Developing Critical Consciousness - Coauthoring Your Life

Who are you? How much of who you are has to do with your individual choices? How much has to do with the family, community, society, class you are born into? How much has to do with the genetic heritage and sex you are born with? How much has to do with the ways in which the social world around you responds to these factors?

Last fall at Kalamazoo College my daughter took a Freshman Seminar entitled "Co-Authoring Your Life." The texts the students read and discussed were familiar to me--Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, John Krakauer's Into the Wild, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life--but the framework was new. The course, taught by Andy Mozina, asked students to consider how much of their life had been "authored" for them, and how much they had "authorized." I thought this was a brilliant way to introduce students to "critical consciousness," or an awareness of how social factors, upbringing, and cultural situated-ness creates who we think we are.

"Critical consciousness" is a term developed and defined by Brazilian educator Paolo Friere. Known for his work on teaching pedagogy, such as The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Friere developed ideas for teaching the poor in Brazil in such a way that would raise their awareness of the ways in which society was oppressing them. For Friere, effective education should not simply be the transmission of the values of the power elite through the "banking" model of education--transmitting the teacher's knowledge to the students--but should be a dialogue in which students and teachers develop knowledge together by interacting and responding to texts and ideas. In this way, he believed, his students would be empowered to act in the world with a new awareness of the ways in which their lives were interconnected with the production of knowledge. In other words, students learn that they are "co-authors" of their own lives.

In a college education, we develop an awareness of our own values, the texts of our own lives, as we encounter the ideas of others. We test what we believe and what we experience against the new ideas we encounter. Sometimes this can be threatening. Sometimes it is exhilarating. And sometimes it changes the way we see the world and our ability to act in it. Understanding how our world view is related to our position in society is a form of critical consciousness.

This is the second time I have had the privilege of teaching Mennonite literature at Goshen College. As you know, I love the material and am passionate about this topic. Like the study of any "minority" literature, it asks students to develop critical consciousness. I see this happening in your posts recently and it delights me to see this intellectual growth in response to the course readings. However, it is also a painful and delicate process, one that requires generosity on the part of each one of you as we develop our critical consciousness from a different perspectives. Mennonite literature is a peculiar situation. It is a minority literature, but it developed from white European origins. Today, the majority of Mennonites are from cultures and countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Mennonites are a tiny minority in the United States, but they are a slender majority at Goshen College, a Mennonite institution. Many students in this class will feel, for the first time, that their cultural background and values are represented in a literary text. Others will feel that their cultural background is misrepresented in a text, because Mennonites are an extremely varied bunch of people. Some students will feel "othered" by a discussion of values and ideas and history that does not include their own heritage. In a Mennonite literature class we must engage these issues; but it is vital as we develop our critical consciousness to understand that we are developing it from a variety of perspectives--including non-Mennonite ones. (Frankly, Mennonite literature, like Mennonite higher education, would not exist without non-Mennonites.) In some ways, the challenge of this class reflects the challenge that the college itself is facing as it strives to retain its distinctive identity while opening its educational opportunities to a broad spectrum of students from all faiths, races, genders, and places. We begin with who we are, but we are all challenged to read between the lines and across the human boundaries we impose upon our lives to find the connections between literature and life.

Fundamentally, engaging in the study of literature of any kind is to engage in the study of the HUMAN story AND stories. We are one, we are many. Humans live in particular communities. They bring a wide variety of experiences with them. To honor both the particular nature of stories, peoples, and communities -- and to see the broader human connections that undergird them--is what literary study is all about. I'm excited to see critical consciousness developing in your conversations on this blog and I'm hoping that our study of Rudy Wiebe's and Sandra Birdsell's novels will help us to stay engaged with this challenging conversation. Both are prize-winning novelists in Canada whose HUMAN STORIES have gained them a strong audience across cultures.