Foucault, On Writing (Excerpt)

Claude Bonnefoy: How do you experience the activity of writing?

Michel Foucault: When I write, I always have something in mind. At the same time, I always address something that’s outside myself, an object, a domain that can be described, grammar or seventeenth-century political economy, or the experience of madness throughout the classical period. And yet, that object, that domain, I don’t get the impression that I’m describing it at all, of placing myself in a position of receptivity to what it says, of translating with words on paper and with a certain style a certain representation I’ve created of what I’m trying to describe.

Earlier, I said that I’m trying to reveal the distance I have, that we have to these things; my writing is the discovery of that distance. I’d add that, in one sense, my head is empty when I begin to write, even though my mind is always directed toward a specific object. Obviously, that means that, for me, writing is an exhausting activity, very difficult, filled with anxiety. I’m always afraid of messing up; naturally, I mess up, I fail all the time. This means that what encourages me to write isn’t so much the discovery or certainty of a certain relationship, of a certain truth, but rather the feeling I have of a certain kind of writing, a certain mode of operation of my writing, a certain style that will bring that distance into focus.

For example, one day in Madrid, I had been fascinated by Velázquez’s Las Meninas. I’d been looking at the painting for a long time, just like that, without thinking about talking about it someday, much less of describing it—which at the time would have seemed derisive and ridiculous. And then one day, I don’t recall how, without having looked at it since, without even having looked at a reproduction, I had this urge to write about the painting from memory, to describe what was in it. As soon as I tried to describe it, a certain coloration of language, a certain rhythm, a certain form of analysis, especially, gave me the impression, the near certainty—false, perhaps—that I had found exactly the right language by which the distance between ourselves and the classical philosophy of representation and classical ideas of order and resemblance could come into focus and be evaluated. That’s how I began to write The Order of Things. For that book I used material I had gathered in the preceding years almost at random, without knowing what I would do with it, with no certainty about the possibility of ever writing an essay. In a way it was like examining a kind of inert material, an abandoned garden of some sort, an unusable expanse, which I surveyed the way I imagine the sculptor of old, the sculptor of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, might contemplate, might touch the block of marble he didn’t yet know what to do with.

Excerpt from: Michel Foucault, Speech Begins after Death, In Conversation with Claude Bonnefoy, ed. by Philippe Artières and trans. by Robert Bononno (Minnesota: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 78-81.

Diversity is Not Enough (Harvard's Concealed Theology)

By Tenzan Eaghll

Did you catch the article that was making the rounds on Facebook last month about a new free online course on religion being offered by Harvard's Divinity School? The course seeks to improve tolerance and understanding about religion by improving religious literacy. Titled "Religious Literacy: Traditions and Scriptures," the course includes six classes on different topics and will be followed by more specific courses on Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism.

Although the course pretends to be theoretically innovative, it is actually just a repackaging of the old "seven dimensions" model established by Ninian Smart. For starters, the website states that, "The study of religion is the study of a rich and fascinating dimension of human experience that includes but goes well beyond beliefs and ritual practices."  Just like Smart, who identified religion as a unique aspect of human experience and claimed that it has various social dimensions that can be studied cross-culturally, the course designers at Harvard have provided an empirical basis for studying non-empirical phenomena. They have preserved the confessional approach to religious education in a scientific language.

The core objectives of the course are to teach learners that (1) religions are internally diverse, (2) how they evolve and change through time, and (3) how religions are embedded in all dimensions of human experience. It is important to note how they never actually interrogate the meaning of  "religion, " but merely pass the buck, so to speak, and suggest that religion is produced by a series of dimensions that are defined as religious. Here is the YouTube advertisement for the course:

           

                                          

                                   

Notice how they simultaneously suggest that religions do not function in isolation from their political, economic, and cultural contexts,  yet still claim that it is impossible to understand a culture without considering its religious dimensions? This classic phenomenological move attempts to define religion by mundane acts like belief and ritual practice, while simultaneously isolating something that goes well beyond them. 

Of course, by incorporating the social and material elements into their definition of religion, courses like this are certainly an improvement upon a purely theological analysis of the subject, but by failing to submit the category itself to analysis they continue to present religion as sui generis. After all, if "religion and culture" are inseparable, how are they able to refer to religion as something unique that exceeds the limits of human practice?

I would suggest that this attempt to contextualize religion while also preserving its unique qualities is a value laden approach to the subject that does not help us to the understand the complexity of the world we live in, but merely functions as a theological tool to separate religion from other aspects of culture. In the vein of Smart, what the course designers at Harvard seek to create is a "federalism of tolerance" by concealing a theological agenda in a secular guise. The idea that religion is a unique phenomenon distinct from other aspects of culture, such as music or philosophy, is a theological claim that prioritizes religious experience. Simply diversifying the forms of religion and its plurality in history does not correct the misunderstanding about religion. Diversity is not enough. 

Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes

*This post originally appeared in Jeff Noonan: Interventions and Evocations

By Jeff Noonan

1. Teaching at the university level is not a practice of communicating or transferring information but awakening in students a desire to think by revealing to them the questionability of things. The desire to think is awakened in students if the teacher is able to reveal the importance of the discipline as a way of exposing to question established “solutions” to fundamental problems of human experience, thought, activity, relationship, and organization. Teaching does not instruct or transmit information, it embodies and exemplifies the commitment to thinking.

2. True teaching is thus a practice, a performance of cognitive freedom which awakens in students a sense of their own cognitive freedom. Both are rooted in the most remarkable power of the brain: not to simulate, not to sense, not to tabulate, not to infer, but to co-constitute the objective world of which it is an active part. In thinking we do not just passively register the world, we transform it by making it the object of thought, i.e, an object that can be questioned and changed.  To think is thus to cancel the alien objectivity of the world and to become a subject, an active force helping to shape the order of things.

3. All successful teaching therefore results in students who love to think and never stop thinking for the rest of their lives. This result is very different from mastering a certain body of knowledge or learning to apply certain rules to well-defined situations. To love to think is identical to feel and be moved by the need to question: the given structure of knowledge in the discipline, its application to the problem-domain of human life that the discipline ranges over, the overarching structures of human social life within which the discipline or subject matter has its place, and the overall problems of life as a mortal, finite being. To love to think means to remain alive to the questionability of things in all these domains.

