Isolating and Blogging: Interwoven Lessons

As I finish up my winter/spring “Writer-In-Residence” position with The Activist Classroom, Kim asked me to reflect on “what this online writing experience has taught me.” It is a trickier question than I at first thought. I applied for the position in the “Before Times”— pre-Covid-19. I thought it was going to be an engaging reflection on pedagogy during my Postdoctoral Fellowship. A low-key extra task I fit in between making regular trips to Concordia University, attending conferences, writing my book proposal, and forging ahead with my new research: making theatre with elderly people with dementia.

Everything has changed. My whole world, and everyone else’s, has changed.

So it is hard to separate what the online writing experience has taught me, from what the Pandemic experience has taught me or raised for me. So, I will reflect on a few things I have learned through writing online during a pandemic.

Is My Teaching Experience from the Before-Times Relevant?

I feel uncertain, curious, and a little insecure about whether my teaching experience pre-Covid still has relevance. So many conditions have changed for ourselves and our students. The one course I was involved in teaching last term ended early because of Covid-19 restrictions, thus I don’t have personal experience teaching during this time. I watch my children try to learn online, and I can tell you it is HARD. They hate it, in fact.

My most valued learning during the Pandemic has been through actively trying new things. Not sitting and thinking, but doing – engaging in private, domestic performances of sorts. I have hatched ducklings, baked bread, tried new instruments, drawn a series of portraits all for the first time.

I definitely jumped on the Pandemic Baking Bandwagon! (image of my baking products)

I wonder how this can apply to teaching as we move forward with the new world situation. Rather than adapting old ways of doing things, do we need to facilitate students trying things that are completely new? Certainly, we need to keep experimenting and searching for new pedagogical models.

Writing A Blog Post is Harder Than I Thought

I have learned that writing a 1500-word blog post is harder than I thought. Based on how quickly I can whip off an abstract, I thought I would be able to write a post in a day, no problem. But I have found I need longer to ponder. I don’t know if this is due to the challenges of working from home during a pandemic. I start a post and then I need to let the ideas percolate before I return to it another day. I also worry more than I expected about setting the right tone, providing relevant advice, selecting the best images, etc. I have realized that with academic writing (i.e. journal articles and conference papers) I am acclimatized to the expectations. I think about the ideas, but I just know the style. Taking on a new format has made me aware of the skill set I take for granted in more traditional academic writing, and it has given me new respect for authors writing in other formats. It has also made me excited about expanding my writing repertoire.   

Embracing Slowness

More and more during these times, I try to embrace slowness. My friend Ash McAskill, a disability theatre studies scholar and activist, is exploring Slow Theatre Practice and Snail Dramaturgies (see p. 22). I think I am more like a cat than a slow and steady snail. I am languorous for periods of time, then capable of quick bursts of frenzied energy – mostly docile and loving, with the occasional rising instinct to attack.

Meow! (me as a cat)

With no space to be alone, and constantly caring for children, husband, and pets, I simply cannot be fast for long. I’m too overwhelmed. There are too many distractions. Accepting that this is not a personal weakness is HARD. It has meant that I have felt anxious about turning around blog posts quickly (despite Kim’s reassurances). The inequities for women in academia have not only become more apparent than ever to me, they have been enhanced during this pandemic, especially for women who are mothers or caregivers. I am working to value and explore slowness as a theoretical approach and also as an access strategy.

I LOVE Visual Storytelling and Not Everyone Shares This Preference

I have realized that I favour visual storytelling much more than I knew. I LOVE selecting images for my Blog posts! I have spent Isolation producing my first visual art project (@frontline_faces_of_covid19). The current lack of live performances has made me keenly aware that I am drawn to the visual aspects of liveness and theatrical performance, and that I much prefer writing performance analyses to close readings of text. I also discovered (for the first time!!!!) during Isolation that other people literally hear their own voice talking to them inside their head (mind blown!!!). I don’t: I see pictures. I am intensely visual!

Inside other people’s heads (image of words)
(source)

Inside my head (image of pictures) (source)

This has taught me two things:

First, in future I will explore other forms of “writing” that allow me to capitalize on my strong preference for visual images. This excites me a lot!

