Henry Giroux, Radical Pedagogy and the Discourse of Lived Cultures
(from Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope)

[...]

Central to this view is the need to develop what I have termed the theory
of self-production [recursive and vice versa] (see Touraine, 1977). In the most general sense; this
demands an understanding of how teachers and students give meaning
to their lives through the complex historical, cultural, and political
forms that they both embody and produce. A number of issues need to
be developed within a critical pedagogy around this concern. First, it is
necessary to acknowledge the subjective forms of political will and
struggle that give meaning to the lives of students. Second, as a mode of
critique, the discourse of lived cultures should interrogate the ways in
which people create stories, memories, and narratives that posit a sense
of determination and agency. This is the cultural "stuff" of mediation ,  
the conscious and unconscious material through which members of
dominant and subordinate groups offer accounts of who they are in
their different readings of the world.
If radical educators treat the histories, experiences, and languages of
different cultural groups as particularized forms of production, it be-
comes less difficult to understand the diverse readings, mediations, and
behaviors that, let us say, students exhibit in response to analysis of a
particular classroom text . In fact, a cultural politics necessitates that a
pedagogy be developed that is attentive to the histories, dreams, and ex-
periences that such students bring to school. It is only by beginning with
these subjective forms that critical educators can develop a language
and set of practices that engage the contradictory nature of the cultural
capital with which students produce meanings that legitimate particular
forms of life.
Searching out such elements of self-production is not merely a peda-
gogic technique for confirming the experiences of students who are si-
lenced by the dominant culture of schooling. It is also part of an analysis
of how power, dependence, and social inequality enable and limit stu-
dents around issues of class, race, and gender. The discourse of lived
cultures becomes an "interrogative framework" for teachers, illuminat-
ing not only how power and knowledge intersect to disconfirm the cul-
tural capital of students from subordinate groups but also how they can
be translated into a language of possibility . The discourse of lived cul-
tures can also be used to develop a radical pedagogy of popular culture,
one that engages the knowledge of lived experience through the dual
method of confirmation and interrogation . The knowledge of the "other"
is engaged in this instance not simply to be celebrated but also
to be interrogated with respect to the ideologies it contains, the means
of representation it utilizes, and the underlying social practices it con-
firms. At issue here is the need to link knowledge and power theoreti-
cally so as to give students the opportunity to understand more critically
who they are as part of a wider social formation and how they have been
positioned and constituted through the social domain.
The discourse of lived cultures also points to the need for radical edu-
cators to view schools as cultural and political spheres actively engaged
in the production and struggle for voice. In many cases, schools do not
allow students from subordinate groups to authenticate their problems
and experiences through their own individual and collective voices . As I
have stressed previously, the dominant school culture generally repre-
sents and legitimates the privileged voices of the white middle and
upper classes. In order for radical educators to demystify the dominant
culture and to make it an object of political analysis, they will need to
master the "language of critical understanding." If they are to under-
stand the dominant ideology at work in schools, they will need to attend
to the voices that emerge from three different ideological spheres and
settings: these include the school voice, the student voice and the teacher
voice . [the voice of the tool , the voice of the platform-in-school , the voice of the tickets ...] The interest that these different voices represent have to be ana-
lyzed, not so much as oppositional in the sense that they work to
counter and disable each other , but as an interplay of dominant and
subordinate practices that shape each other in an ongoing struggle over
power, meaning, and authorship. This, in turn, presupposes the neces-
sity for analyzing schools in their historical and relational specificity,
and it points to the possibility for intervening and shaping school out-
comes. In order to understand the multiple and varied meanings that
constitute the discourses of student voice, radical educators need to af-
firm and critically engage the polyphonic languages their studens bring
to schools . [school gives the structure, polyophony is the voicing?] Educators need to learn "the collection and communicative
practices associated with particular uses of both written and spoken
forms among specific groups" (Sola & Bennett, 1985, p. 89). Moreover,
any adequate understanding of this language has to encompass the so-
cial and community relations outside of school life that give it meaning
and dignity.
Learning the discourse of school voice means that radical educators
need to critically analyze the directives, imperatives, and rules that
shape particular configurations of time, space, and curricula within the
institutional and political settings of schools. The category of school
voice , for example, points to sets of practices and ideologies that struc-
ture how classrooms are arranged, what content is taught, what general
social practices teachers have to follow [assesment, policies , evaluations ..]. Moreover, it is in the interplay
between the dominant school culture and the polyphonic representa-
tions and layers of meaning of student voice that dominant and opposi-
tional ideologies define and constrain each other.
Teacher voice reflects the values, ideologies, and structuring princi-
ples that give meaning to the histories, cultures, and subjectivities that
define the day-to-day activities of educators. It is the critical voice of
common sense that teachers utilize to mediate between the discourses
of production, of texts, and of lived cultures as expressed within the
asymmetrical relations of power characterizing such potentially 'coun-
terpublic" spheres as schools . In effect, it is through the mediation and
action of teacher voice that the very nature of the schooling process is
either sustained or challenged; that is, the power of teacher voice to
shape schooling according to the logic of emancipatory interests is inex-
tricably related to a high degree of self-understanding regarding values
and interests. Teacher voice moves within a contradiction that points to
its pedagogical significance for marginalizing as well as empowering
students. On the one hand, teacher voice represents a basis in authority
that can provide knowledge and forms of self-understanding allowing
students to develop the power of critical consciousness. At the same
time, regardless of how pol i t ically or ideologically correct a teacher may
be, his or her [their] "voice" can be destructive for students if it is imposed on
them or if it is used to silence them.
the teacher voice being performed by non-teachers?
possible experiemnt: switch words: teacher <-> tool

