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The Model Seminar:
Teaching Critical Thinking in a
Large Introductory Sociology Class
Douglas Sadao Aoki and Mark Jackson
University
of Alberta
Abstract
The Model Seminar: Teaching
Critical Thinking in a Large Sociology Course
Imagine
(or remember) a typical graduate seminar: about a dozen
students gathered around a table with their professor,
discussing a text they’ve read in advance. Now
please adjust your picture. First, make the students
younger: first and second-year undergraduates. Add a
teaching assistant (TA). Then open up the seating arrangement,
creating a broad, shallow arc. Now push three of the
walls of the room back, way back, and populate that new
space with the tiers of seats of a lecture theatre. Fill
those seats with 145 other undergraduates and re-imagine
the whole. This is what we call a “model seminar”;
this is how we teach introduction to sociology.
The
model seminar originates in a crucial question for undergraduate
education: what should an introduction introduce? While
this question is taken up every year by countless instructors
and administrators in countless institutions, the apparent
diversity of the answers is belied by how they characteristically
reduce the issue to a decision of content. In sociology,
the content of an introductory course invariably refers
to that subset of disciplinary knowledge established
(and thereby elevated) as “the fundamentals.” Less
commonly, such a course also aims at teaching critical
thinking.
Both fundamentals and critical
thinking are
traditional terms of pedagogical rhetoric, even if
they are much more fraught and complex than generally
acknowledged, but their mutual familiarity obscures
the severity of their differences. This article resurfaces
those divergences to illuminate the implications for
intro sociology and teaching in general. We might have
attempted an objective and neutral comparison of these
orientations, but that would have been disingenuous.
Instead, we admit our bias from the outset: we are
committed to teaching critical thinking as an introduction
to sociology—and perhaps to the life
of the mind in general.
We
do not necessarily reject other approaches, even those
that make us anxious. On the contrary, we believe that
introducing students to sociology in different ways is
essential for the vibrancy and openness of the field.
The alternative—standardizing the introduction
to sociology—surrenders the best of the discipline
to the worst of its institutionalizations. C. Wright
Mill’s (2000) sociological imagination has long
been a touchstone for the discipline and it remains so
for us, since imagining has never flourished under bureaucratic
regimentation or the eradication of diversity.
Nor
do we concede that we ultimately face a forced choice
between fundamentals and thinking. Instead, by insisting
that teaching critical thinking is radically different
from teaching fundamentals, we attempt to shift the very
understanding of fundamental.
Appreciating the real distance between the two approaches
allows the gap to be closed, just as recognizing the
specifics of the vastness of the world allows its circumnavigation
to return to the same place. In the best case, we insist,
critical thinking is the
most vital of fundamentals, and certainly more fundamental
than any possible assertion of “core” knowledge.
Following
the logic of this paradoxical coming together through
attending to difference, this article is both a theoretical
argument with pragmatic consequences and a return to
pedagogical tradition through poststructuralist heresy.
In other words, this is not a standard empirical study
that measures the effects of particular interventions
or compares them to those of other approaches. Instead,
this article close-couples our classroom techniques to
our theory, for our aim coincides with our method: theorizing
teaching through its concrete practices. To be more specific,
the particulars of the model seminar integrate five key
theoretical moments:
1. The performativity of discourse
2. Teaching as embodied in its forms and structures
3. The disruption of knowledge by critical thinking
4. The deconstructive inversion of center and supplement
5. The return to tradition as a means of contesting
convention.
In
a recent survey of 301 mostly American sociologists,
Wagenaar (2004) found that “postmodernism” was
one of the concepts considered least “core” to
introductory sociology (feminist theory was another).
This professional consensus might suggest that our approach
is so outside the discipline that it is irrelevant. But
our position is inspired by the noted sociology student,
Saul Bellow, who writes, “He had drawn back to
the periphery in order to return to the center from one
of his strange angles” (1989, 54). The marginality
that poststructuralism still maintains with respect to
a sociological core (that is, in the end, subject to
no general consensus) affords us a particularly effective
means of returning to the heart of its teaching.