4. Thus, the person who loves to think is critically minded. The critically minded person is not an undisciplined skeptic, but one who can detect contradictions between principle and practice, and between principles and the values to which they purportedly lead as means. Critical thinking is not the ability to solve problems within the established parameters of social, economic, political, aesthetic, and intellectual-scientific life. Change is impossible if all that people can do is apply the given rules mindlessly. If the problem lies with the established rules (and fundamental problems in any field always concern the established rules), then confining critical thinking to “problem solving” always serves the status quo (i.e., repeats the cause of the problem as the solution).

5. Every class in which the love of thinking is cultivated must be a class in which the interaction between teacher and students lives through the collective effort to open to question a purportedly settled issue, to see how these solutions came to be, what alternatives they excluded, and what alternatives might be better (as well as what constitutes a “better” solution).  Of course, learning to love to think is always developed in relation to a specific subject-matter and definite methodologies. However, these elements of learning are always means to the real end: awakening and cultivating the love of thinking. Learning outcomes confuse the ends (thinking) with the means (content and skills) and set out to measure how well the students are mastering the content and the methods.

6. Learning outcomes are justified as proof of a new concern within the university with the quality of teaching and student learning. In reality, they are part of a conservative drift in higher education towards skill-programming and away from cultivation of cognitive freedom and love of thinking.  Ironically, the passive, consumeristic attitude that learning outcomes encourage in students works against students becoming motivated to learn even the skills and the information that the learning outcomes prioritize.

7. While they are often sold to faculty as means to improve teaching and better serve the interests of students, what they in fact achieve is a narrowing of the scope and aims of classroom interaction to skilling and information transfer. (See further, Furedi, Frank. (2012). “The Unhappiness Principle,” Times Literary Supplement, November 29th, 2012; Stefan Collini, Who Are the Spongers Now? London Review of Books, Vol. 38, No.2, January 21, 2016). Skills and information acquisition (that which the learning outcomes try to specify and enforce) are not, however, ends, but only means of opening up the discipline (and the world) to question. Nothing will kill student engagement faster than drilling them on information or skills. The really valuable learning happens when the dialectic of question and answer, problem, provisional solution, and then deeper problem excites students sufficiently that they start to want to follow the emergent thread of ideas wherever it leads, because they start to feel themselves actively contributing to that direction.

8. As metrics, they are either redundant (doing nothing but state the obvious, i.e., that a class on Greek philosophy will cover Greek philosophy, and a class that involves essay writing will enable students to learn how to write essays), or useless (if what they aim to measure is something like love of thinking, which is an inner disposition and not subject to quantitative measure). In their belief that only that which measurable is real, defenders of learning outcomes show themselves to be another example of a society-wide cognitive derangement that confuses the value of practices and relationships and activities with their measurable aspects (the “externalist fallacy,” John McMurtry, “What Is Good, What is Bad, The Value of All Values Across Time, Places, and Theories,” Philosophy and World Problems, Volume 1, EOLSS Publishers, 2011, p. 269).

9. That which can be measured is “customer satisfaction.” Even if they are never explicitly justified in these terms, it is clear that when thought within the context of society-wide changes to public institutions and attacks on public sector workers (which include professors in Canada), learning outcomes presuppose and reinforce a consumeristic attitude towards education. They present the purpose of pursuing a course of study as the purchase of a defined set of skills and circumscribed body of information which can then be used as a marketing pitch to future employers. Learning outcomes submerge the love of thinking in bureaucratic objectification of the learner as a customer, a passive recipient of closed and pre-packaged material.

 10. Hence, there is no clear pedagogical value to learning outcomes. If there is no pedagogical value how are we to understand the current fad? As part of the attack on the professional autonomy of professors because it constitutes a barrier to the imposition of market discipline on universities. (See, for example, Jonker, Linda, and Hicks, Martin. (2014). Teaching Loads and Research Outputs of Ontario University Faculty Members: Implications for Productivity and Differentiation. Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario;  Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services (2012). “Post-secondary Education,” Deem, Rosemary, Hilyard, Sam, Reed, Mike. (2007). Knowledge, Higher Education, and the New Mangerialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Bruneau, William. (2000). “Shall We Perform or Shall We Be Free? The Corporate Campus: Commercialization and the Dangers To Canada’s Colleges and Universities. James L. Turk, ed., Toronto: Lorimer; Massy, William F, and Zemsky, Robert. “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity.” If professors are allowed to define their own terms of work (legitimated by appeal to academic freedom and professional autonomy) they escape the discipline of market forces to which other workers are subjected. This allows them to extract rents in the form of higher wages, and it also constitutes a barrier to “higher productivity” (more graduates produced per unit input of academic labour). Learning outcomes are only one aspect of this broader political-economic assault on academic labour, but the motivation behind them—whatever their institutional supporters might say—cannot be understood outside of this context.

Learning Curve: Reflections on Early Career Teaching

*This post is part of a series in which professors reflect on the practical lessons they have learned in the transition from graduate school to employment.

By Sarah E. Rollens (Rhodes College)

I was fortunate to receive many opportunities to teach as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, so that when I went on the job market, I didn’t have to write my teaching statements on the basis of what I would do but rather on what I had done. In fact, I suspect that what set me apart among many other applicants for position was my diverse teaching experiences. In brief, I’ve been teaching since 2011 at four different universities and colleges; two have been public universities in the United States, one a public university in Canada, and one a private liberal arts college in the United States. I’ve guest-lectured in classes at a variety of other institutions. My research specialization is in early Christianity, but like most professors, I’ve also taught more general courses such as Judaism, Christianity, & Islam and Introduction to Religious Studies. My observations about early career teaching for this blog post are thus drawn from a range of students, courses, administrative settings, and campus climates.

