The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy . . . Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom. (hooks 12)
[I]t is crucial that critical thinkers who want to change our teaching practices talk to one another, collaborate in a discussion that crosses boundaries and creates a space for intervention . . . we often have no concrete examples of individuals who actually occupy different locations within structures, sharing ideas with one another, mapping out terrains of commonality, connection, and shared concern with teaching practices. (hooks 129-30)
<1>This special issue emerged out of a September 5, 2020, roundtable titled “‘Teaching to Transgress’ in the Online Classroom,” sponsored by the North American Studies Association (NAVSA) Gender and Sexuality Caucus as part of NAVSA’s 2020-21 series of virtual events for their “Year of Unconferences.” Our participants—Lana L. Dalley, Ann Gagné, Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Alexandra L. Milsom, and Jessica R. Valdez—joined us from locations as varied as Hong Kong, Manhattan, and Columbus, Ohio. They shared strategies for developing accessible, feminist, and antiracist teaching practices under emergency conditions. We three organizers were thrilled not only that the event had attracted forty-six attendees on a Saturday afternoon but also by the positive comments attendees offered after the panel.(1)
<2>We were particularly fascinated by one key theme that emerged in the feedback: participants were most appreciative of the concreteness and portability of the panelists’ strategies—the classroom exercises they demonstrated, the syllabus language they shared, and the creative assignments they described. The panelists gave audience members ideas to play with, think through, adapt, and incorporate into their own classes that very semester—even techniques to try out in class the following Monday. Attendees commented that, as much as they would love to spend hours discussing novel form and sharing archival treasures, what they most needed at that moment were some hyper-practical tools to help them get through the semester while still maintaining their commitments to engaged pedagogy. The three of us conceived of this special issue to extend the conversation our panelists started.
Situating Ourselves
<3>When putting together this issue, we asked all contributors to situate their teaching so as to avoid giving the impression that one teaches or writes from an objective or politically neutral position. We wanted to provide what bell hooks, in the second epigraph above, sees as missing from many academic and scholarly conversations: “concrete examples of individuals who actually occupy different locations within structures, sharing ideas with one another, mapping out terrains of commonality, connection, and shared concern with teaching practices.” In that spirit, we feel we should do the same here and situate ourselves. We are all cisgender, child-free, white-identified women in tenure-track, assistant professor positions at teaching-focused institutions. Throughout this introduction, we use “we” (and other first-person plurals) to refer to ourselves as the collective editing unit we became. Elsewhere throughout the issue, we have asked our contributors not to use the collective “we” when no precise referent has been identified to avoid interpellating readers as members of a group from which they might have been violently excluded or to which they do not see themselves as belonging, particularly since the universal “we” also often obscures who is the recipient of and who benefits from racial violence.(2) While compiling this issue, the three of us were teaching a mix of face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, and fully remote synchronous and asynchronous courses. One of us was teaching a 3/3 load, one a 4/4, and one a 5/4, each responding to the needs of our individual institutions—two private liberal arts colleges with religious affiliations and a public, open-enrollment college, respectively—and their student bodies.
<4>Despite the differences in our teaching situations, however, Spring 2020 emphasized for all of us that hooks’s call for “education as the practice of freedom”—one that generates “excitement through collective effort” and recognizes students as “whole human beings”—has never been more urgent (12, 8, 15, 191). Students, faculty, and staff around the world face evaporating resources, intensifying precarity, expanding care responsibilities, and a deepening sense of anxiety and trauma resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the current emergency teaching conditions and how our respective student bodies have responded, the three of us found ourselves reckoning with how to apply the pedagogical principles that hooks refers to as “transformative,” “engaged,” and “liberatory”(3)—subjects several of our panelists also explored in Summer 2020—while students’ learning environments, living conditions, and health remained unstable. During the past year, many educators have taught online for the first time; others have taught in poorly-ventilated classrooms, large athletic centers, or outdoor tents. Classes are hybrid, hyflex, blended, flipped, synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-synchronous. “Teaching to transgress” has, perhaps, never been such a high-stakes project.
