What does it mean to study Grace Paley as a “critical pedagogue”? First, a bit of historicization is in order. Paley began teaching writing courses at Sarah Lawrence College in 1966, just a few years before Paulo Freire’s groundbreaking 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was published in English (1970). Freire and Paley shared a mutual friend or colleague in photographer Mel Rosenthal, who captured Freire while working in Tanzania and for whose book, In the South Bronx of America, Paley wrote an accompanying essay. Considered a seminal critical pedagogy text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed contains several philosophical frameworks by which we can come to understand Grace Paley as nothing short of critical pedagogue.

Freire’s second chapter, which focuses on the “banking” model of education, proves most useful for our study of Paley, and the ways in which her aims as an activist and writer shaped and were shaped by her position as an educator. The banking model Freire critiques is, in short, one in which teachers are considered the depositors of knowledge and students the depositories––passive objects rather than active participants in the creation of knowledge. What Paley’s words tell us––whether written or spoken, in talks or interviews––is that she neither considered herself to be nor behaved like a keeper or depositor of knowledge. The banking model assumes students “know nothing,” a pathology of ignorance only teachers/depositors can correct by dictating, like narrators, accepted forms of knowledge to the students (Freire 72). Paley totally subverts the banking model in two ways. First, she places real value on the absence of knowledge or lack of understanding; “Stay open and ignorant,” she told young writers in “Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken,” collected with other essays and talks in Just As I Thought (192). Second, Paley expresses awareness of her students’ knowledge and intellectual capabilities. “For me, the problem: How to keep a class of smart kids––who are on top of Medieval German and Phenomenology––dumb? Probably too late and impossible,” she jokes (JT 193).

Nearly fifty years after Allan Gurganus studied creative writing with Grace Paley at Sarah Lawrence College, Gurganus describes Paley’s pedagogical disposition, for the New Yorker: Fiction podcast, as that of a “conductor” of a classroom “in which everybody talked all the time.” The result, Gurganus remembers, was that he and Paley’s other students “wound up learning so much more because it was stereophonic sound.” Stereo is the perfect metaphor for Paley’s principles of teaching, writing and activism, all rooted in the act of listening. Stereo is sound reproduced to create an illusion of multi-directional audible perspective, and Paley’s life’s work was––as a writer, teacher and activist––to lovingly honor and amplify the multiplicity of voices in our world.

As conductor rather than narrator of her classroom, Paley eschews the practice in which “the teacher talks and the students listen––meekly” with her interest in hearing (Freire 73). The spaces that form around Paley’s pedagogical practices foster students’ ability to listen, to others and to themselves. “I believe in reading aloud a lot from the very beginning and in any class I have people read out loud and listen to their own voices. That seems very important to me. And important to them because they hear themselves,” Paley declares in a 2007 interview with Chris Bachelder just months before her death.

As a writer of short fiction and poetry, Paley is decorated and beloved but understudied; sometimes stuck with the label of a “writer’s writer,” Paley is cited as a great influence but rarely found on the pages of academic journals or course syllabi. As a political activist for socialist, feminist, pacifist and environmentalist causes, she is fondly missed by her fellow community members but largely unknown to the young public of today, even those who might consider themselves progressive or politically active. It follows that Paley as teacher––as activist teacher, as activist teacher of writing––has never been the subject of inquiry by any scholar interested in writing studies, composition and rhetoric or critical pedagogy.

The purpose of this digital project, then, is to permeate the membrane that encloses Knowledge, insofar as it is traditionally produced and protected by a privileged class, one that especially includes the educators who might intend or purport to have interest in the democratization of not only knowledge but of the process of knowledge production itself. With Grace Paley as our digital subject, we stand on the astoundingly rare common ground of pedagogy, literature, political history and academic activism. Compilations of what Paley read or may have assigned to students throughout her life––one colored by political event after political event––reveal a truly “critical” pedagogical philosophy embodied by a woman with, to be reductionist, no more than a high school diploma.