Tag Archives: pedagogy

Labors of love and race

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I was invited to participate in two projects this year related to race and diversity in the department. One was directed at growing our diversity and the other was about having discussions about race and diversity in the department (and the discipline more widely). They melded quite nicely together because, as my colleague, Magie Ramirez, and i realized – you cannot have one without the other.

We started a series for our department directed at opening up discussions about race and the discipline more broadly. We brought together our department (graduate students and faculty) to discuss moments in our lives (in or out of the academy) in which we were confronted with issues of privilege. The response was fascinating. We were met with questions about intersectionality and class (particularly), and had delightful conversations about the difficulty of navigating hose in our lives.

We are following up this Friday with an Ethical Pedagogies discussion that we hope will draw the conversation into the classroom setting – addressing difficult moments that we’ve encountered as instructors. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll blog about that after our meeting.

Today, i attended a luncheon put on by the Simpson Center in collaboration with the Public Scholarship certificate program about learning about race at the UW. It was wonderful and informative.

A few things came out of the conversation today that really has made me rethink my role as a woman of color in the academy. The first is that a director of interdisciplinary studies pointed out that the work that we are doing as a committee is really the kind of work that is a capstone project for an inter disciplinary degree, or even for the Public Scholarship certificate. I was struck by this (hours later) in that i have such a love for my discipline and my department more generally that i have not even thought about it as a “project” so much as contributing to my department as a whole. This disjuncture between my willingness to volunteer and the worth (cha-ching!) of the work that we are doing as a committee had never occurred to me.

I became involved because i care deeply about the success and worth of my discipline. And yet, i am reminded, yet again, that here we are, three graduate students of color (all women) and two faculty (also women) working so furiously to bring about the kinds of conversations that we think will make our department, and our discipline, stronger in its research,  pedagogy, and openness in ways that are perhaps so far beyond the scope of our prescribed roles in academia. This is not about tooting our horns, so much as realizing that we have taken on a task that is far beyond the scope of “typical” commitment to the department.

Further, i am struck by the realization that, yet again, we are taking on the role of being the patient ones. We have struggled with people’s difficulties with this process – we are finding patience with the varying speed with which people are willing to confront the privilege of academia, more generally. But i was reminded today that, well, to be frank, how exhausting that work is. A woman from the Communications department said, “I’m not even that old, but i’m exhausted, i’m so tired” with having to take on the task of educating people about race.

But beyond that, what i found so invigorating was the positive response that i got from the group, as a whole. People were excited that we were willing to forge ahead to have these “difficult” and “messy” conversations. I was encouraged to write papers and to bring what we were learning to others to learn from it. And for the second time, i felt validated in the hard work we are doing.

The first time i felt that was when we had a debriefing with the graduate students. They were excited and delighted that we were trying to have these conversations in the department. They want these conversations. They need and desire them. And this is what i want to share with people… so many of the graduate students expressed a keen interest in using this to build TRUST with the faculty. They saw it not just as an opportunity to talk about race, something that can be tough in our world, but that to do it with faculty was such a relief and wonderful experience to get to share with our mentors.

Today, however, i felt it from a much wider audience. They wanted to know more. They wanted to hear about how we were addressing issues of power and hierarchy (yes, we worked with that – we used candy to break up committees and faculty and to put students and faculty into random groups) and how we dealt with discomfort (we made room for all levels of approach – not silencing the direction that people were ready to tackle our big issues from). And they encouraged us to publish.

The faculty that we are working with have heard this from the number of people they have addressed across the campus about how to put together a project like this. There is excitement and interest. But to feel it first hand has been really helpful. I suddenly realized just how important what we are doing is.

This is not intended as a kind of pat-on-the-back by any stretch of the imagination – rather, is an encouragement in the notion that creativity can really open doors to a whole new way of being in the discipline and in academia. We have stumbled and struggled and choked on our own insecurities as we push along this path. But ultimately, this has never been about us or about fulfilling some kind of diversity requirement. Really, this has been a labor of love and race.

As geographers, and as critical scholars, it has been incredibly important to us as a committee and as a department to make the efforts that we have to break the barriers of silence and of privilege to open doors to a new kind of communication – one that is honest and sometimes painful. And i cannot express enough how very encouraging and what an honor it has been to work with the incredible women of the committee and the earnest members of our community to really push all of our boundaries of comfort to be better scholars and better people.

 

Racism in the classroom

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One of the most difficult things to deal with in teaching and TAing is racism in the classroom. I’m not just talking about un-recognized privilege, but actual coded racism (and sometimes not so coded). But i have to thank Sara Gilbert for the best advice i’ve ever received in teaching: always assume the best of every student.

