Archives

Teaching by Learning Blog — 1 Comment
27
Mar 17

Anti-Ableist Pedagogies and You

Cross-posted from the Teach @ CUNY project Visible Pedagogy, here.

This blog post is coming later than it should be. My BPD (borderline personality dis/order), my depression, my anxiety, hit peak levels during the time I was supposed to be writing this: a perfect storm of mental health cacophony.

When I emailed to say, simply, that I was having a rough week mentally (in the same way that I might to say I have the flu), the response was simple: I’m so sorry you’re having a rough time. Please take care of yourself, and when you’re ready, it would be great if we could get the post up next week. The response was simple, and the response was meta: the response demonstrated the kind of pedagogy I’d like to dedicate this blog series to fleshing out.

Anti-ableist pedagogy: what might that feel like? How does anti-ableist practice in your classroom extend beyond providing alt-text, transcripts, and captions, and leaving space when configuring desks for people with various mobility needs and body types to navigate optimally? How can anti-ableist pedagogies transform your syllabus and seep into your assignments and shape your assessment strategies? How can anti-ableist praxis interact with and bolster your goals to actively practice anti-racist pedagogies? (Because surely—in this country in which white people who shoot people are labeled “mentally ill” and brown people who shoot people are labeled “terrorists”; in this country in which the school-to-prison pipeline and special education systems actively seek out Black and brown children and label them as irreparably less than—racism and ableism cannot be unlinked.)

This post is the first in a series that will explore these questions, both theoretically and very, very practically, by identifying approaches to everything from lesson planning to assignment design and assessment that challenge the dually ableist and racist assumptions that too often shape our classrooms, and that certainly shape our institutions. (If you want to contribute to this conversation, please comment and click the link here for more!)

Before we begin, though, a bit of background.

When I write about dis/ability, I put a slash between “dis” and “ability.” I do this to unsettle the deficit model that defines much of dis/ability discourse (and our classroom pedagogies). The slash reminds us, literally interrupts us, before we assume that people with dis/abilites are defined by what we cannot do; what we struggle with; what we must do differently. But the slash doesn’t completely interrupt the word, because our struggles are, in fact, deeply real. Deeply embodied.

But here’s the thing—and no matter whether we’ve been teaching for twelve years or none, a little Dis/ability 101 is never a bad thing—dis/ability isn’t only in the body. It isn’t a deficit, a problem, something to be uncritically cured (erased, exterminated) or that exists only within individual people. All dis/abilities exist—indeed, are created and defined and therefore given shape and meaning—within broader environmental contexts.

I often ask my students to think about a society in which everyone who needs them has equitable access to glasses. Is short-sightedness, for example, in an imagined society like this considered a dis/ability? Why not? How does access to glasses shape what we define as a dis/ability? More broadly, how do the structural components of the access (the environment of power and oppression and privilege) shape how we define dis/ability? What about a society in which break rooms with minimal noise and soft lights and plenty of space to lay down were commonly available and accepted as a requirement for people simple going about their days? How differently might we interpret social anxiety, or depression, or autism, in such a society?

Environment shapes dis/ability.

And our classrooms are environments. Surely, they exist within broader environmental constraints, but the act of dedication to constructing dually anti-ableist, anti-racist pedagogies (again, can’t build one without the other) can re-constitute dis/ability so that we are not continuing to define our quiet students as problems; not continuing to pathologize students who do not conform to white supremacist norms of classroom communication; not banning depressed, anxious, bipolar (etc.) students from our classrooms when we uncritically demand the same kinds of attendance, the same kinds of participation, the same kinds of presence, from everyone in our classroom.

This blog series will explore how to design our classes for all kinds of learners, not just for able-bodyminded white learners. The thing to keep in mind here is this: once we make the needed perspective changes—once we commit ourselves to becoming aware of our bodymindedness and that of our students in the classroom—anti-ableist pedagogies do not necessarily “create more work” for already exploited laborers.

Instead, fundamentally reshaping our classrooms to be as universally designed and power-aware as possible involves a perspective shift, a literal redesign of our pedagogies. But as committed educators, aren’t we supposed to always be redesigning our pedagogies, anyway?  Just as the response to my late blog post—I’m sorry you’re not doing well. Take care of yourself, and it would be great if we can get the post up by next week—embodied an empathetic, anti-ableist pedagogy that still held all involved to a high standard, it didn’t increase anyone’s workload.

But it sure did increase the health and affirmativeness of the work space.

Committing to doing this with the goal of creating anti-ableist, anti-racist learning spaces seems worth it to me. I’m excited to join you on the next few months of exchanging ideas about how to do exactly that.