The performative return to tradition
We begin with performative theory, in three easy steps.
The first comes from Lacanian psychoanalysis—appropriately
so, for it is the first step taken by Jacques Lacan (for
example, 1966, 1973, 1975, 2001) himself: to think all
human relationships in terms of language. This is hardly
controversial for teaching, which has long been recognized
as a practice in and of language. The crucial transition
from language to poststructuralist discourse is made
by Michel Foucault: the definition of discourses as
“practices that systematically form the objects of
which they speak” (1972, 49). The final step is taken
by Judith Butler: more specifically, discourse is language
recognized for its performativity, for how it performs
or constitutes the social world (Butler, 1990, 1993, 1996,
1997). In pedagogical terms, discourse produces the classroom
and everything within it. The happy consequence is that
teaching and its effects are highly susceptible to discursive
tactics. But which of those tactics promote critical thinking?
To be more specific, which pedagogical structures work?
Because
our aim is to teach critical thinking, the model seminar
strategy is both dictated from above, by the theoretical
consequences of that aim, and informed from below, by
practices, demands, and effects in the classroom. A curious
paradox results: the model seminar may appear radical,
but it actually derives from both established practices of teaching and modest, though consequential, shifts
in established thinking about teaching.
This is no accident. We are by no means advocating an
extremist rejection of traditional teaching. Despite
our criticisms, proposals, and provocations, our primary
mission of teaching critical thinking is a very traditional
goal; most teaching sociologists at least talk that talk.
What makes our approach different is that, by taking
that mission very seriously, we drastically transform
conventional sociological pedagogy. In other words, by
hewing radically to tradition (historically honored principles,
aims and practices), we end up no less radically contesting
convention (uninterrogated hegemonic presumptions).
Image
c/o random brad
Trading teaching spaces
The
institutional obstacle to teaching critical thinking
in intro sociology is typically logistical and depressingly
familiar: too many students and too few resources. A
class the size of a seminar, small enough to allow a
wide range of innovative and effective teaching techniques,
has long been a mainstream. Of course, for most large
universities, an intro seminar is unthinkable for economic
and institutional reasons, and will remain so for the
foreseeable future. If we are not to resign ourselves
to the inevitability of lecturing—and the lecture
has been, whatever its other virtues, traditionally problematic
as a means of teaching critical thinking—we must
look to other methods, which are practical for large
classes. One such approach, the model seminar, has worked
successfully in our department for the last seven years.
It derives from both the fantastic and the traditional,
from the seminar as an unattainable fantasy at the introductory
level and as an established institution in graduate school.
The
impossibility of an intro seminar is not a complete negative,
since it suggests that a workable approximation could
be just what we need. The specifics of that approximation,
however, are not at all obvious. Still, there is a very
familiar undergraduate model: the tutorial that traditionally
supplements a large-scale lecture. We ourselves would
have happily adopted the conventional multiple-tutorial
system, were it not for funding restrictions which limited
each course, regardless of enrollment, to a maximum of
one teaching assistant (TA). Necessity thus prompted
the invention of the model seminar, which both sustains
and inverts the tutorial. While the tutorial has been
widely acknowledged as good for critical thinking, the
unsettling correlative is that the mass lecture is not
nearly as good, whatever its other virtues. At the level
of theory, the policy implication is straightforward:
the lecture should be replaced by the tutorial. This
is a standard Derridean move: displace the center by
its supplement (Bennington and Derrida, 1993; Derrida,
1976, 1981, 1982).
Of
course, a 160 student tutorial isn’t feasible,
so some drastic modifications are necessary. Our solution
once again adapts traditional classroom procedures, and
returns to the lecture that we have just rejected. If
heeding a lecturer is a legitimate way to learn, then
observing critical thinking should be just as valid.
