"Everybody Knows This is Nowhere"

Randy: In the fall of 1996, the authors of this paper participated in a classroom that led us to re-evaluate our attitudes toward how critical consciousness can arise in composition classes. I was the teacher of the course, English 101, the first semester of the first-year writing sequence at the University of Louisville. Jane observed the course and interviewed students from it, as part of her dissertation research on cultural critique in writing classes. Halfway through our classroom experience, we gave a paper at the University of Kentucky Conference on Revisioning Social Justice, presenting our tentative ideas of how the students were reacting to the course's theme of utopian studies and the social critique that we saw as implicit in this theme. I went into the conference presentation fairly disappointed in what I had seen in the class. Primarily I saw, at that point, the students bracketing or reducing utopian ideals to what I, at least, considered a personal level. Since then, with the completion of the course, and with ongoing consultation with Jane (who was in turn consulting closely with six students), I have revised my ideas of what was happening in the course, as Jane has revised her ideas of what exactly she was examining in her dissertation study. In this essay, we would like to explore how our own perspectives changed as a result of our collaboration and examine how student, teacher, and researcher perspectives toward cultural change are affected by their mutual participation in a particular classroom culture.

I'd considered teaching a course on the theme of utopia for quite some time, partly as a way of more thoroughly working through my own political beliefs, which are social anarchist. I'd thought of the course more in terms of a literature seminar, reading Plato, Sir Thomas More, Kropotkin, LeGuin, and so on. But I have always felt the value of a thematic focus in composition classes as a means of modeling entrances into academic discourses. My theoryy of writing is, essentially, Bakhtinian--what I try to demonstrate to each student is the richness and flexibility of her own languages. Conversely, I want to convey some of the Heraclitean flux of academic discourses and believe that much of the affective difficulty that students encounter with them is due to a mistaken perception of them as monolithic, as invulnerable "authoritative discourses" (Bakhtin 342 ff.). By developing common languages in the classroom through writing, reading, and discussion, and by encouraging each student to alloy these languages with her own, I think we can make the prospect of learning academic discourses much less daunting for students without watering them down or otherwise undermining their usefulness.

I also wanted to bring to my own work in the classroom the close relation I felt between my theories of language and social organization. Just as Bakhtin sees language (and the ideology that suffuses it) as being in continual flux, constantly affected by the innumerable dialogues between human subjects who are, themselves, made out of their mutual interactions, social anarchism denies the perceived need for any fixed concentrations of political power. Social anarchists believe that mutual aid is the basis of our humanity, that decisions should be made by consensus and at the most local levels possible, and that a just society begins by refiguring our social relationships and building new, non-coercive means of organization (for further explanations of social anarchist theory, see Godwin, Kropotkin, and Ehrlich).

Because of these beliefs, I felt a very conflicted relationship to the cultural studies classroom as I had seen it in practice. Despite some varied and excellent theoretical work in cultural studies pedagogy, including that of Harris and George and Trimbur, the majority of cultural studies classes that I had observed at several different schools, or had heard described, were generally based on an ideological critique of popular culture, on, as Peter Elbow calls it, "the doubting game [which] seeks truth by indirection--by seeking error" (148). I can readily imagine why this has been so prevalent--for one thing, there's a good deal of material available for such a course, with two media criticism texts for college composition classes released by major publishers in just the first three months of 1997 (Cassebaum and Haskell; Thompson). Also, the "doubting game" strikes me as being a relatively easy way to teach a particular type of critical thinking: certainly a good deal of our popular culture reveals itself as sexist, homophobic, or otherwise atavistic under even the most cursory examination. This pedagogy strikes me, though, as being something of a bait-and-switch technique--at first the student is supposedly enticed (and empowered) by working with the familiar, then, she's shown that she herself is deeply implicated by the values described and prescribed there. On a larger scale, consistently playing "the doubting game" with students reinforces an attitude that I, along with Elbow, see as strongly implicit in our intellectual culture since Descartes: that intellect essentially consists of doubting, that even carefully examined commitment to any belief is ultimately a sign of näiveté (150).

I wanted to help my students do a constructive critique, to play Elbow's "believing game" which attempts "to find not errors but truths" (149). I wanted than to engage what was best instead of worst about their own ideals, mostly because of my own political beliefs but also because I felt it would help them produce better writing. I still have enough of a foot in the expressivist camp to believe that students do their best work when their ideas are lauded instead of set aside in favor of continual questioning.

