Towards Building Student Agency

Towards Building Critiquing Student Agency
Various attempts and advocacy of educationists, literacy theorists, pedagogists, compositionists and concerned others are underway towards building, developing, consolidating and reinforcing different kinds and degree of agency in students. Their student agency debate is connected to the goal of education or pedagogy vis-à-vis students and zeitgeist. For instance, the critical literacy theorists contend that the goal of education is and should be developing critical thinking skills in students so that they become able to diagnose, assess and respond to the cases and conditions of exploitation, manipulation or interpellation by any set of ideologies and work towards social change and democratic society. I align myself with critical pedagogists and argue in this paper that the goal of education and pedagogy should be building critiquing agency in students which is to say that their academic and professional training should be geared towards orienting and equipping them with skill, power, capacity, attitude and tendency to analyse, assess, criticize or inquire into the state of affairs of things thereby enabling them to act responsibly for social change or make choices and decisions judiciously to promote democratic social values.
I will build my argument based on my reading of James Berlin’s Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures, Sharon Crowley’s Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays, Bill Reading’s The University in Ruins and Jane Danielewicz’s essay “Personal Genres, Public Voices”. Needless to say, these scholars are composing in different times and from diverse locations and characterizing and imagining students as potential of having or achieving as different capabilities as voices, selfs or subject positions and forward or advocate directly or indirectly a number of pedagogical approaches and theoretical frameworks. Flowing like an undercurrent in all of them, however, is the image of a critiquing student who is capable of critically viewing and assessing the scenario, situations, activities; voicing the opinion from differing and conflicting subject positions and acting thoughtfully or openly even in an increasingly fluid and complex postmodern world to effect change of affirmative kind. Since critiquing student agency should be accompanied by voice and subjectivity though diffused and fragmented to be able to articulate thoughts aimed at the formation of just and democratic society, taking together Berlin, Crowley, Readings and Danielewicz makes a strong case for critiquing student agency as the goal of pedagogy in general and composition pedagogy in particular.
Briefly saying, Danielewicz believes that students have voice and are capable of acting as agents for change. Berlin sees student agency but constructed through discourse and ideology. Readings and Crowley also realize that students have agency but contingent and dynamic. All the four scholars firmly hold, though in different degree, that students have agency but their views, however, conflict when it comes to the agenda of critiquing student agency. For instance, Danielewicz and Berlin are affirmative about students having critiquing agency and making a difference in the society. Crowley and Reading, on the other hand, though believe that students have agency are nonetheless suspicious of them being able to actually work towards the direction of change in the current state of affairs given the corporatized, bureaucratic and ideologically loaded globalized world.
As also mentioned above, Danielewicz professes that students (can) have agency since they have voice. Rising above the process idea of authentic voice, she explores how by practicing personal genres such as autobiography and autoethnography students gain public voice deemed necessary to make a difference in the world. She notes at one point, “By producing texts in genres with recognizable social functions, student writers gain agency” (1), and implies that for the student writers to gain agency, they need to learn to produce texts in genres. The personal genres, she believes, can be the point of entry into the public world. The reason why personal genres scaffold public voice, she says, is that “personal forms, as genres, depend for their coherence on the connection between the personal and the public” (2). Her perception of voice is also different from process people in the sense that she is aware of “its shaky foundations, its ideological baggage, and its annoying elusiveness as a concept” (5) as well as many rhetorical factors/aspects which work together to create voice in the text and that the voice results from the writer’s engagement and position in the world.
In connection with students’ public voice and its potential function, Danielewicz even refers to Randall Freisinger who in his pedagogy of resistance “believes that voice in writing, because it is connected to human agency, may be one possibility for counteracting pessimism and cynicism, two dominating moods of postmodern life” (qtd in Danielewicz 9). Though she does not completely buy Freisinger’s idea of pedagogy acting as resistance, she nevertheless is sure that students can generate authority, a voice and particular subject position by practicing genres. Such “element of agency- that writing is action and that voice increases its power-” says she, “is what makes voice such a crucial quality of written texts” (11). For her, an individual agency is the result of interactive relations; the self in dialogue with others, the world, and its own past which is capable of voice against ideological interpellation even if not of resistance as such.
Even from this brief discussion of her essay, I can see that Danielewicz is talking of the possibility of building critiquing student agency- the capacity to articulate voice publicly- and adopting personal genres as heuristics to prompt discovery of such voice which can be a medium to express subjectivity and desire as well as the instrument for change.
Berlin is little more direct and vocal about students’ critiquing agency than Danielewicz and I want to put myself along the line of his argument. His stance is that critiquing agency in students can be developed, honed and reinforced through proper training and education. For that purpose, he advocates for such an educational, literacy and pedagogical approaches “that prepares [students] to be critical citizens…that students also be prepared to become active and critical agents in shaping the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of their historical being” (54-5). He calls such a literacy approach ‘critical’ whose sole purpose would be to “provide intelligent, articulate, and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community…”(55) . With this pedagogy into action, Berlin envisions students equipped with critiquing and critical skills capable of acting responsibly for the social good although he is aware that postmodern student self is diffused and fragmented, a product of signifying practices, “finally conflicted, incoherent, amorphous, protean, and irrational in our very constitution” (66). He has optimistic note about student critiquing agency which becomes apparent when he claims that each subject/agent (also student) has the possibility of actively changing the conditions of historical experience though each subject in the postmodern age is a dialectical process of subject positions within specific as well as larger social history. He firmly buys the idea that the critical literacy prepares the students capable of critiquing the contesting/dominant ideologies and fight for the just and democratic society and says, “acting is always circumscribed by material and discursive constraints, but acting against these conditions is feasible” (74) .This confidence in Berlin stems from the fact that students have so diverse and varied subject positions as is the case with every other postmodern agent which allow for “the greater possibilities for action” (74) .
