After having completed my reading for this week, I found myself with one big question left to address: why read in a culturally critical manner? What is to be achieved with this approach? I’m not unfamiliar with the approach and so I have my own ideas as to why, but I felt it would be useful for this week’s writing to puzzle out what possible goals professionals in the field such as Scholes and Linkon might have.
I can see the question taken from two approaches, the first being that it is impossible to not read a text in a culturally grounded way, but that reading critically as well enhances the reader’s metacognition as to why they are receiving and constructing a text the way they are. This seemed to be suggested in Linkon and Scholes by their assertions that students possess both some degree of agency and a necessary grounding in their own current culture.
The other approach to answering this question could be that the goal of reading in a culturally critical way is not just a more metacognitive method of reading, but a useful way to critique culture with an eye towards improving it. This is where things get sticky—if a teacher advocates culturally critical reading, are they by extension advocating critiquing and changing culture?
I think that this is the crux of why we don’t see more teachers advocating for culturally critical readings of text—this issue of critiquing our culture and what implications that carries with it. On one hand, some people are really quite content with the status quo and see little about culture that needs critiquing, while others don’t wish to be perceived as taking a political stand in the classroom, never mind that tacit acceptance of the culture is a political act as well.
As a current practicing educator and someone who attempts to consider issues of culture in literature when I discuss it with my students, I have found myself doing this careful dance in the classroom more times than I wish to remember. When reading Elie Weisel’s Night, I’m piqued at his use of the term “homosexual” for what is very clearly a pedophile in the story. When I discuss this cultural issue with my class, I find myself wondering, will I be seen as politicizing the classroom? If I don’t discuss the word choice in this instance, aren’t I politicizing it just the same? I don’t tell my students what opinions to hold, but if I have one in my heart, have I done something unfair as their mentor?
It’s been said by those with more experience than myself that critical thinking in the classroom suffers under the impression that it’s advocating a liberal mindset, and that such a political act has no place in the classroom. As Sholes and Linkon suggest, no reading can be done by a subject totally untouched by their culture. In the same way, I believe no classroom teacher of literature can teach it without committing a political act—it’s just that acts of critical thinking draw more attention.
I think you’re dead on with your observation that “that tacit acceptance of the culture is a political act as well.” I’m reminded of Schulman’s explanation of the original meaning of “to profess” — which is something many teachers strive to avoid. Gerald Graff has an essay about whether we should avoid or face head on these cultural questions in our class. Graff’s solution, written at the height of the so-called culture wars in the late eighties and early nineties, was that we don’t necessarily need to advocate one side or another, but that we should “teach the conflict” itself. I’ll dig up the citation for the article and add it to the syllabus as an optional, supplemental text.