In my preparation for the course I keyed upon one particular text in the cultural studies literature: Diana George and Diana Shoos's "Issues of Subjectivity and Resistance." What George and Shoos advocate is teaching cultural studies using a subject matter about which the teacher is herself conflicted--they themselves used Twin Peaks as their course's primary text. This struck me as more intellectually honest than a simple condemnation, more politically honest--in the sense that both the teacher and the students are exploring rather than the teacher questioning and conquering--as well as a lot more interesting. And I was and am fairly conflicted about the issue of utopia--I wonder particularly if utopian aspirations might not blind us to more immediate matters. My conflict only increased over the course of the semester: a situation that I at first felt uncomfortable with but have now come to view as positive.

Jane: When I began studying Randy's class, I wanted to see how students negotiated or resisted practices of cultural critique in their written responses to assignments, in class discussions, and in their own reflections on their work in this class. I was interested especially in the affective components of critique and resistance. As the semester progressed, I became interested, more specifically, in an area that emerged as one of Randy's chief concerns: Did students see this study of utopia as a form of cultural/social critique, and what possibilities did they see for pursuing the kinds of social change implied by these discussions? Our discussions about the class centered around a resistance that we saw in many students to the idea that meaningful social change could happen. My research questions evolved into a consideration of how students envisioned and described possibilities for social change, how they saw themselves in connection to change, how emotional factors figured into their construction of change as possible and themselves as possible change agents, and whether the spoken and written discourse about social change produced in the class could extend their sense of agency as writers.

The literature on cultural studies approaches to composition tells us we need to teach strategies of critique that enable students to question ideologies and see contradictions in dominant cultural discourses often by contrasting these discursive versions of reality with students' lived experience. Jim Berlin urges that we teach our students that ideology works through language to determine what we see as possible and impossible. Berlin points out that "[t]his is especially important since the recognition of the existence of a condition (homelessness, for example) and the desire for its change will go for nothing if ideology indicates that a change is simply not possible (the homeless freely choose to live in the street and cannot be forced to come inside)" ("Poststructuralism" 23). Berlin argues that because these ideologies are so influential in shaping students' views of the world--often leading them to deny the existence of any inequality--the writing teacher who takes a cultural studies approach must introduce heuristics that allow students to see things some ideologies repress. He explains that "It is at the moment of [students'] denial [of unequal social conditions] that the role of the teacher as problem poser is crucial, providing methods for questioning that locate the points of conflict and contradiction" (Rhetorics 102). Berlin's heuristics ask students to locate binary oppositions, key terms, cultural narratives and other elements of cultural coding in the texts that they encounter daily. The teacher's role of introducing a structure to enable critique is precarious, however, since most teachers would never want to devise a pedagogy that dictates only one appropriate outcome for critique. Berlin acknowledges this hazard when he stresses that the teacher's authority "should never be exercised so that it destroys the student's freedom to critique" (Rhetorics 103). Teachers must negotiate a careful balance when providing methods for critique if they do not want students to perceive them as dictating the preferred critical position. Mary Beth Hines describes this tension in a class

While some may argue that any "control" of classroom discourse reinstates oppression, Richard's [the teacher] interventions were inherently necessary because they provoked the defamiliarization required to irritate students into ideological critique. They also provided the scaffolding needed to achieve more complex analyses. Yet, as the interaction with Greg [a student] suggested, Richard's explicit "structuring" of the discourse made him vulnerable to charges of "imposing" his views on those "impressionable" undergraduates as he zealously sought to "expose" and "sell" his own beliefs. (244)

Kurt Spellmeyer also describes a composition pedagogy that tries to expose contradictions between student experience of the world and dominant discourses, arguing that students' "empowerment depends upon the recognition of a gap between received knowledge and the worlds they know firsthand" (48). While he advocates writing assignments and response to

student essays that encourage the realization of such a disjunction, he does not promote codified sets of questions or procedures to lead to critical reflection because "each question must be shaped by its experience" (57). He argues that 'Textbooks that profess to impart normative 'critical thinking' techniques make thinking and critique equally impossible. Because knowledge always addresses me, I am entitled to any question I care to ask, and any question will serve as a point of departure along the path of reflection and debate" (57). These composition specialists highlight a key problem for teachers who want to encourage their students to engage the world critically through their writing: How does a teacher provide enough structure for critique to enable complex critical explorations in students' writing without encouraging one particular critical/ideological stance?

