Co-Teaching Social Justice as a Graduate Student of Jamaican Descent: Tensions and Challenges

• In Event: 35.051 - Exploring Pedagogies of Resistance: Auto-Ethnographies on Initiatives to Promote Activism

Abstract

The objective of my paper is to examine the complexities and nuances inherent in co-teaching classes that promote activism and resistance from my particular positionality. As a Black doctoral student at a predominantly white institution, I am familiar with the post-truth era and the socio-political value placed on emotion and ideology as opposed to facts and empirical evidence. In particular, my experiences suggest that students challenge facts and empirical evidence with emotion and loyalty to certain ideologies. My identity as a Black man further complicates the relationship between my ‘student’ and ‘instructor’ identities vis-à-vis undergraduate students. Regardless of my position and status at my institution, I am constructed as a threat because of my physical features and the ways in which I carry myself around campus. Lopez (2003) suggests that second generation Caribbean people are characterized based on their phenotype, which has discernable traits of African ancestry. As the son of a Jamaican woman who immigrated to the United States, I share the same experiences as the people at the center of Lopez’s (2003) analysis. Morris’s (2016) perspective coincides with that of Lopez (2003). According to Morris (2016), people of color are not only raced but gendered and endure nuanced systems of oppression based on the intersection between several categories of their social identity. Whereas Lopez (2003) suggests that men of color are projected to be violent and women of color are perceived as sexual objects, Morris (2016) interrogates this gendered oppression and focuses on the longstanding effects of the treatment of black women during slavery on the educational outcomes of black girls in public school. This construction of blackness, however, is based on hegemonic ideologies as opposed to empirical evidence. As an instructor existing within multiple social and political intersections, these tensions culminate in the classroom and on campus. Therefore, I have a personal investment in the ways in which students that I teach not only digest the material but also in how they choose to approach the problems that they learn about in class. Co-teaching a social justice class has been both heuristic and inspiring as I witness students tackle issues that extend far beyond the classroom. The experience has informed my scholarship and allowed me to remain not only critical of my work but also reflexive about myself and how I continue to address my biases and positionality. In addition, my experiences as a co-teacher promoting activism has brought me face to face with the structures that both enable and constrain my own dedication to transforming inequities and redressing injustices. At the core of this is the construction of blackness on a campus that serves a predominantly white student population. My pedagogy is challenged with this construction and my existence on my campus illustrates the manifestation of a post-truth era as it pertains to higher education. My paper will add to the body of literature that explores blackness in higher education, but from a perspective that emphasizes black pedagogical activism.

Author

• Dominic Davy, Binghamton University - SUNY