Toward a Humane Pedagogy (or, On Why Teaching for Humanization Is Well-Meaning Condescension)

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Bearing Witness Through Personal Experiences: Toward an Ontology and Epistemology of Experiential Curriculum as Resistance

Abstract

Purposes
Grounding this paper in my embodied knowledge (Waheed, 2013, 2014; Wynter, 1989, 2003) as a Muslim woman, mother, educator, and scholar (Author, 2017, 2019), I explore the roots of my discomfort with the idea of teaching for humanization. Beginning with a storied moment of experience at a recent conference for social studies teacher educators, in which several scholars confidently asserted that “we need to humanize those who have been dehumanized,” I engage in autobiographical narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Kubota et al., 2015; Author et al., 2014) into my tensions with this seemingly common sense (Kumashiro, 2004), but profoundly problematic, pedagogical belief and curricular approach.

Perspectives
I interrupt and disrupt the notion of “the need to humanize those who have been dehumanized” by interweaving my experiences as an intergenerational survivor of Palestinian displacement, as a teacher educator, as a mother to a child with a disability, and as a Muslim woman in hijab who is all too familiar with a well-meaning condescending pity of those who project their stories of me—of who they believe me to be and what they believe my experiences to be—upon me. Alongside my autobiographical experiences, I further draw upon the work and ideas of curriculum scholars and feminist theorists to illuminate how teaching for humanization of Others (Said, 1978) can impose borders within and between relational selves in the making (Menon & Author, 2018). I argue that, rather than individualistically espousing - and acting upon - the need to humanize those who are already human, we must instead think with, and act upon, our relational commitments to each other by uplifting each other’s voices in mutually enhancing ways.

Discussion
Undergirding this important work will be a new definition of what it means to be human(e) – one that acknowledges the profoundly relational way we are always in the process of becoming more fully human alongside one another. I invite other learners, educators, and scholars—including those from within familial curriculum-making worlds (Huber et al., 2011)—to imagine how we might co-compose a (more) humane pedagogy alongside children, youth, families, colleagues, and others within and across our classrooms, schools, communities, and beyond.

Author

• Muna Saleh, Concordia University of Edmonton