8. Identificación del problema
8.1 Observación de secuencias de uso
The last thirty years has seen a productive, if unfinished from the perspective of radical geography, rethinking of the relationship between researcher and subject and of the epistemological basis of geographical research in general. However, little space has been devoted to discussing the implications of new epistemologies for classroom practice and pedagogical theory. Despite all the post-positivist reflexivity on the research process, academic knowledge is still overwhelmingly treated instrumentally: that is, once written, it is conceived of as information that is unproblematically transmissible, as a commodity that can be readily exchanged for the price of a book, a consulting fee, or university tuition.
For example, Rubin and Rubin’s book-length treatment of qualitative interviewing ends with a chapter on “Sharing the Results” in which they claim that “[t]he last step in the research is to put this information into a report that is convincing, thought-provoking, absorbing, vivid, and fresh . . . If people from the research arena and others who are familiar
with that arena say, ‘Yes, this is the way it is,’ then your research is finally complete. Your work has passed its last test” (1995: 257–74). Rubin and Rubin believe the research process achieves closure the moment writing is completed. According to this theory, once
“produced,” geographical knowledge is viewed outside the wider social context in which it exists. Once written, this knowledge loses the dynamic qualities that theory has given it and becomes objectified, ready for quick and easy dissemination as a piece of writing, whether to policy élites or to other academics. Academic geographers may have become aware of the social relations that affect the research process, but we have failed to extend that understanding to the wider social context in which the product of research exists—the world of teaching and learning that is the research university.
I want to resist the kind of closure that Rubin and Rubin bring to the research process and argue that the work of knowledge production does not end with a written text. Keeping open the problematics of knowing beyond the end of the writing and extending to work inside the academy the lessons learned from con-templating post-positivist methods in geographical knowledge production means developing more sophisticated approaches to pedagogy that do not reduce knowledge to information that is easily transmissible. Such an approach will itself be an engaged form of radical politics. It also suggests ways to talk about the student–teacher relationship that move us beyond the current discourse of student-as-consumer, which perpetuates the instrumentalization and commodification of knowledge and contributes to what radical education theorist Henry Giroux refers to as the “objectification of thought itself” that is part of a
“culture of positivism” in the academy (1997: 25).
American philosopher and educator John Dewey describes how the process of learning is itself an active engagement with the world that cannot be reduced to the transfer of information:
Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out beyond its immediate self. It does not wait for information to be bestowed which will increase its meaning; it seeks it out . . . It is the business of educators to supply an environ-ment so that this reaching out of an experience may be fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously active.
(Dewey, 1925: 245)
Post-positivist models of research imply the dynamic, open-ended, and interactive qualities of knowledge that education theorists have posited as central to learning. Radical geographers need a clearly articu-lated pedagogy that refuses the kind of closure Rubin and Rubin bring to research and reclaims the class-room from the quantifiers of technical proficiency.
Theorists of “critical pedagogy” argue that class-room practices—the ways in which teachers formally approach their students in attempts to convey the
“content” of their knowledge—are structured by ideological assumptions, just as much as is knowledge itself. Without a pedagogy theoretically equal to the production of its knowledge, radical geography runs the risk of losing the current battle over the classroom.
Radical educator Paulo Freire describes how objecti-fication of knowledge within the classroom—one that treats knowledge as a thing to be unproblematically transferred from teacher to student—serves as an instrument of domination and oppression, despite its
“content” (Freire, 1990; see also hooks, 1994). For Freire, such a pedagogic approach treats students as empty vessels for teachers to fill with knowledge, thus disempowering them and devaluing their own experi-ences and powers of critical thought.10Ultimately, such objectification presents the world as a static and fixed structure to which students must conform. Even radical
“messages” delivered in this manner contribute to the perpetuation of existing power relations.11Extending post-positivist theory to the classroom admits the participatory nature of knowledge and invites an active and critical engagement with the world through which students are empowered to transform their world;
it is, bell hooks says, “to teach in a way that liberates, that expands consciousness, that awakens, . . . [and]
challenge[s] domination at its very core” (1994: 75).
Giroux describes the political practices implied by a post-positivist pedagogy:
Critical pedagogy needs to be informed by a public philosophy dedicated to returning schools to their primary task: furnishing places of critical education that serve to create a public sphere of citizens who are able to exercise power over their own lives and especially over the conditions of knowledge pro-duction and acquisition. This is a critical pedagogy defined, in part, by the attempt to create the lived experience of empowerment for the vast majority.