My first observation after these few years is that students really want a professor who is an expert in their field. It’s 2016; my students know how to use Wikipedia if they want to get the basics on a topic. What they want in a professor is someone who is trained to assess the information they encounter in such sources and who can help them understand where it comes from. They want, for instance, someone to help them evaluate the recent blog post about religion that they read on CNN. They want someone who can take one look at a website they have been consulting and observe, “This is run by an evangelical group which explains why they evince beliefs X, Y, and Z.” They want someone who, when asked where the New Testament comes from, will tell them immediately that the earliest list of the 27 canonical books comes from a guy called Athanasius in the year 367 C.E. They want you for your expertise. This is often a challenge to remember, because the job market will try to generalize you. Most institutions are hiring you not to teach the one highly specialized course that fits perfectly with your dissertation topic, but also to teach introductory classes in a broader core humanities curriculum. These are crucially important courses to have, of course, but students and their parents are hoping for experts and for the immediacy of expert knowledge in the classroom.

We all acknowledge that humanities professors should instill oft-lauded “critical thinking” in our students. My sense from job interviews is that people on search committees hear this platitude all the time—“I encourage critical thinking in my classes”—and they’d rather hear what you’re really going to do in order to help students acquire these skills. This is certainly one of my goals when teaching students to read ancient texts in my courses. I encourage them to ask whose perspective the text is framed from, why such a text might be written, whom it benefits, etc. But students also need the specialized historical, sociological, political, and other data to make for the strongest analysis. Let me illustrate. Consider the Book of Daniel. When I encourage my students to “think critically” about such a text, we ask above all about its presentation: what argument is the text making? Whose interests are served by such a text? What is the purpose of such a text?In theory, students can do this kind of analysis in an intellectual vacuum, and it’s probably a valuable exercise to muse about such nebulous questions. But in reality, the best teachers are going to be those who provide them with the data to make solid conclusions with their critical thinking skills. In this case, the Book of Daniel can be made sense of by realizing that it was clearly written under the rule of Greek kings who succeeded Alexander the Great and notably not during the Babylonian Exile when it claims to have been penned. As many will know, you can come to this conclusion about the Book of Daniel if you have a strong background in ancient Near Eastern history. Armed with that, students are now in a position to contribute to the production and assessment of knowledge, not just “ask questions” à la Glenn Beck or some other talking head. This ensures that “critical thinking” doesn’t just operate in an ill-defined space but rather can be focused and honed in a constructive way. Upon reflection, it is thus our expertise that makes the classroom a disciplined place.

Expertise in our areas of study makes it so that when a job advertisement is posted for someone in, for instance, Christian Origins, any random person with reasonable analytical skills is not able to get an interview. Many people already have trouble imagining Religious Studies scholars as specialists—as evidenced by some of my colleagues who have served on search committees and have been the recipients of applications by interested lay people who think they would like to take a stab at teaching a religion course. So, while “critical thinking” is a great skill for us to have and for us to impart to our students, it is not an end in and of itself. It is a skill set that we cultivate and apply to our area of expertise—which, for most of us, requires historical background, critical theory, language study, and the like.

But our expertise in content should not dominate the classroom, which brings me to my second realization about early career teaching: students are not always bringing the technical skills to our classes that we might have hoped—through no fault of their own. We thus have to pick up the slack in many of our courses, even though we are theoretically only responsible for covering a certain content area. One of the best tactics that I’ve incorporated into my courses this year are narrowly focused assignments to help develop certain technical writing skills. That is, I structure my courses to build in skills, not just content. For instance, in my Ancient Christian Gospels course, I’ve set assigned four days to do writing workshops. The students range from freshmen to seniors; some are great at writing, while some still need work. I’ve decided that I can sacrifice a few days of content to focus on such tasks as how to summarize ancient texts, how to use ancient texts for an argument, and how to compare ancient texts with respect to a wider analytical theme. These routine skills that I and others in my field take for granted are completely foreign for some students, and I think it’s important to take the time to explain how to approach such tasks in the most basic way. For those familiar with it, it’s old hat and amounts to an easy A. For those unfamiliar, it might be one of the only focused times to develop such skills in their college experience.

Arguably, the most important thing I’ve learned is that the ethos of the college or university that you’re teaching in determines what you can do in the classroom, and this is mostly out of your control. For instance, I encountered some exceptionally bright students at the University of Toronto, yet they were among ~85,000 other undergraduates who found their ways into Religious Studies courses. I’d have about 40 students in each class, and those who showed up were routinely prepared and interested. I didn’t have an attendance policy, because my students are adults who are juggling work, other courses, sometimes families—and their Religious Studies course might not be their top priority. That’s fine. But it means that I couldn’t count on having all 40 people at each class, which determined how I covered the material and engaged with students. Now at Rhodes College (a private, residential liberal arts college), the ethos is very different. My courses are capped at 18 students. I can count on almost all students attending classes regularly and being prepared (and when they’re absent, they frequently send detailed and apologetic emails explaining their absence). Group work—which I rarely did before coming to Rhodes—is always productive in the classroom. One campus climate is not necessarily better than the other. There’s something to be said for an in-depth lecture that’s chock full of information and given by a specialist at a research-intensive university, but there’s also value in smaller, face-to-face, organic exploration of the material. Some of the best advice for folks on the job market is thus to really understand the differences among various institutions to which they apply and know how to adapt teaching styles appropriately.

Finally, what I’ve also discovered is that my students are really interesting young people, especially when they want to be at college and they are truly excited to learn (as opposed to being present to get this or that credential to get a good job one day). They do cool stuff and have innovative ideas—whether they know it or not. This has encouraged me to have a more dynamic relationship with my students. Instead of having a rigid sense of all the material that I have to cover every semester, I tweak my classes based on how students—whose opinions I greatly respect—react. I ask them which topics have made the most (or the least) sense to them and what sorts of assessments they find the most useful. Granted, I don’t let them run the show, but because they are, on the whole, dedicated and insightful people, their feedback goes a long way in helping me develop my courses and be a more effective teacher.

Interview with the Author: Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power

                                                       Link to book excerpt

Interview with Donovan Schaefer


What is the main argument in this book?

There’s an implicit bias in the humanities toward seeing human beings as primarily driven by the grid of their thoughts. My suggestion is that we need to replace this with a more interactionist picture that sees thoughts as embedded in our bodies. And more specifically, we need to think of bodies as guided by networks of affect as the sources of actions, thoughts, and values. The project of the book is to bring Michel Foucault’s “analytics of power” into direct conversation with affect theory, showing how the landscape of affects is one and the same as the landscape of power. This is what I call the animality of affect—the way that we’re moved by forces that precede language.

