Mireille Falardeau et Michel Loranger Le choix de stratégies ... - CSSE

464 BOOK REVIEWS / RECENSIONS
the requirements of securing human diversity, compassionate justice, and the
renewal of life” (p. 27). Simon’s “project of possibility” is marked by a profound
sense of the complexities of human lives shaped by larger social configurations.
In the second essay, “The Horizon of Possibility,” Simon constructs the ethical
dimensions of this project. He is glaringly aware of the contradictions inevitably
arising from the constrictions within which such a project and its requirements
must be located, where the struggle for transformation is implanted in a restrictive
and divisive social order. Simon acknowledges the need for a discussion of
these requirements, although his is disappointingly abbreviated. However, his
articulation of the constrictions and requirements of possibility does encourage
the embrace rather than the dismissal of hope in face of the massive educational
venture he envisions.
The scope of the project Simon outlines demands the work of committed
educators across many fronts. The expansion of possibilities for education,
generally, is a hallmark of all of Simon’s work. Yet, in “Teachers as Cultural
Workers,” Simon develops the cultural and pedagogical bases for collective
efforts at expansion that are at once enabling and enthralling, nudging as they do
at ways “to constitute, organize and articulate a new set of relations between
education and other practices of semiotic production” (p. 39). Naming the work
of education as “semiotic production” (p. 37) and the practices of schooling as
“cultural technologies” (p. 40), Simon locates both within the realm of cultural
studies, a move that “signals a shift from an exclusive concern with the
substance and method of representation to questions such as which representations
are engaged by whom, how, why, and with what consequences” (p. 46),
questions that cut to the heart of a project of possibility.
Insisting that “all cultural work needs to address the concerns of pedagogy”
(p. 46), Simon sets the tone for the final essay of section one, “Pedagogy as
Political Practice.” If pedagogy is “an attempt to influence experience and its
resulting forms of subjectivity” (p. 59) through the broad bases of semiotic
productions and cultural technologies, then an attendant demand on pedagogies
is that “the [partial] moral vision they imply must be clarified and subjected to
constant critique” (p. 62). The impositional violence of unreflexive pedagogies,
once named, can be addressed through “a counterdiscursive activity that attempts
to provoke a process through which people might engage in a transformative
critique of their everyday lives” (p. 60), that is, “a pedagogy of possibility” (p.
60). Simon outlines curricular measures to shore up this pedagogy while not
losing sight of the “threat and anxiety in the process” (p. 63). A “sense of
collaborative struggle” (p. 63), “a responsible reflexivity” (p. 64), and “an
assessment of epistemological responsibleness” (p. 65) are dimensions of a
pedagogy of possibility that nurture “communities of solidarity” (p. 65) defined
across difference.
Simon ends this important essay with a especially provocative section in
which, as a response to the work of Jane Gallop, he raises the question “Is there