The Forum

Erica Rand

When I started teaching in the 1980s, I intended: to teach at schools that didn't have prohibitive tuition; to give open assignments; to avoid activities, like taking attendance or requiring proof of reading, that, I believed, policed and infantilized students; and to invite students to call me Erica while nonetheless directing our collective attention to hierarchical relations, like my role as grade giver, that no such relaxing of convention would erase. These plans served the principle that radical pedagogy means exposing and challenging dubious regimes of power embedded in educational traditions.

I still believe in the principle, but things happened. I got hired at an urban commuter university, only to learn that administrators had forced me on a department that had chosen a less qualified man whom they (wrongly) expected to disdain feminism. Back on the job market after the vicious fallout, I accepted my one offer—from the expensive to-attend Bates College. While I'd hoped for a brief sojourn, I seem to be stuck here, due partly, perhaps, and ironically, to reasons related to radical practice, like pursuing projects outside the conservative field I was trained in. I wouldn't hire me in art history again either, and despite all the hoopla about curriculum transformation, disciplinarity still reigns.

I sketch my history because where I teach has affected how I teach. Stints at both public and private institutions helped me to see from diverse angles how the ability to succeed at assignments like "write a paper about anything you want concerning the subject of the course" depends on situation and privilege. Even considering oneself authorized to put arguments into the world depends partly on culture, gender, economic status, and race, among other matters. I also saw how feminist and anti-racist pedagogies may, somewhat paradoxically, get in the way here, since critiquing "master narratives" can make people reluctant to assert their own views legibly. I learned, too, that the complete refusal to police might mean that class discussions tanked, that students would just skip, say, the queer text, and that certain leniencies might inadvertently effect racial and class profiling. Which students arrived in my class as seniors having never been held to standards of syntax, punctuation, and structure that job application letters, for instance, require? They were rarely the same students who responded most easily to "Call me Erica," an invitation that sometimes functioned especially to enhance the comfort of the most privileged white male students.

So now I require and record attendance. I invite radical thinking but demand correct apostrophes. I care less about what students call me than about insisting that they assess cues to call me "Professor" or "Ms." against the first-name-only tags worn by uniformed staff, which offer no clue about how to extend parallel gestures of respect to custodial or dining service workers. And, perhaps to my greatest surprise, my signature advice about writing assertively, delivered baldly to female friends and more carefully (sometimes in different language) to students, is this: put yourself out there, dick first.

Ira Shor

Radical teaching is a local practice affected by global conditions. At the center of this everyday work is the singular and often magical encounter between teacher and students. Face-to-face encounters like this are rich in possibilities, which helps explain why teachers bring to class their dreams for a better world as well as why authorities supervise closely what goes on in these productive spaces.

All local practice is affected by the political climate. Of course, the climate now is aggressively conservative but was very different when I began teaching 40 years ago. Mass movements were then on the offensive for...