Bringing to Life “Unrealistic” Ideas: Co-Creating Courses with Undergraduate Students for Radical Change in the Humanities

Covid-19 has damaged our learning community. In the wake of pandemic teaching and learning, students and instructors are still building and rebuilding meaningful professional relationships that make the classroom feel more like a community. Outside of the university, covid has highlighted the social inequities and injustices that characterize Canadian— and more generally, Western—societies. While the university cannot in a single motion solve the social justice issues that deepen inequality, it can play an integral role in initiating an overhaul of society by modeling compassion, collaboration, and inclusivity in educational settings. Change begins in the classroom, but only when the classroom is a space that invites and celebrates radical transformation.

As an educator in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, there has been one idea—one vision for meaningful collaboration—that has kept me motivated through covid, that is, an opportunity for students to design a course that represents the values, interests, and goals of their cohort. My aspiration is to develop a third-year English and Cultural Studies seminar in which students, in collaboration with their instructor, co-create courses for first-year students. What drives this aspiration is my passion for community building in the classroom, for a healthy, inclusive community is one that embodies compassion and collaboration. bell hooks explains that, “As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement [for the learning process] is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence” (Transgress 8). Classroom as community is central to my teaching philosophy because, as I tell students, there are always people who will tear us down, but, in our shared space, we have the capacity to build one another up, to encourage and support one another, to promote a culture of care. But an inclusive classroom community needs to embrace the process of decolonization by rethinking how power is distributed in teaching and learning. In the spirit of collaboration and social change, Walidah Imarisha writes, “decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless” (4). If we are to reimagine how we collaborate with students in the classroom, we must first decolonize our own imaginations to avoid passing on processes and ideas that reinforce systemic discrimination and oppression in higher education.

The vision I share resists the practice of “professing” information; instead, I see the instructor as a mentor-coach (see Sharpe and Nishimura), serving as both a source of guidance and a sounding board for students experimenting with new ideas. While I recognize that budgetary constraints in the Humanities may deem this proposal untenable, I lean into a premise advanced by adrienne maree brown and her work on transformative social justice: that “movements for justice vitally need spaces where we start with the question ‘What is the world we want to live in?’ rather than starting with the question, ‘What is a realistic win?’ ” (“New Inquiry” n.p.). Shutting down ideas as untenable or complicated before they can begin is demoralizing to students and instructors; furthermore, in rejecting ideas that appear unrealistic, we may in fact be rejecting solutions to the precarious state of the Humanities. While teaching at McMaster, I have worked with a plethora of students whose strong sense of social justice makes me feel endlessly hopeful for the future of communities in Hamilton and elsewhere. By inviting students to join educators in constructing inclusive and radically new courses, universities are positioned to facilitate the changes that move students—and eventual graduates—toward the world we want to live in.

To “profess” knowledge is unidirectional, and it perpetuates what Paulo Freire calls the banking model of education; to co-create, on the other hand, signifies partnership and the decentring of power. As educators, we have the opportunity to share our power with students by engaging them in course development. Bringing together the collective expertise of...