Patricia Bizzell
POWER, AUTHORITY, AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY ABSTRACT: This essay addresses the problem of left-liberal educators who want to promote their own values through their teaching but fear that doing so would contradict these values. The problem may arise from an oversimple notion of power as always oppressive; whereas a three-part model of power can show that it has legitimate forms, e.g., "authority." The notion of authority is developed through analysis of the work of Henry Giroux, Elizabeth Ellsworth, and bell hooks [this aurhor spells her name without initial caps].
Let me begin by assuming that many of us teaching today feel caught in a theoretical impasse. On the one hand, we wish to serve politically left-oriented or liberatory goals in our teaching, while on the other, we do not see how we can do so without committing the theoretically totalizing and pedagogically oppressive sins we have inveighed against in the systems we want to resist. Another way to describe this impasse would be to say that we want to serve the common good with the power we possess by virtue of our position as teachers, and yet we are deeply suspicious of any exercise of power in the classroom. I want to address this impasse in two ways. First, I will examine the theoretical bases for our suspicion of exercises of power. I will suggest that the categorical rejection of all uses of power results Patricia Bizzell is professor of English and director, Writing across the Curriculum, at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. She has coauthored The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical to Contemporary Times {1990) and The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing (3rd ed. 1991}. She has written essays on basic writing, academic discourse, and rhetorical theory, some of which are collected in Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (Forthcoming, University of Pittsburgh Press).
© Journal of Basic Writing, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1991
DOI: 10.37514/JBW-J.1991.10.2.04
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