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Drawing on classroom experiences, the author suggests that philosopher Donald Davidson's interpretive principle of charity can help explain why communication is impoverished or even impossible in classrooms governed by traditional, authoritarian practices that form a "pedagogy of severity." If the classroom is to be a place of dialogue, learning, and mutual transformation, teachers should promote a "pedagogy of charity" which assumes that students are rational beings with mostly true and coherent beliefs.
[R]eading and writing are the products ofa lengthy historical labor undertaken and sustained at an enormous human cost No sooner do we permit ourselves to witness this costly struggle, relived in our own classrooms day after day, than we remember the violence required to create readers of generations past and to make us the "readers" we have become.
Kurt Spellmeyer
When the test was handed to me, that nervous, curious feeling turned to frustration and disappointment when I saw a D on the top of my paper and `poor study" written in big red print across the middle; I was so insulted to have been told that I did a bad job studying because I had worked hard to prepare for that test and was used to getting good grades. As we went over the test in class, I did not want to find out which questions Igot wrong or listen to the teacher lecture on study skills; just wanted to quit. Excerpt from Maggie's draft
Having received identical-and worse-grades and similar comments on assignments, I find it uncomfortably easy as I read the above excerpt from Maggie's paper to imagine her reaction as her high school teacher returned the combination multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank American history exam to her. How the grade and the "comment" must have jumped off the paper! Frustrated and angered by the teacher's arbitrary authority to define reality-specifically, the quality of Maggie's study habits-based only on the results of the test, Maggie withdrew from the class that day. For her, even if not for the teacher (who, after all, attempted to review the correct answers and to suggest study techniques), the assignment seemed to be a dead-end from which she would not learn anything productive. Maggie's experience breathes life into Kurt Spellmeyer's chilly theoretical abstraction of the "enormous...