The Indignant Schoolmaster: Bad Faith Pedagogy and Anne Sullivan’s “Little Alabamian”,

TY - CHAP

T1 - The Indignant Schoolmaster:

T2 - Bad Faith Pedagogy and Anne Sullivan’s “Little Alabamian”,

AU - Collins, Michael

PY - 2023/3/7

Y1 - 2023/3/7

N2 - This article takes as its starting point Anne Sullivan’s comments in private letters—published in later editions of her student Helen Keller’s first memoir The Story of My Life—that Sullivan felt unwilling, unable, but financially bound to take on her ultimately world-changing work with Keller to theorise a relation to radical pedagogical labour I refer to (following the work of Jacques Rancière and Sara Ahmed) as a ‘bad faith pedagogy’. Contrary to a Socratic position that based inquiry in the tutor’s capacity to provoke and challenge the learner towards reaching a certain intellectual goal, the ‘bad faith pedagogue’—almost synonymous with the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’—models an equality between the learner and themselves to seeks to create an approach to text and reading that aligns the project of ‘surface reading’ with the aspirations of ‘critique’. I suggest that this position can be read positively as an adjustment to a condition of learning that is conducted under the intrinsic inequalities of capitalism that nonetheless constitutes an act of radical hope; saving both teacher and student from the duty towards mastery that Rancière reads affectively as consonant with a ‘work of grief’ and modelling a condition of equality in the present.

AB - This article takes as its starting point Anne Sullivan’s comments in private letters—published in later editions of her student Helen Keller’s first memoir The Story of My Life—that Sullivan felt unwilling, unable, but financially bound to take on her ultimately world-changing work with Keller to theorise a relation to radical pedagogical labour I refer to (following the work of Jacques Rancière and Sara Ahmed) as a ‘bad faith pedagogy’. Contrary to a Socratic position that based inquiry in the tutor’s capacity to provoke and challenge the learner towards reaching a certain intellectual goal, the ‘bad faith pedagogue’—almost synonymous with the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’—models an equality between the learner and themselves to seeks to create an approach to text and reading that aligns the project of ‘surface reading’ with the aspirations of ‘critique’. I suggest that this position can be read positively as an adjustment to a condition of learning that is conducted under the intrinsic inequalities of capitalism that nonetheless constitutes an act of radical hope; saving both teacher and student from the duty towards mastery that Rancière reads affectively as consonant with a ‘work of grief’ and modelling a condition of equality in the present.

M3 - Chapter

BT - The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies

A2 - Emmett, Hilary

A2 - Lloyd, Christopher

PB - Routledge

CY - New York

ER -