<5>The approaches discussed in this special issue echo many of the central aims of engaged pedagogy. Our contributors prioritize multidirectional and student-centered learning and embrace multimodal assignments and new variations of contract grading. Those teaching Victorian studies, survey, composition, humanities, and art history courses work to decolonize their syllabi, recover unknown authors, and grapple with critiques of “positivist historicism” (“Manifesto”). Contributors to this special issue also build on over two decades of scholarship on critical and feminist digital pedagogies as they foster accessible and inclusive online environments, create interpersonal connections across geographic distances, and embrace the innovative possibilities that technology affords.(4) Most importantly, these contributors all practice radical care and compassion for their students, doing everything they can to ease their students’ burdens, promote their safety and well-being, and help them survive the semester.(5)
<6>As we developed this special issue, moreover, we realized that it offered another series of equally crucial transgressions—ones centered not only on engaging with students, but also on relating to colleagues within our scholarly communities. As evidenced by the recent PMLA cluster “Cultures of Argument,” literary critics are thinking deeply about how they might envision new, more “generous” models for conversing with each other. Pardis Dabashi encourages academics to “wear our arguments like loose garments,” engaging in “more forms of argumentative framing that make claims not at the expense of existing claims but alongside them” (951-52). In the same cluster, Kathleen Fitzpatrick highlights the importance of “remember[ing] the deep understanding and even generosity that are critical thinking’s prerequisites” (959). In this issue, we propose that such “generous” modes of relation extend not only to scholarly arguments, but also to the most material aspects of academic practice. We submit that the production of documents for pedagogical labor be treated as part of the scholarly conversation, too. Our goal is for this special issue to “transgress” not only by presenting scholarship on liberatory teaching, but also by enacting in its very compilation some of the feminist, antiracist, accessible, or otherwise resistant practices that undergird theories of radical pedagogy.
<7>Some of these practices were immediately apparent to us. We are grateful that NCGS is an open-access, online journal—available to all regardless of institutional affiliation or subscription. The contributors featured in this issue are teacher-scholars from a range of institutions (public and private schools, research universities, community colleges, teaching colleges, HBCUs, HSIs, and performing arts schools) and positions (graduate students, postdocs, adjuncts, lecturers, and tenured and tenure-track faculty). In fact, seven out of fifteen contributors, not including ourselves, are non-tenure-track faculty, emphasizing the crucial pedagogical labor being done by those whose employment remains precarious.
<8>Our issue also transgresses in its content. It opens with two theoretical essays that interrogate two taken-for-granted phrases—“standard English” and “feminism.” These terms, and the conceptual values they encapsulate, necessitate sustained and critical unpacking, especially in light of the ongoing—and accelerating—attacks on the American higher education system in the wake of the pandemic. Alexandra L. Milsom’s intervention begins with a seemingly simple question posed to her by one of her students: “Who invented school?” While Milsom does not (indeed, cannot, she shows) offer a clear answer, she does elucidate the history of eugenics that underpins the American higher-education system and the standardized testing regime on which it relies. As she encourages her readers to question what else is being policed—what power structures are maintained—when educators and test makers insist on “the phantom known as ‘standard English,’” she argues that “educators have the opportunity to imagine anew what students deserve” by transgressing institutional norms that were built to maintain class and racial inequities. In a similar vein, Lana L. Dalley’s essay explores the contemporary implications of “the treatment of Victorian white feminisms as simply feminism” within college classrooms (italics original). Drawing on the phrase “white feminism” as it has recently been used in public scholarship and on social media platforms, Dalley shows how anthologies, teaching patterns, and student preconceptions often elide racial justice as a feminist concern. Her essay offers strategies for approaching Victorian white feminisms in the classroom in ways that model, for students, how to “perceive whiteness as a racial category” and, for educators, how to approach curricula as what Sarah Ahmed terms “world building,” a practice that can never be politically neutral. Milsom and Dalley emphasize that the crisis conditions—the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, white supremacist shootings, and widening economic inequity—under which students are learning and teachers are teaching make it necessary to advocate for students; their essays encourage faculty and administrators to reimagine traditional pedagogical norms within higher education with the goal of creating equitable and inclusive learning environments.