I was at a seminar a few months ago where we started talking about the category of charisma and, through the mystical alchemy of academic conversations, got onto the subject of the charisma of babies. We were discussing why it is that people find infants so fascinating and compelling. One of the participants said “People love babies because they represent the future.” That’s what the book pushes back on. Concepts are part of the tissue of forces that produce our actions, beliefs, and desires, but they aren’t fundamental. Rather a grid of cognitively arranged conceptual propositions, the pushes and pulls of power are more animal, shaped by affects before ideas.

What motivated your work?

I was reading a lot of affect theory and trying to find threads that would tie it together. I was also reading evolutionary theory and working on new approaches to thinking about animality from within the humanities using those resources. I realized that the two projects could be knitted together around the motif of power. At the same time, I was thinking about Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin as a figure who could transform scholarship in the humanities not by simplifying it—by boiling it down to a few mathematical principles, as sociobiology tried to do—but by complexifying it. For Grosz, this is consonant with the project of thinking past the human exceptionalism that structures the classical humanities. Human exceptionalism is a holdover from a pre-Darwinian, Enlightenment understanding of the world that leads to misguided models of subjectivity. While leaving room for a thick description of human difference, one of the arguments of the book is that affect theory is a way of locating human bodies on a Darwinian continuum of animal species. It then explores the implications of this positioning for religious studies and cultural studies.

What theory or theorists inform your method and methodology?

Foucault and Donna Haraway are the major background figures on the pure theory side, and J.Z. Smith, Manuel Vásquez, and Aaron S. Gross on the religion side, but the book itself is mostly about telling the story of affect theory in a new way. Within affect theory there’s a divide between two (maybe more) perspectives, which draw on some of the same conceptual resources but push them in different directions. One of the branches is very heavily influenced by Deleuze and tends to have a lot of currency in media theory and poststructuralist philosophy. The other is what Sara Ahmed calls “feminist cultural studies of affect” and is more prominent in postcolonial, queer, and feminist scholarship. 

In the book I relabel them the Deleuzian and phenomenological branches. The Deleuzian branch tends to see affect as a sort of principle of non-structure that is the condition of possibility of experience, but not something you can actually “feel.” The phenomenological branch is more comfortable with the idea that affects have a “shape”—what Eugenie Brinkema would call the “forms of the affects”—and that they enter into the stream of experience. I think that they both have insights to offer the conversation, but the book leans toward the conclusion that to map power in its specificity, we need to move beyond the pure Deleuzian approach and recognize that affects shape bodies in different ways at different times and places. So this brings the book closer to theorists like Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Ann Cvetkovich, José Muñoz, Kathleen Stewart, Sharon Holland, Lauren Berlant, and Jonathan Flatley.

How might the book be used or how has it been used in a classroom?

From what I’ve heard so far, it’s being used in three main settings: in cultural studies classrooms, in theory and method in the study of religion classrooms, and in animal studies classrooms. Those lines reflect the conversations the book sets out to interact with. I think the first chapter is a good, versatile introduction to affect theory and the analytics of power, and the rest of the book develops some themes within affect theory by drawing out three analytical tools—intransigence, compulsion, and accident. At the same time, it makes an intervention in religious studies, pushing past the linguistic turn and trying to reconsider strands of the RS genealogy in the light of affect theory and the analytics of power. Finally, it adds to a conversation happening right now in animal studies that has been advanced by scholars like Kari Weil, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Cary Wolfe, which is to explore how an attention to animals compels us to reconsider the framework of the humanities.

Your book has a chapter on pedagogy, a sort of meta-reflection for a class you taught on film. Can you offer any additional thoughts on that chapter? How does it contribute to the book?

Sure. That chapter is about my Religion, Emotion, and Global Cinema class that I taught at Haverford College during my postdoc there, and about the reading of the film Jesus Camp that emerged out of the class discussions. In thinking pedagogy through affect theory, it follows a trail blazed by scholars like Gayatri Spivak, Gail Hamner, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Megan Watkins. In the context of this book, I’m arguing that pedagogy can be understood as a circulation of affects. This is true in the classroom, where information exchange needs to be set against the backdrop of the system of affects that configures how that information resonates with bodies. Simply put, it’s the reason why we have teachers rather than just textbooks. It’s the Good Will Hunting question: Why not just get a library card? It’s because the teacher’s body, as a channel for the affects flowing around words and concepts, makes learning much, much easier for bodies. Teachers curate a field of information by organizing it affectively, training students in what’s interesting and what’s boring, how to sequence ideas for impact, how to probe their own uncertainties and confusions, and how to combine ideas to produce novelty. Because pedagogy shapes subjectivity at levels that exceed the strictly cognitive, I argue, we need to think of it as challenging the binary of public reason and private feelings.

How do you think students would most benefit from your book?

By using it as a jumping-off point for exploring ways to think about power differently. There’s a growing sense in the academic humanities that we need to move beyond the linguistic turn and describe power as something that always necessarily interlaces with bodies and affects rather than just words and minds. But I’d also say that it’s more than an academic exercise. Looking past the conventional wisdom that human beings are driven by grids of reason (or assuming that what gets called “reason” is always a good thing), attuning yourself to the forces that actually move us, has implications for media, journalism, activism, culture, religion, politics, or whatever else you’re doing where you need to understand humans in all their complexity.

Many thanks for sitting down with Practicum for this interview!

Interview with the Author: Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work

Interview with Sandi Nenga 


What is the main argument in this book?

Working in Class is an interdisciplinary edited volume of essays by cutting-edge scholars of social class.  We asked the authors to use their scholarly expertise to make sense of one aspect of their work in the academy—either scholarship, teaching or academic working conditions.  The overarching argument that connects all 13 essays is that social class shapes every aspect of colleges and universities today, and that we can draw upon our scholarly expertise to identify, resist and disrupt the subtle mechanisms reproducing social class inequalities in the academy.

What motivated your work?