Second, I will strive to be more aware of my visual predilection: (a) in my use of metaphors in my writing (wow are they ever visual!); and (b) in my techniques used to convey material in teaching and other live presentations. I realize that I lean toward presenting material in ways that could disadvantage those who are less visual. For example, I need to audio-describe my images more often and better.

Teaching and Writing Help Me Process the World Around Me

I have also become more aware of how teaching and writing in conjunction help me process the world around me. While I theoretically have more time for writing when I am not preparing lessons and teaching, I find writing harder because I am not in conversation with as many people. In particular, without my students I do not have access to nearly as wide a range of generational, cultural, and socioeconomic perspectives. I feel this lack.

GIF of writer’s hand tapping a pencil, unsure what to write.

The Draw of Liveness

I am more certain than ever about the importance, the draw, the communal experience of liveness. I have been watching a fair amount of theatre online ( Canada’s National Arts Centre and Facebook Live, The National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre). Online theatre can supplement but, for me, it just does not replace live, in-person performance. Even live-streamed online theatre, in my experience, lacks the feeling of communitas or the moments of utopian performativity that live performance offers.

And yet at the same time, I want to stay close to home. I have no motivation to attend live performance in public spaces at the moment; it scares me. Live theatre has shifted, for me, to at-home performances. It is my children putting on skits, it is playing music as a family, it is my husband reading out loud, it is the opera man walking past my house singing, it is the 7pm communal applause for health care workers with its clapping, cheers, and banging of pots and pans. I am experiencing a return to parlour theatre and community ritual. How can this be incorporated into the theatre and performance studies classroom? I don’t have the answer, but it is something I am pondering.

7pm Applause for Frontliners – View and Soundscape on my Porch

Thanks to Kim for the opportunity to be a guest Writer-in-Residence. I hope some of what I have to say resonates or inspires new thoughts for others.

These are difficult times and will remain such for a while. However, they are also times that bring much potential for shifting gears, re-imagining performances, and learning new approaches to pedagogy. I will continue to try to focus on that. Warm wishes to everyone!

My ducklings hatched!!! (image of 3 black duckings snuggled together)

 

Academia and Physical Pain: A Conversation with Sandra Chamberlain-Snider

Well folks, here we are, headed into one of the stranger April long weekends in recent memory.  Wherever you are, we hope you and yours are healthy, sheltered, and well in these strange and tender times.

To ring in the days off, we thought we’d share a post about self-care.

As scholars, we talk a lot about disability, and as teachers, we tend to think about mental health provisions for our students. But, chronic pain sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of hidden disability, if it’s noted at all.

Below, Kelsey and Sandra Chamberlain-Snider, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, chat about their experiences with chronic pain.

***

In my work for this blog and in my daily life, I write and talk about dozens of issues related to post secondary instruction and my experiences as an emerging scholar. Pain is rarely one of these topics.

Yet, physical pain has been one of the constants in my scholarly life. I’ve had roaming stiffness and/or pain in multiple areas of my body for years. Officially speaking, I have been diagnosed with a systemic form of arthritis. In reality, things are a bit murkier, and the diagnosis is closer to my rheumatologist’s’ current best guess.

In chatting about my experiences with friends and colleagues, folks have often disclosed that they, too, are quietly navigating on-going challenges related to pain, illness, or injury. (Strange coincidence side-note: Kim and I have EXACTLY the same autoimmune / chronic pain diagnosis.) While I don’t want anyone to experience discomfort, I have often found these conversations heartening: they provide new ideas or resources and remind me that I’m not alone.

So, I thought I would curate such a conversation for this blog.

To do so, I reached out to my friend and colleague, Sandra Chamberlain-Snider – a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, who, like me was diagnosed with a systemic form of arthritis during her graduate studies.

Sandra Chamberlain-Snider

KB: Can you tell me a little about your journey with pain as a PhD student?

