- Academic Ideology and the New Attention to Teaching
I am using the term “academic ideology” in a sense similar to Jay Lemke’s. 1 He discusses classroom decorum and the balance between the “rule” that students are not to speak to one another during class and the fact that a certain amount of interstudent conversation is permitted during any class meeting except examinations. Lemke sees the “code of student silence” as belonging to that category found in many social situations where the rules are largely pro forma, yet nevertheless honored as the rules. “I propose that they [only-sometimes-enforced rules] operate as part of an ideology; that is, as a system of beliefs that systematically hides its own true social functions. If the rules were strictly enforced, the ideology would be exposed as such because we would have to question the basis of a rule whose enforcement made our lives impossible. But by permitting a rule to be broken as often as necessary to avoid this, this maintenance continues to serve its hidden function” (LS 236). In this essay, and in his subsequent book Talking Science, 2 Lemke explores how the teaching of science is governed by the ideology of individualism, which, in class, stays back, so to speak, and emerges in a few selected places, one of which is testing. Lemke describes how the restrictions on talk create a “picture of classroom learning that distorts its social nature to make it seem as if each student is solely responsible for what he or she learns or fails to learn in class” (LS 236). He argues that this classroom ideology is a fundamental part of the social “system of awarding grades, opportunities, jobs, and radically different standards of living.” In turn, “At the base of this system, of course, behind the grades and before the opportunities, most often stand test results. According to this interpretation, it is no accident that the only classroom activity type in which the rule against talk between students is strictly enforced is test taking, that moment when the social process of the classroom is temporarily replaced by an artificial set of separate, isolated individuals” (LS 236). Tests in science courses represent an ideological node that exercises the influence of the “technocratic elite” (TS 139) in the teaching philosophy of most American schools. When in any classroom, this ideology constrains the [End Page 565] learning styles of future generations in ways similar to how the footbinding of female infants subsequently constrains a class of adult women.
A good picture of the corresponding situation in the academy with regard to teaching is Jane Tompkins’s recent “postcard” to her students:
Dear Students,
When I pay attention to the subject matter in class, instead of you, I get excited, think of an idea that just has to be said, blurt it out, and more often than not, kill something. As in the Dickinson poem (“My life had stood / A loaded gun / In corners”), when I speak the report is so loud it deafens. No one can hear anything but what I’ve said. Discussion dies. It seems it’s either you or me, my authority or your power to speak. What do I do that shuts people up? Or is this a false dilemma. [sic: there is no question mark] Help! 3
Although asking her students for help, Tompkins, by virtue of her having published this “postcard” in an academic journal, is also concerned about the generic situation in which the teacher’s voice overwhelms the interpersonal aspects of a class. Most of us welcome the change in language register that lets established members of the academy ask for help in their teaching, though few of us would agree that Tompkins is on the edge, margin, periphery, or boundary. The question is: what does it mean when those in the center ask for help from their students?
To me it is a sign that there is an unacknowledged ideology at work (in the partial sense that Lemke describes), in the teaching of Tompkins and people like her, who are, unconsciously, inhibited by this ideology, and that, perhaps more immediately, she is so much a...