Without falling into the behaviorist ideology of modeling,
we contend that students can learn to think by observing
other students thinking. So if a seminar is a privileged
venue for critical thinking, then many students can learn
to think by witnessing a few others in a seminar. There
is an established precursor: “fishbowl” pedagogy,
in which students learn by watching a small group of
their peers in action (Bean & Brynildsen, 1969; Beck,
1999; Dutt, 1997; Neimeyer et al., 2003). This is the
structural heart of our strategy: a seminar that operates
in front of the rest of class, in order to teach both seminar
participants and “audience” members to think
critically.
INSERT
PICTURE
Twelve
to sixteen students, depending on class size, join the
instructor and the TA at the front of the lecture hall,
constituting the “model seminar.”
Each class, a different set of students comes down to convene
a seminar around different texts and issues. Unlike the
typical graduate seminar, which closes roughly into a circle,
the model seminar forms an arc that gently concaves towards
the audience. This shape is both instrumental—it
allows the model seminar to be seen and heard by the “audience”—and
potently figurative—it opens to the rest of the class.
This materializes Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) proposition
that while space undoubtedly influences the social relationships
it enfolds—as in the classroom that physically
sustains the pedagogical expectation of the lecture—space
itself is not simply given, but produced. Space is literally
the shape of performativity. Reconfiguring the discursive
relationships of teacher/student, knowledge/thinking, and
speaking/writing reconfigures the space of those relationships.
It’s a theoretical and pedagogical episode of Trading
Spaces: a makeover
of a room into something very different and more hospitable
to critical thinking.
Following
the traditional protocols of a graduate seminar or an
undergraduate tutorial, all students, whether in the
seminar or audience, are assigned the same texts to read
in advance, and seminarists prepare questions and comments.
The model seminar then proceeds like its graduate forbearer,
albeit at a suitably more elementary level. For the first
hour of an 80-minute class, we limit discussion to the
seminar proper. After that, the floor is opened up, so
that the audience can respond to what has been said on
stage. Seminarists get addressed directly—the first
name of each is written on a whiteboard behind and over
her/him—and they never need to be encouraged to
answer back. The exchange between the seminar and the
rest of the class takes up the remainder of the period.
Typically, time constraints mean only a fraction of audience
members who wish to speak are able to do so.
Our demand that students speak in front of a large
class is predictably fraught. Some students can’t
drop the course quickly enough when they learn of this
requirement, although usually about the same number transfer
in, brought to the course by friends already enrolled.
And those who remain show or admit varying degrees of
anxiety. On the other hand, even students who began the
course petrified of public speaking are regularly happy,
proud, and even grateful for being able to achieve something
personally difficult and therefore significant. In more
general terms, we promote the public speaking aspect
of the model seminar as one of its specific advantages.
Intro sociology, like many other courses in the social
sciences and humanities, has regularly been assailed
by students as irrelevant to their professional futures.
But we can credibly present the model seminar as training
them in tangible skills—not just public speaking
and debate, but also critical thinking, writing papers,
and communicating electronically—which are
all valuable in sociology and portable across future
courses and careers.
With
this approach, the conventional examination is untenable.
We are less interested in knowledge transfer in any conventional
sense, which means that direct assessments of knowledge
absorbed are correlatively less relevant. Instead, we
return to what is venerable in the academy, archetypal
for education, and cherished across many disciplines,
but is nonetheless radical for large classes of intro
sociology: the essay. And we do so for the most traditional
reasons. The enduring benefits of students writing essays
from their first year are plain and widely acknowledged,
even if a depressing number of undergraduates have never
had to produce one for a sociology course until their
fourth year (if ever).