SCS: I’d had pain for years but I’m in my middle-fifties. I figured it was part of life. And, I’d also had skin issues for a long time. My GP had been treating me for eczema. In 2016, I got a blood infection from the cracks in my feet, and he sent me to a dermatologist. He took one look at my skin and said: “That’s not eczema. That’s psoriasis.” That kicked things off. Then, a year and a half ago, I started seeing a rheumatologist who diagnosed me with psoriatic arthritis.

Now, the skin issues come and go. Sometimes, it’s great. But, the pain has been a constant. It’s difficult because it’s in your hands and you’re trying to write or type or even look half-way professional with colleagues, or you are interviewing someone and suddenly your hand will cramp up and it’s not like I can just get up and leave the room and shake it off. It became a bit of an issue.

For folks with musculoskelatal pain, there are lots of “tools” for self-massage, rolling, and stretching. Many of these can be purchased for a fraction of the price at your local dollar store: bouncy balls can be used for trigger points, rolling pins can be used as rollers etc.

KB: I get that. I have a few psoriasis patches and roaming pain and stiffness. The pain comes and goes from lots of different places including my left big toe, my left ankle, my right knee, both of my hips, my lower back, the knuckles on my left hand, my right wrist, both my shoulders, and my neck. Also, I currently can’t fully bend my middle or ring finger on my right hand, which all the doctors describe as – and I’m quoting here – “weird.” But, the relatively recent addition of pain in my hands has added an extra degree of urgency because it directly affects my ability to work.

SCS: For me, I know that’s a good part of why I’m in my seventh year of my PhD. My hands only give me so much time during the day. Some days are good. I can get a few hours in. Some days, I get half an hour in and then I have to take a break. And, you know how hard it is to go back into writing or researching when you’ve been interrupted in the middle.

KB: I totally do. Writing is a fragile art. Or, at least it is for me. Especially with heavy-thinking work: it takes time to ease into. If I get pulled away from it, I often have a hard time finding my way back.

SCS: Yes! I try to explain that to my husband all the time.

KB: And, there’s also a strange balance of figuring out when to attend to the pain and when to push through. My friends – many of whom are disability studies scholars – remind me that it’s important to pay attention to my body and that working more slowly can be an act of resistance. (For more on this, Petra Kuppers’ work is an excellent starting place.) I’m trying, but it’s … ahem … still a work in progress.

On an everyday level, I spend a fair chunk of time trying to find “hacks” to make my working conditions easier: I have figured out that suspenders let me keep ice on my shoulders while typing; I have crafted a standing desk from an ironing board (highly recommend); and I have managed to troubleshoot my way through the logistics of working lying down.

One of Kelsey’s crowning achievements: a do-it-yourself set up for working lying down. If anyone wants to try, the key is that you still need proper eye-line ergonomics, which means you need to align your forehead with the top third of the screen.

I’m super pleased with myself on most of these discoveries. But, I do find that simple things – like sitting ergonomics – are made harder by the structures of academia.

In the last six years, I have variously worked as a graduate student, sessional instructor, and postdoctoral researcher. But, I’ve never had a permanent office. Compared to the systemic discrimination and barriers that so many people encounter, this hardly constitutes an issue but it means that I can’t curate my working space.

SCS: Or, the space isn’t there when you’re able to use it. In 2016, we [Sandra’s family] got kicked out of our rental and we had to move quickly. In the new place, I have this little room to do work in. Which is great. I’m feeling good and ready to go. But, then my husband decides to pull out the ceiling for nine months, so I was working in the dining room area with two dogs, and I couldn’t get any work done. And, I went to the local library and the universities to work, but it wasn’t as efficient. So, finally, nine months later, everything was stable, but then the pain came. And, it was like you walk two steps forward and then get pushed back.

I [Kelsey] have experimented with loads of apps that help track pain and/or body cycles (pain, movement, menstrual cycle, sleep etc). Some help. Some don’t. The ones that do help offset some of the mental tracking labour.

KB: Totally, and it doesn’t only impact writing and researching; it also affects teaching.

