Questions about the new pedagogy
I read this piece on higher education pedagogy this morning and I found myself nodding along to a good deal of it. For instance, it is shocking how little formation graduates receive in the actual mechanics of teaching. As I continued to read though, I found that the solutions being advocated are ones that I have recently experienced, and so I feel entitled to give a bit of feedback.
After a lengthy discussion of theories of higher education, here are the recommendations made to educators as a program of self improvement:
These seem like fine suggestions, but they can go wrong very quickly. In the case of "hard conversations about inclusivity", framing and context are everything. Is there a "we" that are excluding a "them" when these discussions happen? Depending on the instigator of the discussion, students are likely to be mis-identified as to what categories they fall into, and the discussion falls back on appearances of race and sex as markers.
I myself am a member of a religious minority that is largely unknown and widely misunderstood. I come from a background of poverty, am non-traditionally aged, and a survivor of abuse. I have been transgender. I still have struggles with food security and mental health. In classroom discussions about inclusiveness though, I am seen and treated as being in the unmarked category, as though I have not had a lifetime of struggle to bring myself through the doors of this institution.
I feel even more strongly about the pronoun protocols. Some of my instructors have taken the approach of making a note on the syllabus that they can be approached to request names and pronouns. Others though have taken to directly asking for pronouns, actively pursuing answers from students. While the former approach seems fair and inclusive, I find this latter approach troublesome both from my own perspective as a desister and for the sake of those who are experiencing gender and sexual confusion.
Dysphoria is a deeply uncomfortable experience. One feels constantly under a spotlight to perform gender correctly, to read one's own performance as an indication of identity and to reconcile their psychology and biology. The last thing I would have wanted would be confrontation about whether I thought I was a man or a woman, and the task of summing up those feelings in a neat set of words.
To say that though is to speak from the inside of what I now consider to be a fundamentally religious experience. The social practices of gender have qualities of the immaterial, the personal, and the spiritual. They aim to solve existential problems in the lives of believers, and require beliefs about the human soul and body. My experiences led me to reject these positions, and deep thought and difficult personal experience inform my opposition to genderist practices. How am I to be included in discussions that treat them as a matter of fact?
I haven't read all of Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I was assigned the chapter where the idea of "banking education" is introduced in a recent course. Friere's critique seemed to have fallen on deaf ears though, because the list of readings for the rest of the semester, one after another, indicated that the instructor viewed themselves as being privileged with knowledge of systematic oppression, and aimed to deposit this information into their students. We were not asked to discuss, we were not asked to bring the knowledge we already had to the table.
The most insulting part of this course was that this was an honors seminar, presented as an opportunity for independent research. Yet none of the classroom discussion or reading was slated for the development of our scholarly impulses. Instead the rubrics made clear that we would be tasked with mapping the specific political views of the instructor onto our projects. This mapping process was described as "producing knowledge", a view that, if I've glimpsed Friere's meaning at all, is antithetical to the growth of students.
As a student, I do bring knowledge and experience to the classroom that I wish to share with fellow students and instructors. I'm radically anti-capitalist, and anti-statist, but I have a very different framework for reasoning about these problems. Somehow this supposedly radical act of pedagogy missed the point of sharing knowledge horizontally. Rather than open exchange of ideas, discussions were railroaded into pet-projects, and time was given to obviously favored holders of the current orthodoxies.
I dropped this seminar for the sake of my sanity, and to protect the integrity of my scholarship. I don't know what opportunities I will have to forego in the future due to this approach to teaching being applied in such an authoritarian and absolutist manner. My question now is, if I am being marginalized like this, who will teach me to fight oppression?
After a lengthy discussion of theories of higher education, here are the recommendations made to educators as a program of self improvement:
- Walk around campus to assess the accessibility of common spaces and classrooms. An accessible desk in every classroom doesn’t do much good if students can’t get to that desk because the rooms are overcrowded.
- Invite students to share their pronouns. Model this behavior, but don’t expect it of every student.
- Make sure there is an easy and advertised process for students, faculty, and staff to change their names within institutional systems. Be sure chosen names are what appear on course rosters and ID cards.
- Add statements about basic needs, like food and housing, to your syllabi. Invite students to ask you for help. Suggest other places they can go for support.
- Regularly invite the campus community into hard conversations about inclusivity. For example, how do race and gender bias affect grading and course evaluations?
These seem like fine suggestions, but they can go wrong very quickly. In the case of "hard conversations about inclusivity", framing and context are everything. Is there a "we" that are excluding a "them" when these discussions happen? Depending on the instigator of the discussion, students are likely to be mis-identified as to what categories they fall into, and the discussion falls back on appearances of race and sex as markers.
I myself am a member of a religious minority that is largely unknown and widely misunderstood. I come from a background of poverty, am non-traditionally aged, and a survivor of abuse. I have been transgender. I still have struggles with food security and mental health. In classroom discussions about inclusiveness though, I am seen and treated as being in the unmarked category, as though I have not had a lifetime of struggle to bring myself through the doors of this institution.
I feel even more strongly about the pronoun protocols. Some of my instructors have taken the approach of making a note on the syllabus that they can be approached to request names and pronouns. Others though have taken to directly asking for pronouns, actively pursuing answers from students. While the former approach seems fair and inclusive, I find this latter approach troublesome both from my own perspective as a desister and for the sake of those who are experiencing gender and sexual confusion.
Dysphoria is a deeply uncomfortable experience. One feels constantly under a spotlight to perform gender correctly, to read one's own performance as an indication of identity and to reconcile their psychology and biology. The last thing I would have wanted would be confrontation about whether I thought I was a man or a woman, and the task of summing up those feelings in a neat set of words.
To say that though is to speak from the inside of what I now consider to be a fundamentally religious experience. The social practices of gender have qualities of the immaterial, the personal, and the spiritual. They aim to solve existential problems in the lives of believers, and require beliefs about the human soul and body. My experiences led me to reject these positions, and deep thought and difficult personal experience inform my opposition to genderist practices. How am I to be included in discussions that treat them as a matter of fact?
I haven't read all of Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I was assigned the chapter where the idea of "banking education" is introduced in a recent course. Friere's critique seemed to have fallen on deaf ears though, because the list of readings for the rest of the semester, one after another, indicated that the instructor viewed themselves as being privileged with knowledge of systematic oppression, and aimed to deposit this information into their students. We were not asked to discuss, we were not asked to bring the knowledge we already had to the table.
The most insulting part of this course was that this was an honors seminar, presented as an opportunity for independent research. Yet none of the classroom discussion or reading was slated for the development of our scholarly impulses. Instead the rubrics made clear that we would be tasked with mapping the specific political views of the instructor onto our projects. This mapping process was described as "producing knowledge", a view that, if I've glimpsed Friere's meaning at all, is antithetical to the growth of students.
As a student, I do bring knowledge and experience to the classroom that I wish to share with fellow students and instructors. I'm radically anti-capitalist, and anti-statist, but I have a very different framework for reasoning about these problems. Somehow this supposedly radical act of pedagogy missed the point of sharing knowledge horizontally. Rather than open exchange of ideas, discussions were railroaded into pet-projects, and time was given to obviously favored holders of the current orthodoxies.
I dropped this seminar for the sake of my sanity, and to protect the integrity of my scholarship. I don't know what opportunities I will have to forego in the future due to this approach to teaching being applied in such an authoritarian and absolutist manner. My question now is, if I am being marginalized like this, who will teach me to fight oppression?
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