I like to think of Working in Class as the intellectual grandchild of Ryan and Sackrey’s (1984) edited volume, Strangers in Paradise.  Ryan and Sackrey’s collection of autobiographical essays written by working-class academics made the workings of social class in the academy visible.  A handful of other autobiographical collections followed, including Tokarczyk and Fay’s 1993 Working-Class Women in the Academy:  Laborers in the Knowledge Factory, and Dews and Law’s 1995 This Fine Place So Far From Home:  Voices of Academics from the Working Class. The autobiographical essay was an incredibly important and useful way for scholars to generate analytical insights about social class, especially in academic disciplines with a paucity of research on social class.  By 2013, when Allison Hurst and I started this project, there were a growing number of  scholars using conventional methods to investigate social class and it seemed as if we could go beyond using only autobiography as a way to generate new insights about social class in the academy.  We asked the contributors to Working in Class to place their individual class biographies, their autobiographical experiences of working in higher education, and the research literature on social class into conversation.

What theory or theorists inform your method and methodology?

Many of the contributors in Working in Class draw upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theorizing about the habitus and cultural capital.  The fact that so many of our contributors draw upon Bourdieu is, I think, a testament to how powerfully his ideas reveal the mechanisms by which social class is reproduced.  I would also argue that the goal of our project—to place the individual’s experiences in the academy within a broader context—pays homage both to C. Wright Mills’ idea of the sociological imagination and the feminist idea that “the personal is political.”

How might the book be used or how has it been used in a classroom?

Working in Class could be used by professors who want to add social class to discussions of diversity and try to highlight the ways that people from different class backgrounds might experience the shared space of the university in different ways.  Essays from Working in Class could also be used as exemplars of how to apply Bourdieuian theory.  Finally, professors who want to encourage their students to try blending autobiographical writing with a literature review and/or analytical writing might find the essays in Working in Class to be useful examples of interdisciplinary writing.

How do you think students would most benefit from your book?

I write in the book that “…as so often happens, messages about social class are buried in the substrata of a conversation.  Statements about social class seem to erupt from the ground up in vague, emotionally encrypted statements…”  Social class dynamics are often difficult to identify because we rarely link the word “social class” to  miscommunications, microaggressions, and institutionalized systems of privilege and oppression.  Reading Working in Class can help students to recognize, name and hopefully resist the reproduction of social class inequalities.

Many thanks for sitting down with Practicum for this interview!

Ask the Experts: How do you Encourage Students to Read?

*The following post is part of a series in which we ask experts for pedagogical tips on specific issues. 

This week we asked our contributors the following question: How do you get students to read? What assignments or incentives do you use to garner enthusiasm? What means of enforcing or grading are involved? How much additional labor does your system incur for you as Instructor?


Pat McCullough: I do a 200-400 word weekly response. I've experimented with the grading. I tried having them grade each other with a detailed rubric, where they would do three peer reviews each week (we use PeerMark through TurnItIn). There were too many problems to make that the official grade. Not all students would complete the peer reviews and therefore not all students would receive the same number of peer scores to average out and there were too many radically different grades to deal with. However, the peer reviews did accomplish two things: (1) it made the students better writers of their own responses and (2) it covered a fair amount of the feedback I would have given. So, I still do the peer reviews and have them suggest a score, but I ultimately decide the official score. I offer more feedback early on and less later. Honestly, the feedback is time consuming and wouldn't work with larger classes. But it prepares students for class discussions and it builds writing and analytical skills over time and not just on one big project at the end. I'm always looking for creative ways to adapt assignments, so I'm looking forward to seeing others' ideas.

Sean McCloud: Example from one of my syllabi: Reading Response Papers: To encourage you to read actively, to read critically, and to prepare for class discussions, you are required to submit 12 reading response papers. These papers must be typed and approximately 250 words (that’s about one page in 12 point font). The papers are due in class on the day the reading is assigned. Each paper must 1) have a title, 2) briefly quote or summarize a passage in one assigned reading for the day, and 3) engage the ideas of the text in some direct and thoughtful way. There are 14 meetings in which you can submit a response.


Each paper is worth 2 points, and turning in all 12 garners you an extra point for a total of 25. You will receive either a checkmark (acceptable) or a minus (unacceptable) for each paper you turn in. A checkmark means that you handed one in on time and followed the guidelines above. A minus means that you did not. The papers are not graded on the persuasiveness of your argument. You are in complete control of how well you do in this part of the course. NO LATE RESPONSE PAPERS... And we always discuss the readings at length in class.

Leslie Dorrough Smith:  Lower level classes: Reading journals, where one entry is logged for each reading. Students ID thesis statement, argument/logic, and any supporting details. I gather these unannounced and then count the articles (quick!) and spot check for the components I just mentioned.

Upper division classes: weekly online quizzes that heavily engage concepts from the readings and then ask some sort of application question. It's open book (=online, off campus), but if they haven't read it, they'll be relatively clueless in answering.


Craig Martin: In my classes I require students to submit a 1-2 page summary of the main points in the reading for every reading assignment. When assigning final grades I drop about a fifth of them, so they have some wiggle room (and that's in the syllabus so they know they'll get a few breaks). I make it clear that it's not a response piece or a reflection piece; I don't want evaluation or moralizing, just a summary that demonstrates they read the whole assignment and have at least a rudimentary understanding of it. (I should note that they can bring evaluations of the readings to the class discussion, but that evaluation is completely beside the point for the purpose of the assignment, which is to demonstrate comprehension.) Grading them is time consuming, since I have a 4/4 load, and typically receive 2 summaries a week from about 50 or 60 students. However, once my reputation for requiring these assignments was established on campus, the laziest population of students self-select out of my courses; that's an indirect benefit to me as an instructor that's accrued over time. However, since I tend to assign difficult texts, I get an inordinate amount of patchwriting, which is an ongoing battle.

Learning Curve: The Confidence Game

*This post is part of a series in which professors reflect on the practical lessons they have learned in the transition from graduate school to employment.

By Richard Newton

I have yet to see a job posting that indicates “no teaching experience necessary.” Stranger things have found their way into the guild’s employment pages, but academic employers are reticent to say they will accept someone with no teaching experience.

This is a rather ingenuous practice as there was a time when every hire once lacked teaching experience. There was a time when that CV line was not. Perhaps as your career advances, you begin to think that your pedagogical prowess came from nowhere. That same“rememory” would then enable you to expect the same of the up and coming teachers who—if hired—would inevitably replace you. Robyn Faith Walsh put it nicely. “If I have observed one thing during the past 18 years, it is that the goalposts for the traditional path to becoming a professor are constantly changing.” It seems worth asking whether employers rarely would hire their former selves.

