No Offense, Doug: Critical Thinking Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In the comment section of the last post, Doug made the following statement:

What propels me into critical thinking isn't duty, or heroic altruism, or any other such world-historical imperative; it's sheer enjoyment. If our students can't learn to feel that enjoyment, they won't do it.

I hate to always do this. I'm a theory guy, so here comes the dreaded theory. In Seminar XX, Lacan identifies four discourses that I think are relevant to why Doug might be mistaken in his belief that students have to enjoy in order to learn. For the sake of this post, I'll oversimplify Lacan's four discourses, but only to the extent of reducing their nuances:

1) The source of agency doesn't come from the individual, but rather from some idealized imagining of knowledge itself. The impossible objective of this discourse is to produce a mastership of knowledge. If we were to translate this into critical-thinking skills, then this is the call to master a primary text, all of its nuances, etc. The primary point of critical thinking in this discourse is to question the paraphrasing's fidelity to the primary text.

2) The individual subordinates knowledge to the production of pleasure and/or the recuperation of a loss. Again, in terms of critical-thinking skills, this is the call for new and new, more pleasurable applications of a theory, paradigm, metaphor, etc. When not a call for pleasure in itself, this discourse calls for the recovery of a loss, such as in marginalized discourses. The primary point of critical thinking in this discourse is to question the appropriateness/accuracy of the transposition from the application's original context to such new contexts.

3) The source of agency in this discourse comes from some idealized imagining of authority that governs over the subject. The subject sees only knowledge/information in others, and thereby suppresses other subjectivities (other people's personal lives, etc.), with the ultimate objective of producing recognition for oneself. In terms of critical thinking, this discourse questions the careful negotiation of different (types of) information in a critical community.

4) The source of agency in this discourse comes from pleasure itself. This discourse subordinates any possibility of mastership to the production of new knowledge. The production of knowledge is the sole objective of this discourse. In terms of critical thinking, this discourse is the closest to deconstruction: a question of premises and then of their relationships to conclusions.

In order to create his cool little "mathemes," Lacan makes the outlandish claim that these are the only possible discourses. While this is obviously untrue, his explanation of how we circulate through the different discourses brings about an important point. We teachers want our students to be capable of all of these different discourses and their different types of critical thinking.

Therefore-- no offense, Doug-- we don't want our students to reduce their critical thinking skills to only those that derive from or produce pleasure.

Writing as Drama Critiques

Last Tuesday the graduate and adjunct instructors of ENGL 101 met to discuss the success of the new program guidelines and textbook during the fall semester. One of the topics of conversation was Writing as Drama, which was used in about fifty sections in the fall--specifically, the August 2007 edition was used, a 400-page stub that only included three pre-academic genres: letters, parables/fables, and memoirs. Here are the notes I got on WAD from that discussion:

• The book doesn’t make the transition to academic writing--students don’t make the connection between the fun work and academic requirements.


• Some felt that the book's tone actively undermines the authority of the teacher and the validity of academic writing.


• Students don’t understand the terminology of the two dramas.


• More advanced students seem to thrive, but the lower level students are even more lost than they usually are.


• The book’s chapters are uneven.


• Many don’t like the tone of the book, which one defined as "cool older uncle."


• The book chastises mechanics as a metaphor and sets up a negative relationship if teachers discuss language as mechanics.


• It would be nice to have student papers that aren't discussed in the book.


• The rubric tends to inflate grades, and students feel entitled to better grades.


• Students do seem to like the assignments and enjoy writing, but they think simply being interested or creative is enough.


• The textbook requires a complete transformation of teaching persona and approach; it cannot be easily adapted, or used strategically.

What I really want to do with these is to start a discussion, so I'm going to resist the temptation to defend the textbook--and in any case, the textbook critiqued in a number of these items is now obsolete, or will be, once the January edition comes out. (It has the academic genres, and makes the transition from "fun" to academic writing clearer--though probably still not clear enough.)

What I'd like to do at this stage, then, is to ask questions--or perhaps a series of variations on a single question, namely, what is the teacher's role vis-a-vis a textbook? What power does a textbook have over a teacher, and what power does a teacher have over a textbook?

1. Can a book's tone really undermine a teacher's authority? Can it do so actively? What is the real underlying problem here?

2. Can a rubric really inflate grades? If students read a rubric as entitling them to higher grades, what can the instructor do to resist or rechannel this expectation?

3. If the textbook grabs students' interest and motivates them to be creative, and then they're unwilling to take the extra steps to catch punctuation and grammatical errors, how can the instructor channel that motivation into these areas that the students seem less inclined to go?

4. Is it really true that "the textbook requires a complete transformation of teaching persona and approach"? It's true that any textbook that is not just a carbon copy of previous textbooks is going to put pressure on the instructor to make significant changes in how and what s/he teaches; but is a complete transformation really required? If it's true that "it cannot be easily adapted," which is to say that instructors have to work harder than they want to in order to adapt it to their existing teaching personas and approaches, what sorts of strategies might be developed to make the adaptation process easier?