culture can be described as a conflictover meaning and more specifically a conflict between variousdiscourses that claim to represent various perspectives.

By introducing ideas from cultural studies we can make ourstudents realize that knowledge and culture are ever shiftingphenomena, which they do not only learn but shape themselves.Again, we want to argue that the best way to tackle today’s conflictsover culture is ‘‘to teach the conflicts themselves, making thempart of our object of study and using them as a new kind of orga-nizing principle to give the curriculum the clarity and focus thatalmost all sides now agree it lacks’’ (Graff 1994, 8).

TEACHER-AS-RESEARCHER

In all the projects we described we invited our students to designand implement teaching materials. This involved having themundertake partial kinds of research. We introduced actionresearch in our teacher training inspired by Elliott (1991): ‘‘It wasno longer simply amatter of producingmaterials for teachers to testin classrooms. It was also a matter of fostering the development ofteachers’ capacities for self-reflection’’ (Elliott 1991, 19). Trainee-teachers focused their lessons and research on ‘‘what’’ and ‘‘how’’pupils came toknowabout particular cultural topics (as for exampleRobinson Crusoe, the landscape, the nation—see the vignettes).Teachers taped their lessons and transcribed the oral interactionwith students. Apart from researching their own teaching, teachersalso uncovered the network of knowledge from their pupils.

We pointed out to our students that in fact Robinson Crusoedid some research on his own teaching: ‘‘I began to speak tohim, and teach him to speak to me; and first, I made him knowhis name should be Friday. . . . I likewise taught him to say Master,and then let him know, that was to be my name; I likewise taughthim to say yes and no, and to know the meaning of them’’ (Defoe1719, 161). A perfect description of traditional education. ButRobinson becomes more or less aware of the relation betweenpower and knowledge. He realises that in ‘‘laying things open’’ toFriday, he really informed and instructed himself ‘‘in many thingsI did not know, or had not fully considered before, but whichoccurred naturally to my mind upon searching into them for theinformation of this poor savage’’ (Defoe 1719, 282–283).


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Through a perspective based on cultural studies (combinedwith discourse analysis) we can deconstruct the things ‘whichoccur naturally to our mind.’ This meta-awareness implies intro-ducing reflection in teacher education. A distinction can be madebetween two kinds of reflection: reflection can refer to lookingback on the first cycle of action (loop): how did I act? But reflectioncan go deeper and also focus on underlying values, assumptions,things which occur naturally. . . . This reflection is epistemologicalbut also influences the identity of the teacher.

Indeed teachers have to test everything they more or less takefor granted, namely their discipline, their subject content, theirrole as a teacher and last but not least, their own identity. Teachersshould be willing to reconstruct discourses, to revise vocabularies.This perspective is very close to Rorty’s central idea that ifthe world and our identity are not constant, we are obliged to‘rediscribe’ it constantly. In his recent work Barker introducesWittgenstein as a founding father and Rorty as inspiring philoso-pher for cultural studies. Barker describes cultural studies as ‘‘asymbolic guide or map of meaning and significance’’ (Barker2002, 5) or ‘‘inspirational guidebooks with consequences’’ (Barker2002, 5). So cultural studies can be a potential tool forintervention in the social world, however, it is not a form of directpolitical activity.

Teachers should be interested in what is happening in culture:‘‘The educator as anthropologist must work to understand whichcultural materials are relevant to intellectual development. Thenhe or she needs to understand which trends are taking place inour culture. Meaningful intervention must take the form of workingwith these trends’’ (Papert 1980, 32). Indeed, teachers cannotafford to neglect—for example—the everyday life of their pupils.The teacher-as-anthropologist is another role, and ethnographyprobably is the best methodology for researching the practiceof meaning-making. Apart from action research, we also invitedour students to read and to do cultural-studies inspired research(for example the representation of teachers, youth in literacy narra-tives mainly in popular culture—see the vignette, for examples ofsimplified versions of ethnographic research on popular youthcultures).

WHAT DID WE LEARN?

By focusing on popular, mass culture and visual culture in the cur-riculum of teacher training, we could motivate our students whoare growing in an era when the mass media is a pervasive, taken


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for granted aspect of culture. This perspective motivates student-teachers as learners. As Donna Alvermann puts it, students today‘‘had experienced firsthand what it felt like to really ‘care’ aboutsomething being taught. Case in point. . . if teachers themselvescan get caught up in popular media texts and still learn, why wouldthey not extend the same opportunity (courtesy, even) to their stu-dents?’’ (Alvermann interviewed by Alsup 2001). But Alvermannalso stresses the fact that she is not advocating that popularculture should become the only content of the new curriculum.Nor does she suggest that we should lure pupils ‘‘into the ‘oldcurriculum’ using something they enjoy, only to incorporate it inway that essentially spoil their pleasures’’ (Alsup 2001).