Last year, I was mid-way through a class on performance and archives, and my pain suddenly flared. It was intense enough that I felt light-headed. At the break, I took myself to the washroom and had a very earnest conversation:

“Kelsey,” I said to myself. “Is there any chance you’re going to pass out? Because, if there is, you need to call off class.”

After a bit of back and forth, I decided I was okay to continue.

In retrospect, I think I’d try to handle that differently by signalling to my students I wasn’t feeling well or ending the class early. But, I often think about that moment because it drew my attention to how few resources were available to me to mitigate the situation.

Unlike elementary or high school teachers, university instructors don’t have colleagues down the hallway who can step in. I can ask people to cover classes, but pain isn’t predictable. And, even if it was, there isn’t a pool of substitute teachers. Usually, I’m asking a colleague, and I often need to bank some of those favours for conference travel or the like.

SCS: I think, too, it’s part cultural: When do you ask for help?

KB: Oh yeah … totally.

SCS: We’re academics. Even though there’s lots of issues and precarity, many of us are fairly privileged in that we get to study what we want to study. So, you’re not always quick to call out. Or to ask for a favour.

KB: And more generally, patriarchy, neo-liberalism, global capitalism – all the “isms” really – tend to belittle interdependence and asking for help. I’m trying to apply concepts from anti-oppression groups, disabilities communities, and critical disability studies to my everyday practices, but it’s not always easy.

Let’s talk about chronic and other kinds of pain, not only in private discussions over a beverage of choice, but also with our colleagues, students, and institutions.

SCS: And, when you’re in pain, you’re not always the most even-tempered person. My husband and I have been in each other’s lives for over forty years and he’s gone through some suffering as well. The last couple of months have been particularly difficult because we’re both in pain. And occasionally I’m like, “Oh my God, are we becoming this squabbling old couple?” But you have to step back and recognize what’s happening, which is, in the moment, so hard.

KB: Yes. I’d like to say that my experiences with pain make me more empathetic, and sometimes they do. But, when I’m having intense amounts of pain, that’s not always true.

And not all the work is personal. Some of it has to be broader. I’m trying – where I can – to push for, and model, systemic changes.

As a teacher, I try to incorporate pain, illness, and injury into access statements and course policies. I’m also working to recognize that not all experiences of pain are going to fall neatly into the purview of institutional access and disability protocols. I can (and want to!) work with students and colleagues to figure out how to navigate bodily changes and to respectfully support one another.

I’m also working to be more open with my own experiences, both as a principle (vulnerability can be really powerful) and to spark discussion. The more I talk to people about my pain, the more they talk about theirs. Those discussions are critical for changing larger circles of discourse.

SCS: Yes. Absolutely.

KB: And, this chat is part of that, I suppose.

SCS: Glad I could be a part of it!

Reflecting on Teaching & Elections

The Canadian federal election took place on Monday October 21st. This post is an offering in the form of a reflection.

Tune in next time for Part II from Joanne Tompkins!

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I wake up groggily.

My body urges me to hang onto sleep. But, my mind has other plans: I need to check my phone. I flop my arm out toward my nightstand, instinctively thumb my way to the interwebs, and pry my eyes open so that I can read the news. Nothing has changed in the time since I fell asleep: the Liberal Party of Canada won the most seats in the 2019 federal election and will seek to form a minority government.

I spend the next forty-five minutes in a daze, scrolling through news and my social media feed. There is no lack of potentially unsettling items – election commentary, the popularity of the hashtag #weexit, signalling a surge of interest in Alberta’s separatist movement – but mostly I feel relieved that I didn’t wake up in an alternate reality where the balance of governmental power swung to the far right. It’s a low bar, but in the context of western politics this year, it nevertheless earns a sigh of relief from me.

Despite my relief, I’m grateful I’m not in a classroom today, an indirect result of teaching during the 2016 American election.

As you may remember, in the fall of 2016, Donald Trump ran against Hilary Clinton in the American federal election.

That same fall, I taught my first university course as an instructor. I was teaching an upper level theatre and performance theory class.

