Can I briefly expand this, partly in the light of Lucky Liquid's response:
Creating a "trans, queer, woman friendly enviornment" is good, and upsetting, failing, distressing, emotionally hurting or otherwise pissing off people who hold views counter to this is also very, very good. How could it be bad?
On first reading I thought it was way off mark also, for the same reasons as LL.
But having reread it, I wanted to swing by and check that Flyboy meant (roughly) 'people who are attempting to prevent the creation of a trans, queer and woman-friendly learning environment should be generally poked' rather than 'people who are transphobic misogynist homophobes should be poked in educational environments'?
I know it sounds like a subtle distinction, but I have a learning contract with my students that they are going to approach discussion in a respectful manner. ('Respectful' includes a bunch of stuff, some of it suggested by each group, but always not making assumptions about gender/sex, not attacking someone's self-definitions, trying not to make sweeping extrapolations from personal positions. All that. This to an extent protects students with all manner of views – although it tends to do a disservice to essentialists and absolutists, and favour relativists, and I’m chewing that one over in my own work.)
I don't require my students to sign up to a particular set of opinions.
This gets bloody hard if someone is determined to express an unpleasant opinion in a lip-service 'respectful' way. It's a bloody difficult judgement call at what point to bring the smack in to preserve a friendly learning environment. I can give examples if it's useful, but this seems a bit threadrotty.
So I'd say that if someone has agreed to assist in constructing a certain teaching environment, and then messes with that environment, they can be warned, and ultimately, poked. Which I hope was what Flyboy was saying (although I get to exclude students if necessary, so I'd probably just ask them to leave rather than run through his list - I have a very different responsibility in the education/safe envirnoment/poking balance as a tutor than I do to people on this board, in that pub, or in my own lounge).
Anyway. It's never easy to spot what will hurt students. I've taught the same thing several times to different groups and different concerns come up each year - emotional sore spots, particular group biases. Some are really left-field – I was totally unprepared in my first stint teaching gender studies for the number of very traditional Christian feminists. Or the number of students who have had plastic surgery. I agree that showing your own 'working' is helpful – as Legba stated, showing that you yourself find the text distressing, or asking students how it makes them feel..
I think this works as part of a student-centred pedagogic approach, and doesn’t work separately from it. If you’ve handed over a certain amount of authority in what is discussed and how it is discussed, there can be a separation between Teacher as Figurehead of Knowledge and the Knowledge under consideration – you are no longer wholly identified with the texts, as their handmaid and sacred interpreter. And the texts are hopefully themselves no longer associated with Knowledge – they’ll be some debate about the canon, or different approaches to literature (it’s similar, I think, in many other humanities subjects). So the student, ideally, feels much more like an agent interacting with texts, rather than someone who is being primed to have a particular correct response to Knowledge.
This is my fabulous synchronised ideal, as it fits together all my opinions on literature, reality, teaching and learning. It’s not as idyllic as I think - like the agreement for a supportive learning environment I mentioned above, it favours those who like uncertainty and want to make their own intervention, and can confuse those who are looking for concrete solutions.
In practise, it can also really confuse students who aren't used to having the balance of authority shifted towards them – they don’t know what mental work they should be doing, they’re trained to retain facts, it becomes frustrating because they feel they don’t know enough to be able to engage with the debate.
And I find particularly that I end up as the only teacher – or one of a couple - who do this. Other tutors are offering solid factual information. This can inspire – which is great – or it can lead to students saying ‘My tutor set me this horrific bit of trash and they don’t even know what they think about it. This course has been terrible.’
I’m going on a bit because I can’t tell if I want to offer critical pedagogy, or personal experience, or Top Tips. Do excuse the long-winded response. |
Far superior to twiddling around with Excel spreadsheets which is what I'm doing for the rest of this summer.