|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|||||
|
|
Teaching PhilosophyConflict and Difference Conflict is important in my pedagogy, both because it happens in collaboration and because it's healthy and necessary if difference is to be embraced and the status quo is to be critically questioned. Encouraging difference and conflict in the classroom is the only way to reveal assumptions and dispositions, understand Other perspectives as valid, and construct learning as a self-conscious, critical endeavor. It's also a powerful way to get students to confront their own dispositions, levels of privilege, and ways with whiteness. Encouraging the presence of competing epistemologies, dispositions, and claims to knowledge in the classroom reveals the networks of meaning that construct meaning and value, validate subjectivity, and institutionalize harmful hegemony, like racism, sexism, and homophobia. This kind of interrogation, predicated on the acknowledgement of conflict and the absence of certain voices and bodies in the academy, asks students to decide to be critical or not, and shows them that this decision is inherently an ethical one, and one about the construction of knowledge and agency. While no exchange of ideas and rhetoric is every truly "equitable," I do still try hard to level the playing field for those ideas and voices that have been traditionally absent, de-valued, erased, and silenced. While we often may end up with resolutions that seem to adhere closely to the values and dispositions that construct the dominant discourse conventions, how we get there provides for a level of criticality that makes those resolutions not simple, uncritical compliance. All rubrics and discourse conventions are continually contested and questioned, always in transition, and always a part of a reflective discourse that theorizes the boundaries and what forms them.Providing students with the opportunity to valuing others' hermeneutical practices and dispositions, even if they do not agree with all of them, can construct classroom conflict as a method, or heuristic, for understanding and incorporating difference in meaningful ways. We won't agree about the merits of every essay, all the judgments of others, or about what makes "good writing." Writers and assessors always have some element of disagreement and conflict about discourse and what is "right" in the world. My job is to guide them through this chaotic experience, especially when looking at colleagues' assessments of their work and published texts that seem to see things in contradictory ways. Dwelling on conflict and dissensus, revealing the dispositions that construct perspectives in readings and each other's discourse, becomes an opportunity to make decisions and reflect upon epistemology and power. This formulates the writing and assessing processes of the classroom as self-conscious, critical learning. Ultimately, the student must be the final arbiter. Conflict and differing perspectives often show the world, the reading of essays, the finding of value, and the classroom as a contentious space connected to the world, as political arenas. Knowledge and learning are therefore equally political, and not neutral activities. Select another link to read more about my teaching:
|