“The idea is to remove hierarchy rather than deliberately behave as if there is no hierarchy. That is solid bad faith. There will never be a total absence of hierarchy. And that’s what’s fun in the classroom, it’s not that you’re being ethical, it’s that the ethical might flower.”
- Spivak in Mark Sanders’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory, p. 120
s0metim3s tags me for the Passion Quilt. What am *I* most passionate for students to learn about? Didn’t someone ask me that in an ‘Introduction to Tutoring’ workshop once? The theory being that if YOU just finds YOUR teaching passion YOU will be a happier and harder worker. Yes … I’m afraid that the very idea of ‘a passion quilt’ makes me think primarily of the uses or work of passion in the humanities and social sciences departments that employ me for tutorials and lectures from time to time. Passion is sacrificial labour for many of my colleagues; the more under-resourced the department, the more people I find who remind me of social workers (in all their compassion). I agree with s0metim3s that “passion cannot be imparted”; “it can be sparked” - I don’t really care whether I do that or not, especially in Weeks 11 & 12 of semester when the students who are still turning up demonstrate so much exhausted, bored passivity (enough to bring on social work burnout - after all I’ve done for them!).
I do feel passion in the classroom sometimes, I feel it spilling from me in the amorous and angry sense - bell hooks has spoken of the erotics of teaching (and I don’t mean in the sense that Helen Garner did in The First Stone). But it’s usually just because I’m cheerfully getting off on myself, what I know and what I care about. Who knows how and where the spark that ignites and connects burns; hopefully not only in my righteous breast. Then again, it worked for Lulu (third from the right).
In whipping the thread up and off, I don’t know any other “educators” with blogs to tag … so I will just say this - liberation from pedagogy!
(PS Let there be no doubt - the image is a still from To Sir With Love).
Young Liberals making recordings of lefty lecturers: do they really think we can’t tell which ones they are? Or will they perhaps disguise themselves in faded surf brand t-shirts a lá the undercovers at the G20 protests?
Put another way - this guy generally stands out in a Political Economy lecture:
(NSW Young Liberals President - from the Daily Telegraph article on the same issue)
That offering students a critique of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘reconciliation’ policies are now somewhat redundant.
At least under J-Ho we can call a spade a spade, i.e. ‘neocolonial race laws’.
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