Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for ActivistEducators.

TEACHING DEFIANCE: STORIES AND STRATEGIES FOR ACTIVIST EDUCATORS

By Michael Newman (John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2006)

Reviewed by Sandra Childs

"Titid assign me a job ... to teach the boys reading. Pa Pierre has a box full of books that he uses to teach the letters and

the words. These books are called Taste Salt. The name makes me remember a story my Mama told us. The zombie understands only his suffering. He has no power to break away. He can only work and work.... If the zombie gets a taste of salt, he will understand. He will open his true eyes and see that he has been made a zombie. And he will turn against his master. He will obey him no longer. He will make himself free ... Then one day I see why the books be called Taste Salt. Is because that is what being able to read and write is like. You understand things you didn't before."

--Frances Temple Taste of Salt

In much the same way Frances Temple asserts the importance of reading to help people wake up and resist their oppression, Michael Newman, in Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators insists on the importance of stories in adult education to help people see they have choices in their lives--choices they can make individually and collectively in order to improve their lives and the society; and choices that challenge authority, disrupt the status quo, and even subvert entire political and economic systems. To that end, Newman shares with us numerous stories that range from the story of Rosa Parks to that of a suicidal girl in a dormitory he was overseeing. He also discusses at length various political philosophers on concepts of power and resistance and offers a few activities to use in the adult education setting.

In his book, Newman identifies ways in which we can take control of our lives--through rebelliousness, problem solving, collective decision-making, dialogue, negotiation, and organized social action. He wisely points out that while we hire people to help us learn to play the piano, we fail to realize that defiance skills, which can lead to individual or collective empowerment, are often left to "common sense" or intuition. Newman argues that these skills must be learned, practiced, and reflected upon. As part of this emphasis on reflection, Newman's book asks some excellent questions that the reader is invited to ponder: "How, then, can we participate in the affairs of our community, state, country and world in ways which will prevent the authorities from so nonchalantly displaying their power? How can we unsettle those in power and actually make them take heed? As activist educators how can we inspire rebelliousness?" (40)

The author's answer: "we can tell stories." (40) And so he does. Newman tells not only the stories of activist heroes such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela but also the triumphant stories of lesser known J individuals such as Pitika Ntuli, a South African professor and poet, who gave an impromptu speech at a festival. He also tells the tragic and tender stories of friends and students who have committed suicide, the fires in his school, and how moved he was by reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller's Catch 22.

However compelling his stories may be, Newman misses opportunities to develop lessons around them, too often failing to tell us how he uses these stories in the classroom or how his students are affected by them. For instance, he shares a poem that provokes his students to deep thought. Then spends two pages discussing how much he likes the language of the poem and never explains how it is used in the classroom. Though he describes his classroom as "learner centered," we rarely get to hear the voices of his students or the effect of his questions or curriculum on them. When the author praises another educator for using a land dispute between Aboriginals, Environmentalists, and Ranchers, asserting that "Mackinnon has given a rich and complex story to tell, " (163) he could have offered suggestions as to how to turn this story into a specific lesson plan, such as elaborate role play for the classroom (each group researching the history; writing interior monologues; presenting, listening, and questioning; engaging in informal negotiations and in formal debate to come to a final solution.) An explanation of a concrete and well developed lesson would have helped the adult educator to use Newman's reflections in the classroom.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In Teaching Defiance, Newman argues for the importance of self reflection in empowering activists but does not adequately explain activities that engage class participants in self reflection or how they worked. Stephen Brookfield, in the forward to the book, claims that Newman has highly detailed descriptions of role plays, simulations, dialogues and meeting guidelines. Newman's book title and book jacket also claim to offer strategies to use in the adult education classroom. Yet, over and over again, he only teases us with brief, vague, and therefore unhelpful lists: "through a series of activities--individual reflection, pair work, small group work and then a full discussion ..." (43) Furthermore, the voices of his workshop participants are all but missing, except in one lesson when Newman describes using a scene from a play as a template for negotiation. The students read the scene to witness a "negotiation" of the terms of marriage between two equally powerful participants. Newman then asks the pairs to imagine they are negotiating a long term relationship. Although we finally hear what the students actually should do in the activity, the author offers nothing about how the activity actually worked or what students said during the reflection and debriefing. As much as Newman acknowledges the difficult work of problem solving, he never reflects on the struggles, downfalls, or the limitations of his lessons in the classroom.

Newman wants to make sure his readers and students fully appreciate the concepts he thinks are central to defiance education. He offers a good deal of theory and appreciation of that theory but little about what students make of it. For example, he follows a passage by South African philosopher and activist Rick Turner not with a discussion of how the students interpret and reflect on the passage or the issues of conscience and consciousness, but with a full explanation of why he enjoys the passage and how he connects Turner's points to Sartre's. He never explains how he gets his students to explore these essential ideas of choice or how he puts them in situations in the classroom to help them shift their thinking. As an educator, I want to hear about the context of his classroom--the curriculum or lessons that help students see where they give up choice to others and when they can and do make choices.

Whether we are working with highly educated professionals during staff development at the end of a long work day, adults without high school diplomas who are looking for jobs, union organizers being trained to tackle the bosses, or retired widows and widowers looking for some new distraction--musing on Foucault or Habermas won't necessarily be successful. As activist educators, the essential question must be how to introduce and explore these concepts to inspire adult participants to see that they are political beings who can impact their own lives and the bigger system. All adults (and a good majority of high school students) can grapple with complex ideas if they are rooted in a context. However, Newman fails to share enough about how he has done this or suggest how we might. For instance, adults in a cooking class might be engaged if introduced to some daring activities that reveal and challenge corporate control of food. Or, in a summer writing institute for teachers, participants could focus on writing about aspects of national or local education mandates.

By the end of what Newman admits is a "discursive book," I do have a deeper understanding of political philosophers such as Sartre, Foucault, Weber, and Arendt and a strong sense of the intellect and passion that Newman brings to his various roles in education. I also have an extensive collection of Newman's favorite stories, along with an understanding of why they move him. But I have a very faint picture of what Newman does with these stories in the classroom--how he uses them, what his students have to say in response to them, and what they learn from them. While I appreciate any opportunity to think deeply, whether about Heiddeger or about control, I was hoping to hear just how his units or lessons work. In order to put to use the ideas in Newman's book, I need him to explain both the theory and practical substance of a lesson, to share the voices of the teacher and the students, and to reflect on the goals and the struggles of the actual lessons.

Newman does an excellent job discussing why teachers must take sides, how people make choices, what motivates people to act, why metaphor evokes change in thinking, why critical thinking must serve social justice, and why all adult education is an opportunity to provoke defiance. I applaud the work he is doing and encourage both K12 and adult educators to work toward waking up their students to their activist selves. Newman's premise and proof of that premise is sound: to create change in the world we must teach people to recognize that they are the agents of change. However, Newman offers the adult educator too little guidance on just how to do that. Newman criticizes "theory which offers little or no room for practice" (122), but in Newman's own eagerness to demonstrate that his practice is rooted in a deep understanding of political philosophy, he leaves little room in his book to elucidate his practice--unless his practice happens to be to lecture on theory.

Reviewed by Sandra Childs