polyphony and pedagogic authority

Polyphony and Pedagogic AuthorityAuthor(s): Linda McDowellSource: Area, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 241-248Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003454 .

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Area (1994) 26.3, 241-248

Polyphony and pedagogic authority

Linda McDowell Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN

Summary The acceptance that knowledge is positional has had a marked impact on geographical research practices and on writing, leading to widespread acceptance that there is a politics as well as a poetics in the production of texts. The representation of subject voices has become a desired aim. Less attention, however has been paid to the politics of reading polyphonic texts. This paper raises a number of questions about the implications that the recognition that knowledge is contextual, multiple and situated might have for pedagogic authority.

Stimulated by feminist and postmodern critiques of the social construction of knowledge, there is now an interesting and expanding debate about the ways in which contemporary geographical texts reflect, re-present and exclude different voices. Increasingly it is recognised that there is a politics both to the practices of research and in textual construction. Thus geographers are beginning to consider different ways in which we might write so as to allow not only the voices of those

multiple others whom we study to be heard in our texts, but also to include our own voices (Crang 1992; Keith 1992; Pile 1991; Pile and Rose 1992; Sidaway 1992;

Watts 1991). In this project, the work of so-called new ethnographers in anthropology has been a particularly significant influence on geographers con cerned with questions about power, positionality and the social construction of knowledge, especially in their focus on the representational politics of textual construction (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988; Marcus 1992; Okley and Callaway 1992).

In this article, however, I should like to turn the focus from the production of texts to their consumption, from writing to reading, and from there to teaching. In the specific context of undergraduate teaching, I want to explore the implications of these new methods of representation for our practice as teachers of geography rather than as researchers in the field. In the debates about the production of the ' new ' geography (or more accurately new geographies) considerably less attention

has been paid to date to the audience than to either the producer or the cast members of these new performances (Katz 1992). While the consumers, whether readers in general or students in particular, have tended to be left in the wings, the teacher-the director if we might stretch the metaphor this far-is nowhere to be found.

I want to raise here, therefore, a number of questions about what the decentering of authorial authority might mean for the role of the reader and for the responsi bilities of a teacher as texts attempt to represent and position not just the views of the author but also the multiple and often conflicting voices of many subjects. How have our responsibilities to our students changed now that we are no longer able to direct them to ' the authorities ' in their field of interest? What sort of skills and contextual information might we expect students to bring to their reading and understanding?

How shall we teach students to read critically, or oppositionally? And how do we make space for their own voices to be heard?



242 McDowell

Pedagogy in the 1990s: from guardians of truth to directors of

conversation?

For teachers of geography in the 1990s, the shape of the terrain on which we stand has been fundamentally altered. Variants of critical social theory, whether marxist, feminist, postmodern or post-colonial discourses, have revealed the ways in which knowledge reflects and affects structures of power and social inequalities. For those of us of ' a certain age ' (the forty-something generation and beyond?), the certainties of our own undergraduate training have been overturned. The very ground on which we stood-what we thought we knew, how we knew it and what we in turn decided to teach our students-has been cut from under us. The disembodied rational subjects that both stood before us and appeared in the pages of the recommended texts has been revealed as a mere mortal; and not only mortal, but also gendered, classed and ' raced ' as a white, western, male, bourgeois subject. As Bordo (1990) pointed out with inimitable style, this disembodied idealisation has more recently 'been brought down to earth, given a pair of pants and reminded it was not the only

player in town ' (137). Embodiment brought with it a challenge to the taken for granted right to speak on the behalf of others.