In other words, the language of critical pedagogy needs to construct schools as democratic public
spheres. In part, this means that educators need to develop a critical pedagogy in which the knowl-edge, habits, and skills of critical rather than simply good citizenship are taught and practiced. This means providing students with the opportunity to develop the critical capacity to challenge and transform existing social and political forms, rather than simply adapt to them.
(Giroux, 1997: 218) Deobjectifying knowledge in the classroom as well as in “the field” exposes the classroom as a site of practical political engagement and disrupts the boundary between theory and praxis. As much as the field, the classroom is a place where we come together to make meaning and knowledge about the world(s) we inhabit.
Knowledge is not merely an object to be used as an instrument of technocratic rationality with which to better manage the world. Rather, it is itself a dynamic pedagogical encounter. Viewed this way, it has the potential to empower rather than dominate.
While the presence of periodicals like the Journal of Geography in Higher Education (JGHE) and the Journal of Geography bring much-needed pedagogical discussions to the discipline, such discussions remain on the periphery of geography. Even Alan Jenkins, cofounder and longtime editor of JGHE, argued in his 1997 retrospective that teaching is less valued now in the discipline than it was in 1977, when the journal was first published, and that the current economic shifts in universities exacerbate the situation: “the pressures of budget cuts and underfunding put greater pressures on [junior faculty’s] time and attention. These pressures make it harder for them and their institutions to ‘value’
teaching effectively” (1997: 13). Furthermore, much of the writing about pedagogy in geography, when not attempting to implement new information “delivery”
systems in the classroom (Towse and Garside, 1998:
386; but see Ó Tuathail and McCormack, 1998a, 1998b), stresses “effective” or “efficient” methods of teaching without addressing the political or ideological issues that concern radical geographers. A notable exception is the recent JGHE Symposium on teaching sexualities (March 1999 issue), especially the article by J. K. Gibson-Graham, which takes as one of its premises that the classroom itself is a space for political struggle and an important site for the project of
“queer(y)ing” capitalism (JGHE Symposium, 1999;
Gibson-Graham, 1999). Accepting the dynamic, interactive, and political nature of the pedagogical
R E S E A R C H , P E D A G O G Y , A N D I N S T R U M E N T A L G E O G R A P H Y 167
encounter means defining the classroom as a vital public space that needs to be defended against the forces of commoditization that would reduce it to a mere medium of transmission.
A radical pedagogy that resists the closure of knowledge also resists the clientization of students discussed by Readings (1996). If knowledge is seen as a cooperative project, rather than an object or com-modity, then students must be regarded as partners in education, rather than consumers of it. By moving beyond an instrumentalist notion of the student–
teacher relationship, we may yet fulfill Derek Gregory’s
“plea” that critical human geography “restores human beings to their own worlds and enables them to take part in the collective transformation of their own human geographies” (1978: 172). The classroom is one vital place in which we enact this transformation.
What implications does this have for new peda-gogies appropriate to a radical geography? Dewey says, Geography and history supply subject matter which gives background and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow personal actions or mere forms of technical skill.
With every increase of ability to place our own doings in their time and space connections, our doings gain in significant content . . . Thus our ordinary daily experiences cease to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance.
(Dewey 1925: 244) The kind of “intellectual perspective” that Dewey describes here differs greatly from the objectification of knowledge driven by dominant educational practices, which prepare students to be efficient and expert users of information in a world dominated by techno-cratic rationality. As Giroux and Freire make clear, such intellectual growth demands classroom prac-tices that go beyond mere “delivery” of information (Giroux, 1994, 1997; Freire, 1990). As Dewey suggests, geography and radical geographers are uniquely equipped to make an important contribution to such a pedagogical and political project. For instance, in a reversal of the logic driving current university restructuring, Matthew Sparke (1999) has argued for a radical geography that instills in students a “geographic accountability,” a type of critical cosmopolitanism that seeks to draw students, who are soon to become active members in a new global order, into a critical understanding of the ethical dilemmas of this new
geographical connectivity that we call globalization (1999: 95–6; see also Castree and Sparke, 2000). The goal of this mindset is not merely to describe a new world order, but to empower students to reshape it according to principles of social justice, critical citizenship, and participatory democracy.
