| Henry Giroux in Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education argues that "literacy cannot be abstracted from the language of difference and power. As such, literacy cannot be viewed as merely an epistemological or procedural issue but must be defined primarily in political or ethical terms ... It is "political" in that how we "read" the world is always implicated in relations of power. Literacy is ethical in that people "read" the world differently depending, for instance, on circumstances of class, gender, race, and politics" (244).;My work examines the development of English studies within an engineering curriculum, arguing that a number of curricular, historical, and gender- and class-related forces have acted, and continue to act, to suppress the political and ethical dimensions of literacy and to use writing not as a means of learning or of critical thinking, but rather as what Michel Foucault calls in Discipline and Punish "a small penal mechanism" the purpose of which is to "exercise over them a constant pressure to conform to the same model ... " (182). Among these forces are the masculinist and militarist roots of engineering as a discipline, corporate control of engineering curricula, and a reaction against the European model of classical (and class-based) education in favor of a "practical" education for proletarian students seeking entrance into industrial organizations.;Drawing on the concept of "subjectivity" as outlined in cultural studies, I examine the ways in which the modernist paradigm of engineering detachment and objectivity, influenced by the heavily mathematical character of engineering education, works against an understanding of the postmodern view of knowledge as partial, affected deeply by race, class, and gender, and historically and ideologically situated. I attempt to demonstrate how the "current-traditional" emphasis on correctness was embraced by engineering schools as a means of producing a desired corporate subjectivity, and how the shift in composition paradigms into expressivism and social constructionism, and an emphasis on the influence of race, class, and gender difference on knowledge represented a threat to an epistemological stance that effaces difference and personal experience while privileging transcendent, ahistorical "knowledge". I finally suggest that a pedagogy that, in bell hooks' words "restores the body" and encourages dialogue while interrogating prevailing paradigms can encourage students to preceive themselves as agents of social change. |
