T-008 Power and Pedagogy: Self, Society and Transformation

(In Place of) Syllabus

Houman Harouni
houmanharouni@gmail.com
310-801-1127
Office Hours: By Appointment

In this course, the syllabus will be formed in the process of our study together. Though
the teaching team and I have an educated sense of the topics that relate to this work, we
also know from experience that a fixed syllabus can’t be responsive enough to what the
work demand. Readings and activities answer to our class discussions and your
individual writings, and so they depend on the collection of our experiences. There are,
nonetheless, some predictable elements, which I will outline briefly. These include basic
texts, group meetings, assignments and grade options.

Purpose:

The purpose of this course is to help students place themselves in relation to fundamental
problems in the practice and theory of education. The course focuses on dilemmas that
arise from contradictions at the core of contemporary society and which cannot be solved
through simple reasoning or by applying so-called "best practices." These contradictions
involve class, identity and other relations within inherently hierarchical structures:
Schooling, which acts as a channel to economic access, at the same time functions as a
chief social stratifier; the critical and well-intentioned educator who tries to give his or
her students better access to positions of power, at the same time reincorporates the
students into the oppressive structures that marginalized them; the curriculum designer
working hard to create a curriculum relevant to the lives of learners at the same time
helps perpetuate a school system that by definition is set apart from families, useful work,
and communities.

Because structures that form such contradictions also form the way we perceive and act
upon the world, the individual tends to either not see the dilemmas or else experience
them in a fractured way that leads to excessive hope or despair. In this course we use the
lenses of critical theory, political economy, and psychology to reevaluate such problems.
This course engages students in a process that is both intellectual and experiential,
individual and collective, theoretical and practical. The aim is to use a rigorous process of
inquiry to arrive at new ways of seeing and acting that allow us to hold the complexity of
our problems and imagine new, radical modes of interaction. The course pedagogy
mirrors this process and is tailored to the particular experience of the students. Issues
discussed include the role of class, race, institutions, politics, and history in education.
We will closely study the work of educationalists such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks,
theorists such as Michel Foucault and members of the Frankfurt School, and other writers
and philosophers from a wide range of backgrounds.

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Design:

Several disciplines inform the design of the course. Critical theory and political economy
help us reexamine education from a perspective that takes material and cultural
conditions into account. Most of our readings will come from this tradition. Philosophy,
particularly dialectical thought, gives a framework to the way we try to move from
unexamined assumptions toward a rich and thoughtful approach to topics – a framework
that will become particularly important to the writing process. Finally, psychology –
including Piagetian interviewing as wells as gestalt and group dynamics theories – help
us create an environment where we can safely and effectively question ourselves.
Throughout the semester I will try to introduce each of these elements with some depth.

The course design requires a real emotional and intellectual commitment from the
teaching team. It requires the same of the students. At the same time, whatever resistance
you might feel toward the design as the course progresses will be welcome and taken up
as an extremely serious topic of exploration and discussion.

Discussions:

Class discussions are perhaps the most important aspect of the course. We begin precisely
at 4:10 pm. It is important that everyone arrives on time, because what occurs later in a
session can only become intelligible through remembering and discussing what occurred
earlier. There is no way to make up a missed session. Only health and family
emergencies can count as excused absences. No screens (laptops, tablets, etc.) are
allowed during class discussions.

Readings:

As of now, there is only one required text for the course. This is:

1. Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

It is important that we all have the same edition of the text, so that in our discussions we
can be on the same page, so to speak.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is available as a pdf from Harvard and can be found here.

As mentioned, the order of the readings, as well as additional texts, will be determined in
the course of our study. These will be, for the most part, dense and complicated pieces
and require close attention as well as extensive preparation – give yourself plenty of time
to read, to look up appropriate sources, and to add plenty of notes and comments to the
margins. We will rarely have more than one text assigned for each session. Once again,

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no screens are allowed during class sessions. Therefore, please bring a printed copy of the
assigned texts to the class discussions.

Writing Assignments:

Reading Responses:

Brief reading responses—at most two-paragraphs long—are due every week, by noon on
Tuesdays. Your response should describe a dilemma that you encounter either in the
reading itself or in your relationship to it. If you can’t locate a dilemma, writing about a
confusion will do! We take these responses very seriously and use them to structure class
discussions.

Biweekly dialectical rewrites:

Written assignments are due every other Friday, at 3:00 pm, beginning with the second
week of the semester.

The written section of the course is based on a method that I have come to refer to as
“dialectical rewrite process.” In the first assignment of the course you will write three
pages about an issue related to education that is particularly important to you. In general,
I say that you should only choose a topic that at some point has kept you awake at night.
For the rest of the semester you will work to rewrite these three pages

The rewrite process has almost nothing to do with the traditional draft-and-revise format
that is taught in schools. Instead, you will receive detailed and intentional feedback from
your TFs that will help you move the paper through various stages of critical thought.
The final product, in our experience, is a completely unexpected and exciting piece of
thought.

Grade options:

I strongly recommend that this course be taken on a Pass/No Pass basis. However,
students can request a letter grade. A passing grade or an ‘A’ means that you have
attended all sessions, completed all assignments, participated in the discussions, and that
you have turned in a final paper. There will be no way of making up for a missed session.
Please avoid them, barring emergencies. Missing an assignment will also result in an
incomplete grade.

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Potential Readings

The readings, listed below, could potentially become a part of our syllabus. They are here
only to give a sense of the types of texts and authors we might engage in our classes.

Theodor Adorno. Selections from Minima Moralia.

Hannah Arendt. “Crisis in education,” from

James Baldwin. “Everybody’s protest novel,” from Notes of Native Son.

Roland Barthes. “Writers, intellectuals, teachers,” in Image, Music, Text.

Wildred Bion. “Group dynamics,” in Experiences in Groups.

Chuang-Tzu. Inner Chapters (A. C. Graham’s translation). Chapter 2.

Franz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. Selections.

Michel Foucault. “Prison talk” in Power/Knowledge.

Paulo Freire. “Education and conscientizacao,” in Education for Critical

Consciousness.

Eric Hobsbawm. “Political shoemakers,” in Uncommon People.

Max Horkheimer. “The concept of man,” in Critique of Instrumental Reason.

Zora Neal Hurston. Selected Essays.

Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society. Intro, Chapters 1-3.

Linda Kauffman. “The long goodbye: Against personal testimony,” in American

feminist thought at century's end: A reader.

Karl Marx. Various selections: “Estranged Labor,” “Theses on Feuerbach,”

“Critique of the Gotha Program,” etc.

Herbert Marucse. One-Dimensional Man, Chapters 1, 4

Richard E. Miller. “The arts of complicity: Pragmatism and the culture of

schooling,” in Cross Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader.

Plato. The Republic (Reeve’s translation). Ch. 6,7.

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Jacques Ranciere. Emancipated Spectator, Ch. 1, 2

Linda Tillman (2004). “(Un)Intended Consequences? The Impact of the Brown

v. Board of Education Decision on the Employment Status of Black Educators.”
Education and Urban Society, Vol. 36 No. 3, 280-303

Cornel West. “The dilemma of the Black intellectual.” Cultural Critique, No. 1
(Autumn, 1985), pp. 109-124