We also became aware of a lot of problems as a result of intro-ducing cultural studies perspective. At this moment, we are doinga research project about the reactions of our students to the intro-duction of cultural studies in their curriculum and about theirevaluation of the contact zone as a new kind of curriculum. Infact we tried to practice what we preach by introducing culturalstudies in our teaching and by organizing our curriculum as acontact zone (see the vignettes above). How did the student-teachers react? Apart from positive reactions they also resistsome aspects of cultural-critical theory.

Students seemed to be wrestling with different paradigms.Some of the reaction of the students mirrored the doubts and com-plexities of postmodern theory. If we ask our student-teachers toreflect upon and eventually to redescribe their theory and practice,their discipline and their identity, this can be liberating but it canalso be problematic, even humiliating or traumatic.

One of the recurring problems signalled by student-teacher isabout the concept ‘critical.’ The adjective ‘critical’ is added to alot of our disciplines (e.g., critical cultural studies, critical literacy,critical theory, critical pedagogy). In our discussions with them,students repeatedly asked what difference the term ‘‘critical’’ madeto the discourse at hand, what is the difference suggested by ‘‘criti-cal,’’ what work does ‘‘critical’’ do, and what does it mean to under-take a ‘‘critical’’ version of or perspective on something? Criticalliteracy for example inspires us to ask a fundamental question:whose literacy? But when we embark on our critique somestudents start wondering: whose criticism? Everything becomespoliticized.

It is precisely the political perspective of some cultural studies-scholars that creates ethical problems for some teachers.They thinkthey also have other responsibilities: to teach skills and knowledge,to prepare pupils for higher education, for society-as-it-is.The same problem arises with concepts as empowerment and


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pupil-centeredness. Introducing many perspectives on a particulartopic (implying taking seriously opinions and ideas. . . from pupilsand students or empowering them) was considered problematic.

Some students reactedwith a very simple question: is it possibleto be wrong? If no interpretation ormeaning can be privileged, whatis the role of teachers? What is the difference between power andauthority? Where does emancipation, critique, empowermentend? Some students were wrestling with a contradiction: theinclusion of marginalized voices seems interesting but what aboutthe erosionof standardsor thedisappearanceof sharedknowledge?

Another problem is about the way students relate to theirdiscipline. Critical Discourse Analysis and CS deconstruct thehistorically based definitions of disciplines in education. If werealize that disciplines are only tools or constructions and notnatural categories, we can indeed deconstruct certain practices(the reference to literature as an autonomous field is a nineteenthcentury construction). Realizing the relativity of disciplines doesnot necessarily imply that some (even a lot of) disciplinary know-ledge is no longer interesting. On the contrary students areconfronted with the fact that disciplines can be described aspowerful discourse communities who decide ‘‘who can thinkand say what to whom in what way, and who or what is excludedfrom discourse and knowledge’’ (Hodge 1990, 13).

Many of our student-teachers also have a special relation withart because they believe that art really matters for the individualartist and appreciator of art as well as for society in general. Ifthe focus of CS is on redescription and redefinition, about a‘new way of seeing’ (Barker 2002), if there is move ‘‘against theoryand toward narrative’’ (Rorty 1989, xvi) then we can wonder whysome art (indeed very often ‘high’ art) is not taken more seriously.Didn’t we learn from Sklovsky and others that art makes strangewhat is considered natural? Didn’t art slow down our perceptionand slow down the movement from perception to recognition?Didn’t Kundera and others plead for the importance of the‘wisdom of the novel?’

For some students the perspective from critical theory leads toa never ending criticism or deconstruction. It leads to a kind ofmiserabilism or scepticism (e.g., Bourdieu, Foucault) with nosuggestion of positive possibilities. According to Bloom, there is‘‘one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost everystudent entering the university believes, or says he believes, thattruth is relative’’ (Bloom 1987, 24). It is precisely this relativismthat can be problematic for students. The cultural, rhetorical turnstrips away the foundational status of all knowledge and for some,this leads to a moral relativism or ‘‘anything goes’’ philosophy.


