Reading pedagogy-as-text: Exploring gendered discourses as canonical in an English classroom

One goal of critical educators is to challenge and destabilize textual narratives of the traditional literary canon because they can affirm cultural narratives of heterosexuality and masculinity. A concern arises, however, when critical efforts are only applied during moments of textual analysis and not considered across the broader classroom context. Using different methods of discourse analysis, this paper explores the ways in which a teacher's pedagogy constructs and performs a type of gender reification, in this case, of heterosexual masculinity. The paper argues that the canon constitutes more than just a list of books-that discourses and pedagogy may reinforce canonical ideologies or narratives similar to the way in which a novel can or does.