The intellectual project of empowerment must be pursued by deobjectifying knowledge in the classroom, thus breaching the walls that have been artificially erected between theory and practice. Only by fully engaging in the pedagogical mission of the university can critical thought have an influence on the social production of a better world and not be further margin-alized in the university. In an era in which the main function of university teaching is to produce efficient workers for the information sector of corporate capital, critical human geographers can play an important pedagogical role in instilling in the corporate bureau-crats of tomorrow—the managers of our so-called
“information economy”—a sense of geographical accountability, an understanding of our situatedness in the contemporary world.12Through a full account of the new international division of labor, critical human geography can show how our lives and the lives of our students are also products of the labor of others. It can help make clear what William Cronin called capitalism’s “landscape of obscured connec-tions” (1991: 340). Critical human geography can help students reflect on how the work that they will do in life has the potential to participate in the reproduc-tion of the world and the perpetuareproduc-tion of uneven development—or in the transformation of the world.
In this context, J. Hillis Miller’s fear that the uni-versity is becoming “an increasingly less important site” is unfounded (Miller, 1996: 7). Rather, the uni-versity’s central role in social reproduction makes it a primary site for struggle and engagement. With the advent of critical theory and a new recognition that all knowledge is socially constructed, critical human geographers can play a part in stopping the instru-mentalization of knowledge and the increasing industrial domination of the world and can help shape a better future. Such a project comes out of the history of our own discipline. Nearly 150 years ago, Alexander von Humboldt insisted that “the character of the landscape, and of every imposing scene in nature, depends so materially upon the mutual relation of the ideas and sentiments simultaneously excited in the mind of the observer” (1849, 1: 6). Critical human geography must make radical pedagogy a central
concern—and must recognize the classroom as a site of practical political engagement.
NOTES
1 In fact, Gibson draws on the long-standing “external funding models followed by colleagues in the hard sciences, engineering, and medicine” (1998: 463).
2 The history that I outline here is specific to American universities, which followed a different trajectory from British institutions.
3 Humboldt’s plan for the University of Berlin, “Über die innere und aussere Organisation der höheren wissen-schaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin” (“On the Inner and Outer Organization of Institutions of Higher Learning in Berlin”), appears in volume X of the 1903 Gesammelte Schriften on pp. 250–60. I have also consulted three translations: Marianne Cowan’s in Humanist without Portfolio (1963), the one which appeared in the journal Minerva (1970), and that by Clifton Fadiman in The Great Ideas Today (1969). References to those editions are indicated by year of publication and page number. I have modified the translation of this piece throughout.
Humboldt’s now-famous “plan,” which is assumed to be the foundational document for the German model university, was unknown until around 1900. A fragment of a memo that Humboldt may or may not have sent to the king, the document was found by historian Bruno Gephardt at the end of the nineteenth century in a drawer in the Prussian ministry and subsequently published (Fallon, 1997: 149; vom Bruch, 1997: 12). It is the basis of much of the contemporary discussion of the
“Humboldtian University.”
4 The social sciences did not separate out from the humanities and natural sciences until the end of the nineteenth century. See Lepenies (1988). For discussion of the emergence of Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissen-schaften and the emergence of the modern conception of aesthetic culture, see Gadamer (1989) and Iggers (1983). Through the influence of Hegel, Dilthy, and others, Geisteswissenschaft, with a focus on “spirit” and speculation, emerged as the accepted philosophical model of inquiry, while Naturwissenschaften became defined primarily in positivist terms. Kant’s aesthetics gave rise to a philosophical tradition in which the
“doctrine of taste and genius” (Gadamer, 1989: 42) was equated with culture.
5 In Britain and the US, however, this “cultural” function came to be housed in the humanities in general and
literature in particular. See Readings (1996) and Graff (1987).
6 For the history of German universities in the nineteenth century, see McClelland (1980), vom Bruch (1997), and Fallon (1997).
7 For more on Gilman and his influence, see Flexner (1946), Franklin (1910), French (1946), Hawkins (1960), Heyman (1998), and Ryan (1939), as well as Gilman’s own reflections (1891, 1906).
8 There is no space in this essay to adequately address the important issue of Gilman’s (and Guyot’s and Humboldt’s) masculinism; let me, therefore, merely note it here.
9 For discussion of university funding during and after the Cold War, see Lewontin (1997). For a general discussion of the relationship between the university and the state after World War I, see Barrow (1990).