Image c/o eschipul
The lecture versus the model seminar: resisting the logic
of knowledge
Insofar
as the displacement of the lecture by the model seminar
radically reconfigures the structure of our course, it
effects no less a change in its
“substance”—conventionally framed as
content. Intro sociology is troubled by a particular incoherence:
on the one hand, there is widespread agreement that there
is “core” knowledge—fundamentals
by another name—for the discipline. On the other
hand, there is equally widespread disagreement about exactly
what knowledge is core. That dispute is echoed by the differing
content of introductory textbooks (Keith & Ender, 2004a,
2004b; Wagenaar 2004a, 2004b). A recent survey that aimed
at identifying the core of sociological knowledge ultimately
didn’t come out as expected: “90 percent or
more of the sociologists in the study [held] somewhat different
perceptions about what it means to study sociology” (Keith & Ender
2004b, 39). The lack of consensus undermines the very notion
of fundamentals for the discipline. This foundational problem
does not make the study of any particular set of fundamentals
worthless, since sociology, while eminently criticizable,
still sustains itself, albeit by introducing itself to
students any of a multitude of cores. But it does suggest
that what is crucial to introductory sociology cannot be
discovered in any particular knowledge or configuration
thereof, but rather in something that develops through
the consideration of what, in current and historical institutional
practice, are distinctly different sets of concepts, topics,
and skills.
The
core may vary from classroom to classroom, but something
more fundamental stays the same: the structural and operational
identity between knowledge and text. That is, the core
is constituted by both the “things” that
are taught—whether identified as social facts,
theories, methodologies, histories, or any other objects
of knowledge—and the texts that articulate
those things. In practice, knowledge and text are barely
distinct. The immanence of knowledge to text may seem
commonsensical, but it is manifestly a social and political
construction of knowledge. To return to the opposition
of fundamentals to thinking, the paradigmatic introduction
to sociology presumes that it is (core) knowledge that
is fundamental. This pedagogical ideology elevates the
textbook as a center of the intro course, the twin of
the performative center, the lecture. The textbook is
the repository of knowledge, directly correlative to
the lecture as the established means of its communication.
We take a very different
view. For us, introductory textbooks can be valuable
and productive because of they are deeply incoherent. A sociological fundamental
is that language is an archetypal cultural production.
Yet this simple and hegemonic proposition has huge consequences,
especially for teaching. It means acts of language are
not just subject to familiar social forces, constraints,
biases, and influences; they are subject to them in an
exemplary way. If we take this canonical fundamental
seriously, language should never be regarded as simply
a means of communication; writing and reading should
never be reduced to skill, competence, or clarity. Instead,
every text—including every line of every intro textbook—should
be regarded as a situation of language as politics, as
a fraught place where power, ideology, and institutional
and personal agendas are played out, sustained and—if
we are conscientious and fortunate—contested.
Every fundamental of sociological knowledge, insofar
as it is inevitably spoken, heard, written, read, and
thought in language, merits not straightforward absorption
as knowledge, but interrogation as a cultural production.
The
model seminar strategy thus merely acknowledges what
is traditionally fundamental to the discipline. To that
extent, it is more sociological than the canonical intro
classroom. To adapt our model adage, any classroom in
which everyone is supposed to think alike surrenders
the right to regard itself as critical. In this regard,
the classroom must not be regarded as different from
any other socio-political forum. With that recognition,
the adage can be turned into a pragmatic pedagogical
principle: if our primary purpose is to provoke students
into thinking critically, then we should structure a
class so that they can think not the same thing, but
many different things. The course that devotes itself
to critical thinking must relegate the replication of
knowledge to, at best, secondary status.
Image c/o ruotsala
The sociological text versus the sociological textbook
This,
then, is the other radical face of the model seminar:
to sustain pedagogical consistency and integrity, it
must oppose the logic of thinking to the logic of knowledge.
Such a cleavage reconfigures the place and deployment
of texts. Critical thinking forces us to recognize reading
is neither a competence nor a skill, but a definitive
social practice. The most important task for the student
can no longer be the absorption of texts, the extraction
of main ideas, or the learning of facts, concepts or
theories, but rather the use of texts to think critically—that
it, the use of texts to think independently and differently.
