Utopian Literature, Empowering Students, and Gender Awareness

Utopian Literature, Empowering Students, and Gender Awareness1. Utopian Hesitancies and a 36-Year-Old Grandmother.Most young professors, still caught up in the glow of completing their dissertations, yearn to teach their specialties.I didn't yearn.I hesitated for some obvious general reasons: inexperienced professors who teach their specialties tend to assume too much familiarity about their topic, and hence fail to clarify or support their claims; or, because of their infatuation with the topic, they smother their students with too much detailed support.Most likely, they alternate between the two extremes, and their students walk away in a fog of generalities and under a mountain of detail.I also hesitated because of the unusual problems posed by teaching utopian literature.(My brief working definition of a literary utopia is: a fairly detailed narrative account of one or more imaginary communities, societies, or worlds.These fictional constructs represent radical, though identifiable, alternatives to the readers' cultures, and they invite iconoclastic and normative evaluations of those cultures.For an extended definition, see Appendix A.) These problems often involve reading processes, redundancy, and depression.Students often want to read utopias as if they were novels and, hence, try to force them into molds that are inappropriate for the genre's historical, cultural, and literary contexts.Since certain themes, structural devices, narrative viewpoints, and character types tend to reappear, a conventional chronological approach could raise the problem of redundant reading experiences. And doubly depressing experiences at that: well-known 20th-century dystopias can certainly be depressing, eutopian works can depress students by making the worlds students inhabit seem bleak in comparison to utopian worlds.By the late 1970s, I was still hesitant, but I hoped I had achieved enough distance from my dissertation to avoid turning my students into foggy-headed detail spouters.Moreover, I had decided that the problems of teaching utopian literature could be minimized if a teacher acquainted him or herself with the growing number of bibliographic and critical tools available to utopographers; 1 and if he or she conscientiously and imaginatively presented the historical, rhetorical, and perceptual differences between novels and utopias, drawing upon the tremendous diversity of utopian literature and emphasizing the positive intellectual and emotional aspects of reading utopias.In an unexpected arena, a freshman composition class, I had also experienced a new impetus to teach utopian literature.As I have described elsewhere ("Using Utopia" 2), I asked the students to pretend that they had all the financial, popular, and intellectual support imaginable and then to describe how they would transform Arlington, Texas, where I teach, into utopia.Soon after most of the students were writing, one student-probably the brightest in the class with a good deal of "life experience" (she was a 36 year-old grandmother)-nervously approached my desk.She asked, "What if I believe that Arlington is utopia?"The students who overheard her laughed.And yet, their papers echoed her sentiments.Most of them projected utopias that were rather unimaginative, minor tinkerings with their present environments (a few more parking lots, a winning season for the Texas Rangers, etc.)This experience convinced me that many of my students were speculative illiterates.Their educational experiences had conditioned them primarily to be dependent on teachers-as-experts who gave them knowledge about the past and present which was legitimized when they gave it back to the teachers in appropriate oral and written forms.This exchange does involve learning, even empowerment: the students gain knowledge, and the teacher expands his or her sense of power by creating a mirrorlike feedback situation.But such teaching does little to develop independent decision-making skills or to foster speculative thought processes that can add significantly to students' abilities to measure themselves and their environments against alternative possibilities. Mystudent's question also exposed my pedagogical illiteracy.I thought I knew how to teach students certain types of concepts, skills, and knowledge, but how could I answer their speculative illiteracy?How could I convince them of the value of what they brought to class (a necessary prerequisite for independent speculation), while simultaneously encouraging them to evaluate critically their ideals and values?How could I foster critical and speculative thought that would not be overly dependent upon the students' perceptions of my own values and ideals.I simply didn't know how to achieve these types of student "empowerment."And I'm still baffled.But I've been impelled to continue my search for answers by my strong belief that exposure to the types of speculation and critical perspectives found in utopian literature can liberate students from old habits of thought and by the advice and help I've received from several critical perspectives (especially readerresponse theorists), from pedagogical experts (particularly those interested in

Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Sociology · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Psychology · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction