Pedagogy Fail.
I made a promise to myself, before returning to school this year, that I would lock myself in my office until my dissertation was done. I did this because my department, as with, I suspect most humanities departments, can be a big ol’ social time suck. The moment you run into another student, a casual hello can easily turn into a rant over coffee to “well, that day was a wash, let’s get a drink” to OHMIGOD! IT’S 4 YEARS LATER AND I HAVE NOTHING TO SHOW FOR IT.
Needless to say, I learned my lesson and now that I have a kid, that hallway rant to coffee to drinks trajectory is expensive. Every minute I spend on daycare and not simultaneously working on my dissertation translates not only into wasted time, but material wasted money and that. makes. me. crazy.
But despite this promise, I decided a couple of weeks ago to attend a workshop on pedagogy and imagining the classroom as a feminist, queer, democratic space. You guys, IT BLEW MY FRIGGIN MIND! The faculty moderator was informative, accommodating, and gave tons of productive feedback. There was a diverse group of graduate students ranging from first years to seasoned teaching veterans and we all exchanged anxieties, practical tips, anecdotes, and resolutions. It felt good, I mean really good. We finally had a space to talk about teaching praxis and it went over beautifully.
Today’s workshop was about social justice and activism in the classroom. What does it look like? What are the ways we encounter it? And most importantly, what are some practical methods for implementing it? It was led by two of our most hot-shot faculty members in GenderSex Studies, who I’ve TAed for. They both are stellar profs in their undergraduate classes and much of what I know about teaching comes from my experience with them. And yet, the workshop was an utter fail.
Instead of a collegial exchange, it felt like a contest for praise. Students offered anecdotes from the classroom and they were either praised for doing the right thing or criticized for doing it wrong. There were no remedies. No constructive feedback about how to better a skill or fix a glaring problem in your teaching practice. Just simply “that’s great” or “that’s really bad, when that happens that means something has gone horribly wrong.” That last one was said to me. Now, of all the skills of my academic career, teaching is my strong-suit. It’s the one thing that I can say, “I’m good at that” and I LOVE it. I love it so much that I CRAVE criticism, please tell me how can do this better. But when I’m told that something I did just sucks, without remediation, I tend to take it personally.
Some other shit happened that I won’t go into, but it was along the same vein — criticism without resolution — so, naturally, when the workshop was over I left feeling pretty bad about myself. There were moments in the workshop where I wanted to crawl under the table and die. I felt unrecognized, small, and stupid. This is not because I’m actually inconsequential and stupid, although I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the smartest person in my program, but I can recognize an authoritarian, infantilizing environment when I see one. Whereas the first workshop was a space of exchange, this was discipline for discipline’s sake. The faculty were the experts, they had the power to establish who in the room was right, who was wrong, and here endeth the lesson.
What pissed me off most? It was a colossal waste of time. I was on a roll today, reading, writing, etc. Then the pedagogy ate half of my afternoon, the other half was spent in a downward emotional spiral from which I’m now just emerging (thank you therapy).
Tell me academibloggers, am I alone in this? Am I just overreacting? Too sensitive and insecure about my work to engage with others who don’t create the most collegial space possible?
