can be freed from the restricting world-view and learn to "rename" the world—to combine word and action in a
literacy which is as much a consciousness-raising as it is a study of grammar.

I believe that many of my students are also victims of this "culture of silence": years of discrimination and
poverty have trapped them in the same sense of alienation and powerlessness which afflicts the poor in the
Third World. Instead of reinforcing this dangerous passivity, I decided to use Freire’s pedagogy to create
writing projects that would foster true critical thinking and valuing skills.

| began by selecting Jonathan Kozol’s assault on American education—The Night is Dark and 1 am Far From
Home—as the practical basis (what Freire calls the "generative theme") for both the course content and the
research project. Kozol writes that U.S. public schools act as a system of state indoctrination which conditions
students to deny their own consciences. What Kozol proposes instead is "education by dialectic"—supplying

students with enough information to challenge the bias of the state, and thus to form their own conclusions

about the nature of reality.

This past semester, I began by having the class watch and discuss such films as Hearts and Minds, Harland

County USA, and Huelga! In addition, rather than lecture, I divided the students into nine groups; each was
responsible for creating a class presentation based on assigned readings in books | placed on reserve—readings
designed to allow the students to challenge the conventional assumptions of their society (as defined by Kozol).
These readings included Plato’s "Myth of the Cave," The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Cry of
the People, Missing, and essays by Martin Luther King. The resulting group projects were both entertaining and
stimulating: one group transformed the classroom into a UN General Assembly meeting, with the students
representing the West, the Communist bloc, and the Third World, debating the resolution that no nation has the
right to interfere in the affairs of any other; another group took Gulf and Western Corporation to "trial" in the
case of the death of a former employee of the corporation in the Dominican Republic; another group dramatized
the transcript of the trial of Rosika Schwimmer, an immigrant from Hungary who was denied citizenship
because of her pacifism.
_ Moreover, | asked each group to respond to its particular work not only on the basis of factual questions, but
also on the basis of values: "Do you think Nyere of Tanzania is right when he says that no one should have a
surplus of food until each person has enough to survive? What changes in your own lifestyle would you be
willing to make in order to insure that each person has enough?" Such questions forced students to clarify their
own values and to test those values by applying them to real-world dilemmas.

But the major project of the semester was, of course, the research paper, and it too served as a logical
extension of our exploration of Kozol’s thesis that American education is never neutral. Each student selected
for a topic some crucial event, person, or theme covered in high school textbooks, and then conducted enough
independent research to write a paper in which she evaluated how the public school texts presented her chosen
issue. Papers which investigated how American textbooks cover such topics as the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and the overthrow of Allende in Chile not only forced the students to
attempt to determine some "truth" by comparing conflicting versions of the same event; they also, judging by
students’ remarks to me, generated the "moral dilemma" Lawrence Kohlberg speaks of—the cognitive conflict
out of which moral growth may arise.

Surely, then, the abilities to think critically and to clarify and to apply values are important and necessary
parts of learning to write, and are just as much "basic skills" for our students as learning how to run a
computer or how to solve an algebra problem—or how to punctuate a sentence. In terms of my own
experiment, | cannot quantitatively measure the growth of these abilities. But for evidence that it does occur, I
can turn to the comments of my students, for whom the experience of the course has been more than an
academic exercise, more than writing another research paper. In the words of one: "The class made me a better
writer. More importantly, it made me a better person." _

Arthur G. Sullivan
EI Paso Community College

For further information, contact the author at E] Paso Community College, P.O. Box 20500, El Paso, Texas
79998.

 

 

 

 

Suanne D. Roueche, Editor
April 18, 1986, Vol. Vill, No. 12

INNOVATION ABSTRACTS is a publication of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, EDB 348, The University of Texas at Austin,
Austin, Texas 78712, (512) 471-7545. Subscriptions are available to nonconsortium members for $35 per year. Funding in part by the WK. Kellogg
Foundation and Sid W. Richardson Foundation. issued weekly when classes are in session during fall and spring terms and monthly during the summer.

The University of Texas at Austin, 1986 ; i
Lentiey duplications permitted only by MEMBER institutions for their own personnel. ISSN O199-106X

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