It can be very easy to simply disregard all of the work of a particular student, write him or her off as a lost cause or simply beyond reaching. Especially when these coded messages are coming through late in the quarter. It can be gutting and heart breaking. But i am learning to hold out hope. Intelligent students know to keep their editorials to themselves in the classroom  - they sense, and come to censor themselves against, a particular culture of the classroom. But there is something to be said for honoring the trust they have in sharing their honesty in written work. At least i choose to see it that way.

I struggle, but in a class like the one i am TAing right now (with Vicky Lawson, GEOG 331, Global Poverty and Care), at the heart of the course is relational analysis – an analysis that asks the students to recognize that we are all interconnected (and therefore, have a responsibility to care) – it can be difficult to hold patience. But how better to teach than to take the time to explain, understand, and help reach those who are still floundering in the societally constructed vacuums of residual analysis? I am ever so grateful to those who remind me to not judge the judgers, but to help guide them toward a more gentle compassion that gives room for different speeds of learning, for the time it takes to overcome 20+ years of inculcation and indoctrination. I can’t imagine the courage it must take to try to overcome that in just 10 weeks. We are asking students to not just let go of how they understand the world and their place in it, but everything that makes their lives have meaning – we are asking them to let go of privilege in order to really enact it. We are asking them to deconstruct all that they know to be true – realize that their cozy self-constructed senses of self are not so self-constructed as they may think. We are asking them to recognize the lie in which they exist. That is a lot to ask of young people.  And ultimately, teaching a relational analysis is really about living it – how better to live it than to practice it among the most privileged people i come to know?

Islam and the veil in the classroom

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I could not be prouder of my students this week.

This entire quarter has been about building up the tools to speak about the ‘veil’ and the War on Terror. What struck me, after i was asked to teach the class, is that most of the students were 9 or 10 when 9/11 struck. Their entire lives as political beings has been colored by the events that have followed that day. Their ‘enemy’ is so different from the ‘enemy’ that i grew up with.

I am a child of the Cold War. I grew up on an F-16 fighter jet base – the last scramble site before the refueling station at Rota, Spain, for the Middle East and North Africa. I grew up with Neun und Neunzig Luftballons. We knew that at any moment the Russians, or Soviets could be on their way across the border. But i also grew up with ‘terrorists’. My father was pulled out of ICU in Landstuhl Hospital when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut. That was a turning point for those of us with tight ties to the military. School was often interrupted for bomb threats – we were shuffled out to the football field while men (always men) in bomb protection suits went to save the day. But that also meant that my bus was met by a Humvee-mounted M-16 at the front gate every morning. That the Def Con level (that Americans only learned about in 2001) was an important part of our daily plans.

Their enemy is unknowable, but somehow representable through the very heavy mark of ‘the veil’. So how to begin to address this?

What struck me was their willingness to admit to and to problematize their own single-sided view of ‘the veil’. They tackled it with a maturity that absolutely floored me. They struggled to really confront their own pre-conceived notions about what ‘the veil’ is and how they perceive it. Over the quarter, we have slowly begun to unpack what it means to be “at war” as well as what it means to be “at peace.” They have read about women who have gone into battle, women who have written about being in battle, women who have struggled to be taken seriously, to disrupt common tropes about their ‘weakness’, ‘fragility’, ‘incompetence’, and their sex and sexuality.

We opened the class with a short discussion on Orientalism (i used the Youtube video of Edward Said explaining how he came to Orientalism) then moved on to confronting the Five Orientalist Frames of Islam (a list that i borrowed from Deepa Kumar’s article Framing Islam: The Resurgence of Orientalism During the Bush II Era, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2010). What emerged was a brilliant discussion led by the students problematizing everything from what ‘oppression’ means to universalim. And in the meantime, the worked through individualism, cultural relativism, and sacrifice.

Repeatedly, students stated that they went into this week’s readings with a single notion of the ‘veil’ as a form of oppression, but that they came out of them, at the very lease, simply more confused, and definitely more cautious in their framing. I cannot express my absolute admiration for their self-reflexiveness, their honesty, and their willingness to struggle with such a complex topic. I have got to be the luckiest grad student / instructor alive.

Next up – (En)gendering the War on Terror! Oh, this class is way too much fun!

Their readings were:

Grace, Daphne. 2004. Selections from: The woman in the muslin mask: veiling and identity in  postcolonial literature. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press: pp. 8-36

Fluri, Jennifer. 2009. “The beautiful ‘other’: a critical examination of ‘western’ representations of Afghan feminine corporeal modernity.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 16 (3): 241.

Mitchell, Katharyne. 2006. Geographies of identity: the new exceptionalism. Progress in Human Geography. 30(1): 95-106.

Freedman, Jane. 2008. The headscarf debate: Muslim women in Europe and the ‘War on Terror.’ In, Krista Hunt & Kim Rygiel, eds., (En)gendering the War on Terror: war stories and camouflaged politics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 170-189.