The impact of this challenge on teaching, particularly on its substantive content, as well as on geographical research, has been marked. The unchallenged authority of the disembodied scholar, untouched by relations of power or social attributes (let alone feelings of jealousy, envy, doubt, love, possession) has been burst asunder once and for all, raising a liberating and enormously challenging set of questions about what we teach, to whom and on whose behalf. Thus, in Britain and North America, and of course elsewhere, these questions have evinced a positive avalanche of popular and academic writings about teaching, and the curriculum. Hugely angry articles from all sides of the political spectrum have disputed the right to decide whose voice

will be represented in the core texts. Those on the political right, for example, are incensed by what they see as an unwarranted challenge to ' the canon '-their unalienable right to include and exclude based on traditional practice. Thus in Britain, to take a single example from the national educational arena, the current Secretary of State for Education, John Patten (latterly a teacher of geography, himself, in the University of Oxford) is enmired in a dispute about the content of the core curriculum for English in secondary schools. The proposed curriculum includes virtually no texts published since 1980. In our restless desire for the new, to be seen to be of the moment, for up to date reading lists and references, this dispute seems astonishing, if not irrelevant, to the teacher of contemporary geographical knowl edge. Yet, in each geography department throughout higher education, similar, if less acrimonious, debates take place every day about the content of the geographical canon that we are at this very moment constructing through our research activities and purveying to our students in our decisions about what to teach under which heading or subdivision of the subject.

Difficult questions

The critique of enlightenment notions of rationality and the challenge to conven tional liberal notions of social justice have been crucial in our understanding of the

ways in which the social construction of knowledge and the practice of politics establish boundaries, including some and excluding others from ' the project '

(Christopherson 1989). Further, the explicit recognition that writing-the construc tion of texts has the same function, that there is a politics to the work of



Polyphony and pedagogic authority 243

representation, has been extremely important in opening up spaces within geography for alternative voices to be heard. However, as Crang (1992) argues in his fine review of polyphony, 'the idea of a polyphonic text involves . .. possibilities and dangers ' (528). I, like Crang, ' find the possibilities fascinating' (530). One part of the feminist agenda has been, of course, to make women's voices clear(er) but, in common with Crang, I also recognise that difficult questions about ' authorship and its authority continue to exist but in new forms' (530). Whereas Crang discusses the many issues that arise in the context of research practice, gesturing in a paragraph (on 543) towards questions about reading, I shall raise here some of the questions that have been puzzling me about the implications of the loss of authorial control for discerning the message(s) of a text. My purpose, in the spirit of the times, is to raise rather than answer questions. More seriously, the questions I outline here are those I am only beginning to address in my own pedagogic practice and my hope is that this paper might initiate a conversation with others searching for what Henry Giroux (1992) has termed a liberatory theory of border pedagogy (206).

Talking back

Lest the succeeding comments are misread as overly critical, before I raise a number of questions about new textual strategies and pedagogical implications, I want to emphasise how important it is for geography that those who were previously silenced are now able to enter our debates. One way to do this is through the words of bell hooks, an African-American feminist scholar whose work has been extremely influential in debates about representation. Her own voice has been heard, often uncomfortably, in challenge both to the orthodoxies of enlightenment thought and to an uncritical celebration of ' otherness '. Thus I find her one of the most thought-provoking of those whom we might term ' scholars of difference'. In this quotation she clearly demonstrates the political importance of alternative voices being heard:

' Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonised, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of " talking back " that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our

movement from object to subject-the liberated voice' (hooks 1989, 12)

In our haste to recognise the liberatory potential of the passage from silence to speech, however, it is important that we do not suspend our critical facilities. Speech from the previously silenced, whether in the form of overtly polyphonic texts or not, does not remove the question of the politics of representation and authorial authority. Rather it complicates matters. In the movement into the auditorium by 'others', whose voices are we now hearing in the academy? Further, is it their own

voice? hooks (1991) herself has suggested that the textual strategies preferred by some black scholars too often are rearranged to suit the ear of the mainly white audience for their work. And who is speaking on behalf of whom? The example of feminism is instructive here. Initially there was agreement among feminist scholars that women had been written out of academic knowledge. It became accepted that

women spoke in a different voice that should be heard-thus Carol Gilligan published an influential book of that very name In a different voice in 1982. In this voice, it is argued, women have a different story to tell, a story told in the name of feminism.



