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.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
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).
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.
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.
References
Advancement Project in partnership with Padres and Jovenes Unidos, Southwest Youth Collaborative. 2005. Education on lockdown: The schoolhouse to jailhouse track. Chicago: Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University School of Law.
Akoto, Agyei. 1994. Notes on an Afrikan-centered pedagogy. In Too much schooling, too little education: A paradox of black life in white societies, ed. Mwalimu Shujaa, 319–337. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Alonso, Gaston, Noel Anderson, Su Celina, and Jeanne Theoharis. 2009. Our schools suck: Students talk back to a segregated nation on the failures of urban education. New York: New York University Press.
Baldwin, James. 1998a. A talk to teachers. In Collected essays, ed. Toni Morrison, 678–686. New York: Library of America.
Baldwin, James. 1998b. Notes of a native son. In Collected essays, ed. Toni Morrison, 1–129. New York: Library of America.
Biesta, Gert. 2006. Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Biesta, Gert. 2013. The beautiful risk of education. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Campbell, Timothy. 2011. Improper life: Technology and biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chavez, Leo. 2008. The Latino threat: Constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Coles, Romad. 1997. Rethinking generosity: Critical theory and the politics of caritas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Cushman, Kathleen. 2003. Fires in the bathroom: Advice for teachers from high school students. New York: The New Press.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1998. Black reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: The Free Press.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1999. Darkwater: Voices from within the veil. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Duncan-Andrade, Jeffrey, and Ernest Morrell. 2008. The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools. New York: Peter Lang.
Ellsworth, Elizabeth. 1997. Teaching positions: Difference, pedagogy, and the power of address. New York: Teachers College Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bíos: Biopolitics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2010. Communitas: The origin and destiny of community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2011. Immunitas: The protection and negation of life. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Ferguson, Ann. 2001. Bad boys: Public schools in the making of black masculinity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Foster, Michele. 1997. Black teachers on teaching. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, M. 2003. ‘Society must be defended’: Lectures at the College of France. New York: Picador.
Freire, P. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Freire, Paulo, and Antonio Faundez. 1989. Learning to question: A pedagogy of liberation. New York: Continuum.
Giroux, Henry. 2009. Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability?. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Graeber, David. 2011. Revolutions in reverse: Essays on politics, violence, art, and imagination. Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions.
Gutiérrez, Kris, Patricia Baquedano-Lόpez, and Carlos Tejada. 1999. Rethinking diversity: Hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture, and Activity 6 (4): 286–303.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hobbs, Sharon. 2001. The ties that (un)bind: Community in the classroom. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, unpublished dissertation.
Jackson, Sandra. 2003. Commentary on the rhetoric of reform: A twenty-year retrospective. In Education as enforcement: The militarization and corporatization of schools, ed. Kenneth Saltman, and David Gabbard, 223–238. New York: Routledge.
Kayser, Wolfgang. 1966. The grotesque in art and literature. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Kozol, Jonathan. 2005. The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 2009. The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lewis, Tyson. 2009. Education and the immunization paradigm. Studies in Philosophy and Education 28 (6): 485–498.
Lewis, Tyson, and Richard Kahn. 2010. Education out of bounds: Reimagining cultural studies for a posthuman age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Means, Alexander. 2013. Schooling in the age of austerity: Urban education and the struggle for democratic life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Morris, Monique. 2016. Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New York: The New Press.
Negri, Antonio. 2008. The political monster: Power and naked life. In In praise of the common: A conversation on philosophy and politics, ed. Cesar Casarino, and Antonio Negri, 193–218. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Noddings, Nel. 1996. On community. Educational Theory 46 (3): 245–267.
Olson, Joel. 2004. The abolition of white democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Paley, Vivian. 1986. On listening to what the children say. Harvard Educational Review 56 (2): 122–131.
Raider-Roth, Miriam. 2005. Trusting what you know: The high stakes of classroom relationships. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Ransby, Barbara. 2003. Ella Baker and the black freedom movement: A radical democratic vision. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Saltiban, B. (2012). Storying academic spaces: Reflections, Narratives, and interpretations of tongan students’ educational experiences. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, unpublished dissertation.
Schultz, Katherine. 2003. Listening: A framework for teaching across differences. New York: Teachers College Press.
Sidorkin, Alexander. 2002. Learning relations: Impure education, deschooled schools, & dialogue with evil. New York: Peter Lang.
Stanton-Salazar, Ricardo. 2001. Manufacturing hope and despair: The school and kin support networks of U.S.-Mexican youth. New York: Teachers College Press.
Todd, Sharon. 2003. Learning from the other: Levinas, psychoanalysis, and ethical possibilities in education. New York: State University of New York Press.
Valenzuela, Angela. 1999. Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Vélez-Ibañez, Carlos. 1983. Bonds of mutual trust: The cultural systems of rotating credit associations among urban Mexicans and Chicanos. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
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
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-017-9566-3