Randy's use of utopia as a theme for his writing course, while not providing the answer to this question, suggests some considerations for introducing a critical discourse that allows students room to exercise their "freedom to critique." During the first class meeting he asked students to freewrite a description of their ideal society or utopia. This particular writing was something that he hoped to see change and grow throughout the semester. In these freewritings, students described societies without racism, wars, or violence in which there would be quality education, employment opportunities, and medical insurance for all. These ideal societies would have no pollution and would be safe places to raise children. Some of these initial writings were abstract in their description ("a perfect society would include peace between all races, all sexes, all people"), while others made connections to the students' own experiences of society, often implying an emotional orientation toward social problems. One student, for example, who wrote about homelessness didn't say simply that in an ideal society homelessness would not exist but that "You could drive down the street and not have to see people huddled under overpasses or pushing shopping carts because there would be homes and shelter for everyone." This phrasing suggests the discomfort or pain the writer feels when perceiving homeless people.

The strong emotions that can come from an examination of personal experiences in juxtaposition with an imagined ideal society can lead to critiques of the unequal status quo. For example, one student, a twenty-two year-old white female who works thirty hours a week to put herself through school while she takes fifteen credit hours a semester with the goal of becoming a stockbroker--we'll call her Christine--described the following conversation that she overheard in a Super-America convenience store about her own car:

Christine was the first to speak in the discussion that followed the freewriting session, telling this story and emphasizing how scared she had been of the potential thieves. A few moments later in the discussion, Christine suggested that a perfect society should have no money and that everyone should have the same thing. The emotional impact of her experience seemed to be the catalyst for her questioning of the values of a society with an uneven accumulation of wealth and consumer goods. Several other students agreed with Christine that money should be absent from an ideal society, but quickly the idea that "This could never happen" was introduced into the discussion. This freewriting exercise that asks students to describe a perfect world encourages them to draw on their own experiences to note discrepancies between the world they know and the world they would like to know. This structure for critique gives students the authority to initiate critiques of society without choosing a particular area for their attention or series of questions to ask that would, to a certain degree, shape the outcome of the analysis. This way of introducing a critical task might give students more of a chance to fashion a critical discourse they feel committed to rather than either taking up or rejecting the teacher's critical discourse. However, providing a loose structure for critique also allows a lot of room for ideologies that inhibit a critical perspective to surface. The disclaimer, "This could never happm" can undermine more complex critical explorations in the name of common sense.

Randy: As I told the students, I expected them to reevaluate and rewrite their visions of utopia throughout the semester. In order to reinforce this hope, the final assignment in the course asked the students to evaluate their experience in the class as a whole, and in particular, to describe how their ideas about utopia had changed due to readings, class discussions, and their own various writings. The formal paper assignments asked the students to narrate their experiences on field trips to the nineteenth-century utopian communities of Pleasant Hill and New Harmony, to evaluate a utopian or dystopian thinker's ideas in light of her biography, and to argue--either in formal academic fashion or in a short story--the question of whether or not the increasing technologization of everyday life was leading us to a more humane society. To encourage the students to re-engage their critical positions throughout their work in the course, I used portfolio grading, and to help them to become more aware of these positions, I asked for a reflective memo with every paper.

When I initially theorized the course, I thought of it in terms of the metaphor that Plato uses in The Republic--that to examine the idea of the just individual we should expand our scope and take a look at the just state, simply because it's easier to see. I thought that the students might have an easier time examining some of their own moral beliefs in this larger scale. By the time the semester was over, I was convinced that this metaphor of utopia as an enhanced reflection of the individual personality had become more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than I had hoped.

Linda, who was an engineering student, eighteen years old, wrote what was to my mind an imaginative and well-written first paper, one that I asked her to extend simply because I wanted to read more of it. She spoke about a society organized in units she called "tribes" of fifty to two hundred people; her tribes would be united by common interests, united economically by tribal production of a single product or small number of similar products. Tribal choice was to be voluntary, with cities refigured as centers of trading and cultural exchange between the various tribes. (I'm being awfully reductive in this description; it really was very fine writing.)

