Outsider Pedagogy and Its Paradoxes

In this environment, students of literature would think "not of examinations or degrees or of what honour or profit they could make literature give them," she asserts, "but of the art itself' (TG 34). In form and content, then, Three Guineas anticipates Paolo Freire's advocacy of "dialogic" over "banking" models of education (81), bell hooks's concerns that institutions of higher education too often reinforce a "culture of domination" (25), and contemporary arguments for "flipped classrooms," "ungrading," and other innovative pedagogical methods designed to rebel against classroom and assessment practices that critics maintain reinforce competition, anxiety, and "compliance," rather than genuine learning (Blum 4-5).2 Simultaneously, however, Three Guineas shares a note of hesitation we sometimes find in the writings of progressive and radical educators. Contemporary employment trends in higher education enforce distinctions between research faculty, adjuncts, and staff; and students and teachers are burdened by debt and anxiety, coming of age-or laboring obscurely-in a precarious world, our future threatened by climate change, AI, political upheaval, and numerous other causes of uncertainty.3 In such a context, simply boycotting credentialism and conventional modes of assessment is unlikely to expand freedom. If students are learning interpretive skills and suppressed 'herstories,' they instrumentalize them, thereby also learning 'entrepreneurial' skills required in a 'flexible,' unregulated neoliberal economy: adapting to the seemingly arbitrary demands of professors who hold keys to their futures.4 So much for "the art itself' (TG 34).5 The passage anticipates aspects of Gerald Graff's 2008 MLA Presidential Address, which culminates in a charge that radical pedagogy contributes to students' compartmentalization of professors and classes.