<9>The majority of essays in this issue are “pedagogy shorts” (described in further detail below) that offer specific strategies, activities, and exercises that build on the feminist, antiracist, and anticolonialist grounding of Milsom’s and Dalley’s intervention essays. These pedagogy shorts also include downloadable lesson plans, sample exercises, and student work. We have added citations to these materials to support recognizing such work as scholarship worthy of attribution.
<10>This all might seem achingly practical—even, to some, non-scholarly. However, as Ahmed reminds readers, “feminism” is concrete, everyday work;(6) “living a feminist life” means finding ways to “support those . . . who are less supported” and to “struggle for more bearable worlds” (1). Particularly in the current emergency conditions, we maintain that highlighting the tangible, everyday aspects of pedagogical work can enable crucial feminist practices, including the kinds of labor sharing, care ethics, collaborative scholarship, and anti-hierarchical thinking that hooks calls for in Teaching to Transgress. We hope that, in its pairing of innovative research and practical tools for teaching—and, indeed, our insistence that these are actually the same thing—this special issue represents at once a work of scholarship and an act of caring.
<11>We are sure we have fallen short in these efforts. Our positionalities and privileges have given us the time and space to work on this issue while also, we are sure, drastically limiting our perspectives. The strategies and materials shared here are by no means exhaustive; as Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan write, a “true, impossible teaching archive . . . would constitute a much larger and more interesting record than the famous monographs and seminal articles that usually represent the history of literary study” (2). There are voices and viewpoints missing here; we think especially of our colleagues whose care work, teaching loads, financial and professional precarity, or health concerns have made writing impossible at this time. Despite these limitations, we hope that this special issue provides some actual material relief during this time, that it, quite simply, makes things just a little bit easier.
Pedagogy Shorts, Appendices, and Citation Practices as Labor Sharing
<12>The bulk of this special issue is an experiment, an in-the-moment and of-the-moment reaction to unprecedented times. We’re grateful to the editors of NCGS, Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue, who generously allowed us to focus this issue around a series of peer-reviewed “pedagogy shorts,” brief articles in which contributors describe a specific exercise, assignment, or approach that they have used in their emergency remote instruction; explain their philosophy; and consider potential limitations, revisions, or adaptations. Because, as Danica Savonick reminds us, “timekeeping [is] feminist pedagogy,” we asked that these “shorts” stay relatively brief and include sub-headings and hyperlinks to particular exercises to support ease of navigation. Each short attempts to strike a balance between providing the detail needed for another to replicate and adapt the assignment while remaining concise enough to be read faster than a standard article. As mentioned earlier, we invited the pedagogy short writers to contribute sample materials to an appendix and make them available as downloadable documents for public use. The appendices include an even richer collection of materials than we could have imagined. Our contributors have shared syllabi, writing prompts, student projects, self-evaluation rubrics, slide decks, screencast recordings, Instagram captions, Zoom screenshots, and much more. We’d like to extend our thanks also to NCGS’s digital editor Anne Reus, whose collaborative approach to journal production resulted in an issue with numerous ways to access the appendix materials: from the table of contents, using hyperlinks to appendices within each essay, and via the-end-of-essay appendices themselves.
<13>Though they form the most “practical” part of the special issue, the pedagogy shorts and appendices also stage its most important interventions. We suggest that these materials in particular offer a number of “liberatory” advantages. First, they represent acts of labor sharing—and thus collaboration, care, and solidarity—at a moment when all are sorely needed.(7) Second, they make visible the work of labor sharing, which, although common, is rarely acknowledged or celebrated. Finally, they showcase the reciprocal relationship between teaching and research while demonstrating the importance of thinking about—and valuing—them as inextricable processes.
