Teaching To Transgress - Vignesh Prasad

## Highlights The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. And if boredom should prevail, then pedagogical strategies were needed that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmosphere. Neither Freire’s work nor feminist pedagogy examined the notion of pleasure in the classroom. The idea that learning should be exciting, sometimes even “fun,” was the subject of critical discussion by educators writing about pedagogical practices in grade schools, and sometimes even high schools. But there seemed to be no interest among either traditional or radical educators in discussing the role of excitement in higher education. — location: 136 ^ref-35003 --- any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged. That insistence can not be simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical practices. To begin, the professor must genuinely value every one’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources. Used constructively they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open learning community. Often before this process can begin there has to be some deconstruction of the traditional notion that only the professor is responsible for classroom dynamics. — location: 151 ^ref-51193 --- That notion of mutual labor was affirmed by Thich Nhat Hanh’s philosophy of engaged Buddhism, the focus on practice in conjunction with contemplation. His philosophy was similar to Freire’s emphasis on “praxis”— action and reflection upon the world in order to change it. — location: 236 ^ref-25894 --- Freire’s thought gave me the support I needed to challenge the “banking system” of education, that approach to learning that is rooted in the notion that all students need to do is consume information fed to them by a professor and be able to memorize and store — location: 229 ^ref-43256 --- I entered the classrooms with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer. — location: 233 ^ref-24521 --- teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that “the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher or any helping professional should be directed toward his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people.” — location: 252 ^ref-31860 --- Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment can not happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks. Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. — location: 331 ^ref-8310 --- Finally, we were all going to break through collective academic denial and acknowledge that the education most of us had received and were giving was not and is never politically neutral. — location: 449 ^ref-35327 --- Diversity that somehow constitutes itself as a harmonious ensemble of benign cultural spheres is a conservative and liberal model of multiculturalism that, in my mind, deserves to be jettisoned because, when we try to make culture an undisturbed space of harmony and agreement where social relations exist within cultural forms of uninterrupted accords we subscribe to a form of social amnesia in which we forget that all knowledge is forged in histories that are played out in the field of social antagonisms. — location: 460 ^ref-2443 --- Many professors lacked strategies to deal with antagonisms in the classroom. When this fear joined with the refusal to change that characterized the stance of an old (predominantly white male) guard it created a space for disempowered collective backlash. — location: 464 ^ref-34251 --- In all cultural revolutions there are periods of chaos and confusion, times when grave mistakes are made. If we fear mistakes, doing things wrongly, constantly evaluating ourselves, we will never make the academy a culturally diverse place where scholars and the curricula address every dimension of that difference. — location: 486 ^ref-39137 --- most of us were taught in classrooms where styles of teachings reflected the notion of a single norm of thought and experience, which we were encouraged to believe was universal. This has been just as true for nonwhite teachers as for white teachers. Most of us learned to teach emulating this model. As a consequence, many teachers are disturbed by the political implications of a multicultural education because they fear losing control in a classroom where there is no one way to approach a subject— only multiple ways and multiple references. — location: 509 ^ref-5901 --- there has to be an acknowledgment that any effort to transform institutions so that they reflect a multicultural standpoint must take into consideration the fears teachers have when asked to shift their paradigms. There must be training sites where teachers have the opportunity to express those concerns while also learning to create ways to approach the — location: 513 ^ref-8946 --- Working with a critical pedagogy based on my understanding of Freire’s teaching, I enter the classroom with the assumption that we must build “community” in order to create a climate of openness and intellectual rigor. Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn — to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. — location: 577 ^ref-25614 --- In my classes, students keep journals and often write paragraphs during class which they read to one another. This happens at least once irrespective of class size. Most of the classes I teach are not small. They range anywhere from thirty to sixty students, and at times I have taught more than one hundred. To hear each other (the sound of different voices), to listen to one another, is an exercise in recognition. It also ensures that no student remains invisible in the classroom. — location: 581 ^ref-35286 --- In my professorial role I had to surrender my need for immediate affirmation of successful teaching (even tough some reward is immediate) and accept that students may not appreciate the value of a certain stand point or process straightaway. — location: 604 ^ref-40614 --- saw for the first time that there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches. I respect that pain. And I include recognition of