Meritocracy is neither what it used to be nor something that ever was. With the increased emphasis on professional development for college educators, I’ve wondered whether the ardent search for best practices has bequeathed a bourgeois academic smugness. This assessment culture—designed to help teachers improve—may have the secondary consequence of naming effectiveness almost solely in negative terms, like we are creating a world where the new teacher is never good enough, just not as bad as expected. It’s no wonder then that academic success is typically seen as acquiring a position where how bad of a teacher you are no longer matters.

There’s a confidence game afoot where graduate students are getting played. 

There are master classes on this at the school of hardknocks. If you’re working multiple jobs to get the food, shelter, and clothing you need so you can take that degree, then I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. And you already understand that there’s a lot of fine print that would follow any suggestion I have regarding the so-called transition from graduate school to employment. All I can offer is a teaching that has been reinforced by my time on the tenure-track. So here it goes: You, too, can play a confidence game by acting the professional part now.

Professional Asceticism

Confidence games are an ascetic practice. You have to know that there’s a sacrifice involved. The con artist is committed to making the sacrifice worthwhile. When I was working (and crying) on my dissertation, I stumbled upon some remarks by Ira Glass, host of the successful This American Life radio program.In the video he revisits his early, painful attempts at telling human interest stories. Now a master storyteller, Glass pleads for artists to hold fast and just produce. Get all of the flawed drafts and ineffective lessons out of the way so that you can embrace the good that you trust will come of it.  File this under “keep on keepin’ on.”

Embrace Your Skills

Confidence games are also a matter of skill. There comes a moment in graduate school where you look around and realize that you don’t’ get stickers for being good at school anymore. Similarly, being smart isn’t enough to advance in or even toward the workplace.  Your employment culture expects you to further their scholarly mission, so the best practices are the ones where you get the most return for your investment. Skill is the knowledge to capitalize on that dynamic. I’m inspired here by actress JadaPinkett Smith’s advice for breaking into any industry.

The trick is discerning the most profitable investment. And what I started realizing in my classroom is that my skills look a lot like my interests. I like having fruitful conversations about religion, culture, and teaching. Beyond articulating my own ideas, I want to learn with others interested in those matters. And damn if I don’t have fun doing so online. It was a no brainer then to start a blog in 2006. Sowingtheseed.org became a digital representation of those interests, and I’ve tried to nurture it from an online master’s research project on the Parable of the Sower to my web portfolio during my PhD years.

Rather than dismissing it as a one-time student’s (over)eagerness, I’ve reclaimed it as a venue for my students to do what I had wanted to do from the get go— exchanging with professional scholars. I won’t claim that I’m great at web design and critical writing pedagogy. But it’s something I work toward because it works for me.  Find what is working for you and ramp it up. We haven’t seen anything yet because your best is yet to come.

Be Social

Similarly, remember that a confidence game is a social activity.  Academics in our field are tutored in the art of independent scholarship. There’s something to be said about individualism but efficiency is rarely one of them. I’ve found that if you frame your work as something for others to believe in, then possibilities of your contributions increase in turn. Without the support of student services at my institution, I, as a junior faculty member, would never have been able to bring in an award-winning writer-historian,host an innovative filmmaker, or launch a classroom-based research project—all this year. Dream the big dreams with the librarians, center directors, deans, and administrators at your school.

From Failure to Happy

My last gleaning has to do with happiness. Be confident in your sense of frustration because class time is too short to do anything otherwise. I’ll admit there’s a level of double-talk between this and my first point. The difference I’m at peace with is in distinguishing between labor and toil. Labor’s like the pivotal lecture that can’t be made fun. Toil is drudgery with no pay off in sight. I get this cerebrally, but I have to work through a lot of baggage to admit that a lesson has failed. But I’ve not once regretted stopping a class and making a course correction. Confidence can even make that look good.

Put simply: There’s no substitution for doing you.  Your honest worst is better than your faking someone else’s best. And the tenure-track is a place where you’ll need to remind yourself of this and other basics.

Richard Newton is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College. He studies scriptures in religion and culture, curates Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations on Religion, Culture, and Teaching; and hosts the podcast, Broadcast Seeding: Future food for Thought.

Book of the Week: Religion and Hip Hop

*This post is part of a series which highlights different ways that seminal and newly published texts can be used to explore religion in the classroom.

By Tenzan Eaghll

Teaching doesn't just happen in the classroom. Critical theory is not just the domain of academics. Sometimes a dance performance at the Superbowl can be a lesson in Black history and race relations in America, and sometimes a "soul filled" rap performance at the Grammy's can be political statement.  As Monica Miller points out in Religion and Hip Hop, sometimes cultural critique takes place in Hip-Hop.  

Miller's book was published in 2012, and applies postmodern and critical theory to expose how Hip Hop has been examined by religious and theological scholars. She argues for a new materialist approach to the subject that doesn't essentialize religion as an internal or private space of belief. More importantly, however, she looks at how Hip Hop artists use religious themes and ideas to achieve ulterior means and effects. Miller doesn't begin her analysis with a definition of religion and then proceed to find evidence for it in Hip Hop, but focuses on how religion is presented, both by scholars and artists.

What makes Religion and Hip Hop so topical is that in the last two weeks we have seen powerful performances by leading artists like Beyonce, Kanye West, Chance the Rapper, and Kendrick Lamar. These performances make Miller's book exceptionally relevant because they offer us a pedagogical opportunity to show students how religion and politics are imagined and contested in popular culture.

On the surface, Beyoncé's performance at the Superbowl was like many that proceeded it: she wore tight sexy clothing and danced in rhythmic formation. But her use of outfits reminiscent of the Black Panthers and the fact her dancers formed an X―an homage to the American Muslim minister Malcom X―caused both outrage and praise.  Various conservatives pundits lambasted her performance as "racist," while more liberal fans called it a powerful feminist statement about black power. However, as Miller suggests when analyzing Nas's 2008 CD, "Nigger," this sort of politically subversive material is nothing new. Hip Hop artists often use their music to create space for political promise and cultural critique (44). If you missed it, here is a portion of Beyoncé's show:

                                                  

Undoubtedly, there are limits to the impact these forms of soft politics have, as they often carry the weight of entertainment rather than revolution, and some have even critiqued Beyoncé's performance as capitalism masquerading as radical change, but regardless of your view on the matter these events offer a particularly useful pedagogical opportunity to discuss how religion and politics are put to work by Hip Hop artists.

