Teaching

I teach with books. I teach how to read them closely and critically, how to understand texts more deeply, how to think with them, how to become conversant in the ideas, representations, and arguments within them, and how to use the learning process intrinsic to reading and thinking to become a more thoughtful, critical, engaged citizen of the world.

The books I choose align with what I understand as the core mission of my discipline: to understand how society works, from ideology to praxis, from the level of the individual to broader social forces and structures. Critical engagement with the texts is part of the process, rather than the result; it facilitates the development and sharpening of the sociological imagination.

Books I'm teaching these days include:

Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory - Patricia Hill Collins

Sensuous Knowledge - Minna Salami

Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality - Jane Ward

Racism without Racists - Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Patriarchy Blues - Frederick Joseph

The Dialectic of Sex - Shulamith Firestone

Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think about Abortion - Gabrielle Stanley Blair

Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won't Save Black America - Stacey Patton

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

“My classroom is always an attempt to dislodge the mechanistic way many students have come to understand their education and its value.”
- Yanira Rodriguez

On Radical Pedagogy

Of the many challenges facing academia today, the corporate culture worries me the most.

In this highly bureaucratized, terrifyingly conformist, risk-averse, deeply Europatriarchal (and thus epistemologically hypermasculine) climate, it is not only radical pedagogy that is under attack, but pedagogy itself, in what amounts to an administrative invasion into the professoriate, an (anti-)intellectual occupation of the classroom.

I follow Freire and the many who have built on his work, in understanding that while the point of education is the building of a better and more just society, this requires intellectualism, that it is not possible without theory, without reading, without the cultivation of a critical consciousness. This critical consciousness is what Peter Berger meant by “the debunking motif” of sociology, the first wisdom of our discipline being that “things are not what they seem.” This is deeply embedded in my teaching; it is what I have always understood sociology to mean, and to be.

Thiong’o argued that colonialism’s “most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.”

These self-perceptions have to include entitlement to, and belonging at, the center of thought, as participants not only in social justice on the ground, but in the conversations that link humanity across time and space, at the center of thinking, imagining and communicating, at the center of intellectualism and creativity.

Radical pedagogy is built on several premises, one of which is resistance to the "banking concept" of education, which itself is predicated on the professor as authority figure "depositing" (or, in today's corporatized vernacular, which arguably flips the script without actually dismantling the authority problem, "delivering") specialized knowledge into the empty-vessel heads of students.

“On the one hand, we want our teaching to serve left-oriented liberatory goals; yet on the other, it would seem to be a betrayal of these goals to exercise power in the classroom.” (Buckingham 1998)

The alternative that Freire offered to the banking concept of education, which is based on an anti-liberatory authoritarian model, was “problem-posing” education, which he argues can overcome the teacher-student contradiction of authority, at which point it becomes a humanist and liberating praxis, by fore-fronting processes that develop consciousness and intentionality: “consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.”

There are tensions here, contradictions between intellectualism and radical pedagogy (illustrated well, I think, by the perspectives of Henri Giroux (2007) and Carmen Kynard (2017), at right/below.

Following Kynard, I view my pedagogy as a process of collaborative struggle: mine against structures and systems that prop up learning as a passive endeavor and education as vocational training, and my students' to rethink, reframe, and reimagine what education is, what it is for, and what it feels like, and what they can do with it.

“Pedagogy always represents a commitment to the future, and it remains the tasks of educators to make sure that the future points the way to a more socially just world, a world in which the discourses of critique and possibility in conjunction with the value of reason, freedom, and equality function to alter, as part of a broader democratic project, the grounds upon which life is lived.
- Henri Giroux
“It should be unconscionable to think that your little assignment or assessment strategy is offering a radically transformative end-game in this social system. That’s academic marketing— and a catering to white comfort. It’s not anti-racism. Your pedagogy is not unshackling 400 years of slavery for any slave or her descendant. Your classrooms are not untying the noose of Jim Crow lynch law, past or present, for any Black bodies that have hung from trees. And you are not breaking down today’s prison walls and borders. […] All that we have— when we think in terms of racial realism— is struggle. That’s it. The hope is in the process of the struggle.”
- Carmen Kynard