Rachael: Thank you to everyone for attending the spring meeting of the Critical Pedagogy Initiative. We’d especially like to thank Enda, Bill, and Heather for their support of the initiative; and, a big thank you to everyone who has supported the initiative throughout the year. As you recall, we originally conceived of the Initiative to be a space where graduate students and professors could come together to discuss our shared project of teaching. We hope that the critical conversations we have here can be a resource for faculty as we revise the curriculum. We envisioned three meetings that gradually expand in scope from the classroom to the department to the institution.
Corinne: In the fall, we asked the classroom focused question “What does it mean to teach literature?” We discussed how good teaching depends on attention to and acknowledgement of our students, an awareness of the relationality of a classroom setting, and a building on prior knowledge. We also talked about how our particular subject matter facilitates learning about the potential of the signifier to make meaning in our lives and the transformational power of literature.
Nicole: In the winter, we asked the department centered question: “What is the purpose of the English major?” which led to interesting discussions about the “dreamlike state” texts can facilitate and our endeavor as teachers to help students hold the full complexity of literary questions. We also discussed the challenges of organizing our curriculum on the quarter system.
Nicole: At this spring meeting, we planned to discuss the institutional question “What is the role of humanistic pedagogy in today’s political climate?” However, we live in a different world now than we did when we first imagined the critical pedagogy initiative. November’s election certainly surprised many of us and challenged us with questions that we still do not know how to answer. We are grateful that this initiative existed so we had a space to come together as a department and discuss how to respond to that election in our classes. During the emergency meeting in the shadow of the election, we discussed the importance of making our commitment to social justice explicit to our students and we are proud that the department issued a statement in response to the election.
Corinne: Since then, however, it seems that the pressures of the quarter system and everyday precarity of academia has pushed us into returning to business as usual. The egregious mandates the administration puts out too regularly leave political organizations scrambling to figure out how to respond and resist. This political confusion coupled with the demands of our profession leave us using yesterday’s pedagogical strategies to deal with today’s challenges, which is disconcerting because we don’t feel that we were on the same page about what those strategies were then and are even less sure now.
Corinne: For instance, the myth of neutrality pre-existed the election. Although we can all probably explain the ways that being “neutral” means aligning oneself with socio-political norms, we also know that students usually demand neutrality as a synonym for fairness. This false ideal is something we struggled to confront before the election, but is exacerbated by November’s decision, which moved the center further to the right. So I’m not asking how we can hide our political beliefs behind the content of our courses, but rather, how we might be explicit about our political values, such as our hope for equality, our commitment to redress historical inequities, our belief in climate change, and many more. We could never be neutral, but now more than ever, we must be explicit and bold in speaking out against hatred.
Nicole: This is scary for TAs to do because we don’t know what the department will support us in saying. We do not know what the job market will look like and whether our political investments will affect our candidacy. We imagine that this boldness is scary for professors, as well, even with the protection of tenure. We have heard rumors of faculty in other departments being censored from speaking against Trump, and know that professors are more likely than TAs to be targeted by right-wing groups who plant students to heckle and goad instructors towards inappropriate responses.
Corinne: So rather than beginning with the institutional, and somewhat theoretical, question about the political importance of the humanities, we want to start with our experiences in the classroom. We hope that our practical responses to actual politically charged scenarios can develop into a collective pedagogical praxis that affirms our commitment to social justice.
Nicole: We have solicited scenarios that TAs and professors have experienced in their classrooms and have organized them into three major scenarios that we struggle with. Notably, most of the situations shared with us focused on problematic student interactions. TAs are also sometimes challenged by the ways in which particular lectures or assignments fall into unintentionally prejudiced rhetoric. A hypothetical example of this is the showing of images of lynching when trying to convince students of the ideology behind lynchings, which could perpetuate the objectification and exploitation of black peoples’ bodies. We hope to hold this in mind, because the only scenarios people felt comfortable sharing here had to do with student/teacher interactions. In the first set of scenarios, a student denies a politically charged facts. Second, a student unwittingly uses racist or other prejudiced language and phrases. Third, a student asserts racist or misogynist beliefs. Although the scenarios submitted to us focus mostly on issues of race and gender, we hope that the conversation and the strategies we develop can also consider other forms of hatred such as heterosexism, xenophobia, ableism, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, and others.
Corinne: We plan to spend the first half or two thirds of these meetings discussing these scenarios. First, we’ll invite the person who experienced it to share, then we’ll divide into small groups to discuss possible responses. Then, after each scenario, we’ll reconvene as a large group to consider the variety of different ways we could respond. Part of the reason we want to discuss this in small groups is because we think that is more likely to facilitate a variety of different strategies than having a single approach dominate. We are cognizant that our own embodiment changes how we might respond to each situation. After discussing all three scenarios, we hope to conclude with a more general conversation that can work towards an outline in response to our question: “What are the English Department’s commitments to social justice?”