What Do I Teach?

The more I teach, the more I face the existential question: what exactly am I teaching students? Do not misunderstand; I know my content well and feel confident as a content expert. I teach feminist and queer histories; I teach theories of feminisms and LGBTQ theories; I teach how feminist and queer artists and writers have used culture as a site for social change. It is not the content that makes me anxious. What makes me wonder about what exactly I am teaching students with a degree of uncertainty is the question of process: How am I teaching students? What will they remember years hence?

I have no delusions that years from now students will remember the nuances of Wittig’s argument that lesbians are not women. They will not remember exactly what Wittig wrote, to whom she was writing, and why it was so powerful for lesbian-feminists in the 1980s. They may remember, however, their discomfort with her assertion that lesbians are not women. (I sometimes imagine grown up students at a cocktail party twenty or thirty years hence meeting a lesbian of the future and asking her, so I remember this idea from my feminist theory class. . . .Wittig. . . oh, you haven’t read her? . . .ok, but well. . . .do you consider yourself a woman?) I want that discomfort with the idea to plague them a bit, a lot even. Mostly, however, I want them to remember what they do with that discomfort. This is the process of my teaching about which I am thinking, intensely. What I want them to do with that discomfort is sit with it. Examine it. Let it occupy them. I want the experience of being uncomfortable, of being discomfited by ideas, by words on a page, to be a natural and expected response of education. I want students to embrace the uncomfortable, to seek it out, to revel in it.

Let me step back for a moment. When I reflect on my own undergraduate education (as I have done here and here), what I remember is not the content of my classes, but the process, the tools that I gained as a person to make my way in the world. How did I learn those? How did professors teach them to me? Did they know that this is what they were teaching?

Let me begin with the tools. From my Women’s Studies undergraduate degree program, I learned:

As a human moving through the world, I have the power to be a creator of culture and meaning for other people like me.
Power surrounds us; we can use it and it can be used against us. We must always be aware of power, analyze it, and engage it strategically and effectively.
Institutional structures and power systems are both constructed by humans and greater than humans. We are called to change them—to hold them accountable to our visions—and to be accountable to them.
We are called to care for one another individually and collectively and we are compelled by our humanness to take action to improve the world in which we live daily and throughout the course of our life.
Anger is a powerful and important emotion but never more important than compassion, truth, and justice.
Systems, institutions, society, and people change. Being a part of that change is difficult and rewarding. It is where the action is. It is where I like to sit, even though it is uncomfortable.
Beauty is holy; language is sacred.

As a twenty year old, these insights were so vibrantly clear to me. I learned them from Women’s Studies’ professors. I want to teach similarly. I just am unsure if I am.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: teaching, Theories of Feminisms, undergraduate eduction, Women's Studies