by Belle Kim
In this post, I want to share a workshop I led in 2017 following Trump’s election and the ensuing, urgent call for more active conversations and mobilizations within our department and program around issues of race, equity, access, power, and critical pedagogy. I’m attaching a detailed description of the workshop along with materials used in the hopes that we as a program will return to and take up the questions raised below again and again in productive ways that lead to substantial, material, and institutional change.
ENGLISH 131 POST-ELECTION WORKSHOP
“All presidents have been destroyers.” – #StandingRock
The purpose of this workshop is to (1) think and strategize together on developing a critical antiracist pedagogical practice that reflects our commitments and investments as scholars and activists; (2) develop course descriptions that situate composition and the thematic content of our class in the current political reality in which we reside, as well as a statement for the syllabus that articulates our own commitments and the expectations we have for our students; (3) mobilize the rhetoric of “stakes” and “warrants/assumptions” (Outcome 3) to teach the ethical and political implications of producing particular kinds of argumentation and discourse; (4) launch collaborative teaching projects that can offer individual teachers more support.
- How do we frame and confront the post-election moment in our classrooms in ways that actively acknowledge and hold different vulnerabilities and their uneven effects?
- What would attempts to think historically about the present look like, given that the entire history of the US has been one of state violence against people of color? For whom has the normalization of white supremacy been consistent rather than a newly emergent crisis?
- What is ethical and political pedagogy? What does it mean to be accountable in the present?
- How can we inhabit and disrupt the university and its current iteration as the production of neoliberal, settler colonial, antiblack racist expansionism while remaining committed to learning as a decolonial, noncolonial, and abolitionist practice?
- Given that the neoliberal university establishes itself by incorporating diversity, difference, and radical disruptive energies into itself, how might we cultivate a practice of critical pedagogy that cannot easily be subsumed, co-opted, or evacuated of political force?
Critical Antiracist Pedagogy Workshop (click here for powerpoint)