Notes
Teaching Public Activism in the Humanities
Jessica Holmes
Introduction to the project:
Still in its earliest stages of development, my project seeks to develop curriculum on teaching public activism in the Humanities. The immediate intended deliverables are as follows:
I will create my own syllabus for an undergraduate level course on public activism (with the intention of piloting a version of the course during the 2019-2020 school year through IWP).
What I mean by “teaching public activism”: This is not intended to be a course on how to be a good activist, but rather an inquiry into and study of activism. My seminar examines the relationship between activism and scholarship by exploring the history of contemporary public activism, the different genres and forms of activism, the deployment of social media in today’s climate, the methods of tracking public outreach and mobilization, and the types of texts that lay the groundwork for and emerge from activism. My course foregrounds three areas: 1) environmental activism 2) animal rights activism and 3) human rights activism (primarily environmental justice examples but opening up the field of study to student interests that might include Black Lives Matter, indigenous rights, disability rights, #MeToo, Occupy Wall Street and more).
I will establish an online space in which to house public activism resources and adaptable
models for teachers wanting to teach public activism (or incorporate it into their existing
courses).
Based on my own experience and my conversations with fellow instructors, faculty, and also high school teachers across the state of Washington (through UWHS), I believe teaching public activism could enliven student learning and empower classroom populations across a variety of contexts and communities. While my own focus is on environmental and animal studies and their relationship to and manifestations in public activism, my goal in developing public-facing resources and models is to share curricular and pedagogical tools, essentially initiating an accessible teaching archive that could be harnessed and adapted by other teachers to fit a variety of fields.
To organize and hold a public workshop, reading or panel that brings scholars and
activists (and activist-scholars!) together.
This third element to the project is completely hypothetical at this point, but I am envisioning a campus event that foregrounds the shared values and aspirations of scholars and activists in our local community. It could be a reading, panel or workshop, or even some hybrid of these formats. I would love to make it a collaborative class project (something students contribute to or help organize), but the budget deadline and quarter system present significant challenges in this regard. If permission could be obtained, recordings of the event could be added to the online public activism archive.
Background & Occasion:
As a critical literary scholar, with a background in creative writing and poetry, I have increasingly worried that I am operating in a kind of literary echo chamber—an academic speaking to academics, a poet writing to poets. Over the past two years, while maintaining a focus on close reading and poetry, I have shifted my critical framework to the Environmental Humanities, Animal Studies and Vegan Studies. I began to see an alignment between my non-academic passions—I spend much of my extracurricular free time advocating for animal rights in the local and online communities—and the stakes of my scholarly work. This has led me to embark on my current dissertation project (still in its early stages): “Toward A Vegan Poetics.” During the 2018-2019 academic year, I also founded the Teaching Workshop on Environment, a quarterly workshop that invites graduate instructors and faculty from multiple disciplines on-campus to come together to discuss pedagogy and the challenges of teaching in the present climate, the affective dimensions of teaching and learning about current environmental issues, and how we can meet such challenges in order to best support our students. Collaboration, interdisciplinary dialogue and affective awareness are foregrounded in my teaching philosophy at large, but teaching environmental and food-based service-learning courses in EWP and most recently Introduction to Environmental Humanities in the English Department have meant teaching increasingly public-facing and interdisciplinary “texts.” Particularly when offered space to explore the affective dimensions of classroom content, students have repeatedly expressed a desire for institutional opportunities to “do” more, to be more “active” in applying what they learn, and to discuss both public and personal accountability (and how to achieve more of it). Students–especially those who are not engaged in anything they consider to constitute “activism”–struggle with how to get involved in their community. In class, they are being asked to digest traumatic content and engage in discourses of crisis (on climate change, animal agriculture, environmental injustice, etc.), but do not feel sufficiently empowered as individuals or as a community to begin to tackle such problems. Or in cases where students do attempt to tackle problems beyond the classroom, they often approach activism with a blind optimism that fails to harness the imaginative and critical thinking skills taught in humanities programs (skills which I argue would better equip them to evolve their activism productively). Teaching public activism in the classroom presents an opportunity for students to more deeply understand and engage in their community, to harness institutional tools and resources at their disposal, and to productively combine practices of hope, resilience and empowerment with those of critical thinking and scholarly analysis.