<14>Though an “appendix” often signals an auxiliary or subordinate part of a publication, here, it does the crucial work of labor sharing, of providing tangible relief at a time when teachers are underwater. The appendices offer not only new pedagogical ideas, but also new pedagogical materials—actual, portable documents that readers can pick up,(8) adapt, and use in their own classes. They form, to invoke Ahmed, a kind of feminist pedagogical tool kit (236).(9) By sharing these documents, our contributors model collaborative and caring scholarly relations, or what Lesley Erin Bartlett, invoking Jill Dolan, calls “critical generosity” (91).(10) As Alison Mountz et al. write, this kind of care is subversive: “[C]ultivating space to care for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students is, in fact, a political activity when we are situated in institutions that devalue and militate against such relations and practices” (1239). Especially now, we believe it is urgent political work to do anything we can to lighten the logistical and affective loads of, for instance, the instructor teaching five classes per semester across three separate schools, the instructor lecturing from behind a face shield and two masks, the instructor quarantined from their medical worker partner, the instructor caring for an elderly parent, and the instructor trying to manage a Zoom class while nursing or performing childcare.
<15>We see the pedagogy shorts and appendices not only as lightening, even in a small way, some of the labor burdens educators—especially now, in a time of crisis—face, but also as valuing and making visible the labor sharing that they often do without formal credit. As Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber write in The Slow Professor (2016), “Deans’ reports tend not to have sections with headings such as ‘helping a colleague figure out why a lecture didn’t go well’ or ‘offering support to an overwhelmed junior colleague’” (72). And yet, how often do educators share innovative teaching ideas—“Please, use this” or “Go ahead, steal this”? How many times has a colleague saved a peer by sending them a lesson plan late at night when they did not have time to prep for the next day’s discussion? We see it as crucial that scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional communities begin to formally recognize and commend such exchanges as intellectual work. We have attempted to begin this work through the citational practices we encourage in this special issue because, as Ahmed reminds us—and as Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong have recently advocated—“citation is feminist memory” (15).(11) We have included specific citation instructions at the bottom of each appendix entry and within each appendix document. Since our contributors have practiced the “critical generosity” of sharing their materials, we ask that readers please include these citations on any document that they add to their own “tool kits,” or in any article where they reference something they have adapted. We aim to encourage a citational network that will acknowledge the contributors’ labor sharing and highlight its importance within an academic rewards system that bestows scholarly value based on citation. Rather than “instrumentalize” or “corporatize” these scholarly relations, as Berg and Seeber warn against, we hope to encourage our readers to insist through their own practice on the recognition of work that is systemically devalued (72).(12)
<16>Finally, in our inclusion of the pedagogy shorts and appendices, we are also making a broader argument about the essential value of pedagogical scholarship, even (or especially) the kind that does not “look like” “scholarship” (e.g., the appendix materials). Now, we know that in many current tenure and promotion systems and humanities job markets such materials might not “count” in the same way as longer articles would; we also recognize that our positions at teaching colleges—institutions that are more likely to recognize this work in annual evaluations—enabled us to edit this issue in the first place. Yet, we hope that by pairing these practical materials with pedagogy shorts that grant a byline, by insisting on their citation, and by having them occupy significant space in the issue, we are making the case for their centrality as forms of scholarship themselves. As Buurma and Heffernan demonstrate, the classroom is where most research (and, as they brilliantly show, most of the history of literary study) takes place (2). It is in preparing for classes, talking and thinking alongside students, and reading students’ work that some of the most generative and exciting insights emerge.
