Being Asked To Teach Antiracistly?

[mahagonny]

My reaction: this should be a workload issue, dependent on union negotiation. If we were teaching passively before, and must now teach in a proactively non-racist way, we are providing additional content and education, and should get more pay.
But can you teach what you've been teaching antiracistly, and if so, how? I don't think I can, but it's not for me to answer 'can you.' If I'm being instructed to, it will mean there is no 'it can't really be done' answer. And you know, student evaluations of faculty performance.

"For non-Black faculty members just beginning this work, Bellamy offers this advice: Reach out to Black-student groups and similar organizations on campus to find out what they want. "Centering Black voices and making sure that you're trying to respond," she says, "is always a good first step when thinking about teaching."

In other words, additional class prep time.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Interrogating-Your-Discipline/249103?cid=wcontentlist_hp_latest

[ergative]

Hmm. Here's an analogy:

Pretend you teach veterinary science. The vet licensing board has realized that accepted wisdom about how to treat bad teeth in cats has changed. New evidence-based research has shown that restraining the cat by sitting on its head is not as effective as swaddling it with a blanket before brushing its teeth. They require that you change your cat dentistry unit to meet these new best practices.

Are you going to demand more pay for changing your lesson plans and teaching new content? Or are you going to accept that the larger organization in which you work has changed its understanding of best practices, and that your responsibility as a member of that organization requires you to meet those changing practices?

The only way I can see justifying resistance to teaching cat-swaddling is if you genuinely believe that sitting on the cat's head is better for the animal than swaddling for it--and even then you might want to take a look at your contract to see what it says about preparing students for their veterinary licensing exams.

So: do you genuinely believe that teaching students to be anti-racists is harmful? Or do you just think it's a waste of your time? If the former, I'm concerned. If the latter, then suck it up and teach them how to swaddle the damn cats.

[Puget]

Hmm. Here's an analogy:

Pretend you teach veterinary science. The vet licensing board has realized that accepted wisdom about how to treat bad teeth in cats has changed. New evidence-based research has shown that restraining the cat by sitting on its head is not as effective as swaddling it with a blanket before brushing its teeth. They require that you change your cat dentistry unit to meet these new best practices.

Are you going to demand more pay for changing your lesson plans and teaching new content? Or are you going to accept that the larger organization in which you work has changed its understanding of best practices, and that your responsibility as a member of that organization requires you to meet those changing practices?

The only way I can see justifying resistance to teaching cat-swaddling is if you genuinely believe that sitting on the cat's head is better for the animal than swaddling for it--and even then you might want to take a look at your contract to see what it says about preparing students for their veterinary licensing exams.

So: do you genuinely believe that teaching students to be anti-racists is harmful? Or do you just think it's a waste of your time? If the former, I'm concerned. If the latter, then suck it up and teach them how to swaddle the damn cats.

+1
Faculty update their classes all the time, to make the teaching more effective or update the contents with new developments in the field. This summer the vast majority of us are reinventing them to run online or hybrid. That's all part of the expectations for teaching a class, just like grading.
I think  mahagonny actually has a different agenda here. . .

[mahagonny]

+1
Faculty update their classes all the time, to make the teaching more effective or update the contents with new developments in the field. This summer the vast majority of us are reinventing them to run online or hybrid. That's all part of the expectations for teaching a class, just like grading.

Yes, and I have done that too, for the same pay. Of course, lots of people are complaining about the extra work in learning zoom, etc. We accept it because it's necessary.

Hmm. Here's an analogy:

Pretend you teach veterinary science. The vet licensing board has realized that accepted wisdom about how to treat bad teeth in cats has changed. New evidence-based research has shown that restraining the cat by sitting on its head is not as effective as swaddling it with a blanket before brushing its teeth. They require that you change your cat dentistry unit to meet these new best practices.

That's a good example of how staying current in your field works. Whereas, if there were evidence-based research showing, first, what antiracist teaching is, and then that antiracist teaching produced better results in my field I would want to know about it. There might be, but I'm not aware of any. 'Antiracism' is a pretty new or at least newly popular concept and I suspect  more of a religion than a needed, universal part of conveying any particular discipline.

So: do you genuinely believe that teaching students to be anti-racists is harmful?

it depends on who's doing it and what they've got planned. Depending on how it gets defined, I may easily be able to point out that I've already been doing it, and longer than many. But there are those whom I don't trust.
Analogy: suppose someone comes to my front door and says "only you can prevent forest fires.' He hands me some literature with helpful tips about how to take care not to start fires, ways that an average person can put out fires, how to make a safe environment when camping or boating etc. Even though I live in the city and don't smoke, don't use incense I'm going to thank him for the information.
Suppose the same guy says 'when you see a person in a parking lot smoking a cigarette, take a video of him on your cellphone. Send it to this online webpage and we'll fix his wagon with an internet doxxing campaign.' I'm going to say 'no thanks I can't help you.'

