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Monstrous Generosity: Pedagogical Affirmations of the “Improper”

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Abstract

This article focuses upon monstrously generous teaching styles, enacted in neocolonial educational contexts, where the interactions between students and teachers are sometimes tense and mistrustful. The tensions between students and teachers are explained by discussing the ways in which schools—in the theoretical perspective of Roberto Esposito—operate to immunize the society against youth deemed improper. Utilizing the theories of Antonio Negri, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the characterization of students as monstrous is discussed and an inversion is suggested, whereby students deemed to be monstrous are considered the source of reinvigorating visions of society. The pedagogical approaches of teachers who seek to welcome and nurture monstrous students are described, relying upon the accounts of great teachers offered by educators and sociologists. In practice, monstrously generous teachers make supererogatory gestures in their interactions with students, as a way of signaling to heavily-armored youth that they are willing to enter reciprocal relationships with them. Once youth drop their armor and begin to share their perspectives, monstrously generous teachers develop multiple means of helping youth develop their worldviews, without surveillance or censor.

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Notes

  1. We seek to address conditions in “neocolonial” school sites. In the United States, many localities in cities, rural areas, and areas bordering American Indian nations have a combination of factors which operate to limit community development and educational achievement: due to a history of colonial control, the economy of the region has limited development and people hold relatively low-paying jobs, if they are employed; the region is populated by people who have been the targets of colonial control and endure high levels of police surveillance; they are shaped by political, economic, and educational policies that assume a deficit portrait of the people in the region. In sites such as these, the graduation rate of students tends to be remarkably low, and the nature of social relationships in neocolonial schools can be highly adversarial. This is one of the literatures to which Valenzuela’s study contributes. Other works showing processes of disposability include: Alonso et al. (2009), Means (2013), Ferguson (2001), and Morris (2016).

  2. While this essay turns to Freire and other progressive educational theorists to outline a critique of generosity, we do so cautiously, recognizing that this literature also harbors assumptions about the human that exalt the very idea of the proper that we are seeking to call into question.

  3. Interestingly, the term generosity derives from the Latin word generōsus, which denotes that someone is “of noble birth.” For this reason, generosity has long been understood as the domain of the affluent, which not only precludes the poor from being considered generous but it affirms asymmetrical power relations in every “generous” interaction, through which the positions of the affluent and poor are confirmed. As Graeber (2011) has suggested, “one of the most insidious of the ‘hidden injuries of class’ in North American society was the denial of the right to do good, to be noble” (p. 8). Monstrous generosity violates this economy and breaks the stranglehold that those in a variety of positions of power have over the field of generosity.

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Correspondence to Gregory N. Bourassa.

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Bourassa, G.N., Margonis, F. Monstrous Generosity: Pedagogical Affirmations of the “Improper”. Stud Philos Educ 36, 615–632 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-017-9566-3

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