244 McDowell

The realisation that it was not so straightforward was a sobering one-often

unhappy for the participants in these early debates (McDowell 1991, 1992). Those of us socially positioned as women, or as people of colour, are divided by ethnicity, by class or by sexual preference so that their/our very experiences, their/our voices, are not one but many. How far then are we able to go in our teaching to introduce our students to multiple femininities or ethnicities? Even if the materials are available to allow us to approach these issues of diversity, how many different voices will students (and we) be able to hear and distinguish between?

Source materials

This leads to a further point: what are appropriate (and indeed more pragmatically available) sources for introducing some of this polyphony into our classrooms? When we find truly polyphonic texts, (in the sense of those where there is intra-textual multi-vocality), we need to know who staged the performance that we are reading and recommending? Have all the voices equal weight? Should they have? Have we enough evidence to judge? If, as is still common, the ' other' voices that we hear speak through western scholars, is the polyphony flattened, controlled, even negated, by its re-presentation by such western scholars, working within western frames of reference? If so, how might we find at least alternative ways of presenting material or better alternative sources? Then by what set of criteria might we judge their validity?

In the more usual circumstances, when we suggest to our students that they read a range of material representing different views, we still need to be sensitive to issues of who has collected, collated, arranged and interpreted the materials that we use.

Who has acted as the gatekeepers of the knowledge? In recommending a text from amongst the burgeoning feminist scholarship, for example, as a counter to masculine voices, it may be that although we may now turn to texts by women rather than by

men, they are still predominantly texts based on the scholarship of white and western women. How do we evaluate the significance of this?

Another way to represent diversity might be to introduce non-textual materials into our teaching to challenge or counter the voices that are heard in texts?

Geographers have always relied on the visual representations of place through maps, photographs and slides and a number of teachers in higher education are beginning to teach courses based on the representation of place in film and at Edinburgh, and perhaps elsewhere, notions of soundscapes as well as landscapes are being introduced as alternative ways of theorising a sense of place. However, these strategies may require that we also rethink our conventional methods of interpretation and assessment, and move away from writing as the key method of students evaluation. In the anthropology department in my own university, students are now able to make their own short films and videos as an alternative to a written dissertation. Such strategies may help students' own voices to begin to be heard as part of the challenge to the single authoritative voice of the author, and of course, that of the teacher.

Contextualising skills

It seems clear, many of us are already turning to different types of texts and source materials in our quest for different voices, in our desire not to mask the ' other ', whether subject or student, and to help our students see the world through different eyes. In human geography, the use of personal narratives and ethnographic materials, once more usually seen as the province of anthropologists, is increasingly common.




However, the recognition that these texts, in particular, are partial means that as

teachers of geography we must face the question of how to help our students recognise and make sense of this partiality. How might we equip our students not only to be able to decentre both the narrator and the subject(s) in these texts, but also to evaluate the partial evidence presented therein? It seems to me that there are significant implications for teaching methods, and for the expenditure of time and resources if we want to ensure that all students are able to begin to acquire the necessary set of contextual, multi-scale materials and knowledge that surely are needed to even hear some of the voices, let alone be able to decode them.

These questions become especially pressing as a growing number of students in higher education are themselves positioned outside both the conventional structures of the academy and the material that they are reading. As an Open University course tutor, for example, I found myself grappling with how a middle-aged Caucasian female academic might make sense of material about Japanese family and gender relations with/for a young male African Caribbean student. In Cambridge the more uniform class and ethnic background of undergraduate students raises a different set of problems in the interpretation of texts as I find myself uneasily positioned ' on the borders ' compared with many of my students and most of my colleagues. Hence the question of my pedagogic authority and its relationship to ' otherness ' is compli cated. Also if, as Haraway (1991) has suggested, the aim of critical scholarship is to 'learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view' (190), how are we to

achieve this in those circumstances, thankfully becomes less typical in British higher education as a whole, where our classrooms are occupied, in the main, by young, white, relatively unmarked subjects. Renato Rosaldo (1993), in a seeringly honest reflection on his own work as an anthropologist, has commented on the irony that the texts that are taught as ' the classics ' in social anthropology are the product of authors who are, as yet, relatively unmarked by experience.

