Politics, Pedagogy, and the Profession of Composition ... - JAC Online

Bruce Horner 135
experience, and when and how to exercise what sort of power to help move
the students as a whole toward the project of the course.
For example, Ellsworth and her students might have negotiated where
and how they, in all their partialities, would direct all their materiallylimited
energies to investigate and counter racist structures and practices
at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (the initial topic of and impetus
for the course, after all). They might have used what expertise, authority,
and resources they possessed to work toward such ends rather than
attempting the inevitably doomed project of achieving a critical utopia in
classroom relations. Indeed, it appears that the students themselves came
to abandon Ellsworth's commitment to achieving an ideal classroom
environment when they transformed the course into what they termed
"Coalition 607" (317). That is, rather than imagining the work of the
course outside material exigencies, they relocated it within a particular
time and place, reoriented their efforts toward achieving more reachable
goals, and treated their contradictions and partialities in relation to those
exigencies rather than letting them serve as obstacles to their work.
That they were successful in doing so demonstrates the need to couple
attention to differences within and among students in a course over time
with attention to differences between the students within a course and
students and others outside the course. Ellsworth is attentive to the
differences among her students, but she says little about the relation of
those students to other students, to their institutional position vis-a-vis
those other students, the university, herself, and the course-all of which
might provide a useful perspective and context from which to understand
the difficulties and successes that she and they experienced. Gore, noting
that many accounts offeminist and critical pedagogies "pay little attention
to the location oftheir practices in educational institutions," argues that
we need to define the contexts for such pedagogical work "historically
and politically" while acknowledging "the unique struggles that characterize
the exercise of power at the micro levels" (61). Otherwise, the
problem of "empowerment" remains trapped in the dualisms of power/
powerlessness and domination/subordination, understood as "purely
oppositional stances" rather than as a problem of "multiplicity and
contradiction." In the case of Ellsworth 's course, differentiating between
her students and others by attending to the fact that the course was a
"special topics" graduate education course rather than, say, a required
first-year writing course would surely be significant to any understanding
of the work of that course. By contrast, her failure to investigate the
implications of the specific institutional, curricular location of the course