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By overstressing and repeating the critical perspectives, decon-structing stereotypes, some students feel overexposed with thesame repeated formula. We think we are confronting them withsomething new, but this is met with indifference. What is the bigdeal in teaching that the literary canon, or the national history isa construction? What is the point in showing that motherhood,love nationalism, youth. . .are cultural constructions? They don’tstop loving their mother, falling in love, getting homesick andfeeling younger than their teachers.

Sometimes teachers of cultural studies must feel like Chip inthe novel The Corrections by Michael Franzen (2002). Chip is a ris-ing cultural studies star teacher at a small New England college(very cliche in the representation of literature or cultural studiesteachers: he tries to write a screenplay and is involved in a loveaffair with one of his students). Well, this Chip—a Foucaultian—is deconstructing television commercials and wonders if hisstudents are not right in thinking: ‘‘there was nothing wrong withthe world and nothing wrong with being happy in it.’’

SHARED KNOWLEDGE

From a more philosophical perpspective, Bizzell is not surprisedthat students ask for more than scepticism and deconstruction:‘‘We are still nostalgically evoking the search for truth, only toannounce that truth cannot be found. We spend out time exposingtruth claims as historically, ideologically, rhetorically constructed;in other words, we spend out time in the activity called deconstruc-tion’’ (Bizzell 1998, 375).

Precisely because teachers don’t feel at ease with some of theprogressive, critical perspectives inspired by critical theory andCS, they often return to pragmatic solutions, to a comfort zoneinstead of a contact zone. Back-to-basics offers them nostalgiafor the good old past by putting the literary canon, the national his-tory (with a positive perspective on the Founding Fathers) andgrammar (of the standard language) back on the agenda (Hirsch1987; Bloom 1988). And Hirsch (1988) created a List Cultural Lit-eracy: What Every American Needs to Know with an appendix.‘‘What Literate Americans Know.’’ He suggests a simple remedy:we have to teach again traditional ‘myths and facts’ described as‘the oxygen of social intercourse’ (Hirsch 1988, xii). Is such a quickfix reasonable? We think on the one hand the problems is morecomplex that back-to-basic suggests, but on the other hand thereis some truth in it. We should bear in mind that the List of Hirschcan be rephrased as what ‘‘all Americans also need to know but areprevented from knowing’’ (Macedo 1999, 118).


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What we argue is that Hirsch (and others from a conservativeperspective) made a point: we need a ‘shared discourse’ and prob-ably some ‘shared knowledge.’ Such a shared discourse createsdiscourse communities on the level of a discipline and on the levelof a community. We should realize that our ways of life ‘‘dependupon shared meanings and shared concepts and depends as wellupon shared modes of discourse for negotiating differences ismeaning and interpretation’’ (Bruner 1990, 25).

Bizzell realizes we need a positive utopian moment in our cri-tique, we need to take the next step in ‘‘our rhetorical turn’’ (Bizzell1998, 384). Therefore she suggests: ‘‘we will have to be more forth-right about the ideologies we support as well as those we attack,and we will have to articulate a positive program legitimated byan authority that is nevertheless nonfoundational. We must helpour students, and our fellow citizens, to engage in a rhetorical pro-cess that can collectively generate trustworthy knowledge andbeliefs. . .’’ (Bizzell 1998, 384). She describes the public functionof the intellectual as precisely rhetorical: ‘‘our task is to aid every-one in our academic community, and in our national community,to share a discourse’’ (Bizzel 1998, 375).

PARADIGMS

Teachers of literature for example are confronted with differentparadigms: cultural heritage, personal response and cultural criti-cism (O’Neil 1993, based on Duncan 2002). If teachers are wres-tling with these different paradigms, it could be the result of thefact they believe that one of these is absolutely right. We think allthree perspectives have made an interesting contribution so are,in a way, true. Realizing this could be therapeutic.

Cultural studies plays an important role in this therapymaking us aware of the different ways we can talk about a parti-cular topic. Since we have a variety of purposes, we develop avariety of languages, vocabularies, discourses, language games,literacies, cultures, etc. Hopefully we thereby also avoidspeaking with a sense of fundamentalist certainty how the worldis or should be.

Teaching is not solely based on the transmission of tradition, itshould also be inspired by innovations and corrections. Weagree with Williams when he states that culture consists of ‘‘theknown meanings and directions, which it members are trainedto; the new observances and meanings, which are offered andtested’’ (Williams 1958=1993, 7). And we think that working withthe best of cultural studies is even benificial for cultural heritage:‘‘the real enemy of traditions is the kind of orthodox literary


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Documents

Culture and Pedagogy in Teacher Education