Whatever the circumstances in which we teach,' the introduction of a wide range of textual and other material in attempts to replicate a fragmented polyphony of voices from the field situation inevitably means that we place far more responsibility on the reader to sort through the various truth claims and interpretations. While the loss of authorial control implied in the abandonment of a single message may result in liberatory scholarship, I wonder about the consequences of what might appear as a parallel abandonment of pedagogic authority. Are we empowering or disabling our students? Sidonie Smith (1993), in a recent review of texts based on personal narratives, suggests that perhaps we ' as readers end up only with a kind of tourist experience' (406), rather than anything more meaningful. Crang (1992) too noted the problem of this touristic interest in the ' Other ' in Moore's (1988) trenchant critique of postmodern social theory. Tourism was also adopted as a metaphor by Bondi (1992) in her critique of Soja's Postmodern Geographies. While the line between a sympathetic traveller and a voyeuristic tourist is a fine one, it is important that we provide some guidance about the difference.

Liberal guilt?

I want to suggest here that ' we ', the western scholars interested in trying to introduce ' there ' to our students who are ' here ' (Geertz 1988), perhaps rather too

easily, through guilt, have tended to assume an innocence in the texts that we recommend, or in the multiple voices that we encourage to speak out in the classroom. We assume that the new scholarship, the new research methods based on



246 McDowell

ideas about the representation of power, positionality and situatedness are by default, more democratic and egalitarian than older texts imbued with authorial presence and authority. It may be that we tend to lend to all voices equal authority, giving them all equal credence, credibility, validity and weight by abandoning any sort of

moral judgement or any method of distinguishing between the voices. Does the inclusion of multiple voices vitiate the impact of a single one-is it cacophony or noise rather than an interdependent polyphony? Are we prepared to leave the judgement to our students? Are all voices equal? Should all be heard? How might we, or should we, assist our students in making judgements about the validity of different voices?

I have suggested elsewhere (McDowell 1992, 1993) that guidance for our attempts to answer at least some of the questions is perhaps to be found in feminist developments of standpoint theory. Sandra Harding (1987) has suggested that ' to achieve a feminist standpoint one must engage in the intellectual and political struggle necessary to see nature and social life from the point of view of that disdained activity which produces women's experiences instead of from the partial and perverse perspective available from the " ruling gender " experience of men' (185). As Haraway (1991) has argued, the voices of the oppressed are more likely to be ' true ' than abstract knowledge constructed from a position of distance, suggesting that the experience of the excluded and exploited is more inclusive and critically coherent than that of privileged groups. In colloquial terms those who suffer are, perhaps, more likely to ' tell it how it is '. This raises, however, one of the

most difficult questions about the construction of knowledge and its evaluation. Are oppressed groups always the best able to know their own needs/construct their own/knowledge/understand their own position or is it perhaps equally likely that the more any group is denied autonomy, the less able it is to articulate its needs or question its way of life? Increasingly in our teaching, in the desire-both laudable and exciting-to represent the experience of others more adequately, we valorise what is often termed experiential knowledge, but by the unsympathetic might be dubbed spontaneous knowledge or ' gut' feelings. How are we to judge this against codified knowledge? It is curious to proclaim the superiority of the former considering the time we spend as teachers disabusing many of our own students of the validity of their ' gut reactions ' to instances of homophobia, racism or sexism.

Further still, if, as of course it must be, the world of women (or any other oppressed group) has been marginalised, distorted or negated by masculinist practices, (or racist, homophobic or imperialist practices) how can it be that the category of ' women ' (or other oppressed minority) maintains a meaning separate from the

conditions of oppression against which it has been formulated? Should we therefore always claim moral superiority for oppressed groups?

