Macro Ideas and A Micro Community of
Educators:
Rowing Coaches on Urban Waterways
&
Illuminating Aspects of Critical Theory and Adult Learning
They meet for an April weekend
annually at Croton-on Hudson, NY and another in Hull, MA, rowing enthusiasts with
a variety of pedagogical, andragogical, and on-the-water skills. Each interested to different degrees in
assuming leadership in largely volunteer, loosely organized groups joined by
the idea that boathouses and access to the water should be available to all,
and free, or at affordable cost.
Many of these trained coxswains will
return to the city to coach and lead community boat building and rowing
programs for adults, and I wonder how philosophers such as Marcuse and Foucault
might relate to them, and to me, as I continue as part of this educational and
recreational movement.
Through activities of several
non-profit organizations, the rowers challenge the ideology that the urban
waterways are innately dangerous places, to be frequented only by large-scale
municipal and commercial interests.
They are engaged in proving that a healthy estuary can safely support
maritime activities of diverse sizes and intents. They contest the idea that small boats cannot or should not be
publically owned. Young people, from
toddlers to teenagers, participate as well as adults, even in the building
process itself of the 25-foot wooden rowing gigs. The oldest rower, Pasquale, is 76 years old.
Herbert Marcuse’s idea of liberation
is akin to that which draws many of the adult educators to the water - the idea
of putting aside the dominant culture via immersion in a radically different
way of thinking. Many find being out on
the urban estuary in a 19th century type of wooden boat an intensely
aesthetic experience, albeit one not mediated by museums, galleries, or
critics, but, as in art, estranged temporarily, in a good way, from normality.
This artfulness may begin to explain
the motivation that starts people rowing, and perhaps why so many educators
take interest in the experience. To me,
Marcuse’s ideas and language on aesthetics are particularly resonant. Question for rowers: Can one define a rowing
boat as an “aesthetic form” if, like
Marcuse, we “tentatively define ‘aesthetic form’ as the result of the
transformation of a given content (actual or historical, personal or social
fact) into a self-contained whole: a poem, play, novel, etc., as the work is
thus ‘taken out’ of the constant process of reality and assumes a significance
and truth of its own?” [1] Upon reflection, I think one could,
especially since the reality of today’s rowing boat is not that of a
utilitarian workaday boat.
Marcuse’s critique on Marxist aesthetics
continues his essay in a manner that affirms my own early intuitions as an
artist struggling to relate to a politicized urban community:
The
critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation,
resides in the aesthetic form. A work
of art is authentic or true not by virtue of its content (i.e. the “correct”
representation of social conditions, nor by its “pure” form, but by the content
having become form.”[2]
According to Marcuse, engagement with
various aesthetic forms can produce a “counter-consciousness: negation of the
realist-conformist mind,” and “the ‘flight into inwardness’ and the insistence
on a private sphere may well serve as bulwarks against a society which
administers all dimensions of human existence … Inwardness and subjectivity may
well become the inner and outer space for the subversion of experience, for the
emergence of another universe.”[3]
Many adult rowers and their
teachers, it seems to me, understand this, and row to escape what Marcuse calls
the “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom that prevails in
advanced industrial civilization.”[4]
The contradiction herein is that it
takes minimally a coxswain and four rowers to get a boat onto the water and
back, and the adult educators involved must ultimately and necessarily work
together as some kind of a group, both during and after the weekend
conference. Peers teach training
sessions and “certification” is loosely defined, a remarkable fact given the
groups’ outstanding safety record in New York City’s and Boston’s rivers and
harbors. As in many social and
recreational activities, a desire for a relaxed power structure leads to the
exercise and interplay of various of forms of power. In analyzing these interactions, the work of Michael Foucault
becomes key.
Power must be analysed as something which circulates, rather than as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.[5]
On longer organized trips through
commercial shipping channels, decisions must be made designating “lead coxswains” and defining that role on a
given day. During weekly “Kids &
Parents” rowing, inexperienced family rowing groups are taken out into the
cove, and at times there are delicate discussions and negotiations between
coxswains and sincere parents who want to instruct their children “how to do
it” when the parents actually do not know.
Boathouse and boat maintenance duties performed by volunteers include
charting tides and currents, completing float plans and insurance waivers,
outfitting boats, cranking the davit, etc.
Who and how those jobs are assigned or volunteered can indicate the circulation
of power through the boathouse on a given week.