Orals Reading Reflections Archive — No Comments
02
Aug 16

“Cures”, Queer Pedagogy, and Affect in the Writing Classroom

When I read (and write) YA literature, I do so with a constant tendency to think of how we conceive of “cures” culturally. Whether squinting at PrEP ads on the subway (which of course is preventative rather than curative), staying up way past I-need-to-gym-in-the-morning-I-should-be-sleeping bedtime with the Magic or Madness trilogy, or flinching my way through the screamingly queer but insistently heterosexualized Maze Runner series, perceptions of “curative solutions” to power-generated dis/abilities are constantly on my mind.

So, when reviewing my notes for orals that left a scrawl of a note about Amy E. Winans’s queer pedagogical thinking next to Michalinos Zembylas’s thinking on critical pedagogy and emotions in posttraumatic contexts, “cures” streamed heavily back into my mind.

My scrawl from Winans writing was in the form of a quote, annotated just with an excited “Pedagogies and CURES” from me: she wrote, “Crafting a queer pedagogy entails disrupting binary models of sexuality in ways that engage with power, rather than obscuring such models within a language of tolerance with which we might seek to “cure” homophobic students” (107). A staunch believer that queer pedagogies are less about LGBT-ness per se (because simply “integrating” queer content into curricula for the sake of “multiculturalism” does not necessarily impact pedagogy) and more about challenging normative beliefs and practices about the creation of knowledge, Winans here highlights the affective push behind many instructors’ attempts to “queer” our courses.

Sure enough, stories and experiences abound in which professors bemoan students’ queerphobia and try to “expose them” to things that will “change their mind” — the problem with this discourse is often its positioning of (often white and cis/het) professor as enlightened and students (often POC, in CUNY at least) as unenlightened, as simply needing “better” knowledge.

And yet. And yet there’s always that ever present pit in my stomach and the tugging of my eyebrow upwards when a student, trying to be progressive, calls my people homosexuals. Only we can call ourselves homos! part of me screams, while the other part shouts right back that this student could be queer, too, and if not, that wonders which battles, which moments, can be used to critically analyze power and which will simply alienate students from an academic discourse that already strikes violently at so many.

And this is where Zembylas enters (though his analysis focuses on race, to the exclusion of sexuality), with his implications that the same disruption of binary models that Winans discusses with sexuality is a necessary component of what he considers critical pedagogy. However, while Winans pushes for analyses of power as the central analytical goals, Zembylas also uses the emotionally-tugging rhetoric of curing to refer to the “[un]enlightened” folk who don’t engage in his form of critical pedagogy (178). He argues that professors of critical pedagogy need to be aware “of the emotional consequences when they categorize individuals into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed,’” because this will not advance a critique of binary logics (which Winans’s queer pedagogy encourages) (179).

Zembylas goes on to argue that Butler-esque mutual vulnerability is important in classrooms because it can open up needed discussions about which human lives are more grievable than others (184). However, in his contexts, I wonder how this mutual vulnerability can be achieved without producing a sense of false equivalency between the deep structural affective impact of white fragility and the deep structural affective traumas of racism. In trying to discuss posttraumatic contexts, Zembylas does not take into account what happens in classrooms when trauma — such as the perpetual trauma of people of color living in a white supremacist society, of queers living in a queerphobic society, and the combinations thereof — is ongoing, is persistent, is daily. Is reproduced by pedagogies that attempt to be critical by focusing largely on the feelings of privileged students. He writes that “the challenge in traumatized communities is often how to deal with the student who resists or rejects critical perspectives and who openly expresses racist or nationalist views because his or her privilege are being threatened or lost”, and he focuses largely on this imagined (and very real) student throughout his work (177).

Does this encourage a critical pedagogy that encourages a “curative” approach, whereby the affective and intellectual energy of the professor (and other students!) is largely devoted to “correcting” views rather than to teaching to, teaching for, students who are currently being traumatized by bigoted power structures?

In other words, what happens when an emphasis on teaching (in this context, teaching in the Winans-esque sense of “curing”) students who are resisting “critical” perspectives actually reifies dominant perspectives, encouraging professors to teach to white students instead of students of color, straight-cis students instead of queer students (etc.)?

Are there certain inevitable outcomes of this seeming clash between the affective energies behind normative knowledge-challenging and the power analyses that lie therein?

Perhaps these questions — and their nebulous, if not non-existent answers — are precisely what Winans was getting at when she wrote that queer pedagogy is about constantly challenging our perceived knowledge, about constantly calling both ourselves and our students to inquire:

“How do I feel and what do I know about this topic? Where does my knowledge come from? What is unknown to me? What is unthinkable to me and why?” (105).

Citations:

Winans, Amy E. “Queering Pedagogy in the English Classroom: Engaging with the Places where Thinking Stops.” Pedagogy 6.1 (2006): 103-122.

Zembylas, Michalinos. “Critical Pedagogy and Emotion: Working Through ‘Troubled Knowledge’ in Posttraumatic Contexts.” Critical Studies in Education 54.2 (2013): 176-189.