<17>Indeed, as readers will see here, most of our contributors acknowledge and cite their students as co-creators of their intellectual work. While some students granted permission to use their names, others remain anonymous in their contributions; in such instances, we have asked contributors to use the gender neutral “they” to preserve and respect those students’ preferences. Many of our contributors also note in their pedagogy shorts the unexpectedly positive outcomes that emerged from embracing new tools, reimagining classroom spaces, and approaching students from a position of empathy rather than authority. And yet, because this work is too often systemically devalued, we have designed this issue to make it more visible. As Buurma and Heffernan write,
Restoring a full material history to the ephemeral hours we spend in the classroom will not in itself change institutional structures or revolutionize labor practices. But it will bring a usable history back into view, one that better represents the complex, dynamic work our profession has undertaken in the past, is continuing to perform in the present, and must offer in the future. (6)
We hope that this special issue forms a micro-“teaching archive” of creative, adaptable, and transgressive assignments, syllabi, curricula, course policies, and student work that responds directly to the COVID-19 pandemic while elucidating the importance of maintaining such approaches in the future, whatever it may hold. We hope it makes the work of liberatory pedagogy visible and enables further transgressions in times of crisis—and in times of calm—by recognizing care, collaboration, and solidarity as, indeed, essential work to cultivate engaged classrooms and, perhaps, a more radically inclusive profession.
Summary of Contents
<18>As much as the pedagogy shorts in this issue reflect the resilience and ingenuity of instructors and students, they also reflect the profound traumas of this time. In the spirit of inclusivity, accessibility, and safety with which we have approached this issue, we want to warn readers that many of these pieces contain potentially triggering content. Teaching in 2020-21, after all, might also mean grappling with illness, death, suicide, and mental health challenges, as well as race-based brutality, white supremacist violence, and sexual violence. This special issue engages with all of these topics and more. If any reader would like to discuss the particulars of each piece further before delving in, or would like an amended copy of any article, please do not hesitate to reach out to us (kcox [at] csc.edu, sdraucker [at] siena.edu, and dthierauf [at] ncwc.edu).
<19>The first section of shorts, “Coping with Crisis,” consists of five articles that survey the damage done by the pandemic and offer theoretical, practical, and affective responses to those disruptions. Travis Chi Wing Lau’s pedagogy short centers concerns of disability, access, and ableism in both higher-education pedagogy and the field of Victorian studies at large. Lau invites readers to prioritize universal accessibility in teaching and writing beyond the present moment. We hope that readers will keep in mind Lau’s appeal that academics “owe it to students and to ourselves [faculty, staff, and administrators] to imagine more accessible, inclusive futures” as they peruse subsequent essays. Next, Helena Goodwyn reports from a year of helping students cope via Zoom, a medium new to many instructors before the pandemic. Her essay covers a variety of activities, many of them informal and affect-based, that transform potentially tedious and burdensome remote classes into spaces where students feel safe, connected, and welcome. Jessica R. Valdez’s essay, on teaching her class “The Police in Literature and Culture” to students in Hong Kong during the pandemic and under the newly instated National Security Law, pursues the same goal as Goodwyn’s while also reflecting on the global political turmoil of the past year, both in China and the US. Valdez offers readers strategies to address ongoing challenges to academic freedom and policing in their virtual classrooms that privilege students’ security concerns. Amanda Mingail Shubert’s and Doreen Thierauf’s contributions round off this section by highlighting the beneficial effects of relaxed syllabus policies to accommodate students’ needs. Shubert devised a self-directed participation assignment, counting for fifty percent of the total course grade, that allowed students to assess themselves. After having thus lowered the stakes, something her students appreciated, Shubert ponders whether “merit-based grading simply reinforce[s] a punitive capitalist logic that turns student work into alienated labor” and welcomes future discussions about the logic of grading. In the same vein, Thierauf reports on the positive effects of implementing more flexible deadline policies while tying such changes to the “wider culture of workism in academia that discipline[s] students and teachers.” She ends her piece by appealing to teachers to prioritize students as people and to cultivate a permanent stance of empathy and kindness—not only in times of emergency.
