Still Crying in the Corridors: Teaching as a Human Act

• In Event: 31.076 - Creating a Culture of Revolutionary Praxis: The 25th Anniversary of Life in Schools

Abstract

Life in Schools speaks to what Paulo Freire describes in his book Pedagogy of Freedom (1998) as "teaching as a human act" (85). In critically revisiting/revising his own early work as a teacher in Toronto's Jane Finch Corridor, McLaren's text exemplifies how our humanity is often too easily forsaken in educational settings by becoming reduced (as is often the case in both overly academic and journalistic accounts) to the instrumental policy wonk mixture of sociological data and method training in pedagogical "best practices." Instead, in Life in Schools, what we find is a humanistic type of bildungsroman in which becoming a teacher requires ever-learning one's weaknesses and one's unexpected strengths as one deepens one's commitment to better understanding the conditions that might allow for a liberatory learning community to flourish. While revolutionary critical pedagogy, in McLaren's style especially, maintains a type of romantic ethos, importantly Life in Schools is not a primer on how to liberate the oppressed; but rather -- in depicting his culture shock and relative critical illiteracy as a progressive novice white educator -- McLaren's book reveals the hard knocks we teachers must learn to experience in coming to more fully recognize how squarely the dominant culture can stack the deck against those (predominantly people of color) who fill the halls of working class schools, as well as those who would make of themselves catalytic agents of social change through teaching. In the book's tale of McLaren's difficult realization and subsequent re-theorization of this complex problem, he provides a rich portrait that reveals that good teaching in the end is a human vocation that can only come into perspective over time and that must be understood slowly. Moreover, and central to my presentation, I want to emphasize how the experience of critical teaching -- though filled with rebel yells and shouts for justice and joy -- is also racked with human suffering (Kahn, 2010). If Life in Schools superbly documents how, as Tyson Lewis (2013) has recently outlined, the "life" of students and communities can be horribly transmogrified into the biopolitical "bare life" of those compelled to be the protagonists of the school-to-prison pipeline, the book additionally offers a critical alternative of learning to bear witness to this suffering by more fully characterizing our relation in opposition to it. In this way, the "oppressed" emerge from being a one-dimensional class predicated only upon survivance into a carnival of emergent characters that may yet be personal resources for a better world. But, again, rather than provide us with another model of Hollywood's myth of the "hero teacher" (e.g. Blackboard Jungle, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers), one who can discover the kernel of subjectivity latent in the objectified masses, McLaren's book methodologically emphasizes the need to strip himself naked as the "critical pedagogue," to invert and refine his prior work theoretically, and so to bring it into a larger historical relationship that offers the possibility of atonement-through-humanization.

Author

• Richard V. Kahn, Antioch University Los Angeles