I’m largely proud of the pedagogical work I did in that class. Behind the scenes, however, it was what I would politely refer to as a shitshow. I was figuring out the online learning system and the specific potentials and constraints of the classroom space; I was doing huge amounts of prep work; I was playing with my style as an instructor; I was writing my dissertation prospectus; I was completing articles, and I was doing all of this while caring  for my mother who was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer (I should say here: while she still has the routine tests, she’s currently healthy and there have been no signs of cancer since she finished treatment in 2017). It was, in short, not the easiest autumn for me.

Then, about three weeks into semester, I realized something: I’d scheduled my feminist theory class for the day after the American election.

Oh boy.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t do that on purpose, but it mattered that I hadn’t. And, it mattered, in particular, that semester. As November approached and the campaign filled the ether, I kept looking at my syllabus. There was no way that topic on that day was not going to be a thing.

Six weeks later, I was proven right.

Generally speaking, I’m a pretty emotionally even-keeled human. But, the results of the American election – wherein Donald Trump, after a vitriolic, racist, misogynistic, ableist, xenophobic, islamaphobic (to name a few of the plethora of “ists” that might be included here) campaign, became president of the United States of America – intersected with the challenges of my personal life and shook me. I cried most of the 45-minute drive to campus.

And, then, as teachers do, I pulled myself together, walked into class, and looked completely normal.

Things were not normal, however.

Even though I was teaching in Canada, I could see that the election results had significantly affected many of the students. They looked tired; their shoulders were slumped; their expressions were solemn, sad even. And yet, there they were, in their theatre and theory class at 10 in the morning, looking at me.

I could feel the teaching moment open-up in front of me: the next 80 minutes could be a lesson that bridged the classroom with the world, that created space for the plethora of student experiences (including those that were ambivalent or happy about the election results), and that prompted genuine dialogue.

And, just as quickly, I knew that I couldn’t capitalize on that opening. I was too new as an instructor and too personally exhausted.  I performed my lesson plan, and it went fine. But, it wasn’t transformational. It wasn’t even particularly good. It was just a lesson.

I know that many postsecondary teachers see elections as opportunities to generate dialogue or to meaningfully connect the classroom to the world at large. I respect that a great deal.

As an early carer instructor, however, elections have often felt like elastic bands around my teaching practice. The opportunity of the added tension is palpable but so are its constraints:

How do I capitalize on the increased political awareness that tends to accompany elections?

How do I encourage inclusive, respectful, dialogue?

How and to what degree do I perform my own political values?

How do I balance all of these questions in relation to my role as a contract instructor, in a workplace where many of my colleagues have positions that grant them more job stability, and by consequence, more room for error and conflict?

I don’t have the answers to these questions but I offer them, and my election reflections, as a gesture to the other teachers who don’t either.

Sometimes, we don’t, or can’t, capitalize on teaching moments. And, that’s okay. Others will come along.

In my case, I hear another federal election cycle is on the horizon in the United States. As you can imagine, I can hardly wait.

Being a Student Again: How Taking Classes Made Me Reflect on Teaching Classes

I feel like I’m in high school again, and it’s been an unexpectedly good thing for thinking about teaching.

I recently moved to Montreal and decided to take French classes. As I filled out the online registration forms, I thought to myself, “A little morning routine, a little french, and the possibility of interaction with other humans in the brand new city I’ll be google-mapping my way through? This is a great settling-into-a-new-city-plan.”

I wasn’t wrong: the classes have been immensely useful for grounding my first couple of weeks. They have also been unexpectedly helpful for thinking about my own teaching.

Here are the top three things that being a student has got me thinking about:

The Vulnerability of Learning

As a kid, I was in French immersion – a Canadian public school program where students from non-French speaking families take most of their elementary and high school classes in French. So, technically, my French is decent. Practically, it is not.

Trying to find my knowledge of French has been felt like being in the movie Inside Out: I spend my morning classes running around my brain, searching for old memories. Much to my dismay, it seems that many of these memories have been dumped to make room for new skills and knowledge.

To the shock of no one that knows me: I have a robust set of feelings when I’m not instantly good at something. So, when my teacher hands back my homework, and I see the 1003 minor grammar errors, I can’t help but wince a little.

