Classroom Cons and Assigning Activism: Ethical Issues in Relational Pedagogy

In the midst of my lecture on the intersection of performance, activism, and rhetoric in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Project C” campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, a student rose from his seat and interrupted me. For the next forty-five seconds, he implored his seventy-nine fellow students to take seriously the idea that money cannot buy happiness, asking them instead to consider whether their pursuit of traditional notions of wealth and success were obscuring deeper understandings of fulfillment. His hand shaking, my student raised a dollar bill high in the air, tore it into several pieces, dropped them, and returned to his seat. His defacement of currency shocked the class, who sat quietly for a moment before bursting into applause. It was the first illegal act committed in my class this semester, and I wanted to seize the opportunity for further conversation.

The above description recounts one student’s response to my incendiary moment assignment, which I designed for a course on critical thought and human expression. This undergraduate class covered radical political and social movements around the Atlantic Rim from the eighteenth century onwards, exploring methods and tactics of persuasion associated with major social change.¹ The assignment, designed to create opportunities for student-initiated action and open conversation in a large-format course, challenged each student in the class to interrupt one of my lectures at some point during the semester, seize control of the classroom for a single minute, and perform an incendiary intervention of some kind. In order to successfully complete the assignment, students were required to carefully consider their own values, choose a topic, devise an effective means of capturing attention, assess their own performance skills, play to these strengths, and execute a one-minute interruption of the lecture. Each incendiary moment was followed with open conversation about the impact of the performance and the issues raised by the student.

This assignment represents one of the intriguing and confounding aspects of teaching for me: the paradox of assigning activism. Since I see student initiative as fundamental to synthesizing new skills and knowledge, I am interested in providing my students an opportunity to test out key pieces of theory they read and discuss in class. Thus, I prioritize giving students opportunities to test their ideas about activism through embodied practice. Furthermore, performative assessment methods like these call into question some of the most dominant and enduring pedagogical techniques integrated into college classrooms. In creating the incendiary moment assignment, I set out not only to provide students a hands-on, embodied learning experience, but also to address my concerns about large-format lectures as a dominant pedagogical tool.

Scott Freeman and colleagues’ 2014 meta-analysis of success and failure rates for students in lecture-only courses versus students in courses with some elements of active learning confirms that lecture remains a problematic instructional mode, and the study’s results encourage faculty in lecture courses to diversify their teaching methods accordingly. Yet, the ubiquity and perceived economic necessity of large lecture courses also necessitate that educators strategize ways to reimagine the passive student/active lecturer model of learning from within the lecture format. In consideration of both these issues, I designed my incendiary moment assignment to open spaces for students to disrupt the social relations of a typical lecture course, embedding within it a more immediate and more unpredictable set of learning experiences. Through the surprise interventions of the incendiary moments, students create space for more complicated intersubjective encounters among myself, fellow students, and teaching assistants during each lecture period. More importantly, with this assignment I attempt to reframe power relations within the classroom and make space for students to work as activists, seizing control of the lecture and driving our collective learning experience. Yet, assigning activism raises complicated issues related to agency, power, and efficacy in the classroom. To help articulate some of the questions that underpin these issues, I will first draw out a few themes that emerged from some of our class discussion of the aforementioned dollar-bill incident.

After the student completed his intervention and conversation began...