In the reflective memo that she submitted with the paper, Linda asked me to comment on whether she had been sufficiently inclusive; she wanted to make mm that no one was left out of her vision. But other students did not feel this necessity, quite the opposite in fact. I'll quote from Jim's first paper:

I have incorporated into my utopia the things in life that I love, and the things that I am passionate about. I have also been careful to avoid things that either make me unhappy or cause me great pain.... I have chosen my utopia to exist on an island, far from anything familiar. Free from any outside influences, that might possibly corrupt what I feel to be a perfect society.

Jim was not the only student to present this kind of isolationist, personalist view of utopia. In fact, when I asked the students to give a name to their Utopias they, almost without exception, named their societies after themselves.

In the midterm evaluations of the course, I explicitly asked the students several questions that had concerned Jane and me--whether they thought a fundamentally just society was possible and what place individuals could have in making social change. Their answers, once again, seemed solipsistic: "My conclusion is that the only utopia that can ever work is a personal utopia. Deciding what you want in your world (your life) and discarding the rest. Our society is too big a mess to even try to solve its problems." "I don't think there is one particular thing a single person can do to improve the society, except always try to improve his/her own lifestyle, and especially stress to others the importance of doing the same for themselves." Other students, as Jane has already noted, simply denied the possibility of a just society, often after giving detailed descriptions of what such a society might look like: "You may say to yourself, 'How can this be? Well, I think it can never be...." Needless to say, I was perplexed by this, and began to feel a

Jane: Nick Tingle has described similar statements of resignation and despair about the possibility of social change by students in his composition class. He suggests that to better understand this reaction of despair we need to took at it in psychological terms. Drawing on the work of Heinz Kohut, Tingle suggests that an individual's need for an "empathetically responsive environment" is reflected in the desire for "mystical unity with the deity or in the utopian hope for a society erected on social justice" (85). Tingle points out that the argument that social change won't happen or isn't realistic "serves primarily to protect the student against the ... injury which might occur were he or she seriously to consider what he or she might do, in his or her limited and finite self, to change the world" (86). Several students' comments during our initial interviews suggest a direct connection between their resignation toward any hope of social change and emotional wounding or disappointment. The arguments that change is unrealistic or impossible seem to be ways for students to protect themselves from repeated disappointment.

Linda thought part of Randy's goal for the course theme of utopia was to keep students from giving up on their ideals, but saw social change as unlikely. She said of the course: "I guess it's kind of geared to make us think, make us not give up on what we believe in and you know, to keep us from just pushing it back in our minds. I don't know, maybe in some people it would inspire them to go out and--try to change something. I don't think its worth it ... I try not to look at things too optimistically because then you get disappointed. Really badly."

I just look at people when they complain, "Well, what are you going to do to fix it?" "Oh, I don't have time" or "I'm not that involved in it" or bla, bla, bla. Well don't complain about it. If you're not going to do anything to fix the problem then don't complain about it. You'll find I'm not a very big complainer. Just because unless there's something that me, physically, I can do to fix a problem, then I really don't see it as too much worth my time.

Protecting himself from disappointment seems to be the reason that Michael doesn't see complaining or trying to fix things as worth his time. When explaining why he prefers to take a humorous approach to most of his writing assignments he says, "You get too serious about a topic and you throw yourself into it then eventually ... you're gonna get let down."

Randy: There is an interesting contrast between the emotional distress that Jane has described and the emotional valence of the class itself. On the first night of class, I noticed that the students were very eager to discuss the course themes--very eager to talk in general, much more so than any class I had taught at the University of Louisville. UofL is a large and diverse public university with an urban mission--the median age of undergraduate students is in the mid-twenties--and the class itself reflected this: There were several returning students, several African-American students, a Latin-American student; about three-fifths of the class were women. Over the course of the semester, the class grew to have a high degree of mutual respect, of community--and this is not just my opinion; several of the students commented along these lines in their midterm evaluations. I don't feel justified in taking much credit for this; it seemed to be there that first evening.