Of course, critical thinking is no more susceptible to universal definition than core
knowledge (Grauerholz &
Bouma-Holtrop, 2003; Geertsen, 2003) and no less dependent
on cultural and institutional politics. And this is
why no definition of critical thinking can be found in our text. We are not proposing and
would never propose to establish the “true” nature
of critical thought—but we do believe that
it can only emerge as sociological imagining insofar
as it exceeds the learning of any element of knowledge
posited as core or treated as truth embodied in a text.
Since sociological texts
are still central to our model seminars, their reading
might appear to be an obvious point of convergence between
our teaching method and that of the conventional introductory
course. In this case, appearances are deceiving. We have
abjured intro textbooks and used only primary sources.
The modular nature of the model seminars makes it appropriate
to use a collection of readings that we assemble ourselves.
This tactic is hardly radical in itself. The course reader
is a familiar intro resource, so institutionalized that
publishers regularly offer companion readers to their
big, overpriced textbooks.
Despite
the classroom primacy of the textbook, it is the paradigmatic
secondary source. To be more precise, the textbook is
emblematic of performance of two kinds of work: the “extraction” of
the “main concepts” of some primary source
and the clear “explanation” of them. The
textbook is the end product of a “correct” reading
of primary sources. But extraction and explanation do
not comprise all of reading. Instead, they merely structure
a particular discursive practice. To parallel Foucault’s
(1980) notion of a regime of truth, we could say that
this is a regime of reading, one that structures a parallel
regime of teaching practices (Aoki, 2000). The conventional
bundling of textbooks with test banks of multiple choice
exams is only too fitting, for reading constituted as
(and restricted to) extraction and explanation aims at
precisely what such exams are meant to assess: the sustenance
of knowledge through its reproduction. The pedagogical
logic of this mode of reading therefore recapitulates
that of the lecture.
Since
the model seminar strategy rejects the logic of the lecture,
it must also reject the mode of reading embodied and
sustained by the textbook. Reading as extraction and
explanation, like any mode of reading that valorizes
its own correctness, aims at a classroom in which everyone
reads exactly the same way and extracts exactly the same “content.” It
is deeply ironic that the hegemonic criterion for the
excellence of a textbook is how it promotes the easy “absorption” of
knowledge, for, if we return to our pedagogical adage,
absorption—which is another kind of reproduction—uses knowledge
precisely to extinguish thinking (Aoki, 2002).
The
model seminar reader is therefore constructed through
a very different logic. We seek texts that will push
students to think at more than one level; we seek texts
that take up positions provocative enough to elicit different
responses from students. We reject the indoctrination
of students to read the same texts the same way and absorb
the same fundamental knowledge. Instead, we aim to demonstrate
that real and competent students (and professors and
TAs) can read the same texts but come legitimately to
different and even opposing conclusions. The model seminar
is therefore distinguished from conventional approaches
because it takes the intro sociological fundamental of
the cultural situation of language to its implacable,
reflexive conclusion: reading an intro sociological text
is itself a situated cultural practice.
With
this in mind, we seek primary sources by sociologists
that are, in general practice, distinguishable from secondary
sources in how they generate fierce debate as to their
meanings, import, and implications. We seek texts that
connect with the lives of our students, such as analyses
of terrorism, Canadian identity, anorexia, gay marriage,
affirmative action, interracial dating, student drinking,
masculinity and violence, abortion and Christianity,
relationships on the internet, and undergraduate education.
But we also seek texts that connect with students’ lives
by displacing or undermining their ideological foundations.
