Contextual Knowledge

A repost from Criticality, my cultural theory blog of the last decade

One of the things I want to do with this Substack is to share different parts of my writing self, and consequently of my self-self. What follows is a post I wrote for my abandoned (but still live online) blog, Criticality. The subtitle of the blog was: Critical theory, critical culture, & postmodern humanism. As I explain on the blog’s About page—

Criticality (formerly called Pedagogishness) began in January 2012 as a place for me to share my own ideas about teaching and learning in the humanities classroom. But I quickly found that I was more interested in blogging about the problematic status of the humanities and humanism itself than in things like learning objectives or low-stakes writing in the classroom. Indeed, I was most engaged when writing about critical theory and how it relates to critical pedagogy. And I was more or less obsessed with redefining humanism for a postmodern society.

NB: The original incarnation of Pedagogishness is also still live online.

The entry re-presented here was posted on September 9, 2018. I had recently starting teaching a section of English 101 (freshman comp) as an adjunct assistant professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Until this very hour, I had forgotten that I briefly returned to Criticality back then—and with a quite pedagoguish entry at that.

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The epiphanies abound now that I am in the classroom again. In my last post, I talked about the terms academic writing, argumentative writing, and critical writing. I explained that I meant “critical writing” not in the sense of writing as a critic—say, reviewing a literary text or performance piece—but rather in the sense of writing as critique, and critique in the sense associated with critical theory: a critical intervention in a social, cultural, or political arena, intended ultimately to do some kind of political or ideological work from a particular critical or theoretical perspective. So much for the last epiphany.

But as I thought about the work we were doing in English 101 on critical reading and argumentative writing, it occurred to me how much social, cultural, and historical context students needed even to understand what they were reading, let alone to write about it. For example, in teaching a New York Times op-ed piece by broadcast journalist Robert Leonard about why rural Americans voted for Trump, I could not take for granted that my students would know that Republicans and Democrats were members of the two major parties in our political system, or what the terms “right” and “left” meant in political discourse.

On the Critical Thinking page of this website, I list six types of knowledge that I derived from Bloom’s taxonomy: factual, conceptual, procedural, analytic, synthetic, and evaluative. In beginning to teach my current English composition class, however, I realized that I need to add a seventh type of knowledge to the list: contextual knowledge. I broached this with my students on the second day of class, putting on the board the name Pierre Bourdieu and the idea of cultural capital. I’m no expert on Bourdieu or the fully developed concept of cultural capital, and I think what I have in mind by “contextual knowledge” may be more modest in scope than Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, but I think it’s a useful starting point.

By contextual knowledge, I mean knowledge that is in fact largely factual, but goes beyond the kind of factual identification associated with rote memorization, and extends to an awareness of people, places, and a wide range of things that characterize the society, culture, and politics of any given time and place in human history.

So, in studying an excerpt from the introduction to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, there is actually quite a lot of contextual knowledge that students need before they can hope to achieve even a rudimentary, let alone a sophisticated understanding of the text. They need to know about the various incarnations of the War on Drugs in the United States, going back at least to the Nixon administration. Moreover, it is not enough to know that certain bills were passed by Congress and signed into law by Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton from the 1970s to the 1990s. They need to know about the history of racialized social control and the opposition to it, from slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement. And they need to understand how these two things were connected as a matter of policy, politics, and social history. They need to know, for example, about the socio-political reality disclosed by Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman in this 1994 interview with Dan Baum for Harper’s magazine:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

These words blew Dan Baum’s mind in 1994, and they blew mine when I read them last week—in the kind of response I like to call “shocked, but not surprised.” And it is precisely this kind of context—this kind of contextual knowledge—that students need, in order to understand much of the writing we assign to them, or that we expect them to discover on their own as sources for their independently researched writing assignments.

Imparting this kind of knowledge, or teaching students how to acquire it for themselves, is one of the most important services we perform for our students, and one of the hardest parts of our jobs as teachers. It can also be one of the most rewarding parts, if you are fortunate enough to be greeted by nods of recognition or glints of “Aha!” in your students’ eyes or on their faces as you go about the business of contextual education. After my class on the Michelle Alexander excerpt from The New Jim Crow, some students remarked on my “passion” for “this stuff,” said that I was holding my textbook in my hands and gesturing “like a preacher” as I read the final pages of the text aloud to them in the waning minutes of class, and asked me if I’d considered a career in politics! “Maybe thirty years ago,” I replied, unable to keep a grin off my face, “but thank you.”

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Coming soon on my Substack: A brand new review of Kimberly Akimbo, and a 30-year old foray into gay coming of age fiction. Yep, you got that right: not poetry, FICTION.