I was initially very pleased by this classroom atmosphere, of course, but in the process of rethinking the course in preparation for Jane's and my presentation, I started to see it as problematic in some ways. I thought it was entirely possible that the class was all too comfortable for my students. Therefore, I based a good deal of my analysis in our presentation on the work of the political theorist Joan Tronto, whose book Moral Boundaries is a recension of Carol Gilligan's work on the ethic of care. Gilligan and other feminist thinkers have described a "different voice" that is gendered feminine (though not necessarily sexed): a voice that, in ethics, values human relationships over acontextual rule systems; Tronto's project is to reinscribe this relational ethic, this ethic of care, back into a political context.

Tronto describes Gilligan's shortcomings as being an acceptance of certain moral boundaries that have been part of Western ideology since the eighteenth century, and, more specifically, since Kant: The boundaries I'd emphasize here are, first, a boundary between morality and politics, and second, between private and public life. Despite the fact that "the personal is political" is a germinal statement of second-wave feminism, Gilligan--and many other thinkers who draw on her--do not acknowledge the converse, that the political is personal. In other words, Gilligan's ethic of care is distinctly moral, distinctly private. Instead of tearing down the binary, the boundary, between the moral and the political, the personal and the public, Gilligan, in Tronto's view, has simply inverted it.

As Gilligan has received these boundaries unquestioningly, as our society as a whole has received them, so, it seemed to me, had my students. When I asked them to envision a just society, it seemed that they encoded it as a moral society--a society in binary opposition to a political society. Many of the students envisioned societies in which human relationships would be fundamentally changed, fundamentally egalitarian, and in which relationships between people were considered more important than rules of law or custom--but they had to code these possible worlds as personal. They saw a private, moral world, rather than a public, political world. For instance, Anne, one of the most enthusiastic students in the class and a very talented writer, gave me a reflective memo with her first paper in which she said that she couldn't write about some aspects of her utopian vision because they were too personal. This opposition of the personal and the political recurred again and again; Linda, who wrote such an excellent first paper, did her second paper on Orwell, writing at one point that "Of course, writers use other materials than their own lives, and Orwell often wrote about politics." This was immediately after she had written about Homage to Catalonia and Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

I began to wonder, given the prevalence of these binaries, whether the students read the classroom itself in reference to them. I believed the students could easily have encoded the tolerant atmosphere as home-like, as private rather than public, "moral" rather than political. And so the subject matter of the course seemed to be reinscribed as a matter of private concern. In our class discussions, I saw a general pattern in which students would refer to their own experiences or react to the experiences of other students almost to the exclusion of engaging the course readings. Although for both political and pedagogical reasons I wanted to value the students' experiences as worthy of serious discussion, I came to feel that I had not done enough to draw their comments back into the more "public" discussion that the dialogue between the readings supplied. What I saw as hopeful in the discussions was that our classroom seemed to become something of a liminal place, that at least a part of the university, even a large and quintessentially public university such as UofL, could be recoded as a private and moral space. This seemed to me to be a faultline through which we could begin to tear down this boundary between the private actor and the public world which the student cannot see herself as influencing. But I was fairly dubious about this prospect, thinking that the boundary lines between the moral/private and the political/public were so much a part of my students' socialization that they would, ultimately, be unable to call them into question. Jane, however, in her interviews with the students, was able to see something more complex.

Jane: Because Randy's structuring of a critical discourse about utopia invited students to draw on personal experience to critique larger social structures, an easy line cannot be drawn between public and private. As we have talked more about the class while revising this essay, Randy and I agreed that he could have productively exploited the liminal position of the classroom by asking the students to consider ways they could continue to explore their concerns about society in a more explicitly public discourse. In particular, one student's comment has made me reconsider the ways that this class could have pushed more at the public/private boundary. When I asked Christine in an interview whether she thought any of the class discussions or writing about improving society could have an impact beyond the classroom after the end of the semester, I had had in mind whether the discourse about utopia might have any lasting impact on students and whether or not they saw themselves as possible agents of change. Christine replied, however, that she didn't think the class discussions or writing would have any effect because "our English class is not in the congress or talking to President Clinton; it's just a class discussion." Christine's comment, as I reflect on it now, offers a critique of school writing and discourse that is familiar to composition specialists: Most writing in composition classes offers students a limited sense of agency as writers because they feel they are writing only for their teacher and only to show their competency in the context of the course. Many teachers who take a cultural studies approach to writing argue that many assignments encouraging critique influence students' subjectivities and could prepare them in the future for careful critical thinking that will enhance their contributions as thoughtful citizens in a democracy (Berlin, others). However, Christine's comment should invite extended consideration from teachers who, like Mary Beth Hines, want to "better understand how discursive practices could be linked to social change" (231). Christine questions the impact of classroom discourse because she does not see it on a public (or public enough) scale; she encodes the classroom discourse as private in contrast to the public realm of political/legislative discourse. Christine's critique has helped me to see an additional meaning in our article's title. We intended for our reference to Neil Young's album title, "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere," to suggest the idea voiced by many students that everyone knows utopia could never happen, so, in a sense, discussions of and writing about utopia are moot exercises. As I thought about Christine's comment in the context of Susan Miller's critique in Textual Carnivals of the limited scope of writing in composition classes, I began to wonder if the title could reflect the composition class as "nowhere," too--or, at least as unrelated to the "public" world outside of the classroom. The critique that the writing students do in our classes is separate from any kind of communication or discursive agency in the world beyond the classroom is an important point to consider, especially for teachers who try to foreground the connection between the individual and society.