In opposition to the celebration of the university as
a place where students come to slake their thirsts to
learn, we proceed in the conviction that our students
(and we ourselves) generally come to the classroom
“knowing” far, far too much: for instance,
that Canada is the best country in the world, that terrorism
wears an Islamic face, that First Nations students get
unfairly preferential treatment in universities, that human
life begins at conception or that human life begins at
birth, that the students themselves aren’t binge
drinkers, that people who get dates over the internet are
pathetic losers, that the mission of intro sociology is
to teach them the fundamentals of the discipline. Our job
is not to add to that surfeit of knowledge-taken-as-truth,
but to nudge students into thinking about its heretofore
unacknowledged contingency.
Rereading the textbook
While
we have not attempted to measure the effects of the model
seminar strategy and its array of techniques in any comprehensive
way, some telling points can be gleaned from the standard
course evaluations by our students. While we have been
generally happy with our scores (a mean rating of 4.6
out of 5.0 over six years) and comments, occasionally
students have complained that they learned nothing.
We
interpret their insistence of nothing learned as simultaneously
sincere and hyperbolic. As educational researcher Stanley
Varnhagen (2004) has noted, students learn from even
the worst of teachers and courses, although they can
learn more effectively from better ones. But that doesn’t
mean that our most dissatisfied students can be dismissed
as merely wrong. In fact, according to the discursive
theory that motivates the model seminar, such judgments
of “wrongness” can only be sustained if language
acts are speciously reduced to communication (and if
powerful critiques by Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Butler,
Jean-François Lyotard, Slavoj Žižek, and many
others are ignored).
Despite
how intro sociology typically introduces students to
language by elevating that reduction to truth, a better
reading is that such students are
“right,” albeit unwittingly so. Their passionate
rejection of the sociology of knowledge/language/ideology
we teach is in itself an affirmation of that teaching.
That is, students protest the model seminar because they recognize that it disrupts the close-coupling of knowledge to
learning that they have been taught to accept as the true
face of education. Of course, while they decry that disruption,
we embrace it as the foundational trope for introduction
to sociology.
This
difference in judgment, like any social phenomenon, is
susceptible to sociological inquiry. The claim to have
learned nothing from the model seminar is revealing when
framed by the nature of its readings: primary sociological
texts. Such readings define disciplinary literature as
such, yet are held by some students as useless for learning
sociology. It must be noted that the complainants did
not, in general, reject these primary texts because they
were too difficult to understand. Nonetheless, their
rejection was at the level of discursive form—what Lacanian
psychoanalysis identifies as the signifier, the material “stuff” of
language, as opposed to the “content” or
signified. A relevant thought experiment is telling:
if those primary texts had been reworked and repackaged
in typical textbook format—organized in a
standard way, edited down to digestible summaries, illustrated
with photos and colorfully boxed examples, etc.—we think
that students would have felt they had learned a lot.
This seeming contradiction is eminently explicable. A
necessary element of the
“hidden curriculum” is that the institution
of its un-hidden counterpart performatively and ideologically
configures the student to absorb what constitutes legitimate
teaching, modes of reading and pedagogical texts. The
students who complained they learned nothing from the
model seminar did so because they had previously absorbed
those ideological forms only too well. Teaching has been
and continues to be defined by the textbook as the exemplar
of the secondary text—so much so that it has
become much more primary than primary sources, at least
in the undergraduate classroom. For many students, knowledge
is only recognizable as such when it has gone through
the secondary process.
We
found this inversion of the primary and the secondary
both fascinating and troubling. Our response, this past
year, was to reintroduce the textbook, with a suitable
adjustment. We retained our reader, although we shortened
most of its texts, and paired each seminar’s reading
with a selection from the textbook. Reprising our essay
tactic, seminarists were asked to make connections between
the two texts, as one operational mode of critical thinking.
This was a very conventional exercise, but we tried to
move beyond convention by exploiting the differences
between the student perceptions of the textbook and the
reader.
