TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
The final week of ‘Unfree labor and racial capitalism’ has come, and the classroom is buzzing. Today is the ‘Research Forum,’ and there are three panels taking place. The student panelists presenting today have come ready with slides; some even have music or videos to share as they talk about agricultural work, janitors, domestic labor, and construction workers. They have been building their research projects the whole term and are ready to present them publicly and discuss them with each other. After the first panelists finish their presentations, the student acting as moderator gives space to the presenters to reflect on the panel as a whole and ask questions of each other. I hear the students comment on the working conditions migrant workers face in the nurseries across the state, how Portland sex workers are organizing against recently passed legislation, and issues of union-busting among restaurant workers, topics, and cases they said they had not had the chance to explore before this class.
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The excitement the students and I share about discussing these topics is directly linked to how we have built a communal learning space throughout the term. I understand the classroom as a democratic, egalitarian, and open meeting place where both the teacher and the student meet with the intention to seek knowledge, not to transmit it. No one enters the classroom as a clean slate, neither the teacher nor the student. Students are workers, organizers, caregivers, etc. By creating a class compact at the beginning of the term, we set the ground rules for our work together. Starting from the students' prior expertise, my goal is to create an empowering environment that allows them to not only become familiar with a certain body of knowledge but also equip them with specific skills such as academic and news and media literacy, policy analysis, collective decision making, time management, and public speaking. Understanding that not all students are able to take advantage of the resources offered by the University in the same way, I work consciously to share information about them and build incentives into my courses for students to explore and use them, for example, by inviting representatives from different campus programs to come present in our classroom.
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I update reading material throughout the term to honor students’ knowledge and experiences, informed by one-on-one meetings where I learn about their interests. During a week we discussed care labor, a student who worked at an elderly home and another who worked as a nanny started the conversation by sharing their work experience and conditions before we dove into the assigned readings. Pairing academic articles by renowned scholars in the field with public policy reports and media allows students to approach topics in multiple ways and learn how to engage and question the materials. For example, when analyzing recently proposed or passed legislation, such as FOSTA/SESTA[1], I ask students to identify the issue this is meant to address and present materials that guide their discussion on whether the issue has been solved, and who the solution primarily benefits.
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I rely primarily on essays, short answers, multimedia assignments, and collaborative projects in which they must engage with their community. Course assignments require students to reflect on their opinions, emotional responses, and experiences with a given topic and facilitate discussions to teach both their peers and me. I measure student learning by developing progressive assignments, where students can build on their work during the term in different stages, work alone, in pairs, receive feedback and see their work transform and improve. By starting projects early in the term, first meeting with me to brainstorm ideas, then writing a proposal and an annotated bibliography, workshopping their initial essay drafts with their peers, giving each other feedback, and discussing their final products in pairs, the final presentations were exceptional.
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I strive for an education system that allows students to develop their ideas and realize their abilities as active subjects engaged in the continuous construction and transformation of the world they are part of. I note that this creates awareness of their capacity to act on the issues that are discussed inside and outside the classroom. Inviting community or campus organizations to join us to discuss some of the class topics allows them to learn how issues can transform into action and how they could get involved. Because I view the classroom as a political space not confined by the walls that hold it, I participate in community and campus-wide activities and invite students to be a part of them. For example, during a labor class, I invited students to the public bargaining sessions of one of the campus unions. We later discussed the connections between what we saw there and that week’s main topics. I have also incorporated students to research projects I was part of and provided training and practice of qualitative methods: doing cold-walks for recruitment, in-depth interviews, coding, and then writing a collective peer-reviewed paper as co-authors.
[1] Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA).
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