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Kathleen Weiler (1988), in her brilliant ethnography of a group of fem-
inist school administrators and teachers, illustrates this issue. She 
reports on one class in which a teacher has read a selection from
The Autobiography of Malcom X describing how a young Malcolm is
told by one of his public school teachers that the most he can hope for in
life is to get a job working with his hands. In reading this story, the
teacher's aim is to illustrate a particular theory of socialization. John, a
black student in the class, reads the selection as an example of outright
racism, one that he fully understands in light of his own experiences. He
isn't interested in looking at the more abstract issue of socialization. For
him, the issue is naming a racist experience and condemning it force-
fully. Molly, the teacher, sees John's questions as disruptive and chooses
to ignore him. In response to her action, John drops out of the class the
next day. Defending her position, Molly argues that students must learn
how the process of socialization works, especially if they are to under-
stand fundamental concepts in sociology. But in teaching this point, she
has failed to understand that students inhabit multilayered subjectivi-
ties which often promote contradictory and diverse voices and as such
present different, if not oppositional, readings of the materials provided
in class, in spite of their alleged worth. In this case, the culture of the
teacher's voice, which is white and middle class , comes into conflict
with that of the student voice, which is black and working class. Rather
than mediating this conflict in a pedagogically progressive way, the
teacher allowed her voice and authority to silence the student's anger,
concern, and interests.
I also want to add that the category of teacher voice points to the need
for radical educators to join together in a wider social movement dedi-
cated to restructuring the ideological and material conditions that work
both within and outside of schooling. The notion of voice in this case
points to a shared tradition as well as a particular form of discourse. It is
a tradition that has to organize around the issues of solidarity, struggle,
and empowerment in order to provide the conditions for the particular-
ities of teacher and student voice to gain the most emancipatory expres-
sion. Thus, the category of teacher voice needs to be understood in
terms of its collective political project as well as in relation to the ways it
functions to mediate student voices and everyday school life.
In general terms, the discourse of critical understanding not only rep-
resents an acknowledgement of the political and pedagogical processes
at work in the construction of forms of authorship and voice within dif-
ferent institutional and social spheres; it also constitutes a critical attack
on the vertical ordering of reality inherent in the unjust practices that
are actively at work in the wider society . To redress some of the problems
sketched out in the preceding pages, I believe that schools need to be
reconceived and reconstituted as "democratic counter public spheres'--
as places where students learn the skills and knowledge needed to live in
and fight for a viable democratic society. Within this perspective, schools
will have to be characterized by a pedagogy that demonstrates its com-
mitment to engaging the views and problems that deeply concern stu-
dents in their everyday lives, Equally important is the need for schools to
cultivate a spirit of critique and a respect for human dignity that will be
capable of linking personal and social issues around the pedagogical
project of helping students to become active citizens.
In conclusion, each of the three major discourses presented above as
part of a radical pedagogy involves a different view of cultural produc-
tion, pedagogical analysis, and political action . And while each of these
radical discourses involves a certain degree of autonomy in both form
and content, it is important that a radical pedagogy be developed
around the inner connections they share within the context of a cultural
politics. For it is within these interconnections that a critical theory of
structure and agency can be developed--a theory that engenders a radi-
cal educational language capable of asking new questions, making new
commitments, and allowing educators to work and organize for the de-
velopment of schools as democratic counterpublic spheres.

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notion 'counterpublics' temporarly situated
habermas put forward the term

technical element.
there in the discuorse analysis, understanding of the school voice as also expressed thorugh the physical space..

visual side of voice.. lack of tonality in that sense.. quite monophonic

shift attention between ongoing conversation..
no overhearing.. quite minimal option.