After the semester's end, I happened to tell Randy that Christine was pregnant. He immediately asked if she had known she was pregnant when she wrote a science-fiction story for the course which centered around the "Baby Igloo," an artificial womb which was the government-sanctioned means of reproduction in a future dystopia. He was, he said, disappointed when I told him that she hadn't known. He was looking for a personal correction on her part to the course themes and thought that she might not have felt comfortable discussing her pregnancy in a classroom of twenty people, just as Anne had declined to give some of the "too personal" details of her planned society. While Randy thought the classroom might be too public for such discussions, Christine believed it too private to be a locus for negotiating social change. If these different views of the classroom's position in relation to society had been discussed, Randy might have been able to bring in to the course some of what I found in my interviews: that in general, the students were negotiating a more complex relationship between the "private" and "public" than was revealed in class.

While the strategy of withdrawing oneself from even thinking about changing society may be a natural reaction to the distress of discovering that one's power to effect change is limited, such withdrawal doesn't have to end in permanent resignation and apathy. Tingle suggests that in these reactions of anxiety and despair are the seeds of commitment; he urges that we try to transform these feelings of despair in our students into the desire to "create a world in which all may feel at home" (88). Of course, that's easier said than done; but as teachers interested in social change, we can start by being attentive to these emotional struggles our students are having with issues of social justice. And as writing teachers interested in social change we can also urge our students to consider how, specifically, they might speak or write to facilitate complex debate and maybe some kind of action in relation to issues they are concerned about. The classroom need not always be considered either public or private; similarly, cynicism does not always translate into apathy.

Randy: It was only after the semester had ended that I began to realize that I myself was guilty of reductionism in my view of the students, that I had inscribed onto their experience the public/private boundary that Tronto sees as so prevalent in our cultural conditioning. Through being interviewed by Jane, through looking back at our conference presentation, and through comparing the different dialogues between student and teacher, student and researcher, and teacher and researcher, I have come to feel that my students were able both to visualize a wider cultural critique than I had realized and thus to make the relationship between the private and the public, the moral and the political, more complex for themselves. That I didn't realize this reductionism at the time led me to reconsider several missed opportunities.

One of the things that changed my mind was my experiences with Jim, and my reflections on what Jane discovered in her interviews with him. One Wednesday near the end of November, I noticed that Jim was enormously anxious about the prospect of rewriting his first paper and about his work in the class as a whole. In fact, he seemed to be convinced that he wasn't going to pass the course, which surprised me greatly and led me to violate one of my own rules of portfolio grading by telling him that I thought he was doing "B"-level work. After I told him that, I tried to help him work through his writer's block by taking dictation from him about his "private" utopia and where it came from. During this dictation session, he repeatedly spoke of the pressures he was under and his need to escape from them, a theme he returned to in his final paper: "My utopia is basically an escape from everything I know. I wrote about a place where I could be alone, left to do what I want without being disturbed. I wanted to be in a place where I was on my own time and I was answering only to me."

