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

466 BOOK REVIEWS / RECENSIONS
Many sources of beauty are encountered in this text. One of the most fulfilling
arises from the interspersing of Yiddish language, Jewish story, and Jewish
history as partial expressions of Simon’s own “location as a Jew engaging his
own tradition” (p. 141). Simon uses this engagement with his Jewish subjectivity
to elaborate important concerns of text, history, and meaning in the excellent
essay “Beyond the Racist Text: Jewish Applause for a Yiddish Shylock.” Current
controversies over texts and curriculum in all forms of schooling make this essay
important. Its pedagogical implications will be especially appreciated by
educators grappling with the problems associated with censorship, what Marlene
Nourbese Philip (1990) calls “the privileged discourse” (p. 209). Using as his
starting point a discussion of a Yiddish production of The Merchant of Venice,
Simon develops a convincing basis for moving beyond the question of the racist
or sexist text into questions of the discursive conditions that make possible
specific writings and readings and the implications of these latter questions for
redefining how we teach controversial texts. This essay highlights Simon’s ability
to deal concretely, convincingly, and uncompromisingly with issues of practice.
If Simon’s collection has a significant flaw at all, it is the inclusion of the
essay “What Schools Can Do: Designing Programs for Work Education that
Challenge the Wisdom of Experiences,” co-authored with Don Dippo. The
purpose of this essay is to focus on “the centrality of the pedagogical problem
of both legitimating student experiences [in cooperative work education
programs] as appropriate curriculum content and at the same time working to
challenge such experiences” (p. 135). However, written as it is in a less reflexive,
less analytic style sharply juxtaposed against that of Simon’s earlier essays, this
essay fails the promise of its purpose. Further, placed where it is in the
collection, the essay is noticeable in its failure to sustain the philosophical depth
of the book, the momentum of which builds with each of the preceding essays
only to be interrupted (eroded) by the tone of this piece. Some editing should
also have been done to provide greater continuity between this essay and the
others in the collection and to avoid the repetition of already-established
arguments and secondary references (the Bloch quote on dreams appears in the
first essay and this one). Given the comparative weaknesses of this essay, I feel
this space could have been better used to develop an essay on a point of
provocation raised but not fully developed elsewhere, for example, eros and
pedagogy or the dialogic method.
For his title, Simon draws on Walter Benjamin’s words, to “brush history
against the grain.” This is a compelling connection given the shared and urgent
concerns of Simon and Benjamin to articulate ways in which renewed
possibilities for humanity might be expressed through a radical reconnection of
the present with the past. In many ways, then, it is appropriate that, in the final
essay, Simon reclaims Benjamin’s work for its offerings to a critical pedagogy,
specifically a pedagogy of remembrance. The final essay, “Remembrance as a