Reply to comment

Hi Anne,

As I was looking over my last response, I realized that your question contained one assumption that I thought still needed to be unpacked:

OTOH, "shared understandings are...the goal of storytelling or rhetoric."
OTOH, "the goal is... moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar,
so that new insights...mutual criticism and refinement...
can be generated."

If I understand you correctly, you feel that these two goals contradict one another. But I am not sure why, as long as we assume a collective process in which students play an active role in setting the agenda and generating the frameworks and insights of discussion.

I suspect that I should have made it clearer that I do not regard any "shared understanding" as the final destination of a course or a lecture, but as a collectively-generated rhetorical platform that students may use to develop and extend indefinitely their own insights, as part of the looping activity that Paul described in his initial post. In my view, this notion of "shared understanding" as framework for discussion (what kinds of explanations might we entertain for discussing Swift's misogyny?) channels and directs both agreement and disagreement.

And knowing how to defend one's own views, how to relate one's position to others, how to agree intelligently and to disagree in a productive manner are all parts of the tacit knowledge that students need to learn in order to function in a college classroom. And I suppose that I always value well-articulated disagreements in the classroom over passive assent.

Best,

DM

PS: If you're interested, I can share with you a draft of an MLA presentation on cultural studies pedagogy that I did with other members of the Long 18th last winter. See

http://long18th.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/the-long-18th-mla-cultural-studies-pedagogy-panel-wrap-up/