Performing Dissident Thinking through Writing

Theoretically informed by Julia Kristeva’s linkage of political dissidence with thinking, this chapter explores a deconstructive tool used to develop dissident thinking through writing in the post-secondary classroom: the “Proprioceptive Question,” a central feature of Metcalf and Simon’s Proprioceptive Writing™ (2002). After this method’s fundamentals are addressed, the devaluing of subjectivity throughout schooling, as played out through literacy learning, is surveyed. Analysis of the Proprioceptive Question in terms of its discursive components and examples of its academic uses follow in order to understand what makes this question such a powerful method for developing subjective engagement in the university setting. Just as dissidents separate from existing regimes to organize their opposition, this chapter concludes that student writers via the Proprioceptive Question create space between themselves and their thought content to challenge their own ideas. Thus the question serves as a form of political intervention, a disruptive pedagogical practice.

The Risk of Rhetorical Inquiry

In this chapter, the author provides a theoretical outline for a practice of rhetorical inquiry in the college writing classroom, and focuses on three conditions that permit this inquiry to enact a “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler, 1999). The first condition calls for pedagogues to amplify the performative dimension of language to disrupt what Dewey terms the “quest for certainty.” Second, students and teachers work to reconfigure their current perspectives through undergoing dialogic encounters between incongruous perspectives. Third, these performative and dialogic encounters must reiterate with increasing complexity and within increasingly unfamiliar and complex contexts. After an extensive theoretical exposition of these three conditions for a disruptive pedagogy, I present a few illustrative instances in the college writing classroom.

Negotiating Disruption in Visual Arts Education

The visual arts has a long tradition of providing a space for artists to take up disruptive practices such a, challenging what is known, questioning and exploiting cultural codes, and providing alternative social practices. This chapter is interested in how visual arts students take up these disruptive possibilities within the complexity of secondary schools; a space historically characterised by hierarchal power, surveillance, and institutionalized structure. This chapter draws upon interviews with art teachers to examine the discourses surrounding their observations of ‘disruptive’ art created in their classrooms. In particular, the author focuses on the stories of two students who through their artwork explored and transgressed normalised notions of sexualities and bodies, which was signalled to be problematic within the school context by the teachers. This discussion explores how teachers, students, and the general school community respond and negotiate the tension and discomfort that can arise from ‘disruptive’ art.

Smart People Learning

This chapter highlights instructional practices informed by an Interactive Learning Model (Johnston & Dainton, 1996) that fosters retrospective sensemaking (Weick, 1995) and heightens reflective practice (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004; Schon, 1987). This disruptive pedagogy reveals the symbiotic nature of theory and practice and teaches aspiring and practicing leaders that effective leadership is all about learning.

Locating and Loving the Personal

In this chapter the author takes up the use of narrative inquiry within a secondary English language arts methods course. She focuses on two discrete moments that took place during one class session, where she and her students shared and discussed personal narratives. In particular, she explores the pedagogy that might be required to support a group of pre-service teachers’ work to become a connected knowing group, including the disruptive nature of vulnerability and risk taking.

Coevolving through Disrupted Discussions on Critical Thinking, Human Rights and Empathy

The resulting exchanges of knowledge laid the ground for knowledge and cultural exchanges in interactive, unexpected educational processes.

Creating Tension

This chapter will critically examine the disruptive pedagogies being employed during the initiation, transition, and extension phases of a virtual school culture and its impact upon the virtual school community, pre-service, and ultimately, in-service-teachers. Through the virtual, it is intended that pre-service teachers (who have a placement at this school of ideas) may be able to experience new ways of teaching and learning and, in turn, start to step away from their schooled pasts in order to reflect upon, critically assess and then enact needed change. As pre-service teachers are the potential creators of yet unchartered pedagogies, they are a vital resource. Provocation will be examined using an Action Research model.

Setting the Stage for Professionalism

This chapter discusses the problem of professional writing students transitioning from an academic environment to a work environment. Even the best students struggle in their upper-level courses as instructors expect a higher level of professionalism from their more advanced students. The authors argue that the conflict between the “student” identity and the “professional” identity should be made explicit in the writing classroom. Students can learn to develop and perform new professional roles by employing a theatrical approach, a disruptive innovation that adopts Constantin Stanislavsky’s system to the professional writing classroom. Although the approach begins as role-playing, the emphasis is on becoming the professional self. Specific assignments, projects, and student survey responses are discussed.

Disrupting Disruption

As educators look for productive ways to encourage students to disrupt their deeply held beliefs, they often turn toward liberatory pedagogies. Such pedagogical practices, however, often provoke student resistance to what is seen as attempts at indoctrination to liberal politics. This chapter explores responses to student resistance, especially Kopelson’s (2003) performance of neutrality, and posits instead a pedagogical practice based in the theory of invitational rhetoric, one that asks instructors to (attempt to) relinquish their intent to persuade students. This invitational pedagogy provides a strategy to reduce nonproductive student resistance while allowing for critical inquiry within the college writing classroom.

Web 2.0 and Conscientização

This chapter introduces multiliteracy as an extension of traditional notions of critical pedagogy that uphold student reflection in and about their world through dialogue as a crucial component of becoming a truly literate human. Students immersed in digital media should be encouraged to investigate and create multimedia in the 21st century classroom. However, instructors not familiar with digital media can find opening their classrooms to digital texts a risk to their professional identities. Just as true education should help students challenge, resist, and modify their perceptions of reality, educators must constantly disrupt their own classrooms to experience true conscientização, or consciousness of consciousness along with students.