Jane: While this utopia-as-escape did create a privatized version of utopia, it was also an endeavor of cultural critique for Jim. The values of a quiet, simple life that respects natural beauty that Jim expressed in his utopia essay were in direct opposition to the values of the frenetically-paced world of work that support the accumulation of material possessions and a focus on superficial appearances, the materialist values that Jim told me in an interview he does his best to reject. Jim described his interaction with the idea of utopia as a process of self-discovery. While Jim seemed to gain a greater awareness of some of his own values through his discussions of utopia, he didn't seem able to articulate in his papers what he told me in interviews about how his personal values were connected to the flaws he saw in society. It seemed that to do so would have been too emotionally overwhelming.

Randy: Unfortunately, I was unable at the time to discover the larger cultural critique that Jane found in Jim's struggle. Had I been able to do so, I would have asked him to examine the sources of the pressures that he felt and why he felt them so strongly at this particular point in his life--what the nature of "everything [he] knew" was that made it so urgent for him to escape as well as why, exactly, it was all he knew. However, at the time I only saw his isolationist desire and, feeling the pressure myself of the need to help him calm down and focus a little more, I did not encourage him to develop explicitly the larger implications of wanting to be left alone.

Like Jim, most of the other students used their final, reflective paper as an opportunity to narrate their actual experience of the classroom, rather than discussing the ideas of the course and the changes in their own writing. I saw what I took as a nadir to this in Harriet's paper: "The class discussions were for the most part very interesting, especially when we talked about utopia and our different views. I must admit I don't really remember everyone's ideas or beliefs but I think we were comfortable in talking with each other about them."

I was particularly disappointed in these papers because they showed so little of the imaginative verve and critical engagement that were in many of the students' earlier works, especially in the papers on the utopian or dystopian prospects of high technology that they had just finished. For this assignment, Harriet had written a brilliantly understated satire on how she had, unwillingly, become her workplace's expert on new software while other workers bemoaned its complexities and eventually disappeared, never to be seen again. Anne had written a short story about a future Luddite rebellion that I encouraged her to revise for publication. Linda had produced a well-developed and impassioned argument against genetic engineering, and Jim had very effectively conveyed the pathos of buying one shiny new personal computer after another, only to see them become obsolete within months and to stack them into a back corner of his garage. But as I read the relatively schematic and lifeless final papers in December, already somewhat disappointed in what I saw as my own pedagogical failures, I concluded that my students had gotten far less from the course than what I'd hoped. In fact, I wondered whether my own political beliefs in consensus and mutual aid had simply encouraged the worst sort of mealy-mouthed "liberalism," in which it becomes almost impossible to make judgments of political morality, in which Hitler is seen as having had his problems too, of course. In retrospect, and particularly because of what Jane found in her interviews with the students, I think that this final assignment was simply an inaccurate measure of what the students took away from our discussions. By its very nature as the last assignment in the course, the reflective paper asked for a type of closure that I had hoped would be critical, self-critical, and ideological. Most of the students responded to this implicit call for closure by narrative closure--by telling their story of the class--rather than by analytic closure. I now feel that to ask my students for an analytic closure to their experience after sixteen weeks is almost ludicrously premature.

Jane: Michael's final paper was also structured as a narrative of his experience in the class and was somewhat disappointing in the depth of reflection and analysis it offered. However, my interviews with him revealed that, for him, the class had been part of an ongoing struggle with ideas about social change. By the end of the semester Michael seemed to have reassessed his refusal to get involved in social problems. He explained to me in a postsemester interview that the study of utopia had "changed the way he looked at things" and described an eagerness to critique plans for social change. He also suggested that the class's focus on utopia may have been an attempt on Randy's part to orient students toward the idea of change: "Now that I think of it that may very well have been his agenda for the class, that we sit and look at the way we want things to be and then we sit and look at our own world and try to change it." He credited the class with affecting him this way "a little," and explained that:

Before, I was more inclined to just let the world run as it is.... but now I wouldn't mind going to the public forum [a local meeting to discuss a proposed teen curfew] and giving my opinion on whether or not I thought it would work. Or other forums for that matter... Before his class I was probably more inclined to just let it happen, whereas now I would probably be more inclined, if I had the opportunity to attend something like that I would.

