What is the goal of
post-secondary education? While politicians and business leaders
echo the familiar cant of "marketable skills" appropriate
to the "globalized economy," Livy Visano and Lisa Jakubowski
offer a different response. In Teaching Controversy, a book
that could have carried the subtitle: University Instructors
of the World Unite!, Visano and Jakubowski call on educators
to teach controversial issues that will motivate students to work
towards social justice. The title's double entendre is deliberate.
This is not a standard defence of university education, and it is
bound to create controversy. The authors would welcome a lively
debate on the subject. Visano, an Associate Professor of Sociology
in the School of Social Sciences at the Atkinson Faculty of Liberal
and Professional Studies at York University, and Jakubowski, an
Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brescia University
College, affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, are
troubled by what they view to be the increasing commercialization
of post-secondary education. Continuing in this direction, the authors
insist, will change "the role of the university from a public
to a more private 'for hire' enterprise with a more limited and
highly compromised quest for knowledge" (p. 139). Using the
ideas of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci as their compass, and of
Henry Giroux and Paolo Freire as their guide, Visano and Jakubowski
map out a different course for Canada's universities.
Many of Marx's theories
are as relevant to twenty-first-century higher education as they
were to nineteenth-century industry, the authors imply. Leaving
aside Marx's rough outline of violent confrontation between capitalists
and workers, Visano and Jakubowski gravitate towards Gramsci's more
nuanced portrait of class struggle. Gramsci developed the notion
of "hegemony" to describe the manner by which the dominant
class in a capitalist society perpetuates its power through persuasion,
and the subordinate class perpetuates its subjugation by offering
its consent. According to Visano and Jakubowski, hegemony dominates
all aspects of twenty-first-century Canadian society, including
higher education.
Applying Marxist models
to classroom life, they draw on educational theorist Paolo Freire's
notion of "banking" — "an act of depositing
in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor"
— to describe what is wrong with contemporary university teaching
(p. 31). By indoctrinating students, rather than communicating with
them, the dominant class has used schools to elicit the subordinate
class's consent. In this way, as Henry Giroux has pointed out, the
principles of marketplace capitalism have been passed on from one
generation to the next.
Visano and Jakubowski
insist the cycle can be broken; what is required are educators willing
to take risks in what they teach and how they teach it. Educators
must "reach in" (acknowledge their own biases) and "reach
out" (recognize their similarities and differences with their
students). Rather than standing above and apart from students, an
educator should create collaborative partnerships, becoming, in
the words of Visano, a "guide on the side, not a sage on the
stage" (p. 115). An educator can also challenge the dominant
hegemony by teaching controversy — and here the reader arrives
at the authors' primary thesis — sensitizing students to inequities,
and providing them with opportunities to act on their new-found
knowledge by working towards social justice.
What does this kind
of teaching look like? Visano and Jakubowski devote their longest
chapter to one example: teaching students about the subjugation
of Canada's First Nations peoples. In the spirit of a Native sharing
"circle", in which each speaker tells her story while
others listen, John Elijah of the Oneida Nation, Ursula Elijah of
the Cree Nation, and Julie George, an Ojibway Indian from the Kettle
and Stoney Point First Nation, testify to the oppression of aboriginal
peoples in the past and present. Visano and Jakubowski add their
own voices, providing examples of classroom projects that move students
beyond listening and towards action that will bring about justice
for First Nations peoples.
In this, and many other
ways, the authors weave together theory and practice in their defence
of teaching controversy. They demonstrate how dialogue can lead
to insight by including conversations with each other on difficult
issues. References to classroom projects and field trips dot each
chapter, even when these events do not turn out as the authors had
expected. These examples from the authors' own experience form one
of the strengths of the book, and at the same time one of the weaknesses.
Visano and Jakubowski have drawn on their research and teaching
about the plight of some of our society's most oppressed people
to develop a thought-provoking thesis about the goals of post-secondary
education. However, teachers of other disciplines may not be able
to link content with action in as straightforward a manner.
The issue comes down
not to whether their model is valid and admirable but to whether
everyone should be expected to follow their example. Certainly there
are powerful pragmatic disincentives for those who, unlike the authors,
do not have tenure. Allowing course content to evolve according
to the expressed needs of students conflicts with almost universal
institutional expectations that a defined curriculum be given to
students near the start of a course. Furthermore, the "guide
on the side" needs to submit grades for each student at the
end of the term. And in many cases students arrive to courses hoping
to be captivated by "a sage on the stage." In short, following
the authors' lead may be a recipe for professional martyrdom: undoubtedly
admirable, but understandably unpopular.
The authors, to their
credit, recognize this difficulty, yet they insist on the need to
resist. Their students, I am sure, would not want it any other way.
Visano and Jakubowski appear to thoroughly enjoy creating a debate,
and welcome responses of all varieties. One hopes that this is the
beginning of a sustained dialogue about the goal of post-secondary
education, and that they will provide readers with further insights
into how their colleagues can bring controversy into the classroom.