Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary

I loved re-reading Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary. Rose departs from "scholarly tradition" to recount his experiences as a struggling student in South LA. His aim is to examine the social conditions of teaching/education, as well as to critique the various ways in which the educational system -- and its arbitrary standards of literacy -- not only stereotypes the students, but has lasting effects on their ability to learn and teachers willingness to teach.

For me, what's most useful about this book is the way in which Rose doesn't explicitly theorize; if he does, it's based strictly on the experiences he has with individual students. This seems an answer to the theory/practice debate, in that it offers a model of theorizing not only based in material reality, but one that doesn't try to abstract the person from the situation. As Rose discusses various curriculums he had, he reveals his approval of academic discourse; that is, he believes in teaching students academic discourse because it will help them get to where they are going. For me, this is useful because it doesn't merely critique academic discourse as oppressive; instead, he understands that the methods by which it is purported and guarded are oppressive. In a word, Rose's book could be summarized as "access": he wants all to be able to access the standard of literacy that we've come to take as basic -- while understanding that there are different models of literacy to take into account.

In terms of the theory/practice debate, then, Rose is surely a practitioner. The self he constructs in the book suggests that he isn't interested in theory, except in how it can help him teach. However, I would argue, too, that what he discusses in the book advocates a blended model of "informed practice," where theory and practice blend so seamlessly into each other that it's impossible to tell which is which.