<20>The second section of pedagogy shorts, “Creating Digital Learning Communities,” contains six articles in which instructors discuss how they have “hack[ed]” new—or, new-to-them—technology tools to facilitate engaged learning communities, foster collaboration, and prioritize student health and safety (Morris 28). Talia Vestri describes using screencasts and Google Slides to create a sense of classroom presence across geographical and temporal distances while balancing her own switch between institutions and full-time childcare responsibilities. Kimberly Cox shares an exercise she developed to introduce her students to Zoom, a tool with which many were unfamiliar. This exercise helped Cox create a collaborative, accessible, equitable, and safe classroom environment for both in-person and remote students. Also focused on Zoom, April Patrick describes how in-class annotation exercises using Zoom’s icons and stamps features encouraged class participation, especially for students less comfortable speaking aloud. Shannon Draucker’s piece focuses on another “fun” tool—Google Jamboard—which helped her and her students enjoy unexpected moments of levity and play in an otherwise difficult year. Andrew Rimby’s piece shifts the conversation from the visual to the vocal. He describes how VoiceThreads, paired with a virtual walking tour activity and a Queer of Color theoretical framework, enabled him and his students to interrogate “out loud” the racially burdened legacies of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Finally, Carrie Dickison’s short uses the Community of Inquiry (CoI) pedagogical framework to rethink learning management systems’ discussion boards as sites for collaborative knowledge creation and student and instructor presence. Together, these shorts not only reflect the remarkable flexibility and resilience of instructors during the various pedagogical “pivots” of 2020-21, but also serve as reminders that “online learning” can offer just as many—if not more—opportunities for inclusive, accessible, and student-centered learning—opportunities that instructors should perhaps not be so quick to abandon when the “new normal” returns.
<21>The final section of pedagogy shorts, “Imagining Collaborative Assignments,” contains five articles, each of which describes a successful experiment with remote learning activities, along with students’ roles therein. Each essay follows a model hooks describes in Teaching to Transgress by “mak[ing] the classroom a space where experience is valued, not negated or deemed meaningless, . . . [where] the concept of a privileged voice of authority is deconstructed by our [students’ and teachers’] collective critical practice” (84). Christa DiMarco explains how she and her students exploited the confines of Zoom to create a collaborative performance modeled on Judy Chicago’s art installation The Dinner Party, celebrating the achievements of women-identified people whose artistic contributions have been historically overlooked. Gabrielle Kappes and Riya Das similarly designed assignments focused on researching women who continue to be undervalued. Kappes reimagined her nineteenth-century British literature survey by placing the writing of Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, and Una Marson at its center and creating an Instagram assignment inviting students to communicate their research—and these writers’ sheer #blackgirlmagic—to actual audiences. Das’s “Forgotten No More” essay prompt similarly gave students the option to choose a female-identified figure from the nineteenth century whose contributions have been overshadowed by individuals born with greater gender, racial, religious, or economic privilege. Christie Harner shares an assignment in which students investigate the Victorian serial novel and Netflix serial shows while authoring and binding a serial novella. In the end, each student group’s novella was snail-mailed to class participants. Harner’s pedagogy short contains one such student-produced novella—“Self Checkout”—that illustrates how assignments focused on seriality helped students feel connected in a time of disconnection. Finally, Bettina Tate Pedersen empowers her students as critical close readers by blending a COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education) annotation assignment with critical Broadview editions. While her class focused on four Jane Austen novels, the collaborative learning that her assignment facilitated could be easily adapted and applied to any literary text encoded in COVE and published as a critical edition.
New Normals
<22>With this issue, we, along with our contributors, also work through our own anxieties as teachers (and humans). We hope to have harnessed some of the chaotic energies unleashed by the past year to provide useful—and even enjoyable—resources for others. For many scholars and students, this year has not been “productive,” which, to us, is entirely understandable and should never be used against anyone in hiring or promotion decisions. We were lucky that editing this special issue provided us with a safe haven and allowed us to ponder the generative aspects of the pandemic (such as they were) while collaborating with other pedagogues experiencing similar struggles. As Lau asks his readers, “how does the field continue the access conversation when the vaccine makes the pandemic ‘no longer a problem’?” In designing this issue, we hope that approaches which seek to meet the needs of everyone through equitable, inclusive, and empathetic classroom spaces turn into the “new normals” beyond the pandemic. Perhaps “teaching to transgress” will simply become teaching.