Week 9, Post 9: McCormick, Ch. 5: Mythbusters

Summarize your assigned chapter. (5)

McCormick decries conventional pedagogies (and their textbooks) that point students in conflicting directions, both to remain unbiased and to take a stand when writing a research paper.  More wrong headed still, she says, is the fact that these pedagogies are rooted in objectivism.  The remedy, she asserts, is to "recognize the situated nature of all discourses, including one's own, and to evaluate them in terms of their effects rather than their claims to objectivity" (136-7).  Additionally problematic for the author, these conventional methodologies ask students to discern "reliable" from "unreliable" sources without any real clues on how to do it; then they want students to evaluate such sources before the writing, already taking sides (140).  Should the student find any contradictions between sources, he's instructed to neutralize or ignore them: "The goal of such writing is to simplify and homogenize, not to interrogate the tensions within a given field of inquiry" (141).  McCormick's method, though, sees contradictions as aspects of "human history which ideology works to conceal." The goal of the student, then, is no less than to "reconstruct history from alternative perspectives for different ends" (142).  The culmination of McCormick's pedagogy is the research paper, in which students anaylze conflicting viewpoints, reading ample historical texts, in the aim of rewriting a "cultural myth" (146).