it now when I teach, that is to say, I teach about shifting paradigms and talk about the discomfort it can cause. White students learning to think more critically about questions of race and racism may go home for the holidays and suddenly see their parents in a different light. — location: 612 ^ref-51655 --- This is why it is difficult for me to speak about sexism in Freire’s work; it is difficult to find a language that offers a way to frame critique and yet maintain the recognition of all that is valued and respected in the work. It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response — location: 693 ^ref-59715 --- it was educators like Freire who affirmed that the difficulties I had with the banking system of education, with an education that in no way addressed my social reality, were an important critique. — location: 725 ^ref-45259 --- One of the reasons that Paulo’s book, Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, has been important for my work is that it is a crucial example of how a privileged critical thinker approaches sharing knowledge and resources with those who are in need. — location: 755 ^ref-59641 --- Only through such praxis—in which those who help and those who are being helped help each other simultaneously—can the act of helping become free from the distortion in which the helper dominates the helped. — location: 758 ^ref-58418 --- “a certain kind of theoretical performance which only a small cadre of people can possibly understand ” has come to be seen as representative of any production of critical thought that will be given recognition within many academic circles as “theory.” — location: 898 ^ref-7721 --- any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public. — location: 904 ^ref-44890 --- Within revolutionary feminist movements, within revolutionary black liberation struggles, we must continually claim theory as necessary practice within a holistic framework of liberatory activism. We must do more than call attention to ways theory is misused. We must do more than critique the conservative and at times reactionary uses some academic women make of feminist theory. We must actively work to call attention to the importance of creating a theory that can advance renewed feminist movements, particularly highlighting that theory which seeks to further feminist opposition to sexism, and sexist oppression. Doing this, we necessarily celebrate and value theory that can be and is shared in oral as well as written narrative. — location: 976 ^ref-17344 --- Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, we have already witnessed the commodification of feminist thinking (just as we experience the commodification of blackness) in ways that make it seem as though one can partake of the “good ” that these movements produce without any commitment to transformative politics and practice. — location: 994 ^ref-24492 --- “For Said it is both dangerous and misleading to base an identity politics upon rigid theories of exclusions, ‘exclusions that stipulate, for instance, only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial subjects can understand colonial experience.’” I agree with Said’s critique, but I reiterate that while I, too, critique the use of essentialism and identity politics as a strategy for exclusion or domination, I am suspicious when theories call this practice harmful as a way of suggesting that it is a strategy only marginalized groups employ. — location: 1137 ^ref-22185 --- It has been difficult for white women who perceive black women servants to be “like one of the family” to understand that the servant might have a completely different understanding of their relationship. The servant may be ever mindful that no degree of affection or care altered differences in status— or the reality that white women exercised power, whether benevolently or tyrannically. — location: 1353 ^ref-376 --- Until white women can con front their fear and hatred of black women (and vice versa), until we can acknowledge the negative history which shapes and informs our contemporary interaction, there can be no honest, meaningful dialogue between the two groups. The contemporary feminist call for sisterhood, the radical white woman’s appeal to black women and all women of color to join the feminist movement, is seen by many black women as yet another expression of white female denial of the reality of racist domination, of their complicity in the exploitation and oppression of black women and black people. — location: 1400 ^ref-33473 --- Though the politically progressive clam or is for “diversity,” there is little realistic understanding of the ways feminist scholars must change ways of seeing, talking, and thinking if we are to speak to the various audiences, the “different” subjects who may be present in one location. How many feminist scholars can respond effectively when faced with a racially and ethnically diverse audience who may not share similar class backgrounds, language, levels of understanding, communication skills, and concerns? — location: 1537 ^ref-62232 --- We needed concrete counter-examples that would disrupt the seemingly fixed (yet often unstated) assumptions that it was really unlikely such individuals could meet across boundaries. Without these counter-examples I felt we were all in danger of losing contact, of creating conditions that would make contact impossible. Hence, I formed my conviction that public dialogues could serve as useful interventions. — location: 1761 ^ref-17339 --- that we both have a real concern with education as liberatory practice and with pedagogical strategies that may be not just for our students but for ourselves. — location: 1811 ^ref-28233 --- “This really is about power. I really do feel more ‘in control’ when I’m behind the podium or behind the desk than when I’m walking towards my students, standing close to them, maybe even touching them.” Acknowledging that we are bodies in the classroom has been important for me, especially in my efforts to disrupt the notion of professor as omnipotent, all-knowing mind. — location: 1859 ^ref-15074 --- While writing the essays in this book, I continuously thought about the fact that I know so many professors who are progressive in their politics, who have been willing to change their curriculum, but who in fact have resolutely refused to change the nature of their pedagogical practice. — location: 1893 ^ref-11549 --- many students confuse a lack of recognizable traditional formality with a lack of seriousness. — location: 1929 ^ref-8603 --- when students did not appear to “respect their authority” they felt these practices were faulty, unreliable, and returned to traditional practices. Of course, they should have expected that students who have had a more conventional education would be threatened by and even resist teaching practices which insist that students participate in education and not be passive consumers. — location: 1932 ^ref-47989 --- Pleasure in the classroom is feared. If there is laughter, a reciprocal ex change may be taking place. You’re laughing, the students are laughing, and someone walks by, looks in and says, “OK, you’re able to make them laugh. But so what? Any one can entertain.” They can take this attitude because the idea of reciprocity, of respect, is not ever assumed. It is not assumed that your ideas can be entertaining, moving. — location: 1952 ^ref-58150 --- To some extent, they saw me as “dictating” that they engage in liberatory practice, so they complied. — location: 1978 ^ref-42326 --- more radical subject matter does not create a liberatory pedagogy, — location: 1991 ^ref-56002 --- When one speaks from the perspective of one’s immediate experiences, something’s created in the classroom for students, sometimes for the very first time. Focusing on experience allows students to claim a knowledge base from which they can speak. — location: 1995 ^ref-39730 --- In principle, the classroom ought to be a place where things are said seriously—not without pleasure, not without joy—but seriously, and for serious consideration. — location: 2020 ^ref-22211 --- All too often it is assumed that if you “give students the freedom”—and it’s a mistake to think we’re talking about giving students freedom rather than seeing it is a project that teachers and students are working on together—there will be chaos, that no serious discussion will ensue. — location: 2038 ^ref-38825 --- There has to be more of an emphasis on job-sharing and job-switching in the interest of creating an environment where engaged teaching can be sustained. — location: 2214 ^ref-29134 --- By transforming the oppressor’s language, making a culture of resistance, black people created an intimate speech that could say far more than was permissible within the boundaries of standard English. The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies— different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview. — location: 2279 ^ref-3806 --- Bourgeois values in the classroom create a barrier, blocking the possibility of confrontation and conflict, warding off dissent. Students are often silenced by means of their acceptance of class values that teach them to maintain order at all costs. — location: 2364 ^ref-44415 --- Early on I did not realize that class was much more than one’s economic standing, that it determined values, standpoint, and interests. It was assumed that any student coming from a poor or working-class background would willingly surrender all values and habits of being associated with this background. Those of us from diverse ethnic /racial back grounds learned that no aspect of our vernacular culture could be voiced in elite settings. This was especially the case with vernacular language or a first language that was not English. To insist on speaking in any manner that did not conform to privileged class ideals and mannerisms placed one always in the position of interloper. — location: 2406 ^ref-32356 --- Demands that individuals from class backgrounds deemed undesirable surrender all vestiges of their past create psychic turmoil. We were encouraged, as many students are today, to betray our class origins. Rewarded if we chose to assimilate, estranged if we chose to maintain those aspects of who we were, some were all too often seen as outsiders. — location: 2411 ^ref-37763 --- In the classes I teach, I have students write short paragraphs that they read aloud so that we all have a chance to hear unique perspectives and we are all given an opportunity to pause and listen to one another. Just the physical experience of hearing, of listening intently, to each particular voice strengthens our capacity to learn together. — location: 2467 ^ref-62311 --- Few of us are taught to facilitate heated discussions that may include useful interruptions and digressions, but it is often the professor who is most invested in maintaining order in the classroom. Professors cannot empower students to embrace diversities of experience, standpoint, behavior, or style if our training has disempowered us, socialized us to cope effectively only with a single mode of interaction based on middle-class values. — location: 2482 ^ref-59062 --- I was deeply afraid of using authority in a way that would perpetuate class elitism and other forms of domination. Fearful that I might abuse power, I falsely pretended that no power difference existed between students and myself. That was a mistake. — location: 2488 ^ref-41599 --- Some of the suspicion is that the presence of feelings, of passions, may not allow for objective consideration of each student’s merit. But this very notion is based on the false assumption that education is neutral, that there is some “even” emotional ground we stand on that enables us to treat every one equally, dispassionately. In reality, special bonds between professors and students have always existed, but traditionally they have been exclusive rather than inclusive. — location: 2622 ^ref-23235 --- Commitment to engaged pedagogy carries with it the willingness to be responsible, not to pretend that professors do not have the power to change the direction of our students’ lives. — location: 2718 ^ref-22957 ---