At the same time, the coalition of faculty at the University of New Mexico (United Academics of UNM) have won their union election by a huge margin (almost identical to GSU's from two years ago). This is rad in and of itself, but especially wonderful to me because Albuquerque is my hometown. In the words of Professor Nick Estes: "with a union we can better serve our students and thus better serve ourselves as workers of UNM." and "with a union we can increase hiring and sustaining Native faculty."
These folks are truly inspiring, as are the people of Chicago and Albuquerque coming to their aid. To those of you who insist unions should stay in their lane and only fight for wages... well, frankly, you're racist.
As any of the amazing educators currently out on Chicago picket lines or in New Mexican classrooms will tell you, teaching is hard. Furthermore, going on strike and witnessing true collective power in the face of oppression profoundly changes the ways you teach, as evidenced by these blog entries.
With all this in mind, I've talked a lot about neoliberal education (remember Irami Osei-Frimpong's video?) and I want to make a note here on what is called "inclusive pedagogy," just because it's come up a lot for me the last couple of weeks. Inclusive pedagogy refers to a paradigm of teaching which acknowledges the varied backgrounds, learning styles, and abilities of all the learners in a particular classroom, which is of course very important and cool. At the same time, "inclusivity" has become a buzzword in a lot of liberal institutions and, as a result, you see a lot of teaching workshops centered around it. That's good, right?
My big beef with the rise of ~inclusivity~ is that institution-sanctioned spaces rarely do their due diligence in making white, wealthy, male, and otherwise privileged people uncomfortable with the current state of affairs. That means these workshops fail to confront the reality of racial capitalism in perpetuating a stratified society, where simply making our ivory towers more inclusive passes as a radical act. To borrow the words of Professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: "I harp on liberalism here because I think too often liberals who believe we should seek to grow the status quo ('America is good, it just needs to be better!') co-opt the language of those trying to destroy the status quo ('America is an imperial project built on genocide!')"
We academics should be working to remake the institutions of higher education—as political, economic, and social engines—to serve working people, not to just promote a handful of black and brown and female faces while perpetuating the ongoing underlying system of stratified exploitation.
Now, this quarter I've been attending a Fundamentals of Teaching in the Mathematical Sciences seminar run by two graduate workers, Karl and MurphyKate. These two are both brilliant mathematicians, dear friends, and incredible instructors who constantly strive to be better and I love them very much. They are running these workshops under the close supervision of the Chicago Center for Teaching at UChicago and this week was specifically on inclusive math pedagogy.
We opened with an exercise that I think can be useful to warm up academics who come from a great deal of privilege and haven't thought a lot about what it's like to not be themselves in educational contexts: we broke into small groups, were given a bag of supplies, and told to build mobiles. The secret was that different groups had different items in their bags—some had wire, glue, markers, glitter, scissors, and other materials, but my group only had a clothes hanger, paper, and some tape. After we created our mobiles, Karl and MurphyKate graded them—the groups that had received plentiful resources were praised but the rest of us, held to the same standard, were critiqued harshly despite creative efforts. At the conclusion of the exercise, we were asked when we realized the distribution of resources was unequal, what our reaction was to these asymmetries, and how it felt to be judged in such an unjust way. As you might expect, the groups with lots of resources hoarded them while those with very little tried to find ways to cooperate.
Even though I think this exercise was fairly tame—no one had even brought up words like “race” explicitly yet—I could see a few folks take what was being discussed very personally as they started connecting dots. The room, by the way, was overwhelmingly white and male. As we moved on to think about axes of identity which could lead people to feel excluded in a math classroom, a friend of mine brought up gender and was immediately met with a retort that "2/3 of my calculus students are regularly female, so I disagree." While we were discussing methods we use to encourage collaboration, an attendee became visibly agitated when I said that I regularly pause class to remind my students that math is not an individual endeavor and we ought to be working collectively to create spaces where we can be wrong and learn together.
I'd rather not dwell on those really unpleasant interactions; props to Karl and MK for mediating them. Instead, I'd like to focus on the takeaways that have been bouncing around my head this week after speaking with other BIPOC and radical educators, in particular during a course on Critical Pedagogy with Dr. Cheryl Richardson.
A few people in the math educator workshop had trouble thinking about ways they could be inclusive with respect to race and ethnicity in their classrooms: "Instead of dividing up a cake, do I pick... I don't know, something else from another culture?" Yeah, someone actually said that. The underlying sentiment they were expressing match those I encounter a lot in pedagogy spaces, where sometimes even the facilitators make excuses for me (usually the only STEM person in the room) by saying "Oh but in math, the answer is right or wrong—so all this doesn't apply."
How do you make your class culturally relevant when all you’re doing is computing integrals? We lecture, we have homework, and we have tests—how do you make that inclusive? Don’t our students just care about their grades anyways? There’s no way to be inclusive when all that matters is doing calculations!
These ideas are all connected. Also, to be clear: If you are worried that your students only care about their grades, rather than the content of your course, then you should reflect carefully on yourself and what the environment you create in class says about your priorities. Do you only spend class time doing things that will be graded, either by homework or quiz or exam? After all, how can we expect students to value the collective struggle for knowledge if we ourselves do not? This last bit is a reference to a passage from bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress, flagged by a friend from Dr. Richardson's class (who would like to remain anonymous):
"On another day, I might ask students to ponder what we want to make happen in the class, to name what we hope to know, what might be most useful. I ask them what standpoint is a personal experience. Then there are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountaintop and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountaintop is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there collectively grasping,
feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know."
My friend pointed out, I think truthfully, that this idea of yearning as a way to know "would freak out a UChicago student."
Remember, the hallmark of modern education is that it relies on a market-type analysis to evaluate both teachers and students. As said on neoliberalism by Irami Osei-Frimpong: "the principles of our analysis lead us to believe that it is irrational to invest in people... unless those people show themselves to be poised to increase in value in terms of quantifiable assessments." There’s no time in today’s classroom for wonder—just facts and the cold evaluation of regurgitated facts, so we can decide who is worth investing in and divesting from! This is why inclusivity, in the context of modern higher education, often just gets reduced to cosmetic changes in metrics rather than truly transforming our pedagogy. After all, how the heck are we supposed to quantify a student's yearning??
I try to make my classroom more inclusive by learning about how math as a discipline is tied to political power and human experiences, both historically and today, and connecting these ideas to the lives of my students. I do that by giving weekly readings, by making time in class to discuss these readings, and by asking students to journal about their thoughts in an ungraded format; I intentionally provide space that is separate from the economized endeavor of technical knowledge, where "the answer is right or wrong" and comes with an all-important grade attached. But this isn't the only way to be inclusive and I'm excited to continue learning for the rest of my life about the many ways that I can be better.
Teaching is hard. So is inclusivity. If you want to make your classrooms inclusive, workshops are great but just going to one and expecting to learn the secret two-second fix isn’t enough. Justice takes work, from learning the political history of mathematics to making intentional spaces for discomfort, from organizing a democratic union to trusting our students' capacity for yearning. As teachers, our battle with neoliberalism is eternal—both in New Mexican universities and in Chicago streets.
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