Contemporary Challenges: Teaching Labour History

Introduction

As scholars and academics, we are trained and rewarded for our mastery of content, of the facts, concepts, and ideas that make up our discipline. When we start teaching, it is common for us to focus on content. We are, after all, experts. We profess our expertise to the initiates and judge them by how well they absorb what we lay before them.

This top-down process has been intensified in universities during the neoliberal period. Today, university classrooms are dominated by prerequisites, learning outcomes, scanned examinations, teaching assessments, larger classes, fewer tutorials, fixed seating, Massive Open Online Courses, and "student response systems," that is, electronic clickers that let students "participate" by pushing a button to register a choice from displayed options. To be sure, each of these tools may have pedagogical benefits. But they are not imposed on instructors to support collaborative, democratic, sound pedagogy. Rather, they are imposed so the university administration can generate more revenue and process more units at a greatly enhanced pace. The situation is worse for the growing cadre of precarious instructors, who are often handed teaching outcomes and syllabi and assessment tools designed by someone else and whose future hiring may depend on conformity to neoliberal pedagogy. It is difficult for instructors to push back; indeed, to those raised and educated in this climate, it can be difficult even to imagine alternatives.

Yet for those who believe our work should help inform and empower those who want to engage in progressive collective action, how we teach is often more important than the content of what we teach. This means learning to teach against the trends and practices and expectations of the boss. It means thinking about teaching as a way to help people develop their own capacities for understanding and for action. It starts not with content and assessment but with the people we are teaching. It pays less attention to facts and ideas, although clearly these remain important, and more to the dynamics of the people in the class, so we may learn from each other and teach each other. It is designed to help us examine new ideas through our experiences and the experiences of others so we may become more effective. The role of the instructor is less to deliver and test for content and more to create a place where people participate and gain confidence in their own power so they push and probe one another and themselves.

Teaching in this way is not new. It is a staple of labour education where unions want to have active, militant members. It is sometimes called the "organizing model" of teaching, for it draws upon lessons from effective organizers. It starts not with the mastery of the expert but with the knowledge that people have ideas and experiences they will draw upon and that will shape how they handle new ideas. That in turn pushes the instructor to take seriously not just the content but the people in the group and to work as part of the group. It assumes that how material is delivered matters at least as much as the material itself, for the point is to help people learn how to build oppositional cultures and structures.

That is hard to do with a Scantron exam and predetermined learning outcomes. The four essays that follow share some of our experiences and experiments in teaching in a more democratic and participatory way. We are not experts, but we are long-term instructors, educators, participants, and scholars of labour history and labour studies who think about, research, collaborate, and practise teaching against the grain of neoliberalism. Our hope is that readers can adopt, adapt, reject, reshape, and build on our teaching experiences. In this way, we can share and shape our educational vision and our daily practice for a democratic, participatory future.

• Teaching Labour History and Organizing Skills with Movement Activists
• Mark Leier

In addition to teaching at sfu, I teach labour history with union members, and it is often more rewarding than teaching undergraduates who take the course because it fits their timetable. Not...