While Michael's articulation of this change does seem striking, I think we need to be careful not to portray this experience as a sudden, dramatic conversion of sorts. Michael's language in this interview could be well-suited to a narrative of dramatic change. However, putting such a spin on Michael's words might lead me to ignore other things he had told me in earlier interviews that are also telling in terms of his awareness of himself as a possible change agent. For example, he explained his desire to be a high school history teacher by asserting that he thought American youth had a horrible grasp of history and that people who don't know the past are condemned to repeat it. This goal suggests to me one way he sees of possibly making a difference. This added bit of information lends itself to a construction of change as gradual, as Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy describe student change in a college philosophy class that Randy will discuss in more detail below. Student change is an ongoing negotiation or struggle, one in which emotions necessarily play an important part. Somehow this class seems to have provided Michael a space to negotiate and reflect on his relation to social problems; this, in turn, allowed him to express, at least temporarily, an emotional orientation toward change other than the one of resignation that he articulated earlier in the semester. Significantly, Michael's apparently enhanced feeling of agency is associated with discourse, speaking in this case. The semester of speaking and writing about social change in relation to utopia seems to have made a difference in Michael's attitude toward seeking change through discursive means.

Randy: On reviewing my pedagogical "failings," I realized that what I had done was ignore my own feelings concerning the complexity of human personality and ideological change. Bakhtin's theories of language and Kropotkin's theories of social organization strongly posit the continually unfinished nature of both public and private discourses, as well as a continual dialectical interplay between these discourses, one that makes any line drawn between them arbitrary at best. In my own studies of law school enculturation, I have found that the usual boundaries that composition scholarship has drawn between "resistance" and "accommodation," between stubbornly retaining a privatized identity and completely yielding to a socially-constructed one, are also arbitrary and inexact. Like Wendy Bishop, I believe that educational change is "slow and convoluted," with "no clear developmental process" (143) of a Piagetian or Kohlbergian sort. Yet I found myself, at the end of the semester, wishing out loud to Jane that I had been more confrontational in class discussions, possibly even to the point of, in Hines's words, "exposing and selling" my own beliefs in a devil's advocate role because I hadn't seen enough evidence of my students' commitment to critical thinking.

When I told Jane this, she advised that I read Fishman and McCarthy's "Teaching for Change," which I had somehow neglected even though I had been highly influenced by their earlier studies of Fishman's philosophy classes. They recapitulated for me that change is incremental rather than dramatic and that change is best accomplished in cooperative inquiry rather than confrontation. They evoke the Deweyan principle "that people cannot be handed ideas like bricks" (355) if they are to truly comprehend them--much less have bricks thrown at them by those teachers who are desperate to inculcate certain ideals. Such teachers force students not into a single position, but into a binary opposition between the (presumably) inhumane ideals that students have held and the more enlightened dogma that are professed in their classrooms. This binary opposition has the practical effect of drawing a pitched battle line between students' private beliefs and what can be publicly said in the classroom; in Bakhtinian terms, it makes the teacher's discourse an "authoritative" one which must be either completely accommodated or completely resisted, without much consideration of the real complexities of classroom cultures or of the nature of persuasion. I had been mistaken in seeing a more subtle binary opposition: that between students' sense of private aspiration and their sense of public agency. I had neglected the incremental steps between the moral worlds that they expounded and the political worlds they saw themselves as inhabiting without agency, but in the final analysis, many of them were able to begin to reconcile these worlds.

Jane: In our classrooms we could try to help students to find some sense of personal agency in the liminal space of the University. This is true not only in the substance of what is taught, but also--and perhaps more importantly--in the models of knowledge-making and community that are revealed there. Perhaps this is what Linda meant when she described the class itself as a kind of utopia:

That whole thing of listening to people whose ideas are different than yours. And being a little bit more understanding and accepting of other people's ideas. I guess in a way, working towards what most people's ideas of utopia are--a place where people are accepted and people are a little bit more open to different things. It's along the same lines as that. On a really, really, really, small scale.

Perhaps by carefully establishing a tolerant atmosphere while encouraging students to engage with specific issues they already feel concern (and probably anxiety and despair) about, we may be able to turn resignation into commitment.

1. The title comes from Neil Young's 1969 album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.

2. All student names are pseudonyms. We wish to thank all the students who participated in this study for giving their consent to quote from their writings, class discussions, and interviews.

Berlin, James. "Poststructuralisrn, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom:

Ehrlich, Howard J., ed. Reinventing Anarchy, Again. San Francisco: AK P, 1996.

Harris, Joseph. "The Other Reader." Journal of Advanced Composition 12 (1992): 27-37.

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