Orals Reading Reflections Archive — No Comments
30
Mar 16

The Verbal as Proof of Humanity

Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson’s “Rethinking Rhetoric through Mental Disabilities” offers important insight into the pervasive ways that assumptions of rhetorical/communication norms fundamentally impact who is considered fully human in dominant discourses. Her article attempts to work through the question:

“[h]ow can people who have psychiatric and cognitive disabilities that interfere with communication exercise rhetorical agency?” (157).

The question of how this rhetorical agency — and ableist assumptions about who can exercise it and who cannot — has huge implications both for people with dis/abilities and for rhetoric.

Reminding her readers that language is at once material-physical and culturally produced, Lewiecki-Wilson argues that,

“we need… a broadened concept of rhetoric to include collaborative and mediated rhetorics that work with the performative rhetoric of bodies that “speak” with/out language” (157).

She goes on to position facilitated communication as an example of such a redefinition of rhetoricity (and also, perhaps, of literacy). Though negative thoughts and feelings about the efficacy and ethics of facilitated communication abound in popularized debates, the potential power of Lewiecki-Wilson’s argument is that it has the potential to reframe anxieties about facilitated communication by questioning the root of non-autistic people’s anxiety about it.

Lewiecki-Wilson argues that whenever marginalized people enter public debates, the pressures of liberalism push such voices toward using the rhetoric of ‘we are just like you and want to be treated just like you.’ This obliteration of difference from the norm neutralizes the potential power of multiple rhetoricities; this liberalized ‘we are the same’ discourse also delegitimizes any claim to rhetorical agency that is not ‘just like [the norm].’ It validates the norm, situating people with “severe mental dis/abilities” as perpetually striving toward producing normate forms of communication. In this way, Lewiecki-Wilson’s praise of facilitated communication might serve to question the un-question-able: why might people with normate bodyminds be so dead-set against forms like facilitated communication if not because it poses such a threat to the supremacy of the verbal?

Regarding claims of facilitated communication’s relationship with exploitation and appropriation, Lewiecki-Wilson might suggest a reorientation of how we think about exploitation (though I worry that this might be too dismissive of the concern). Because the logics of ‘we are the same’ liberalism also (ironically) claims that we must be fully autonomous individual actors (aside from the fact that this is an impossible aspiration), Lewiecki-Wilson suggests that we define exploitation with the underlying assumption that all people have access to autonomous, individualized, speech-oriented rhetorical patterns. She elaborates, arguing that:

“by insisting on such a sharp demarcation line between individual rhetorical agency and lack, we don’t solve these problems as much as silence them. We may also be revealing our general anxiety to hold back the undifferentiated physical and social flow of language, and our unwillingness to enter into caring and committed intersubjective dependency with others and with the material world” (162).

This discomfort with “intersubjective dependency with others and with the material world” directly feeds in to a cultural refusal to recognize as human people with primarily non-normate rhetorical practices. She argues, crucially, that “we often demand some verbal response from an Other as proof of their humanness” (157, emphasis added).

To me, this work links up importantly with that of Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the very concept of humanity is inextricably tied with race. Her attentiveness to the material histories of race and the violences of racism she argues persuasively that there are several “genres” of lower case-h humanity, which is to be distinguished from upper case-H Humanity. While Humanity is inextricable from western whiteness, those human beings that occupy lower case-h humanity populate rich genres dictated by the power dynamics and cultural interplays of various moments in time and history.

Crucially, here, those who cannot sufficiently perform western whiteness – quite possibly an impossible performative status – are actively barred from achieving Humanity and gaining the basic privileges that accompany this classification.

This denial of capital-H Humanity to people of color is intimately intertwined with the kinds of dehumanizing agency-stripping that Lewiecki-Wilson is observing. Indeed, the history of interpreting non-normate communications and embodiments as less than human has a rich history of conflating racialized people with dis/abled people, through violent histories of dually racist and ableist eugenics practices; racialized reproduction ‘experiments’; and the disproportionate representation of students of color who are labeled as having mental dis/abilities in public schools, just to name a few.

Attentiveness to these interconnections could surely enrich the ways that we understand the relationship between rhetorical agency, interdependency, and the performative rhetorics of non-normate bodies.

CITED:

Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. “Rethinking Rhetoric through Mental Disabilities.” Rhetoric Review (2003): 156-167.

Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” A Companion to African-American Studies (2006): 107-118.

Pluralizing Literacies Blog — No Comments
03
Feb 16

White Teachings and Black Literacies

Welcome to my mini-blog devoted to my weekly reflections on the course readings for Carmen Kynard’s African American Literacies and Education spring 2016 class at the CUNY Graduate Center! (For more on the class, check out the awesome course website here!)

In this blog, I will respond to the weekly writing prompt questions that Carmen provides, while grappling with how my body — ensconced in white privilege — interacts with Black and other POC literacies in my writing classrooms.

Skip to toolbar