Like Berlin, Crowley is also concerned with ideology and its critique and, by extension, building in students critiquing and critical agency. She spots ideology right in Freshman Composition course and notes: “The course is meant to shape students to behave, think, write and speak as students rather than as people they are, people who have differing histories and traditions and languages and ideologies” (8-9). For her, the present form of freshman composition does nothing other than rendering the bourgeois subject/s (students) docile and humble. That’s why she labels the present comp approach humanist and then attacks it in many grounds such as being bourgeois and status quoist. She at once realizes the limitation of contemporary composition pedagogy and reinforces Berlin’s call for extending the range of composition pedagogy citing him that “compositionists are not interested in limiting writing pedagogy to instruction in reflexive self-examination (Berlin 1982)” (14). According to Crowley, neither composition nor literature in its present form “offers much hope to those who would like to change the world” (78) as comp is bent towards instilling ideology and literature rendering students sensitive, creative or imaginative. Neither of them is therefore committed to producing the critical and critiquing student agency. Rather they render students blunt and flighty therefore indifferent to the ground reality. This is the prelude why she deems a change in the orientation of both courses urgent.
Though I don’t want to put myself into any camps-rightist, leftist or any other- of composition teachers and theorists, I can still sense that aiming to build critiquing agency in students involves some degree of leftist orientation. Both Berlin and Crowley have leftist inclination as both of them talk of critiquing ideology and its hegemonic role. Crowley explicitly puts herself in leftist camp of composition teachers and believes that their composition philosophy and pedagogy could be instrumental in changing the orientation of the course. She declares, “I share the goals adumbrated within the camp of leftist composition teachers” (235), who, according to her, “desire that their students be altered to the oppressive and debilitating means by which their culture defines them and their relations…as well that students be empowered by their awareness of oppression to change the means by which it is maintained” (235). For her, the goal and function of pedagogy should be to empower students so that they become able to critique and act to alter the oppressive mechanisms maintained by ideologies of various kinds. This way, while she realizes that immediate change in composition courses including freshman is wanted, she is, but, apprehensive of “the possibility of turning Freshman English to radical purposes” (235), given the “oppressive institutional history and a repressive intellectual tradition” (235) in the universities.
Readings, on the other hand, highlights the demise of nation-state and the emergence of global or ethnic identity as the postmodern phenomena. He sounds a little different from both Berlin and Crowley in his argument that the contemporary subject “is no longer a political entity, is not a subject of the nation-state” (48), but when he blames consumerism and other attendant ideologies such as globalization for this phenomenon because they have hollowed out the political subjectivity in subjects/students, he reminds us of Berlin. At other point, Reading declares that “contemporary students are consumers” (53) and thereby implies that contemporary students are the victims of consumerism and other ideologies and are hardly concerned or capable of/about critiquing interpellation or similar phenomena brought about by competing set of ideologies.
Like Berlin and Crowley, Readings also rejects the possibility of unified, coherent subject/s and instead talks of “singularities…variously occupy[ing] the positions of speaker and listener” (185). For him, “the singularity of the “I” or the “you” is caught up in a network of obligations that the individual cannot master” (185). Finally, he ends up forwarding the pedagogy of difference or dissensus in the classroom of highly bureaucratic and corporatized university- the university in ruins. Since the student agent is divided and incomplete as a result of globalization process and demise of the nation states, the only way of generating knowledge or knowing is “dissensual process… dialogism rather than dialogue” (192); only through dissensus is “thinking together” (192) possible in the University in ruins where student body is made up of singularities. For this to happen in the classroom, Readings suggests working under the rubric of thought as for him "education is this drawing out of the otherness of thought that undoes the pretension to self-presence that always demands further study" (162). Openness on the part of students/teachers and classroom as the sites of inquiry and contemplation where contradictions, conflicts and tensions prevail without any definitive resolution is Reading’s underlying idea of student agency. Reading’s imagined students though not as active and critical as Berlin’s are nevertheless as Crowley’s and Danielewicz’s capable of voices of dissensus, inquiry and self-reflection meaning some form of critique and alternative perspective.
Arriving at this point, after analyzing the major pedagogical thrusts of the four scholars in question, their views on the role of pedagogy in general and composition pedagogy in particular and their stance on goal of pedagogical approaches as building critiquing student agency, I am still unsure of how goal set as building, developing, honing and reinforcing critical and critiquing agency in students can be realized by employing what set of pedagogical approaches and who are accountable for this. I believe like Berlin and Danieliwitcz that critiquing agency in students is necessary and can be built up or developed by adopting appropriate pedagogical approaches but at the same time not sure like Reading and Crowley whether students will want or be actually able to exercise critiquing agency in the increasingly fluid, complex, globalized and corporatized postmodern world. There are numbers of barriers for the students to raise voice or actually act for change and democratic values or society such as media being controlled by capitalists, and academics being made ideologically loaded and prominently technical. But still, as all the four scholars agree, that the change in current state of affairs of things is necessary and somebody has to take the initiative towards that direction. There are not and cannot be any other people than the academicians and scholars who can take that initiative and there can be no other appropriate site other than academy for beginning that initiative. And finally there are no other agents than the hugely potential students who can herald change and this all can be achieved by no other approach than building, developing and reinforcing the critiquing student agency.




Works Cited
Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures: Refiguring College Studies English. West
Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2003.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays.
Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Jane Danielewicz. “Personal Genres, Public Voices”. College Composition and
Communication. Urbana: Feb 2008. Vol. 59, Issue. 3. 420-450
Readings, Bill. University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard U
Press, 1996.