What these questions demand is a political or moral response. I believe we should not abandon our responsibility as authors, teachers and scholars to judge between

multiple and competing voices. Hence I remain unconvinced by calls from within geography and from other disciplines to ' celebrate rather than hierarchise difference ' (Young 1991, 319), to achieve an ' openness to unassimilated otherness '

(320) without the establishment of a set of criteria to evaluate the significance of these differences. As Giroux has argued ' educators cannot merely give equal weight to all zones of cultural differences; on the contrary, they must link the creation, sustenance, and formulation of cultural difference as a fundamental part of the discourse of inequality, power, struggle and possibility (Giroux 1992, 206). We must not ' erase ourselves ' (Grossberg 1989, 30) but construct pedagogic strategies that enable our




students to do more than speak out, but rather enable them to place themselves in networks of power in relation to others, both those whom are present but also ' others ' who may be absent. Indeed, as teachers, we may find it necessary to ' speak for ' those who are unable or unavailable to speak for themselves. Thus, we need some notion of truth, equality or moral order so that we are able to assess and evaluate what we and out students are reading and hearing.

As Crang (1992) argued in the context of his discussion of writing rather than reading, of research rather than teaching ' the polyphonic text ... does not necessarily abandon the concept of truth ... Indeed, given the need for some

metanarratives to organise the meetings of diverse voices, it is important that it does not ' (545). This recognition of the value of metanarratives, albeit partial and situated notions of truth (see the recent interesting collection edited by Judith Squires (1993)) rather than a totalising claim to scientific objectivity is equally important for critical pedagogy. While we might celebrate the decentering of the author (the rumours of death have been greatly exaggerated), it is important that we do not also abdicate our pedagogic authority. If the purpose of geographic teaching is, as I believe it to be, to prepare our students to be active citizens, able to think critically about and struggle against social injustices in various locations, then the ability to see through the eyes of others, distant in place, gender, race or class, developed through critical analysis of a variety of texts, be they mono- or poly-phonic, as well as by experiences and political involvement, is surely a necessary basis for constructing a multiple definition of social justice and for social struggles to achieve it. Here I agree with Giroux, when he suggests that we ' need to rupture the relationship between difference and exploitation through a vision and a social movement that transform the material and ideological conditions in which difference, structured in the principles of justice, equity and freedom becomes central to a postmodern conception of citizenship and radical democracy ' (Giroux 1992, 200).

Acknowledgements I should like to thank Peter Lloyd for his enthusiastic response to an earlier version of this paper which greatly encouraged me to produce it in this final form and three anonymous referees whose comments were extremely stimulating. Would that I knew who you were, but grateful thanks anyway.

Note

1 I am extremely grateful to an anonymous referee for pointing out in a footnote that the educational

context does have enormous significance for how we construct and maintain our position in the

classroom. I take the liberty of reproducing the footnote here in an attempt to introduce a little

polyphony here too. ' The precise educational context in which " we " are teaching is obviously crucial. On campuses where

there are large numbers of white, male, middle-class faculty and many students are black, female,

working- class, then I would argue the need for teaching to be as open to " polyphony " as possible and

to give students as much chance for " talking back " as possible. But is the situation really the same in

somewhere like Oxbridge, where very many students will hardly be strangers to the " ruling " view of

the world, and where the need would arguably be to keep them silent for long enough to demonstrate

that there are quite other lives, other places, other concerns which a "critical " academy must take

seriously? Is there something to be said for maintaining as democratic a" polyphony " as possible in the

former case (with little teacher direction) but a much stronger " pedagogic authority in the latter case

(with much more teacher direction)? Or is this to introduce a dangerously explicit left " bias " into our

teaching practice? '

This final question of course, is based on an assumption that 'other ' voices are ' critical ', or

' progressive ', which is not always the case as I try to make clear in the succeeding section.



248 McDowell

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