This week we’ll discuss the methods, purposes, and politics of pedagogy. We’ll consider the contents and contexts of learning – including where and when it happens, with whom, and with what forms of consent, if any. How do our existing infrastructures and protocols – our classrooms, calendars, curricula, disciplines, and systems of accreditation – both provide necessary structure and impose limitations, and how might we imagine new modes of learning outside those conventions?
Academic Object Analysis Presentations: Miko, Radhika, Anya + Shanshan
In-Class Exercise: Teach What You Know?
To Prepare for This Week:
- If you like, please share a bit about your final project in the #our-final-projects channel on Slack, and feel free to use this space over the next several weeks to solicit and offer input and advice on your own and your classmates’ work!
- Optional: Listen to Daniel Shea, with Jonathan Zimmerman, “The Amateur Hour,” New Books Network [podcast: 50:26] on Zimmerman’s The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) [podcast: 52:26].
- If you have time, you’re welcome to read Paulo Freire, Chapters 1 and 2 in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50th Anniversary Edition (Bloomsbury, 2018): 43-86 [1 hr], but Peter Roberts also provides a concise summary of Freire’s pedagogical contributions across his entire oeuvre: see “Freirean Pedagogy” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (Oxford University Press, 2017) [15 min].
- Read bell hooks, Introduction, “Engaged Pedagogy,” and “Embracing Change” in Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994): 1-22, 35-44 [1 hr].
- Optional: Read bell hooks, “Time Out: Classrooms without Boundaries” in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (Routledge, 2003): 13-24.
- Optional: Watch bell hooks, Imani Perry, Karlyn Crowley, Zillah Eisenstein, and Shannon Winnubst, “Teaching to Transgress Today,” The New School (October 2014) [video: 1:56:58].
- In class, I’ll share a few short passages from Harney and Moten’s Undercommons regarding what it means to “study” “with and for” others.
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: NIshnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3:3 (2014): 1-25 [1 hr]. Simpson’s discussion of the legitimacy and valuation of indigneous knowledge foreshadows some of the themes we’ll be exploring on April 19.
- Think back to our “Para-/Extra-Institutional Schools”: what kinds of teaching and learning are practiced there? I invite you to explore our “Pedagogical Arts” Arena channel, too, and to take a few moments to skim through the Casco Art Institute’s Unlearning Exercises [10 min].
Supplemental Resources:
- Emily Apter, “O Seminar!” Cabinet Magazine 39 (Fall 2010).
- Architectures of Knowledge Interdisciplinary Research Network.
- Victoria Baena, “The Classroom Crisis,” Boston Review (September 13, 2021): a review of Rachel Sagner Buurma and Lauren Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Jarvis R. Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Wodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021) – but the review is just as useful for its extensive references to other theorists of progressive education and radical pedagogy.
- *Susan D. Blum, “Why Don’t Anthropologists Care About Learning (or Education or School?) An Immodest Proposal for an Integrative Anthropology of Learning Whose Time Has Finally Come,” American Anthropologist 121:3(2019): 641-54.
- +William Clark, “Material Practices,” “The Empirical Base,” “The Examination,” and “The Research Seminar” in Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2006): 4-6, 21, 93-140, 140-82.
- Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister, eds., Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, May 2022); Radical Pedagogies research project.
- Federico Doglio, “The Architecture of Education,” Canadian Centre for Architecture (2014).
- *Margaret Eisenhart, “The Anthropology of Learning Revisited,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 52:2 (2021): 209-21.
- Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy (Routledge, 2005).
- +Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021).
- Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, 10th Anniversary Edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
- Carmen Kynard, Black Feminist Pedagogies.
- +Jack Halberstam, “Moten and Harney also study….” in “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons” in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Debt and Study” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013): 8-11; and Harney and Moten, “The General Antagonism”: 147-8.
- Reinhold Martin, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia University Press 2021).
- John Mink, Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom (PM Press, 2019).
- +Theron Schmidt, “What If We Think of the Classroom as a Work of Art? Performance, Collaboration, and Social Engagement Considered as Pedagogic Practices,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (2020).
- Leanne Simpson and Glen Coulthard, “Leanne Simpson and Glen Coulthard on Dechinta Bush University, Indigenous Land-Based Education and Embodied Resurgence,” Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education & Society (November 26, 2014) [podcast: 40:18].
- *Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, + Schooling in San Francisco (Duke University Press, 2019) – especially Chapter 1: #OurLivesMatter and Appendix.
- Audrey Watters The History of Personalized Learning (MIT Press, 2021).