Lying to Expose the Truth

Abstract

iB ut you can't do that to first-year writers, it's subversive, the audience member said. It was 1994. As a firstyear graduate student, I was on a panel titled the Classroom: An Exercise in Stereotyping, at Duquesne University's Global (Inter)Sections: Gender, Race, and Class in (Multi)Cultural Texts conference. We three graduate assistants discussed a writing and cognition exercise that we used in our classes and that I had developed in my first quarter of teaching. Of course, we expected to hear rave reviews on our innovative teaching. Instead, a few members of the audience, most of them graduate assistants, agreed with the speaker, who felt we were somehow subverting the students. As a few of the dissenters explained, our exercise was flawed in two ways: it was centered on homosexuality, a topic that was shocking for young and impressionable first-year students; and we misled our students to elicit a particular response from them, which was morally objectionable. Subversive? I wondered if it was true. The American Heritage Dictionary showed me that to subvert was to completely or to the character, morals, or allegiance of; corrupt (820). Was this what my exercise had done? Was the topic of homosexuality too sensitive for eighteen-year-old students? I defended the exercise and its results at the conference but later decided to reevaluate it, looking for this subversion. There is deception involved, admittedly. The topic of homosexuality did involve controversy, especially a decade ago. But did deceiving first-year writers and introducing a topic such as homosexuality destroy them? Did it somehow manage to undermine their character or morals? With the help of theorists David Bartholomae, Kurt Spellmeyer, and Michel Foucault, I finally concluded that, yes, the exercise was somewhat subversive. It did threaten to do just the things that the dictionary explained were subversive. However, subversive was just what I was looking for in an exercise to expose the truth to students. The subversion was necessary. In many ways, subversion was the very thing that created the learning space that students needed to fill.