The Need for Roots

Review of Mark Bracher, Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation. Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 244 pages. ISBN: 1403975620 (Hardcover) at $80.00, ISBN: 0230621114 (Paperback) at $28.95.

Mark Bracher’s Radical Pedagogy argues that the “most fundamental mission” of educators at all levels ought

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to be “the construction, maintenance, and elaboration of students’ identities” (p. 71). This pedagogy is indeed radical, not only because it represents a paradigmatic shift in educational theory and practice, but because its central construct, identity, is held to be the “prime mover” of human behavior (p. 3), the root of social justice and ethical responsibility, and the key determinant of successful learning.

In contrast to narrower conceptions of identity as subject position or group-membership, the book’s first part theorizes identity comprehensively, across three loosely Lacanian registers (the affective, the imagistic, and the linguistic) and five identity structures elaborated by Robert Kegan (the impulsive, the imperial, the interpersonal, the systemic or institutional, and the trans-systemic or interindividual). This expansive understanding of identity grounds Bracher’s claim that educators must recognize and develop students’ identities on multiple registers. It also permits Bracher to explore how several types of identity failure and later, several traditional pedagogies, may contribute to repression, splitting, attribution errors, and misunderstandings of self and other.

Distinct from “cultural studies” approaches, Bracher’s pedagogy is an explicitly psychoanalytic one, motivated by the analyst’s “desire for absolute difference” (p. 131), in which the educator’s goal is that students come to a greater recognition and integration of their internal otherness, the excluded aspects of their selves. This requires not only that teachers achieve a more sophisticated understanding of identity development and structuration, but that we confront the pitfalls of our own identity-maintaining practices. The book’s second and third parts are devoted to facilitating this task. Bracher’s sparing use of Lacanian formulae in his analysis of five traditional pedagogies effectively serves his purpose: to illustrate how the transference relationship underlying each pedagogy can jeopardize students’ identity-development, in some cases by asking students to identify

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with the teacher’s knowledge or values, in other cases by affording encounters with otherness only at great historical or cultural remove.

After offering a method for self-analysis by teachers as well as a reflection on generativity as our most fundamental impulse and identity need in Part Three, the fourth and final part of the book focuses on changing harmful identity contents while supporting benign, prosocial ones through an empathetic, “sentimental education” (p. 173) à la Richard Rorty (not Flaubert). Bracher concludes by returning to his model of identity, arguing that students who have achieved integrated, interindividual identities will act responsibly within the complex ecology of “all humans (and everything else as well)” (p. 203), a pedagogical aim which seems utterly appropriate in a rapidly changing, increasingly interdependent, global era.

There is much to admire and little to criticize in Radical Pedagogy: It achieves its goals succinctly and convincingly. Nevertheless, the book compels us to ask important questions both practical and theoretical. On the practical side, it seems necessary to consider how educators can become aware of students’ identity needs in a way that permits us to respond to them effectively. What kinds of interactions, assessments, or interventions might be called for? What role should individual, disciplinary, and institutional differences play in shaping suitable radical pedagogical practices? That is, should identity needs ever take a back seat to basic skill-development or other practically necessary learning? If the goal of the teacher is to assist each student develop her or his identity, then what (presumably radical) restructuring of teachers’ contracts, duties, and institutional roles might be required to facilitate the necessary greater individual interaction between student and teacher?

Bracher’s work also raises valuable theoretical questions which many readers will wish to pursue. It is difficult

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to read the book without reflecting upon the presumption contained in it that teachers (of all subjects, at all levels) must be committed to social justice. While undoubtedly an admirable notion, educators must consider how this commitment (if indeed they share it) ought to be coordinated with the commitments of other faculty members, students, and educational institutions. Furthermore, it may be worthwhile to ask to what extent educating students to act in accordance with certain social and political ideals (even just ones) uses them, their energies, and their tuition payments to serve a vision of society’s collective needs that may or may not be their own.

Even psychoanalytically-inclined readers may remark that the “discourse of the analyst,” which strives for the “absolutely different” self-discovery of the analysand/student, accepts identity-bearing signifiers such as gentleness, reflexivity, empathy, and tolerance, while rejecting other signifiers such as hyper-masculinity, (p. 165), bellicosity, and impulsivity as products of repression, immaturity, or pathology. Of course, all pedagogies are value-laden, and these particular values are far from objectionable. Nevertheless, it is worth considering what place an identity-based pedagogy could give to a critique of the values embedded in identity-development, or, more broadly, in psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Finally, it is fair to ask whether new curricula designed according to identity-based criteria would permit students to experience the (arguable) greatness, human capacity, and ingenuity contained in classical or canonical works, such as those of say, Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare. While there are no indications that these or any other authors would be specifically excluded from a radical pedagogy, Bracher contends that “the most beneficial knowledge [about language and literature] is an understanding of how the various elements of language function to construct, deconstruct, and re-

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structure both our individual and our collective identities” (p. 187). This claim that literature (or any other subject) is worth study primarily because it teaches us about the construction of our own identities may be uncomfortable for those who believe that significant achievements in all disciplines are worth knowing, rather, because they call us to embrace a humanity, an imagination, or even an identity that we had not previously known. It is a fascinating question whether such texts and such a (Harold) Bloomian vision of literary identity-enhancement could ultimately cohere with Bracher’s approach. What is certain is that, by revealing identity’s central role in both learning and social justice, Bracher’s contribution adds to longstanding pedagogical debates like these a new, timely, and most welcome dimension.

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