Ask these Questions About Your Education
- Does your education move you to struggle?
- Compel you to feel the force of ideas, theories, questions?
- Does it equip you with tools for being curious, listening and taking seriously the lives and worlds of others, and resisting and claiming your own voice?
Claiming an education is NOT
- Worshipping professors as exalted Experts and uncritically regurgitating their ideas.
- Perpetuating and protecting harmful academic values that ignore and exclude ideas, experiences, and voices that oftentimes by their very existence within the academy, question what and who education is for
- Rigidly fixing the relationship between teacher and students as one in which a Teacher only teaches and students are only taught.
Claiming an education IS
Practicing your pedagogical values, not just protecting them.
Students are NOT
- Consumers
- Butts in seats, or “butts with jobs”
- Faking anxiety
- Coddled
- Over-sensitive complainers
- Prepared
- Going to take it anymore
What is an Education For?*
- To develop new languages for understanding mySelf and the world.
- To connect with ideas, authors, other people.
- To cultivate and practice being curious and capacious.
- To be exposed to new ideas, new worlds, new ways of being.
- To harness passion and direct it in meaningful ways.
- To develop resources for processing and healing.
- To acquire tools for resisting and reimagining.
- To engage in/with LIFE.
- And to contribute to and sustain ongoing conversations that are bigger than any one individual or institution.
*Besides learning marketable skills, earning a degree and getting a job.
Who is an Education for? Everyone.
As a Teacher, I am NOT giving
- Advice
- Permission
- a Lecture
- a Sales Pitch
As a Teacher, I AM giving
- an Account of a teacher/person/thinker/troublemaker who is passionate about education
- Proof that other ways of being/engaging/teaching are possible (not always successful or recommended, but possible)
- an Invitation to engage, experiment, resist and unlearn unhealthy habits
Teaching is a political act.
Teaching is a political act. After teaching within a women’s and gender studies department for so long, it’s easy to forget that this is even necessary to express. Political not just in what we teach, but how and why. My goal was to inspire students, but also to equip them with tools for resisting, challenging, and transforming. [editorial note: more to be written.]
Continue reading: Teaching Experience: An Inventory
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