In my research, I intentionally question how and why certain histor(iograph)ical narratives were constructed (by white, male scholars) in the twentieth-century. In this way, I see the project of my own research as inherently aligned with Caughie and Pearce's project in their article, "Resisting "the Dominance of the Professor": Gendered Teaching, Gendered Subjects." Caughie and Pearce question hegemonic authority in the classroom through a dialogic analysis of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The authors read Woolf's discontinuous narrative form as a pedagogical model to be employed in feminist classrooms.
They outline, rather than the more traditional, patriarchal model of educational authority, a model in which multiplicity, flexibility, and overlapping voices are to be heard. Though I fully support their model for a classroom where multiple, overlapping narratives are located and encouraged, I have a harder time imagining how such a model should be mobilized in introductory courses where students might encounter certain topics for the first time.
In a university setting where prerequisites are increasingly rare, students don't always come to the classroom with the same level of knowledge as their classmates might. Some students are seniors fulfilling introductory-level credits while others are freshmen in their first semester. So how can and should instructors negotiate a classroom in which socially constructed narratives/norms are reconsidered while simultaneously providing students with information that may or may not be new to them? How might we present information in such a way that it seems less "foundational," but still provides students with a framework in which they can be critical and self-reflexive?
Hmmm, this is a really interesting question, Melody, and one that I've wondered about before, too.
Last year when we took Art History Theory & Methods together, I was faced with some of these exact problems. As a first year Master's student, I was exposed to many challenging texts for the first time, while some of the PhD students in the class were revisiting these texts for the second, third, and fourth times. While the course expanded my knowledge of the subject exponentially, I constantly felt disadvantaged, and for a number of reasons. As I didn't have much of a background in the subject, the texts took me a long time to get through and during class discussion, I found that I had often focused on the "wrong" thing. The level of some students' discourse was at a much higher level than my own, so I often felt embarrassed to make comments that I felt were too basic. Finally, I often wondered if my written responses were graded in comparison with other students' who were much more advanced. While I tried to contribute to conversation in the class, I found myself becoming increasingly silent throughout the semester, as I felt that my comments wouldn't be at a high enough level and would be shot down by more advanced students.
This experience caused me to think about how this course specifically, and other courses more generally, might have been more successful at accommodating beginning students such as myself, while still challenging advanced students. First, in courses that attract a broad variety of students of different levels, I think that it is important to give an introduction/overview of the texts. I don't think that this has to be a replacement for students thinking for themselves -- rather, it can be a way to introduce arguments a writer is making, and key areas the instructor would like to focus on in class discussion. (This may present an opportunity for students to suggest other avenues from which to approach the material, as well.) It may also be helpful for instructors to develop different kinds of questions for class discussion -- ones that are broad and inclusive of students of different backgrounds (for example, questions that ask about the application of a theory to one's own personal experience), and ones that may be more challenging (perhaps prompting the advanced students to share their knowledge). Finally, I think that it is important for instructors to try to meet their students part way, in terms of instructors' expectations of students' output. (However, the risk this may run is the problem Fisher describes with her student Joy, who believes that she is entitled to receive an A.) While there should be clear expectations of students and a level of objectivity in grading, at the end of the day, I don't think that all students should be graded the same. For example, I wouldn't grade an international student who is fundamentally struggling with English the same way I would a senior who is able to clearly communicate complex ideas. Perhaps this same mentality may be applied to students with a more nuanced level of ability as well, in that students are partially graded on the ways the instructor sees them engage, improve, and develop throughout the semester.
Maybe this is a simplistic way of attending to your question, and I'm sure that people with more experience teaching could nuance it better. Maybe these ideas have very basic problems that others would like to address, and I would be very open to hearing those. I think that your question, Melody, is a very important one, though, and one whose possible answers shift wildly from one class to another; it is one that needs to be constantly attended to and one that instructors should keep returning to so that classes can be more accessible to broader swaths of students.
Melody, this is a late reply, but I think the way that "introductory" courses are institutionally positioned in relation to academic canons is part of what creates this problem. The taken-for-granted model is that there are "foundational" knowledges, categories and concepts (often produced by white males and dominant groups more broadly) that is then troubled by critiques (often by those marginalized by the "foundational" paradigm). The assumption is, one has to first go through the ‘basic’ concepts/categories and only then can come to critical/revisionary positions. This is in line with several other logocentric structures – original/derivation, center/periphery, and so on. As long as institutions will continue to judge the rigor or quality of knowledge by familiarity with a canon, there is no easy "solution" to the problems you highlight, since it is caught up in the entire edifice of academic knowledge production itself. I think the first challenge is for instructors themselves to "decolonize" their minds so to say, and think about marginalized epistemological positions not as addenda to the foundational structure, but see how shifting epistemological loci changes even what we might consider to be “foundational” and basic, in the first place. Then on, the problem of “introductory courses” – from which students are expected to take away a basic framework – may be tackled in several ways, which would be specific to the class. One way would be maybe to start out with an “unconventional” or “tangential” take on some "basic" categories in a given field. For instance, say in an introductory feminism class, one could start out by considering a concept like “patriarchy” and “gender” not by starting from Beauvoir or other “foundational” 2nd wave white feminists, but (say) by looking at what patriarchy, gender hierarchy and subversion might have meant in the racialized context of slavery and segregation in the US South. Then one could work “back” to the ostensible “center” and to the “canon”, only now one would have already troubled its foundational status by showing how we could work to the “basic” concepts from different locations, and that the given canonical model was not the only possible route to rigorous/critical knowledge. One could also thereby raise questions of what the canonical positions and literatures excluded/occluded, while giving the students a “base” from which to negotiate it as needed.
Wow. You've articulated some really interesting ideas, Ani. I like your idea of starting a semester by introducing the topic from an unconventional starting place, which may later reinforce the fraught questions and problems that were prior and subsequent to the formation of the traditionally held "canonical" text. It made me think about how, in classrooms, we create mini-canons -- ghost canons that students who are being introduced to a new subject believe are THE canon (they may not realize that everything presented to them is not common knowledge and has not been received equally). It might be interesting to see how can be self-reflexive in the creation of our own classrooms' canons, and open up this meta-conversation with our students.
Melody, since I've been thinking a lot about student voice lately, I was thinking that when there are these discrepancies of knowledge amongst students, this might be a good opportunity to let students' voices be heard. As new "foundational" concepts are introduced, it might present a good opportunity to see what students know and can explain to their fellow students (do you think this should happen before or after they read an important text?). If you present a variety of these opportunities for students to share their knowledge throughout the semester, it might reinforce the idea that we all come to the table (or desk, as it were) with individual strengths and our own unique specialized knowledge.