Kendrick Lamar's presence at the Grammy's this year takes this form of soft politics to a whole new level. His performance has thus far been praised as one of the greatest in the history of the award show, and has evaded much of the criticism slung at Beyoncé. In reference to the mass incarceration of blacks and the history of slavery and oppression in America, Lamar walked out on stage in chains in a prison setting. In a performance that blurred the lines between poetry and rap, Lamar talked about hypocrisy, God, and redemption, and ended his show with a black and white picture of Africa and the words Compton written on it―another allusion to oppression and slavery.  Click here for this must see performance.

Obviously, Miller's book doesn't analyze these recent Hip Hop performances, but I mention them here in light of her book because the work provides a wonderful way to engage students in a theoretical debate about contemporary issues.  So much of religious studies involves a discussion of dead white dudes, but black popular culture is critically engaged in the definition and contestation of religion, and it provides a relevant way to discuss difficult theoretical material. In her discussions on 50 Cent, KRS One, the RZA, Cornel West, Black Churches, and Krumping, Miller explores what the uses of religion seek to "accomplish, authenticate, and authorize in the cultural activity of Hip-Hop" (69).

Learning Curve: Bienvenido a Miami

*This post is part of a new series in which professors reflect on the practical lessons they have learned in the transition from graduate school to employment.

By Robyn Faith Walsh

Once, while working for an emeritus professor at Harvard Divinity School, I unearthed a phone directory from the 1960s. It was very Mad Men. At first, it was a delight to thumb through the photos and see what many of the famous names in the field looked like back when they were masters and doctoral students. Then, after a few pages, I noticed that next to each phone number was a different woman’s name. The only exception to this pattern was the entry for the solecoed (now a well-known scholar at Princeton, I’m happy to say). It clicked: these were the names of the students’ wives. After all, you need to know how to greet the woman taking your classmate’s calls. Like I said, very Mad Men.

I entered college in 1998, and you could argue I never really left. While the golden age of the bespectacled and be-tweeded, gentleman scholar had more or less passed by the time I entered the fray, it wasn’t completely over. Many of my (male) professors, now near retirement, continued to smoke tobacco pipes in their offices, serve alcohol during seminars, and entertain students at their homes where their wives would dutifully serve us. In some pockets of the field, the vestiges of this way of life persist, but it is increasingly rare. Academia is far more diverse and also more corporate than in generations past. The idea of the (mostly male) scholar who is able to “have it all” is also increasingly, even comically, off-the-mark. If I have observed one thing during the past 18 years, it is that the goalposts for the traditional path to becoming a professor are constantly changing. Further, the expectations of what a professor’s life should look like are no longer stable. Forget having a partner at home to answer your phone calls and raise your kids while you research, write, and teach. Some of us would settle for any semblance of office space or health benefits.

Last week, a related—and seemingly casual—conversation between academics on Twitter and Facebook erupted into a discussion eminently hashtag- and meme-worthy. It began with an exchange of Acknowledgements pages from a handful of monographs. The authors cited seemed blithely unaware of the fact that their expressions of gratitude (particularly of men to their housewives) betrayed levels of social privilege no longer representative of the academic community at large. Sharing screen captures and quotes from these publications evoked a number of laughs, but it was humor tinged with a certain irony. As a groundswell of examples and comments grew online, some tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct faculty began writing mock author acknowledgements/biographies intended to be more representative of today’s life in academia.

With these tweets there is little evidence of helpful housewives. Others openly discussed the troubling disparities between tenure-track and adjunct faculty in terms of benefits and other resources. If I still lived in New England, I know I’d be thanking Reynold’s Wrap and duct tape for helping me plug some of the drafts in the moldy Victorian basement (I’m sorry, “garden apartment”) I called home for years. Soon, the phenomenon made news on Inside Higher Ed and opened up a new discussion about whether such accounts were indeed representative: are they too negative? what are reasonable expectations for early career scholars entering the field?

I am currently in the middle of my second year in a tenure-track position at the University of Miami. Before coming to Miami, I taught as an adjunct instructor in Religious Studies and Classics for about three years at The College of the Holy Cross and Wheaton College in Norton, MA. I accepted my first adjunct position before I had even submitted my prospectus. At the time, I had observed that those who had taught their own courses (“controlled their own classroom”) were often the ones getting tenure-track jobs. My doctoral institution didn’t offer that option for Religious Studies students; it only offered assistantships. I enrolled in a teaching certificate program, and began developing my own syllabi. I was forced to forfeit my graduate stipend (if I wasn’t a teaching assistant for them, the institution wasn’t willing to support me), and I began cobbling together instructor work. At one point I was teaching a 5-3 and commuting about four hours a day, five days a week in order to make ends meet. It took me a bit longer to finish my Ph.D. than my cohort, but I think the gamble paid off. By the time I decided to test the market, I had developed a strong track record in pedagogy and demonstrated that I knew how to get research done while teaching full-time. I was hired ABD roughly a month after my initial interviews at SBL/AAR.

The mini biography I offer above informs my first piece of advice about the field/market: trust your own critical thinking. No one told me to give up my stipend and start teaching. In fact, I was often advised to do the opposite in order to “finish in five years.” But, I could see the market had changed and that the traditional advice seemed outmoded. I’ll admit that it isn’t feasible for everyone to do what I did, especially those with families or other concerns. I had to live without benefits and below the poverty level for quite some time. I’m still trying to pay down my credit card debt. I had to ask my family for help financially. One of my dissertation advisors even let me live in his house while he was out of the country so I could save money and shorten my commute. Additionally, at the time, I was only responsible for feeding myself and my little dog (although, to be fair, she could have eaten her weight in chicken wings daily if I let her). But, I understood that I shouldn’t blindly accept the conventional process and that I needed to be bold enough to chart my own path. Whether it is when you start teaching/pedagogical training or even who you select to be on your dissertation committee (to whatever extent you can control that process), don’t be afraid to assert yourself if you judge it will better your circumstances in the long term.

