I am losing my religion. This resistance letter to the dying academy aims to ask questions. Is the present situation what we signed up to do?
When I began teaching, it filled me with life. I delivered my first class in 1997. I was 22. My first class was for a group of gifted artists in their teens from low-income housing in San Francisco. Daily, my heart was whole to the point of bursting. I will remember the four students I taught. We brought our complete selves into the classroom. Our socioeconomic childhood realities and our labelling of being gifted had led all of us into the same room, only six to seven years apart in age. The gifted label was extending colonialism, gender discrimination, and classist oppression throughout the education system. Yet, somehow, against all odds, it had led to a few of us who were talented in the ways society deemed correct to have access to tools and support our fellows did not.
At this point, this meant early access to the internet, computers, technology, and the skills therein. I had begun to make art with these tools, and it was my DIY self-taught artmaking practice I shared. There was no mandate on me to teach how to edit and shoot digital video and use Director to create compelling stories. People told you that you were wasting your life on the computer during the 90s if you programmed art. The idea of being a media creator or creative technologist was foreign. You could not stream video on a home internet connection.
The non-profit I worked for would have been perfectly happy with me showing them to use early photoshop tools and walking out, but that was different from where I found myself as a filmmaker. I did something radical unknowingly; I shared my artmaking journey with them. I started by explaining how I had seen free access to these tools on public television stations. At the time, public access television offered tools and broadcast space for many artists and activists. We took to the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District with a borrowed video camera and filmed our lives and what we saw that mattered to us. The students and I showed up for each other in a way that brought about our mutual liberation. We transgressed the boundaries of what education could be together. By accident, I was working akin to bell hook’s Engaged Pedagogy without even knowing it. I was being present as part of my practice, and it effortlessly spilt over into my working life.
Fast forward to today. How does one show up with an engaged pedagogy now? Where is room for the whole self in the class? I’ve stopped planning tightly structured lessons and I have begun to focus on doing work which brings joy. I am going to instruct all of my lecturers to now only teach what gives them happiness with any given subject. What is sparking their mind right now? What are they finding hope within? I want them teaching that. For myself, I’m turning to dialogue with my peers in the room and playing embodied games to illustrate concepts physically. Traditional approaches do not allow for transgression. New methods are required.
I am on unsteady ground for the first time in my teaching journey. I’m brave enough to admit I have to find new ways of showing up because old methods have hit an endgame for me. Making has given me a lifeline to survive the darkest parts of my life. It’s where I turn for hope now. How do I make my classroom anew?
I must ask, “Why am I still here?” I’m in a university system in the UK. Working in British HE, where education is far more accessible to the public is a far cry from teaching low income children. It also comes with the bagage of classism and colonial thinking that being within it requires unpacking. How does one find hope and kindness working in such a structure?
I’m going back to the basics of bell hooks; I’m going to show up with my whole self, and I’m going to ask them to do the same. Some will ignore me, but some may come along for the ride. How we move within is up to us.