10 For a discussion of the problematics of importing Freire into a North American context, see Stygall (1988) and Giroux (1994).
11 This is of course something that marginalized groups within the academy have long recognized (see hooks, 1994).
12 This sense of “accountability” carries with it an implicit imperative towards Harvey’s notion of social justice (Harvey, 1996).
REFERENCES
2020 (1998) “Commission on the Future of Higher Education Charge.” 12 August, http://www.
washington.edu/faculty/facsenate/2020/2020 charge.html.
Ash, M. G. (ed.) (1997) “Introduction.” German Universities Past and Future. Providence, RI:
Berghahn Books, pp. 3–27.
Barrow, C. W. (1990) Universities and the Capitalist State.
Madison: Wisconsin University Press.
Bledstein, B. J. (1978) The Culture of Professionalism:
The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York: W. W. Norton.
Bowen, M. (1981) Empiricism and Geographical Thought from Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brubacher, J. S., and W. Rudy (1968) Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1636–1968. New York: Harper and Row.
Castree, N., and M. Sparke (2000) “Introduction:
Professional geography and the corporatization of
R E S E A R C H , P E D A G O G Y , A N D I N S T R U M E N T A L G E O G R A P H Y 169
the university: Experiences, evaluations, and engagements.” Antipode 32(3).
Cowley, W. H., and D. Williams (1991) International and Historical Roots of American Higher Education. New York: Garland.
Cronin, W. (1991) Nature’s Metropolis. New York:
Norton.
Dewey, J. (1925) Democracy and Education. New York:
Macmillan.
Fallon, D. (1997) “Interpreting Humboldt for the twenty-first century.” In M. G. Ash (ed.) German Universities Past and Future. Providence, RI:
Berghahn Books, pp. 149–57.
Flexner, A. (1946) Daniel Coit Oilman: Creator of the American Type of University. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
Franklin, F. (1910) The Life of Daniel Coit Gilman. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co.
Freire, P. (1990) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.
French, J. C. (1946) A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1989) Truth and Method. Second edition. New York: Continuum.
Gibson, L. J. (1998) “Institutionalizing regional science.” The Annals of Regional Science 32:
459–467.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1999) “Queer(y)ing capitalism in and out of the classroom.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 23: 80–5.
Gilman, D. C. (1860) “Humboldt, Ritter, and the new geography.” The New Englander 18(70): 277–306.
—— (1891) “The Johns Hopkins University (1876–1891).” In Studies in Historical and Political Science. Ninth series, no. 3–4. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
—— (1906) The Launching of a University. New York:
Dodd, Mead and Co.
Giroux, H. A. (1994) Disturbing Pleasures. London:
Routledge.
—— (1997) Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Graff, G. (1987) Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
Gregory, D. (1978) Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson.
—— (1994) Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Guyot, A. (1850) The Earth and Man. Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln.
Haraway, D. (1996) “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” In J. Agnew, D. N. Livingstone, and A. Rogers (eds) Human Geography: An Essential Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp.
109–28.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
—— (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Hawkins, H. (1960) Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Heyman, R. (1998) “Geographical thought, ideology, and the university: The Humboldt brothers and Daniel Coit Gilman.” Unpublished master’s thesis.
University of Washington.
hooks, b. (1994) “Toward a revolutionary feminist pedagogy.” In D. H. Richter (ed.) Falling into Theory.
Boston: Bedford, pp. 74–9.
Horkheimer, M., and T. W. Adomo (1990) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum.
Humboldt, A. von (1849) Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. 2 vols. London: H. G.
Bonn.
Humboldt, W. von (1903) “Über die innere und aussere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin.” In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. X.
Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, pp. 250–60.
—— (1963) Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Translated by Marianne Cowan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
—— (1967) “On the historian’s task.” History and Theory 6(1): 57–71.
—— (1969) “On the organization of institutions of higher learning in Berlin.” Translated by Clifton Fadiman. In R. M. Hutchins and M. J. Adler (eds) The Great Ideas Today 1969. New York:
Encyclopaedia Britannica, pp. 348–55.
—— (1970) “On the spirit and the organizational framework of intellectual institutions in Berlin.”
Minerva 8(2): 242–9.
Iggers, G. G. (1983) The German Conception of History.
Iggers, G. G. (1983) The German Conception of History.