Related to this, just say no. As you move along in your career, you will be asked to participate in a variety of professional activities and to contribute to a number of projects. At first, this is exhilarating. But, what helps you at the start of your career may not help you down the road. Certainly, in the beginning, you need to build your CV. If you have the time, feel free to accept offers to blog, write book reviews, compile bibliography, and contribute to encyclopedias and edited volumes. I still do (obviously!). But, these kinds of projects may not necessarily help in obtaining a permanent position or with tenure. When it comes to publishing, peer-reviewed work and your own monographs are the most prized.

If you have a tenure-track position, make sure you understand precisely what will get you tenure. Ask recently tenured faculty what it took for them to advance. Keep in mind that scholars who obtained tenure long ago will have outdated perspectives (you can no longer wait five years to publish your dissertation, for example). If your institution offers a workshop for faculty to review and discuss the expectations for tenure, attend. You may be surprised to find that the administration at your college or university holds the bar quite high, that they explicitly exclude certain kinds of publications from consideration, or that they have very specific rules for potential letter writers.

When it comes to pursuing tenure or simply functioning within a department, there is often a difference between the “rules” and reality. Do not underestimate the value of being a good citizen. If you’re an adjunct who is not obligated to participate in service, attending or helping out with departmental activities is a good way to solidify professional connections and increase your profile within the institution. If you are at a research university and your enrollment numbers and teaching evaluations shouldn’t count against you in your tenure review, that doesn’t mean you should stop promoting your courses or that you can completely disregard your students. If your teaching evaluations are abysmal, it would be wise to work on your approaches in the classroom. Not only is it always a good idea to pursue avenues for professional development, you also never know when the culture and standards of an institution might shift (e.g., teaching became much more of a factor for tenure at the University of Miami under recently retired President Donna Shalala’s regime than it had been previously). Use social awareness to help you decide which tasks and responsibilities you should investigate, accept, or reject.

While this may be somewhat controversial, I also believe that you have to recognize that there is a degree to which being a professional in this field involves a certain amount of strategic performance. Whether we are in front of a classroom, speaking to the public, or sitting in a committee meeting, there are particular ways that we have all been socialized to embody “the Academic.”I find that it’s important to understand, both, what you represent to those around you and what you project (and I do see these as different things). And I think it’s important to figure out what kind of relationship you want to have with this aspect of the job.

For example, on the subject of gender, I know my students are going to scrutinize what I wear. Gender bias is very real in our culture, and if you are a public figure in any measure, such bias is as regrettable as it is inevitable. As such, I work with it to whatever extent I can.To offer a “very Miami” case study, shortly after arriving here, I noticed that, like it or not,women tended to wear high heels as a means of expressing authority. Not being particularly interested in or adept at wearing them, I took to wearing flats to class but also carrying a pair of high heels that daily peek out of my satchel for whenever they seem necessary. My students think this is a hilarious commentary on Miami culture, and it is often an example I can reference in the classroom when we talk about gender expectations.  I agree that much of this kind of culture both in and outside of the academy needs to change. But I also think that, to some extent, you can find ways to make it a tool and, ultimately, a benefit.

I also see mentorship as an integral part of the role we play. Personally, I have found that making myself available to my students has been more rewarding than not. There is almost never enough time during class to talk in depth about all of the issues the study of religion can raise. I have also had students come to me because something we addressed in class has come up with friends or family and they want advice on how to talk to others about what they are learning. These moments can be invaluable for helping students feel a sense of ownership over their developing knowledge of our subject matters.

And beyond the classroom, the majority of our “audience” is comprised of young people entering a sometimes-difficult phase of their lives: some are away from home for the first time; maturity can be an issue; cognitively they are still prone to take risks. A wide variety of studies have demonstrated that signs of mental illness often emerge for the first time in young adults. Thankfully, our campuses usually have excellent resources and professionals to help deal with such issues. Yet, it is also the case that many students will turn to their instructors or professors first. We are hardly trained for this aspect of the job. If fielding the personal problems of your students is something with which you are not comfortable, by all means, set firm boundaries. For me, being in conversation with campus resources and assisting students in finding the proper resources to succeed personally and academically has been a real privilege.

Do they come to me because I’m a woman? Maybe. And, I have certainly learned the hard way to limit my office hours and to ignore emails after a certain hour. But, the same advice I gave at the onset of this piece about trusting your own critical thinking applies here as well. You may not understand entirely why your students come to you, but if they do, it is because you embody something that seems authoritative and maybe even “safe” to them. We have to anticipate this aspect of the job, educate ourselves about the resources at our institutions, and decide what we are able to offer.

Moreover, from my own experience, you can’t underestimate the influence a strong mentor can have on your personal and professional choices. I took every class my undergraduate Classics advisor, Nancy Evans, offered. At some point in the early going, she had me over to her house for tea. I already looked up to her, and she had such a lovely home with so many books (oh so many books!). I knew there were no guarantees, but it helped me decide to go to graduate school. Evans and others modeled for me how to be persistent and weather the expectations of this career. Allowing for that kind of relationship with your students can be an incredibly powerful pedagogical tool, and it is also one of the things that has kept me motivated in the moments when teaching seems like something of a hindrance to neglected research and writing.

Finally, realize that in many ways you are an island. When you are in graduate school, you have a surplus of mentors, peers, and friends willing to discuss your research. You have your cohort of fellow students. You have a (hopefully) captive audience among your professors, directors, readers, and advisers. But, when you begin teaching, it is more the norm that you are the only person representing your area of specialization. Those easy conversation partners are gone, and the training wheels are off. I admit that I still haven’t figured out the best way to handle this aspect of being an early career scholar. So far, I have tried to find as many conversation partners as I can among my immediate colleagues and in allied departments or local universities. I attend as many public lectures and readings as I can. With the help of a colleague in Classics, we applied for (and got) funding for an open research group. And, I keep in close contact with my graduate school friends and colleagues from my adjuncting and grad school days. When I face a challenge with my teaching, I reach out to senior colleagues within my department and at other institutions (thank you Russell McCutcheon). Facebook has also been my friend, particularly when I have a last minute question or if I need advice before class. While this is all still new to me, it seems to be a fairly effective strategy for building community and, hopefully, my career.