Chapter 4 Rethinking Radical Pedagogy as Movement-Building: Service-Learning, Counterpublics, and Autonomous Activism Many of the struggles over schooling I discussed in the last chapter have continued to reassert themselves as U.S. capitalist democracy has reorganized. In his recent book, Stealing Innocence, Henry Giroux reaffirms that progressive educators need to see formal schooling as a contested site of political struggle that is neither free from the influences of the dominant culture, nor a site where hegemony is reproduced mechanistically (130-1).1 As in his previous writings, Giroux draws upon Antonio Gramsci’s theories of hegemony to situate education as a cultural site of struggle. Even though “Gramsci did not believe that state-sponsored schools alone would provide the conditions for social change,” Giroux argues, “he did suggest they had a role to play in nourishing the tension between the democratic principles of society and the dominating 1Giroux has made this argument throughout his long career. In his first book, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling, he argued vigorously against prevailing radical educational theorists who saw education as either free from social structures, or that it sole function was to reproduce compliant workers: “Schooling must viewed in non-mechanistic terms as a superstructural agency that has both relative and dependent features which characterize its relationship to the dominant mode of production” (Giroux, Ideology 78). Even as he rejected this explicitly marxist terminology in his later work, he continued to insist on this dynamic approach of analyzing schooling (Giroux, Border Crossings, 151-2; Giroux and McLaren, “Radical Pedagogy” 153-4; Giroux, Impure Acts 143-4).Mahoney 128 principles of capitalism and corporate power” (130). Giroux picks up on Gramsci’s argument that “every relation of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educative relationship” that exists not only in schools, but in the culture at large (Gramsci 350). Like all aspects of civil society, Gramsci was not willing to reduce formal schooling solely to reproducing the interests of the dominant classes. Even in traditional schools that were intended for the “new generation of the ruling class,” the mode of teaching in those schools exceeded the needs of training the new ruling classes (40). That is, gaining access to schooling could enable an unskilled worker to become a skilled worker or even a member of the upper classes. But as Gramsci argues, “democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker cam become skilled. It must mean that every ‘citizen’ can ‘govern’ and that society places him [sic], even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this” (40). Schools are sites of hegemonic struggle that are never complete in their reproductive function within capitalist societies. For Gramsci, schooling was one of many “educative relationships” that maintained hegemony for the ruling classes. Fundamentally challenging the dominant hegemony means building a counter hegemony, new educative relationships, and creating the material conditions for every citizen to govern. It is for this reason, Martin Carnoy argues, that schools “cannot be a source of developing proletarian hegemony,” in part because of their role in maintaining ruling class hegemony, but also because schools are not the only site where hegemony is maintained (90). Instead, schools “can provide knowledge of a certain intellectual motive, but this knowledge can only be used for the proletariat by being transformed through a process of establishing proletarian culture” (90).2 2 Carnoy’s argument is supported by many of Gramsci’s writings. See Prison Notebooks, especially pp. 29-32; 40-42; 246-247.Mahoney 129 Gramsci’s notion of hegemony presumed the existence of an extra-institutional, autonomous proletarian movement that could make possible fundamental changes in education. That is, in order to bring about a revolution in schooling there would have to be a revolution in society. If radical or critical teaching is about helping bring about social change, then an important consideration is how do teachers encourage the development of critical citizens and provide students with skills useful for building political movements and constructing autonomous, counter hegemonic political spaces. Many radical and critical teachers are growing increasingly impatient and frustrated by currents of critical pedagogy that seek to promote pedagogies of “critique and possibility” that contribute to social transformation, but do not make clear how the practice of critical pedagogy is useful in social movements. Jennifer Gore argues that certain tendencies within critical pedagogy, particularly the work of Giroux and McClaren, are limiting in their privileging of theoretical critique and their failure to deal with questions of classroom practice (35). Gore argues that their emphasis on theoretical critique is not merely an oversight, but is reflective of masculinist academic practice. While not explicitly addressing the link between pedagogy and social movements, Gore and other feminists raise important concerns about the difference between institutional critique and the practical skills needed for activist organization.3 3 For example, Elizabeth Ellsworth argues that too often critical pedagogy provides useful language for talking about education, but it often fails when it comes to practices. She suggests that often times when she and her students have tried to put some of the theories of critical pedagogy into practice, “we produced results that were not only unhelpful, but actually exacerbated the very conditions we were trying to work against” (Ellsworth 301). See also, Luke and Gore Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy.Mahoney 130 In a slightly different vein of critique, Ellen Cushman argues that critical educators can unwittingly privilege ideology critique as the marker of political struggle and neglect the actual forms of resistance oppressed peoples enact in their daily lives. She argues, “[b]ecause resistance takes place behind the public transpiring of events, most critical theorist [sic] haven’t inroads to the forums in which urban and minority groups develop counter hegemonic attitudes and craft language skills” (Cushman, Struggle 25). Cushman argues that literacy