I think  mahagonny actually has a different agenda here. . .

Aha...you are on the lookout for people with an agenda?

[secundem_artem]

Hmm. Here's an analogy:

Pretend you teach veterinary science. The vet licensing board has realized that accepted wisdom about how to treat bad teeth in cats has changed. New evidence-based research has shown that restraining the cat by sitting on its head is not as effective as swaddling it with a blanket before brushing its teeth. They require that you change your cat dentistry unit to meet these new best practices.

Are you going to demand more pay for changing your lesson plans and teaching new content? Or are you going to accept that the larger organization in which you work has changed its understanding of best practices, and that your responsibility as a member of that organization requires you to meet those changing practices?

The only way I can see justifying resistance to teaching cat-swaddling is if you genuinely believe that sitting on the cat's head is better for the animal than swaddling for it--and even then you might want to take a look at your contract to see what it says about preparing students for their veterinary licensing exams.

So: do you genuinely believe that teaching students to be anti-racists is harmful? Or do you just think it's a waste of your time? If the former, I'm concerned. If the latter, then suck it up and teach them how to swaddle the damn cats.

+1
Faculty update their classes all the time, to make the teaching more effective or update the contents with new developments in the field. This summer the vast majority of us are reinventing them to run online or hybrid. That's all part of the expectations for teaching a class, just like grading.
I think  mahagonny actually has a different agenda here. . .

I think you've kinda hit the nail on the head.  The "everybody needs to teach anti-racism" agenda is one.  There is another agenda that says "I came to the university to teach and research in my field.  I did not sign up to change the world."

Between what I teach and what my own beliefs are, I live somewhere between these 2 poles.  If you have time, or if the curriculum in your field allows it, you can teach all the Isabel Wilkerson you want.  But forcing that agenda through the teeth of the university at large is misguided.  Even if you are successful, do you want some proportion of the faculty making their resentment clear every time the required "diversity and inclusion" module comes up? 

And what about students?  A friend of mine teaches a feminist writing course to undergraduates.  And every year she ends up with a couple of dude bros from the hard sciences in her class making sexist trouble because they needed an elective and this was the only one that fit their timetable.

If universities are serious about anti-racism, the classroom is not the place to do it.  Students are with us for what, 15-16 hours a week?  Co-curricular activities in the dorms, funding for socially/politically/racially/culturally different student organizations to collaborate on a project or similar are more likely to be effective.  Students and faculty who are already onboard with this agenda are already supportive.  Those who are less supportive, or actively oppose it, are unlikely  to come aboard just because they were forced to. 

To turn ergative's metaphor around, opponents need to be swaddled in a blanket, not have their heads sat on and their teeth brushed (or brains washed) by people yelling "racist" and promoting cancel culture.

[Sun_Worshiper]

I think the so-called mandate to teach anti-racistly is really more like a nudge to encourage faculty to make our syllabi more inclusive and incorporate some content on race/class/gender, where it is possible to do so.  Doing these things at the margins is not that hard and can actually be a fun and enlightening exercise.

[pigou]

What Black student groups really love is getting emails from 300 faculty asking them for uncompensated labor. Maybe we can also put Black faculty on more committees that don't help them get tenure.

Of course nobody can be opposed to being anti-racist, because none of us are (or want to be) racist. I suspect we all want to live in a world that is less racist. But the way we're overcoming systemic inequality is not by putting a paper by a Black author on the syllabus. It's absolutely insane that there's a collective belief that the reason minority students aren't becoming prolific researchers is because they don't see people who look like them in those positions. It's either that or massive educational inequality starting in pre-K. Just because one of those things is easier to fix doesn't mean it's the thing that'll actually be effective.

[Parasaurolophus]

I think the so-called mandate to teach anti-racistly is really more like a nudge to encourage faculty to make our syllabi more inclusive and incorporate some content on race/class/gender, where it is possible to do so.  Doing these things at the margins is not that hard and can actually be a fun and enlightening exercise.

That's my understanding as well, and it's basically what's being said in the article mahagonny linked to. (Although we can add things like rethinking our assignments and how we can use them to foster race-conscious critical attitudes, etc.)

