Photo: Virtual Tour / UWC
Teaching Praxis
The next assignment in this teaching portfolio is to define my teaching philosophy. To do so, new staff members were asked to attend a series of workshops to debate the latest in learning and teaching theories.
While sitting in these sessions, I kept coming back to my own training as a geographer. Geography, as a discipline, comes with a set of in-built tools not only to understand the world but to change it. Geography education, then, can offer students the resources to build solidarities, imagine possibilities, and engage in struggles toward more liberatory futures. As such, I think geographical teaching can never simply be a "philosophy," conceived of as a generalisable or universal set of theories. Instead, geographical teaching should be a "philosophy of praxis" (a la Gramsci), whereby theories are never separate from practices, which are integrally and immanently connected to political struggle.
Teaching as praxis suggests that how we theorise about teaching should be deeply connected to how we teach, what we teach, and what we hope to achieve by teaching. In order to empower students to change society, it is important to start from where students are, from the common senses they have acquired from their secondary schools, social organisations, sport clubs, friend groups, social media platforms, and churches. While common senses can be diffuse and contradictory, they contain kernels of good sense as well honed through their everyday experiences of living, working and observing the world. From such kernels of good sense, a group of students can translate back-and-forth between their everyday practices and theoretical knowledges. In this way, learning is not uni-directional (from teacher to student) but co-produced through all of the experiences that we bring into the classroom space. In this way, we can collectively begin to illuminate the oppressions of daily life and the local and global power structures that maintain severe inequalities. In the following paragraphs, I offer my philosophy of praxis using concrete examples of how I help students envision and practice ways of changing the world.
The point is to change it. -Marx
I endeavour to teach students about the ways global racial capitalism has come to dominate the world, producing the inequalities we tend to accept as "natural". For example, in my second year course, I developed an entirely new block on "Livelihoods." In it, I show how capitalist conceptions of livelihoods, while very dominant in our lives, are a relatively recent phenomenon. We discuss how people in Africa and elsewhere have had very different ideas and practices about how to sustain life. Often referred to as "precolonial," we problematise how this category collapses at least 250,000 years of history and millions of square kilometres of diverse geography into a singular time and space defined solely in relation to European colonisation. We then explore how the diversity of these livelihoods were curtailed as capitalism and colonialism reshaped the world through the dispossession of land, the commodification of labor, and the articulation class with race, gender and cultural differences for profit. We then consider how these political economic relations still affect our lives today, albeit in new ways, including the ongoing casualisation and informalisation of work, the rise of unemployment, and the assumption that we should take on debt to pay for the things we need to survive. We end the block by reading utopian African literature and political theory and discussing its ongoing relevance (or not) for today. Through my course design, I try to work from my student's own common sense about their everyday experiences to build a more critical consciousness. I want students to understand the political histories of livelihoods, so that they also understand how the inequalities we experience today are not "natural" but produced. In the evaluations, many students called the block "eye-opening," "informative," enabling "one to think broadly and understand the world around them better."
(Social) space is (socially) produced. -Lefebvre
Geography also helps us thinking about how our everyday spaces are socially produced. Using basic geographic concepts, I teach about how power operates in and through space in ways that are not readily apparent, but that we all consent to every day. In my third year class, "Problematising the City in Africa," I often use the classroom itself as an example to explain this, asking students what spatial forms establish me as the "expert" and them as the learners. They readily describe the immediate environment, mentioning things like the stage, computer, passwords, locks, riot screens, private security, but also less tangible things like my authority to issue marks, the universities authority to levy fees, and a range of unspoken indicators of class, race and academic privilege. I then try to use the pedagogical encounter to build an educational environment that models social and economic justice and non-hierarchical learning, by transgressing the boundaries we identified. In large classes, this means getting off the stage, running up and down the stadium seating, and even, at times, asking two students throw apples across the room to their peers who answer questions. All of these unexpected ways of using space, break down expectations around who is supposed to do what and be where in the classroom. Beyond these small gimmicks, I use the first few minutes of each class period to break students into groups and ask them what they felt were the main learnings from the previous lecture. I ask groups to share what they came up, enabling them to explain the lessons in their own words and celebrating their expertise. I also ask students use my first name to interact with me as a peer and co-producer of knowledge, not as an authority figure. I try to take the power and secrecy out of marks by ensuring that all assignments go through several drafts and rounds of feedback, enabling students to improve. In all of these ways, even in large lectures, I can start to teach about the way space is organised to bolster power and how we can try to break down such hierarchies by changing space. The classroom is, of course, a small example, but I hope that they can see how we can produce space differently at significantly larger scales.
