Tag Archives: teaching

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?

Racism and peace in America

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I made the mistake of looking at More Deleted Comments from White Readers on the United Black America website this morning. The question at the end, from the author, was, What’s your comeback to these comments?

My first instinct was none. Absolutely no comeback  - just compassion. But can we simply sit in a state of compassion when faced with the virulence of violence that stems not just discursively, but also physically, legally, socially, economically? I realize that this is one site – one that probably attracts trolls (not purposefully, mind you, this is not a “blame the victim” moment – rather, there is a quiet part of my heart that is hoping that it’s just a few drunk idiots who had nothing better to do than leave ratty comments).

But this isn’t the only moment of virulent racism i’ve bumped up against in the past few weeks. In the last two weeks of the quarter, my students and i tackled very large questions around the War on Terror. I started to type “Muslim” and “Christian” into search engines. It dragged me down a horrifying rabbit hole of hate.

Do we continue to sit in peace? Can we?

My students and i struggled with this question in Week 8. We read Martin Luther King’s “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” and three other works about women who are working toward peace (listed at the end of this post). What we came back to again and again was the question of what it means to enact peace and must there be violence to even bring issues to the forefront. But that can’t’ be it. It can’t just be that heinous acts of violence bring racism and other oppressive forms of marginalization (and hate, really) to the front stage – there is violence happening every day for a wide range of perceived differences, in all kinds of places.

Judith Butler (Precarious Life) tells us:

…the shared condition of precariousness leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as “destructible” and “ungrievable.” Such populations are “lose-able” or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life as we know it rather than as living populations in need of protection from illegitimate state violence, famine, or pandemics.

That anyone can call this a post-racial society is beyond comprehension when you consider these delightful campaign ads of 2010. How is it that we live in a society that can equate Christianity with Americanness and Americanness with hate. Take, for instance, the latest Perry campaign ad. (Or, as my partner just said, when i played it for him “Freaky-deaky! Have you got your [EU Country] citizenship paperwork finished?”)

Paul Farmer (2003) and others (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004) have pointed to structural violences as equally demanding of our attentions as the political violences which, for so long, were deemed somehow more “worthy” of attention and analysis. Yet, structural violences hold every bit of the historical and social processes that are embedded in so-called political violences. It is not enough to narrate the violences so much as it is important to trace them back to the social, political and economic ideologies underpinning these violences – the construction of hate.

But sometimes, i wonder if tracing is enough… if protesting is enough…

other readings for week 8

Hays-Mitchell, Maureen. 2005. Women’s struggles for sustainable peace in post-conflict Peru: a feminist analysis of violence and change. InLise Nelson & Joni Seager, eds., A companion to feminist geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 590-606.

Berger Gould, Benina. Ritual as resistance: Tibetan women and nonviolence. In Marguerite R. Waller & Jennifer Rycenga, eds., Frontline feminisms: women, war, and resistance. New York: Routledge, 206-228.

Fluri, Jennifer L. 2006. “‘Our Website Was Revolutionary’: Virtual Spaces of Representation and Resistance.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographers 5 (1): 89-111.

UPDATE

I would like to point to the number of “Likes” and “Dislikes” for this ad… i feel a little better about life, today:

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.

 

 

Teaching and bias

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Teaching the Gender and Geography course is … well … exhilarating. For a Geography course that is so heavily theoretical, we have a surprising diversity of personal frames of thinking in the class. It’s both delightful and frightening. I also have a surprising number of young men in the class – they make up a substantial proportion (maybe 25%?).

Yesterday, i could not have been more proud of them. We spent the first hour talking about the Occupy movement. I had planned a lecture around Gramsci and the early Marxian debates (particularly between Lukacs and Rosa Luxembourg) about the difference between (and the different ideological attachments to) spontaneity and vanguardism. Instead, i opened the floor to let those of my students who have been heavily involved in the Occupy Seattle protest to explain to the class what the movement is about. One of them pulled out the formal statement from OWS and three of them read it aloud to the class.

What ensued turned into a heated debate about “appropriate” ways to protest or to try to get things changed in Congress and in the laws. I’d say the class was 1/3 for, 1/3 against and 1/3 completely unsure about where they stood. What i admired about their debate was the way in which they helped each other to remember to be polite – let people finish before jumping in, raising hands to make sure that people were aware of who wanted to speak next, not speaking for too long at a time, taking notes so they could respond point by point. We had some incredibly tough moments, but they made it through rather swimmingly. What i appreciated most was their ability to catch each other and start laughing at their own frustrations.

