Towards a Pedagogy of Equality

Recently, I was invited by the Futures Initiative and HASTAC to offer opening remarks for a year-long conversation, The University Worth Fighting For, a year-long project designed to tie student-centered, engaged practices in our classrooms to larger issues of institutional change, equality, race, gender, and all forms of social justice. Here is an excerpt from my remarks:

What would a classroom look like if it were designed not to reproduce traditional hierarchies of privilege and power, but instead to produce justice and equity? Would it begin with a privilege checklist, or with everyone sharing their preferred gender pronouns? Would there be a values statement in the syllabus, or would you ask students to draft a class constitution? Would someone be assigned to take progressive stack to ensure that marginalized and excluded voices get to drive the conversation? What would you ask students to produce in order to demonstrate what they have learned? Would you ask them to produce it alone or together, and why? Who would read, evaluate, and provide feedback on their work?

Recently, I had the opportunity to collaborate in drafting a set of questions to help digital humanists think about designing their teaching and research in ways that might help produce social justice. This got me thinking, what would a similar list look like for pedagogy? What questions can we ask ourselves to work not just towards an equitable classroom, but a more equitable world?

Important practitioners of critical and creative pedagogy, included in the suggested readings and viewings for this conversation and in the resources and references cited below, invite us to think about how our teaching and learning practices relate to conditions of inequality and injustice beyond the classroom. This discussion is intended to take up the challenge.

You can read the full post and contribute to the conversation here.

 

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