Rigor Mortis: An Engagement with Rigor in Political Science Education (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on Teaching

Abstract

In its description of the student learning experience, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) sets as its first standard that faculty be “rigorous” in their teaching. This paper explores rigor as it appears in a range of documents related to the teaching of political science—from accreditation documentation, to cross-institution departmental communications, and in the political science literature. I argue that rigor is a value concept that encloses a rigid ideology of norms in learning that prizes the stiff, the uniform, the compliant, the productive, while rejecting alternative qualities that might have different pedagogical benefits such as looseness, flow, shockingness, or unruliness. The virtues of rigor define success in terms of ruly excellence, which separates the star pupil from the chaff—ultimately an anti-democratic praxis that is often used against both faculty and students whose embodied unruliness (woman-ness, Blackness, queer-ness) exists outside of the dominant ruled order. By applying the critical theory method of immanent critique, wherein a concept is explored against its own norms, I explore the hidden interiority of rigor, ultimately, offering alternative pedagogical standards such as joy, collectivity, care, or justice.

Author

• Wendy Wright, William Paterson University