These “values of community,
interdependence and collective action” lie at the heart of the Swahili concept
of Nguzo Saba, along with ideas about
“breaking
the individualization and competition implied in some interpretations of
self-directed learning, privileging the collective co-creation of knowledge
within collaborative work or community groups, and refusing to separate the
formation of individual identity from community practives and traditions.”[6]
Beyond the immediate community of
rowers, actions of the larger power structure are an inextricable part of the
experience of many on-the-water adult educators and learners. Here, at times, the structure is traditional,
especially when competition for valuable waterfront property jostles with the
public interests that set aside these areas as public space. It is then that Marcuse’s concept of “repressive tolerance” is demonstrated. A recent New York Times article trumpets a
headline above colored pictures, “On the Waterfront, at Least for Now: Hudson River Park Threatens Some Home-Grown
Free Spirits.”
Non-profit groups profiled in the article
include a marine science field station, a children’s baseball program, a
kayakers’ group, and organizations restoring four historic boats including a
retired city fireboat, a lightship, a steam tug, and an old ferry. According to the article, “some of the
directors of the non-profits … say they worry that the trust wants recreational
businesses and shiny, dentless historic boats instead of their weathered,
working ones.”[7] Defenders of the status quo on the other
hand, “point to the existence of dissenting voices as evidence of the open
society we inhabit, and the active tolerance of a wide spectrum of ideologies,”[8]
just as would have been predicted by Marcuse.
In learning to navigate a human-powered boat in conjunction with a diverse crew, challenged by tides, currents, weather, and commercial river traffic, and also learning to navigate the various political structures that can permit or deny one’s presence on the water, adult rowers, particularly coxswains and coaches, begin to recognize themselves as agents of power on several levels. In exercising these, adult educators learn, in the words of Foucault:
“What
makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it
doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and
produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive
network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative
instance whose function is repression.”[9]
This paper has
tried to highlight several emphases of critical theory, as applicable to and
though the lens of activities of adult educators and learners in the field of
community rowing. Aesthetics, and also
the relation of certain kinds of individual inwardness to the success of
collaborative work, have been for me, two emphases that seem on first glance at
odds with the rest of the critical theory discourse, but they are argued
convincingly via the inclusion of philosophical essays by Herbert Marcuse. Critical theory is a thought provoking,
exceedingly relevant body of work that I look forward to exploring in relation
to further experiences in adult education.
Photo:
MN Hawk © 2000
Bibliography
Brookfield,
Stephen, ed., “Critical Theory and Adult Learning,” Teachers College ORLD
5815 Course Packet, August 1-2, 2002,
Stewart, Barbara, “On the Waterfront, at Least
for Now: Hudson River Park Threatens Some Home-Grown Free Spirits,” New York
Times Metro Section, August 8, 2002, p. B1.
Following are references cited in the
ORLD 5815 course package, Teachers College, Columbia University, that I would
especially like to further read on this subject:
Baptiste, I.
2000. “Beyond reason and personal integrity: Toward a pedagogy of coercive
restraint” Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education. 14,/1,
27-50.
Cale, G., and
Huber, S. 2001. “Teaching the oppressor to be silent: Conflicts in the
‘democratic’ classroom.” In The changing face of adult learning.
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Alliance/ACE Conference. Austin, TX.
Marcuse, H.
1964. One dimensional man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, H.
1969. An essay on liberation.
Boston: Beacon Press
Marcuse, H.
1978. The aesthetic dimension:
Toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press
Colin, S.A.J III
& Guy, T.A. “An Africentric Interpretive Model of Curriculum Orientations
for Course Development in Graduate Programs in Adult Education,” PAACE
Journal of Lifelong Learning, 1998, 7, 43-45, re: the Swahili concept of Nguzo Saba
Tisdell, E.J.
1995. Creating inclusive adult learning environments: Insights from
multicultural education and feminist pedagogy (Information Series No. 361).
Columbus, OH: ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational
Education. Accession #ED 384827.
Clearinghouse #CEO69588, Columbus OH,
$9.75, 112 pp.
NYC Recreational & Educational Organizations
Downtown
Boathouse http://www.downtownboathouse.org/
East River
Apprenticeshop http://www.ERAshop.com/index.html
East River
C.R.E.W. http://www.eastrivercrew.org
Floating the
Apple http://www.floatingtheapple.org/
Friends of
Hudson River Park http://www.friendsofhudsonriverpark.org/
Hudson River
Park Trust http://www.hudsonriverpark.com/welcome.html
John Harvey
Fireboat http://www.fireboat.org/index.asp
Metropolitan
Waterfront Alliance http://www.waterwire.net
New York
Restoration Project http://www.nyrp.org/boathouse.htm
New York
Restoration Project http://www.nyrp.org/atwork_boatbuilding.htm
Pier Park &
Playground http://www.pier40.org/
River Project http://www.riverproject.org