Other than the hit to my ego, this has been a critical reminder of the the vulnerability of not knowing, of not understanding, of trying but not getting it right the first, second, or even the third time. I try to acknowledge this vulnerability when I teach but sometimes I forget how amplified it can feel for students.

Exams

Three weeks ago, I could not have told you the last time I took a midterm. That changed, last Wednesday. And, much to my surprise, I think that’s a good thing.

As a university instructor, I know that tests can be good evaluative and pedagogical tools, and I do incorporate final exams into some courses. But, I also know that tests favour certain learning styles over others and can prompt huge levels of stress and anxiety for students. In the context of rising mental health crises across American and Canadian post-secondary campuses, the stakes of stress and anxiety can be concrete and significant. It doesn’t help that, even when test-related stress is contained to the classroom, students generally hate exams.

Actual archival evident that I took a French midterm some time after high school.

In my French class, I was no different. I did not want to take my midterm. In fact, I briefly considered refusing to do so (me: at my most mature).

After having a little chat with myself, however, I decided to write the midterm. This meant I had to study. And, you know what? Studying prompted me to engage with the material in a way I’d been avoiding: I went back and reviewed some of the core concepts; I memorized the rules; I did mock exercises.

Did it bring back a whole bunch of weird want-to-succeed-in-evaluative-contexts feelings? Why, yes it did. Did it also light a fire under my learning feet? Most definitely.

On Mattering

As a university instructor, I’m aware that, within the context of a classroom, I am in a position of power. As a student, I am am actively reminded of how this power looks and feels.

The teacher – who is like every french teacher I can remember: energetic, kind, passionate, precise – is the point toward which I, and all the other students, are oriented physically and intellectually. And, boy oh boy, do we notice everything she does:

• I notice that she tends to stand on the right side of the white board (likely so she doesn’t have to cross when she needs to start to write a sentence). This means that she often unintentionally favours the right side of the class, who are physically closer to her.
• Another student feels that she pays more attention to those with stronger language skills.
• Another student feels her pedagogy is better than any of the other instructors they’ve had.

Even for adults with diverse areas of expertise and experiences (the class of twelve includes adult learners from 7 different countries who work in a range of fields from health care to hospitality to academia) the teacher matters, and that mattering often articulates in very embodied, and sometimes very emotional, ways.

---

I already knew all of these things, of course.

After all, I’ve spent big chunks of my adult life as a student. And, even though I’m done with formal coursework (phew!), I’m an active learner. I take professional development workshops, praxis sessions, and all kinds of classes. And not all of these classes are in areas where I excel either. I, Kelsey Blair The Historically Inflexible, take yoga classes.

But being in a semi-intensive, pass-or-fail class with medium-level stakes for most of the students has reminded me, at a bodily level, of what it feels like to be a student.

This, in turn, has reinforced something I already suspected: being a student, particularly in moderate- to high-stakes environments, is invaluable to the development of my teaching practice.

Deeply awesome advice on teaching students about critical thinking

I’ve belonged to the Tomorrow’s Professor listserv for a very long time. It’s an amazing resource, run by Rick Reis at Stanford, and its regular postings touch on matters relevant to university students and teachers at all points along their careers (from undergrads to senior administrators). The posts come twice weekly in term time; they are almost always good reads over lunch, but some are genuinely inspiring. These are the ones I save: I print them, I forward them to colleagues, and I place them in my current teaching folder, for use in the next set of classrooms.

Today’s post was one of those posts. It excerpts material from Stephen Brookfield’s 2012 book, Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions. You can read the entire post here; below, I quote my three favourite insights from the post, with thanks to Brookfield, and to Tomorrow’s Professor.

Brookfield’s principal claim in this excerpt is simple but startling: that teachers need to remember that students need to learn what critical reading, writing, and thinking actually mean before they can do those things. If you’re anything like me, you have internalized “critical thinking” as the raison d’être of the Humanities classroom, forgetting that there are actually a lot of incorrect assumptions and blatant misunderstandings about the very idea of what it means to be critical circulating in our popular culture. Brookfield intelligently frames, and rebuffs, those misunderstandings; here are my top three. (All text is from Brookfield; all boldface and italic emphases are my own.)