I pulled the conversation short when the room got so heated that we headed down the normative judgment path – when students started making statements like, “Poor people are lazy” and “I know someone who…” We took a break, washed our hands, took a deep breath and started on the second hour looking at news articles (each week, students bring news articles that are gendered in nature and discuss them together). And then Slut Walk and issues of women being told that dressing suggestively (whatever that means) leads to rape.

Bless him, one of my male students ventured to mention that it was “kind of like advertising when you wear a short skirt” … i don’t think he got to finish his thought. And that’s about the time i shut down. *sigh* … thank goodness the bell rang, but not before i thanked them for being so willing to put themselves in the line of fire and to ask the really hard questions. Really, if we were all of like minds, the class would be very boring and not very useful to anyone.  I just hope they understood.

The issue i have been having is that i want the students to have an open forum in which to discuss their ideas. The lowest marks i get in teaching is that i don’t make enough room for students’ opinions. I know that when i start soap-boxing, i can be extremely silencing. So how to balance the push for critical thinking without shutting down students who disagree with what i’m teaching? In the entry level courses, i’ve always been able to frame it as offering a new way of thinking for the toolbox. But in a 400-level course, i feel that they should have the tools and don’t need to be beaten with them.

Maybe i’m being to lenient. I suppose that i’ve given them enough time to start understanding that i’m not shutting them down, and now i have to really start pushing them harder – asking the difficult questions… I absolutely abhor confrontation (unless i’ve had a glass of wine or two – then i have no problem pulling out the velvet bat and bopping people on the head), and yet, here i am teaching a rather controversial course in a very controversial time. But i’m still trying to break some of them off the habit of using normative judgment adjectives as truths…

One of my older students approached me after the bell rang asked if we could start drinking in class… i hear you, sister! I think i might be slipping a flask into my bag on Mondays and Wednesdays, too…

Teaching the tough stuff

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This has been an interesting quarter. It’s my first teaching on my own, and i felt that the students should own their process. So – with all the eagerness that only a naive new instructor could have, i proceeded to construct a course without construction. You can see my syllabus here, which resulted in this schedule.

Because the quarter system is short (10 weeks!), we had a lot of work to do in the first few days. I had them read Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and had them turn in their first assignment by Wednesday of Week 1. I lost around 12 students in the first week, but gained another 12 back. We then chatted about what it was that they felt the point of the class was.

By Week 2, they had to turn in five articles each, on the topic that they would be spending the rest of the quarter on (by Monday). I took these home and skimmed through all (150) of them and looked for themes and repeats. Of these, i found some consistent themes and then constructed the course around them.

What i found so interesting was the number of students who were interested in 1) studying neighborhoods in South King County, or the traditionally diverse neighborhoods, and 2) understanding how race and ethnicity play into segregation or perceptions of safety and housing / transportation. The difficulty was that because this course is a field research course (GEOG 490, Field Research: The Seattle Region), it is not designed to handle some of the big theoretical questions that students raise. Rather, it is designed as a capstone project wherein they mobilize everything they have learned to this point as a catalyst to go out into the field to learn more.

This means, we inevitably hit some rough spots. Mostly, it means that we struggled with race and ethnicity. What are they? How do we think about them? How do we move from noticing patterns in race, ethnicity, or SES in housing, education, or crime to theorizing about these differentiations? Ten weeks (or eight, once the reader was put together by the end of Week 2 – or six when you take into consideration that the last two weeks were dedicated to final presentations) is not enough to tackle these big questions while also diving into the Seattle Region (for which we used the Seattle Geographies book), approaches to visual and other methodologies (for which we used a mess of articles and book chapters ranging from Edward Tufte to Gill Valentine), and topical articles that they were interested in.

So what to do?

What i found fascinating was the range of capabilities and comfort in addressing issues of race and ethnicity and poverty. I knew, at the outset, that they would teach me more than i could ever teach them. And i was right. Beyond the incredible speakers we had over the course of the class (including Craig Mamammano, Julia Wharton, and Christopher Martin Hoff), we visited the Henry Art Gallery for a show of the Seattle Photography Club from the early 20th century, and we hung out with the amazing Amanda Hornby as she showed the students how to find elusive materials to work from in the library.

Overall, between the self-selecting and the amazing topics the students chose, the course was a success. And while some students never quite got past the descriptive aspects of doing field research, i think they gained new insights into field research. I was so lucky to have such a lovely group of students for my first teach-alone experience!