College Composition & Communication - Volume 52, Issue 4, 2001

In the literature of critical pedagogy, resistance theory analyzes, ranks, and judges the emancipatory value of writing behaviors, privileging nonreproductive and transformative consciousness over cultural reproduction. The ranking of consciousness and the central metaphor of “reproduction” too often are naïvely applied, suppressing the political, social, and pedagogical value of writing that develops from within contradictory consciousness.

Drawing on classroom experiences, the author suggests that philosopher Donald Davidson's interpretive principle of charity can help explain why communication is impoverished or even impossible in classrooms governed by traditional, authoritarian practices that form a “pedagogy of severity.” If the classroom is to be a place of dialogue, learning, and mutual transformation, teachers should promote a “pedagogy of charity,” which assumes that students are rational beings with mostly true and coherent beliefs.

This essay presents a narrative description of experiences shared by the author, his father, and a Nez Perce man named Larry Greene. Those experiences are explored in relation to institutionalized education in order to provide insight into not only subjugated ways of knowing but also alternative places of learning.

Occasioned by the recent epidemic of violence in schools and the author’s memory of violent schoolyard rhymes, this essay explores the ways students experience contemporary writing pedagogy. To do so, the essay ranges from rhetoric’s historical discussion of the pleasures of writing to composition’s more recent interest in academic professionalism to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of masochism to the problem of teaching and learning in a consumer culture.