Content area
Full text
High school teacher Kelly Ann Nugent asked her students to design schools that embodied the principles of learning suggested by writers such as Dickinson, Emerson, Poe, Thoreau, and Whitman. By doing so, students understood better not only the ideas of the writers but also the sometimes-contradictory conditions of their own schooling.
Question authority. This is what Walt Whitman demands at the outset of "Song of Myself": We must place "[c)reeds and schools in abeyance" so that we may "for good or bad . . . speak at every hazard, / Nature without check with original energy" (188). Open this poem in your classroom. Can you feel the tension? I hope you can-you have been made redundant by the good gray poet. The problem is that few of our students feel the tension, and it is not because they do not know what abeyance means.
There is an obvious obstacle to subversive teaching in public schools. Postman and Weingartner pointed out that because "the critical content of any learning experience is the method or process through which the learning occurs" (19; italics in original), radical content is easily overpowered by the messages embedded in the conventional methods, or "media," that represent the spectrum of currently accepted teaching methods. Though this conflict alone can obstruct attempts to teach subversive skills and texts, the problem has been compounded. Students live in a culture that has experienced the collapse of these tensions; their world is one in which hegemonic institutions-especially mainstream corporate media-have adopted the rhetoric of rebellion and nonconformity, thus conflating powerful radical language with the routine consumer behaviors promoted by advertising and television programming. With this diluting of radical language in the mainstream, the potential for learning from subversive texts is diminished as long as the power of the words is not reclaimed. It is our job as teachers of literature and language to facilitate this taking back of power.
I had not yet recognized the impact of this coopting of the countercultural language when I began the unit on the Romantics and transcendentalists in nineteenth-century American literature with three inclusive college-track junior classes in rural Appalachia. The literature of the American Romantics and transcendentalists is revolutionary, fresh, and bursting with life. The language is transformational;...