Opening Remarks

Nicole:  Hello everyone, thank you for coming to the first meeting of the Critical Pedagogy Initiative that is co-hosted by the Graduate committee, undergraduate committee, and the committee of graduate students.  I am Nicole, and together with Corinne we serve as the co-chairs of the Committee of Graduate Students for this calendar year. CoGS, the governing body of English graduate students, is comprised of two representatives per cohort.

Together with Rachael King, we will facilitate the meeting today.  We are excited that you want to participate in this first of its kind initiative, which is truly a joint faculty and graduate student endeavor.  In addition to Bill and Heather (of the undergraduate and graduate committees), Bishnu and Enda have been instrumental in beginning the project (and providing refreshments, thanks to Lit and Mind for that too). Rebecca and Katie, who serve as the Lead TAs, have also been invaluable contributors to this Initiative.  We want to also acknowledge that many professors and graduate students have advised and helped shape the initiative, and we hope it continues to be a collaborative effort.

Corinne:  I am really grateful that you are here because I feel that everyone in this room shares the same secret about the importance of literature and why we teach it.  I hope that together we can come to a language that can translate this secret into a call, a philosophy, a rallying cry that can guide the way we teach.  In our work as TA’s, graduate students get to see a number of different professors lecture which  both gives us a sense of the pedagogical diversity of the department, and also exposes us to a variety of different teaching strategies that we may admire and try to emulate.  At the same time, graduate students bring a broad range of teaching and learning experiences to the department— some of us studied at small liberal arts colleges and encounter large lectures for the first time here; others taught during their master’s work at different universities; still others are certified teachers; and some are teaching for the first time.   Despite how radically different we all are (which is a good thing), there are some core beliefs that we have about what it means to teach English. We share an investment and an attachment to a particular kind of object—literature, usually fiction— that is not taken seriously and is even denigrated in other spheres.  We share the knowledge that these written artifacts can do something that nothing else can.  We believe that even when the world seems to be falling apart around us it is still important—perhaps more than ever—to share this investment with our students.   These central beliefs are made explicit in some classes, assumed in others, and sometimes left unsaid.  We do discuss these ideas when professors meet with their TA teams, graduates students bring them up at CoGS meetings, and we are sure they are the subject of many faculty meetings, but we lack a space for collective conversation and critical reflection about our teaching praxis. The purpose of this initiative is to bring this shared knowledge to light between us, to pair it with what we know about how students learn, to test it against our theoretical commitments, to determine what it is that we need to maintain and protect from the ever-encroaching material realities of the research university.

Nicole:  Adding to this point, we came to realize that when the university tries to create these forums, they tend to be top down and not productive. For example, when I attended a university wide “controversy in the classroom workshop,” which involved four professors speaking about the current political situation; they were reluctant to engage with our questions and teaching scenarios, and the model of a panel of speakers with grads in the audience resulted in what felt like wasted potential for everyone involved. These questions of controversy, of teaching tactics in this political climate, and of including all students’ voices while staying true to humanist ethics are ones that I believe can best be answered in a conversation. This is why we decided to organize these meetings as discussions rather than panels, because each one of you here has something to say about these teaching matters, and it is important for us to hear each other.

Corinne:  Our department is known for the many scholars who interrogate, argue and work for the importance of the humanities both in the context of the research university and in violent and fractured world in which we live.  I’m not only thinking of large organized projects, like 4Humanities, but also everyday acts of humanity like the letter Aranye wrote in response to the Isla Vista violence, which, three years later, undergrads still cite as their motivation for studying English.  The new Arnhold collaborative research grants like Julie and Eileen’s publishing project is another example.  Although I can see how our faculty put their scholarship to practice in the world through acts like these, I want to also know what that looks like in the classroom.  How do our theoretical investments manifest themselves in our interpersonal interactions with our students?  What commitments to literature, to students, to each other do we share across the department?  It is not our intention to legislate standardized departmental policies or uniform learning outcomes.  Rather, we hope to articulate our most important pedagogical values that, even if conflicting, can serve as landmarks orienting us to a common horizon.

Katie:  Our goal is to bring together graduate students and professors to articulate the department’s shared pedagogical values.  We’ve organized these meetings to expand in focus.  Today we’ll talk about the classroom, in winter we’ll talk about these questions on the level of the department, and in spring, we’ll address these issues in the context of the university.  Hopefully, each conversation can build on the previous one.  Today we’ll try to articulate the underlying values behind why we teach literature.  We’ll reserve the last ten to fifteen minutes to agree on what the provisional consensus of this group is.  We will post those on this cool website, so in winter when we consider “what is the purpose of an English major?” we can refer back and ask how these values might manifest themselves in an undergraduates’ mind.  Also, on the website, we will have links to our departmental resources and projects related to humanist pedagogy.  For instance, Literature and the Mind has dedicated the spring quarter to “Intersubjectivity and Pedagogy” and plans to host a fall conference on the same topic.

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