Holding a public event as a companion to a course in public activism not only creates an occasion for activists and writers/scholars to engage in dialogue under the same roof, but it might also bring literary and/or scholarly texts to life in a way that is often lacking in English classrooms specifically. Of course there are many exceptions, but English is one of the Humanities disciplines with a less-established tradition of public engagement and collaboration. This project speaks directly to much of what was lacking in my own humanities training (I feel I’m still playing catch-up). Texts (including traditional, written, visual, oral, multi-modal, etc.) underlie activist narratives and track the trajectory of activist impact, and so it is time the study of activism take on a more central role in English and Humanities classrooms.
Pedagogical Goals:
To generate collaborative, student-driven definitions of activism (which lead to the discussion and development of various activist identities among students).
To practice performing critical readings of specific public actions (across several movements).
To illuminate the intersectionality of various justice movements as well as the stakes of classroom content.
To encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, community partnerships, and the pursuit of public good through student work in the academy.
To create and maintain space for discussing the affective dimensions of classroom content and public activism.
Steps & Timeline:
Summer 2019:
→ Research: meet with local activists, gather case studies and models (from both academic and non-academic sources).
→ Compose course materials and structure.
Fall Quarter 2019:
→ Pilot a portion of the course–perhaps as one central unit in my ENGL 299 IWP Course (Vegan Studies theme), with plans to pilot the full course during Spring Quarter 2019. This will allow me to experience both teaching it as a full course and incorporating elements into an existing course (better enabling me to archive materials sensibly for other instructors).
→ Organize and hold a public event, either independently or as part of a collaborative class project/companion.
Winter Quarter 2020:
→ Begin to archive materials on Teaching Public Activism on the online platform of my choosing.
Spring Quarter 2020:
→ Pilot Public Activism course (through IWP).
→ Continue to archive materials on Teaching Public Activism on the online platform of my choosing.
→ Reach out to partners who might be interested in piloting and/or adapting some of the materials in their own courses and potentially at other institutions. This will include proposing at least one conference workshop or panel to connect with more instructors and scholars.
Discussion Questions:
→ What is the best way/space in which to publicly house resources and models online? Launching my own website presents financial challenges in that domain fees would be ongoing (indefinitely). The UW website has many potential branches but can be clunky. I plan to create a Google Drive for the drafting of initial materials, but ultimately, I would like something much more public-facing. Are there potential collaborators or already existing spaces I might seek out?
→ What are the political and ethical challenges of teaching public activism in the college classroom (keeping in mind that I want to welcome dissent among students, to create an inclusive space for all students, and to be as transparent as possible in my teaching and pedagogy)?
→ What is the best way to utilize the research budget? Should I worry about housing the online archive, or would it be more fruitful to pay speakers at a public-facing event? (My inclination is the latter, but there are still the logistical issues the former presents.) Or are there other even better ways to spend a portion of the budget?
→ In what other ways (besides those I’ve mentioned) can participation in and understanding of public activism deepen the impact and stakes of academic scholarship? And can more direct access to scholarship enrich public activism (if so, how might the course and/or archive provide such access to those not affiliated with academic institutions)?
→ What are your favorite examples of activism (doesn’t have to be environmental/animal-focused), especially nontraditional examples?
→ What should requirements for student community engagement look like in a course such as this? Open-ended? Service-learning-inspired? Extracurricular? Group-based? Collaborative class project (such as holding an end-of-term public event)?
→ How do you track the “success” of public activism? (This is a question I struggle with, so I imagine I will struggle teaching it. The course seeks to ask and address such a question, not necessarily answer it...but I’d still love to hear perspectives.)
→ Any advice on balancing the history of activism (which could easily be its own course) with foregrounding current actions and movements?
References, Resources and Potential Course Texts:
Curriculum for the Bioregion: http://wacenter.evergreen.edu/curriculum-for-the-bioregion
Davenport, Leslie. Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change : A Clinician's Guide. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 2017. Print.
Dixon, Chris. Another Politics : Talking across Today's Transformative Movements. Berkeley: U of California, 2014. Print.
Jones, Pattrice. After Shock: Confronting Trauma in a Violent World, A Guide for Activists and Their Allies. Lantern Books, 2007.
McKibben, Bill. Falter : Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? First ed. New York: Henry Holt, 2019. Print.
Monbiot, George. Out of the Wreckage : A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. London ; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017. Print.
Nijhuis, Michelle. "The Valve Turners." New York Times Magazine (2018): 42-6. Web.
Pellow, David N. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA: Polity, 2018. Print.
Stephen Siperstein, Shane Hall, and Stephanie Lemenager. Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities. Taylor and Francis, 2016. Web.