Just
as the complaint about learning nothing is, at the theoretical
level, bound to the institutional status of the textbook
as the paradigmatic secondary source, the debate we sought
to provoke between students is likewise bound to the
complementary status of the primary text. That is, while
some students believed they could learn nothing from
reading a journal article, many more believed that they
could challenge the positions and arguments of the latter—for
example, arguments on abortion and Christianity, or masculinity
and sexual violence—in a way that they rarely
did with a textbook. That difference derived immediately
from the institutional legitimation of the textbook and
its pedagogy as delivering knowledge qua truth. From
our perspective, this legitimation, which is conventionally
immune to interrogation, is deeply alarming and completely
counter to what we are trying to teach.
It
was because we think the textbook was so fundamentally
flawed, however, that we returned to it. That return
did shift our teaching, so that one of our prime missions
became to teach that a textbook should be read, not for
knowledge as impossible truth nor the imposture of fundamentals,
but rather as a paradigmatic instance of the social,
as an ideological object always situated by the cultural
politics which pervade it. When we ask students to connect
the provocative texts of the reader and the canonical
selections from the textbook, what we intend is that
both should be interrogated as discourse and neither
should be treated as truth. We hope, therefore, that
we have productively inverted our relationship to the
standard intro textbook: before, we renounced it because
it was so problematic; now, we exploit it for the same
reason.
What
is happy and terrifying about widely used intro textbooks
is how well they serve our new purpose. Carrothers and
Benson (2003) make that very point with respect to the
way such textbooks treat symbolic interactionism, but
the problem is much wider than that. For instance, we
begin our course by pointing out that while our textbook
identifies five theoretical perspectives for sociology—symbolic
interactionist, functionalist, conflict, feminist, and
postmodern—others give three or four. We note that
while our text states that one of the major problems
with postmodern theory is that it does not ask questions
about power, Michel Foucault, the figure who stands in
most for postmodernism in sociology, is best known for
theorizing power/knowledge. We show how the book repeats
the venerable intro sociology error of telling the tale
of the many Inuit words for snow, which linguist Geoffrey
Pullum (1991) refuted years ago. Similar instances can
be found in every chapter (Henslin, Glenday, Duffy & Pupo,
2003).
Some
of these examples are error of fact, but, in good sociological
fashion, facts are always social and therefore eminently
well-suited for sociological examination. More importantly,
though, such failures are not indictments of our textbook
or any other particular one, but rather indicative of
the general problem with the textbook as a discursive
form that necessarily abridges, summarizes, and reduces
complex and contested social phenomena into systematic,
consistent, and easily digestible chunks, and is always
suspect as a result.
Taking the street, not
holding the fort
It might be complained
that we have proposed little that is new in this article.
We would cheerfully admit it. The specific novelty of
the model seminar strategy both arises from traditional
principles, such as the promotion of critical thinking,
and results in traditional practices, such as the essay.
Even our theoretical trope of the inversion of supplement
and centre is hardly new, inasmuch as it goes back to
Derrida of the early 1970s, although Derrida unfortunately
remains a novelty to much of sociology.
If what we have proposed
and argued seems radical in any way, we would insist
that it is radically embedded in tradition—but
in a particular way, for we understand the utility of
tradition as embodied in its mobility. The inspiration
is once again a military trope, proposed by Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari (1987): instead of sustaining
the logos of
intro sociology as “holding
the fort”
of canonical knowledge, we run under the banner of
what they call nomos—taking the street.
The concept of the fort
resonates with the conventional metaphor of fundamentals
as the foundation of a discipline figured as an edifice.
We are simply recognizing that an edifice is a poor figure
for the flexibility and motility immanent to critical
thinking, whether in the university classroom or on the
streets of the world. We want to introduce students to
sociology as something other than a thing so burdened
that it can never budge from its foundations. Finally,
we also admit that we have raised more questions than
we have answered, but, traditionalists that we are, we
reiterate the long-established satisfaction in doing
so.
Image
c/o gsgeorge
References
Aoki, D. S. (2000). The
Thing never speaks for itself: Lacan and the politics
of clarity. Harvard Educational Review 70, 347-369.
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