Thirteen Perspectives on Critical Pedagogy: A Collage

“In the morning, an incident of blackbirds happened.”

—William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

I

I first encountered Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” in a Modern poetry class as a Masters student. The class was taught by Dr. Hoyt in a slow, Alabama drawl that turned Stevens’s interconnecting ideas of order into warm, lazy circles. Dr. Hoyt called me “Miss Harris” and dutifully taught a composition class each semester because it kept him honest.

The second time I encountered the poem was on my own syllabus as I wrote the course outline for my first Composition/Literature class. I knew I liked it, and I thought hearing twenty-five people talk about it would help me figure out why I liked it. Besides, I’d had it in a graduate class. Teach what you know. That didn’t work so simply; we struggled through the writing of the poet who watched blackbirds. And, certainly, the freshmen didn’t miss the opportunity to point out that the line, “A man and a woman and a blackbird are one,” is a bit kinky.

The third time I returned to the poem was as a first year doctoral student in another Modern Poetry class which barely touched “Thirteen Ways” in lieu of spending inordinate amounts of time on “The Comedian as the Letter C”—a dense, indecipherable poem and worth the future intelligentsia’s time.

As I return to it now I try to shake off the memory of a horrible parody (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Washing Machine”) and see what it has to teach me about perspective this time: perspective is from within and without, is multiple, is dynamic, is sometimes deceitful. It shows what my own eyes do not naturally consider. I want to use Stevens’s multi-faceted contemplation of blackbirds, life, thought, and action as a model for beginning to find answers to the questions arising from this semester, sometimes for the first time, sometimes recurring: what is critical pedagogy? where do I and my students fit into it? what happens after critical pedagogy? I turn to narrative, reflection and collage to answer these questions.

II

I just got done reading Wendy Bishop’s Teaching Lives, Teaching Stories; the book made me cry. Maybe because it’s the first time I’ve seen in print the writing that I have in me to do. Bishop has a whole piece in her text that has absolutely nothing to do with the teaching of writing on the surface. No explicit references. No sources. No (see Welch or Murray or Elbow) snuck in at the end of the paragraph. Only her. Her own, singular voice and the assumption that she, too, can speak about writing.

Bishop’s book, I think, is a mixture of her experiences with sources, of her poetic spirit and sensibilities, of her conversations with students, colleagues, research, and herself. I planned this essay before I read her book, but I see her collection of pieces as similar to this piece. Mine began on the last day of class when several individual students’ personalities confronted me, each needing more attention than I had time to give to any one of them. I know that Bishop does not name herself a critical pedagogue, but I see in her stories critical work. I also see the creative writer crafting a text. This, too, is critical work. How do the stories I tell shape me, my students, critical studies? What stories are available to me? Bishop, in such pieces as “Let Me Tell You About the Rocks” and “Teaching Lives: Thoughts on Reweaving Our Spirits,” shows how a teacher moves in that complicated classroom space. She begins, also, to show how those movements intersect with students’.

Is critical teaching only about self-discovery? I believe it is about the self, the community, about writing, about composition, about teaching, about society. And what do we do afterwards? Maybe it is just that I am in my own turmoil of change and so need to answer that question—what happens after the change...