Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric Apr 2012 Open Access

Traps, Tricksters, and the Long Haul: Negotiating the Progressive Teacher’s Challenge in Literacy Education

Paul Feigenbaum

Abstract

In recent years, numerous scholars have become disillusioned with first-wave critical pedagogy, particularly the idea that transformative intellectuals can emancipate students and advance progressive politics despite working for reactionary educational institutions. Portraying social justice-oriented teachers as dogmatic, naïve, and self-contradictory, these post-first-wave scholars hope instead to cultivate students’ critical literacies within the default and privatized ethos of the American Dream. A handful of other scholars look to literacy education’s progressive extracurriculum for ideological refuge from institutional hegemony. This essay, while agreeing that significant obstacles constrain progressive teaching in ways that first-wave critical pedagogues have not sufficiently acknowledged, nevertheless rejects the idea that progressive teachers are trapped by unavoidable paradox. It argues further that, rather than accentuating a dichotomy between institutional and extracurricular, socially conscientious teachers can more productively negotiate the challenges of progressive education by breaking down walls between these locations.

Journal
Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
Published
2012-04-01
DOI
10.59236/rjv11i2pp5-38
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Gold
Topics
writing pedagogy teacher development argument literacy studies race and writing
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