hooks

 Peter Elbow’s “The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization”

For me, Peter Elbow’s “The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization” enacted the type of dynamic “itch and scratch” that he proposes as the differences between a visual understanding of form and a temporal understanding. This long article kept me reading until the end because of Elbow’s voice and the narrative he tells. In many ways, I think Elbow makes a great point in noting that readers are stuck experiencing texts in time, which means some visual metaphors (such as “sign-posting” in essays or thesis statements providing a “map” for readers) DO seem to fall short, particularly in the type of article-length papers we write in graduate school.  Particularly challenging is his re-imagining of “cohesion” and  “coherence,” which we often think of as logical and linear (“do all my points make sense in the order in which they appear?”), but Elbow wants us to think of us part of a pull that draws your reader through your own thinking process (or a cleaned up version of it). He writes,

“Current notions of cohesion points to local links between individual sentences or sections. Links are good; they grease the skids, but they don’t pull. I’m interested in what we might call dynamic cohesion – where we’re pulled from element to element. Current notions point to global semantic webbing that make readers feel that all the parts of a text are about the same topic. That’s valuable (and not easy). But I’m interested in dynamic coherence where the parts of the essay don’t just sit together because they are semantically linked; rather, we feel them pulled together with a kind of magnetic or centripetal force. Dynamic cohesion and dynamic coherence create the music of form” (633).

His illustrations of music and the type of dissonance and consonance that pulls the listener into the experience of rhythm and melody in time are useful. They remind us of the oral nature of speech and what is lost when we attempt to visually ramify a text through bullet points, outlines, and the dreaded five-paragraph essay. The oral nature of language is highlighted when Elbow states that the most common way that “writers bind words and pull readers through a text” is through Narrative (634). Particularly helpful for me in my own writing is his point that narrative can be personal stories, yes, but it can also be a mode of narrating our own thinking that is similar (though in some cases less personal) than the exploratory essays we just completed.

 Bell hooks

Bell hooks’ argument for a critical pedagogy that creates a democratic classroom among an increasingly multicultural or diverse student body is, as she notes repeatedly, clearly influenced by Paulo Freire. Freire has cropped up in many of the theorists we have studied, which demonstrates how persuasive his negative description of the “banking system of education” and the class barriers that divided the bourgeoisie academy of those who have power from students who do not have power or a voice. From Freire, hooks develops what she calls a “transformative pedagogy rooted in a respect for multiculturalism” (40).  The term “multiculturalism,” which was thrown around anywhere and everywhere especially during the 1990s when hooks wrote this collection of essays, is not a label we tend to use in today’s discourse. For hooks, rather than being essentializing or divisive, the term “multiculturalism” appears to denote a certain kind of democratization that was rapidly happening within the university at the end of the twentieth century. In addition, hooks assumes that democratization of the classroom is a key goal for universities as a whole and a common good we should be working toward. She perhaps defends this goal in other portions of Teaching to Transgress since the chapters we have somewhat jump into the nuts and bolts of transformative pedagogy. Hooks writes, “Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy” (39).

Importantly for hooks, this responsibility to contribute does not imply that the classroom has to be established as the ultimate “safe zone.” Contribution can be contentious and messy.  Wanting to create a classroom of “openness and intellectual rigor,” hooks writes, “Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn – to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world” (40). I believe her use of the word “ideally” here is very important, since we all might be able to imagine particularly difficult classmates or students who make us really question why that student is even at the university to begin with. We also get better sense of how hooks envisions this democratization practice which may be full of confrontation and disagreement in her chapter on “Confronting Class.” Hooks argues against the notion that a teacher’s primary concern should be to “maintain order” within the classroom, as this reinforces the bourgeois values that have been established in the university. From the perspective of the students, hooks argues that these same social pressures often silence “marginal” voices. 

The classroom is a very complex place.  There are many relationships, juxtapositions, and power structures at play, both between the teacher and students and between the students themselves.  This being said, and while I agree with many of the sentiments hooks expresses, her view of a community based classroom in which every member plays a productive role seems to lean towards the idealistic.  I understand the urge to use the classroom as a means of empowering the marginal and those who seemingly do not have a voice.  For many students, the college composition classroom will be one of the first places in which they find themselves able to express new and previously unspoken ideas, and of course we want to create an atmosphere in which this exchange can be made possible.  What must be kept in mind, however, are the practicalities of classroom time and dynamics. 

Are teacher’s to force students to speak who would rather remain silent?  I don’t believe I spoke much at all during my first two years as an undergraduate, yet I still managed to make much of my undergraduate career.  I have taught in a variety of classrooms – including classes with only international students, classes in a small Arkansas town, and courses here at a large university.  Each classroom has its own dynamics and adjustments must be made based upon diversity and student background.