And, honestly, it's not a hard thing to do, especially in lower-level general surveys. Specialized upper-level classes might be a different matter, at least depending on the topic, but the less specialized the course, the greater the latitude to include new or different voices. I teach the same two courses three to four times a year, each (occasionally I get two sections of a different one). It's boring to do the same thing over and over and over and over again. So every semester, I change a few topics/readings. It's more for my sake (/sanity) as it is theirs, and I try to choose topics or readings which will be of interest to my student population, or which will educate them about local issues. It's been incredibly easy to build in what could be broadly characterized as an "anti-racist" component, and it's not really been any extra work for me (since I gradually switch things up a little anyway). As an added bonus, my students are really interested in it--even though they're international students, and even though a lot of the content turns around anti-Indigenous racism in Canada. They learn a lot about their new country that way, and their eyes are opened to problems they didn't see or understand before, and which they can relate to their own experiences.


More broadly: is anyone actually being instructed from the top to do this? Because that's not at all what was being said in the article.

[mahagonny]

More broadly: is anyone actually being instructed from the top to do this? Because that's not at all what was being said in the article.

Yes. I was given a survey with questions like 'what do you want to know about how to be an antiracist faculty member.' That's pretty heavy handed, given the backdrop of today's conversations in the media, the cancel culture, the suspicion. It didn't even start with 'do you think this is a time when attitudes against racism should be reexamined?' There's no acknowledgement that people have already been teaching in ways that support, nurture individuals of diverse backgrounds, appearance, etc. This strikes me as a blind spot. The discussion is all about 'change, change' change.' It's negative and depressing. And our union is getting into it. There's a lot of anger. I don't want to hear from angry people about how to improve my teaching. These are things that should be rubbing up against academic freedom protections.

[Sun_Worshiper]

More broadly: is anyone actually being instructed from the top to do this? Because that's not at all what was being said in the article.

Not at my place

[downer]

People have been pointing out problems with the "dead white men" domination of curricula for at least 35 years. This is not something new. If you haven't noticed it previously, what have you been doing?

I'm one of the first to prioritize my own time and to resist demands to do "extra." But if you are not thinking about how you teach and updating your syllabi on a regular basis, then ... well, there are all sorts of problems.

[mahagonny]

People have been pointing out problems with the "dead white men" domination of curricula for at least 35 years. This is not something new. If you haven't noticed it previously, what have you been doing?

But if you are not thinking about how you teach and updating your syllabi on a regular basis, then ... well, there are all sorts of problems.

Oh, good Lord....Apropos of what, in this discussion? I'm talking about people outside my field who are certain that I need to teach my field differently, because I'm white.

[secundem_artem]

More broadly: is anyone actually being instructed from the top to do this? Because that's not at all what was being said in the article.

Not at my place

Not from the administration, but a few years back there was a very hard push by some of the more politically/socially active members of the faculty senate at Artem U for a wholesale, uni wide curriculum change to focus on this.  It did not go well.  Faculty remain free to include or exclude these kinds of issues as they see fit - which is the way it ought to be.

[mamselle]

I won't be re-developing my offerings on colonial households to meet a pre-determined non-historically based conclusion, but I don't have to.

I've been offering tours that end with the two gravestones of young black servants (i.e., slaves, but that's the text on the stone) and describing just what we know and don't know about them for 25 years.

I've been preparing an article on the four known burials (and two more probable) of slaves and manumitted servants for awhile, and include my findings in all my other discussions as well.

My dance work has been informed by Asian, South American, African, and Native American as well as Western dance, music, and art history since the 1970s.

I have always worked hard at phrasing things politely and considerately (to me, that's what PC really stands for, "polite consideration" of others) and have, when corrected, received the correction and built it into my work going forward.

I've done those things freely because they're an obvious part of the work itself, and I'd be irresponsible if I were to omit them from my studies.

So where have all you people been?

M.

[fishbrains]

I won't be re-developing my offerings on colonial households to meet a pre-determined non-historically based conclusion, but I don't have to.

I've been offering tours that end with the two gravestones of young black servants (i.e., slaves, but that's the text on the stone) and describing just what we know and don't know about them for 25 years.

I've been preparing an article on the four known burials (and two more probable) of slaves and manumitted servants for awhile, and include my findings in all my other discussions as well.

My dance work has been informed by Asian, South American, African, and Native American as well as Western dance, music, and art history since the 1970s.

I have always worked hard at phrasing things politely and considerately (to me, that's what PC really stands for, "polite consideration" of others) and have, when corrected, received the correction and built it into my work going forward.

I've done those things freely because they're an obvious part of the work itself, and I'd be irresponsible if I were to omit them from my studies.

So where have all you people been?

M.

True that. But my admin looks like it's going to do something like mahagonny's. And there is a world of difference between an "anti-racism" approach developing from a professor's research and desire to be a better person/instructor, and a condescendingly cynical dictate from adminicritters who have plenty they could be tending to in the name of "antiracism" in their own gardens.