That It’s Negative:

For many of us the word critical carries negative connotations. Being critical is equated with cynical pessimism, with taking great pleasure in knocking down what other people have created; in short, with attacking and destroying what we portray as the naïve and shortsighted efforts of others. It is important to say from the outset, then, that critical reading is a process of appraisal, involving the recognition of positive as well as negative elements. In fact, using the words positive and negative is mistaken because it only serves to reinforce a false dichotomy that we have to reach a verdict that something is good or bad. What critical reading and writing are all about is assessing the accuracy and validity of a piece of work. This means that we will usually find aspects of research, philosophy, or theory that we dislike, disagree with, and find incomplete or overly narrow. But we will also find aspects that seem to us well described, recognizable, and informative. Few pieces of writing we read in a doctoral program will be so unequivocally wonderful or awful that we can adopt a film critic approach to its appraisal, giving it an intellectual thumbs up or thumbs down. If we are reading critically we will almost certainly find that our appraisals are multilayered, even contradictory (as in when the same passages both excite and disturb). But central to all critical reading is the acknowledgment of what we find to be well grounded, accurate, and meritorious in a piece of scholarly writing, as well as what we find wanting.

That It’s the Preserve of Politically Correct Left-Wingers:

…The point about critical reading, properly encouraged, is that critical questions are asked of all ideologies, disciplines, and theories. So a critical social science turns a skeptical eye on all claims to universal validity. For a teacher to mandate in advance—either explicitly or implicitly—that only one ideological interpretation or outcome is permitted in a discussion or assignment is to contradict a fundamental tenet of critical thinking. That tenet holds that all involved—including teachers—must always be open to reexamining the assumptions informing their ideological commitments. For teachers this imperative is particularly important, since one of the best ways in which they can teach critical thinking is for them to model the process in their own actions. I hope, personally, that a critical reading of texts results in students becoming more skeptical of conservative ideologies, and more aware of the inhumanity of monopoly capitalism. And I feel a duty to make my bias known. But I also must continually lay out my own assumptions, and the evidence for these, and invite students to point out omissions in my position and to suggest alternative interpretations that can be made of the evidence I cite. For me to decree that “proper” or “real” critical thinking occurs only when students end up mimicking my political views would be the pedagogic equivalent of papal infallibility. I would kill at the outset any chance for genuine, searching inquiry.  

That It’s Wholly Cognitive: (this one’s my favourite!)

Critical reading, like critical thinking, is often thought of as a purely intellectual process in which rationality is valued above all else. The concept of rationality figures so strongly in work of critical theoreticians such as Habermas that it’s not surprising to find it prominent in discussions of critical thinking and reading. However, critical reading as it is outlined here recognizes that thought and reasoning is infused with emotional currents and responses. Indeed, the feeling of connectedness to an idea, theory, or area of study that is so necessary to intellectual work is itself emotional. Even our appreciation of the intellectual elegance of a concept or set of theoretical propositions involves emotional elements.

So in critical reading we pay attention to our emotions, as well as our intellect. In particular, we investigate our emotional responses to the material we encounter. We can try to understand why it is that we become enthused or appalled, perplexed or engaged, by a piece of literature. As we read work that challenges some of our most deeply held assumptions, we are likely to experience strong feelings of anger and resentment against the writer or her ideas, feelings that are grounded in the sense of threat that this work holds for us. It is important that we know this in advance of our reading and try to understand that our emotional reactions are the inevitable accompaniment of undertaking any kind of intellectual inquiry that is really challenging.

I’ve decided that I’m going to use these insights next semester very directly – I’m going to share them with my students, and invite a conversation about them. (This conversation might take place on the same day that we talk about owning our intellectual space; let’s imagine it to be a meta-lesson, early in the term, on how to improve our classroom learning toolbox.)

And, on that note: if you’ve got specific strategies for helping students to understand critical thinking and to develop their CT skills, I’d love to hear them.

Best of wishes,

Kim