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BOOK REVIEWS / RECENSIONS 463
Teaching Against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility
by Roger I. Simon
Toronto: OISE Press, 1992. xviii + 172 pages.
REVIEWED BY URSULA A. KELLY, SAINT MARY’S UNIVERSITY
In the present ethos, where educational thought is colonized by an overarching
conservatism, educators seeking a visionary reprieve — a seeing through and
beyond the often reactionary rhetoric — find themselves in a season of neardrought.
For this reason alone, I welcome Roger Simon’s recent publication, a
collection of interrelated essays on various aspects of teaching for social
transformation. Teaching Against the Grain is a foundational text for rethinking
the boundaries and possibilities of educational practice and should be of interest
to cultural workers — teachers, students, artists, activists — interested in using
their specific work sites to promote positive social change.
The eight essays in the book are divided equally into two sections. The first,
“Engaging the Project,” establishes the epistemological foundations for an
evolving pedagogy of possibility; the second section, “Reinventing Practice,”
wrestles with the problems and possibilities of implementing a critical practice.
Only two essays have been previously published, one of which is co-authored
with Don Dippo. To diminish at least somewhat the unavoidable compromising
of what is an important and complex polemic, I shall briefly review each essay
individually and in order of its place in the book.
In Teaching Against the Grain, Simon provides a substantive treatise on a
“pedagogy of possibility.” He challenges the clichés through which a critical
pedagogy is often (mis)understood by those both outside and inside the politics
of its commitments. He resists, for example, the plaguing tendencies towards
“totalizing revolutions” (p. 5) and “universalizing abstractions” (p. 7).
Teaching Against the Grain is testimony to the evolution of a profound and
moral thinker, an educator whose contributions can be measured in the textured
resonance of line and nuance of phrase as Simon revisits and revisions principles
of hope, justice, freedom, and possibility. Roger Simon offers educators, across
a diverse range of cultural fronts, a harvest of thought. Reaping this harvest is
the stuff of dreams in the sense that Ernst Bloch defines them, hopeful “images
of that which is not yet” (cited in Simon, p. 7). In the opening essay, Simon calls
these “disruptive daydreams” (p. 3), “the beginning of hope” (p. 9), the impulse
for which is the necessity of social change produced out of the dissatisfactions
and distortions that are the contemporary arrangements (disorders) of social life.
This same impulse propels Simon’s writing. What Simon calls “the guiding
telos” (p. 27) of the book is “the expansion of human capacities contained within