The "Hidden" Curriculum.
Geography also helps us think about where academic knowledges and expectations are produced. I recognise that not everyone has had an opportunity to learn to read and write at the level we expect -- and yet, these are rarely explicitly taught at university. Many (though not all) of my students come from low-income communities and under resourced secondary schools. They matriculate without having the opportunity to develop critical reading and writing strategies to help them succeed. I seek to demystify reading and writing by offering mini-lectures on foundational skills, with detailed instructions and corresponding assignments. For example, in my Honours "African Urbanisms" course, I have a series of small, daisy-chained tasks about how to read an article. If in the first week we talk about where to find the basic bibliographic details of our key readings, then in the second week students have to demonstrate that they can do so themselves in our next key reading. If in the second week we talk about how academic publication works, in the third week students have to identify if our key reading is from a special issue in a journal or a chapter in a book – and so on. We go on to talk about how to identify arguments, how to understand who an author is engaging with, and how to evaluate evidence. The most difficult skill, of course, is helping students learn to put several articles in conversation with one another, recognising both the similarities and differences in the readings. I teach this by asking each student to choose readings for one or two weeks related to the theoretical themes of their research projects (i.e. urban subjectivities, the neoliberal city, etc). I work with them one-on-one to develop a presentation to deliver in class in the relevant week. During this time, we talk through how the readings are related to each other and their own research data. The final assignment is to produce the literature review of their dissertation in small parts, which we peer review and develop each week. In this way, the class becomes a collaborative effort, where we all help each other to advance their own research projects. Students have told me I was the first instructor to explain how they should approach difficult texts – a skill which helped them participate more fully in other courses and feel more confident engaging with students and faculty across campus.
Bread-and-Butter Issues.
Finally, I have developed my teaching praxis in the classroom and out. Beyond traditional classroom instruction, I work with students to apply for scholarships, graduate programs, and NGO placements to make sure that their education connects to the next steps in their lives. I also support students who are navigating financial insecurities or coping with safety concerns in times of crisis. As an example, my time at Berkeley, Milo Yiannopolous and other right-wing grandstanders came to our university ostensibly to prove that campuses were curtailing free speech. However, as part of their visit, they doxxed trans and undocumented students to create immense anxieties and insecurities amongst the student body. I participated in organising efforts to protests their visit, defend campus against militarised police, and ensure vulnerable members of our campus community were as safe as possible. I held my classes at a theological college a few blocks from campus and offered extra student consultation hours for anyone who could not come to campus. Likewise, I was teaching as a postdoctoral fellow at UWC when the pandemic hit in 2020. I had watched US universities close two weeks earlier and knew we would follow. I printed out hard copies of readings for students in my Honours seminar and sent them home for the semester. When lockdown began, most of my students had no access to internet at home and were unable to travel to public internet hotspots. While students would eventually be provided with data, before support was available, I phoned them each week to understand their accessibility needs and discuss readings and assignments. Most students were able to continue the course, reporting: “phone calls during office hours to check in and to get feedback were highly appreciated. Speaking to your lecturer on the phone brought an element of closeness and that someone is there in terms of a support system. It made a hard experience less lonely.” In the classroom and out of it, I am committed to providing students with tools for learning and studying deeply to confront systems of oppression.
While sitting in these sessions, I kept coming back to my own training as a geographer. Geography, as a discipline, comes with a set of in-built tools not only to understand the world but to change it. Geography education, then, can offer students the resources to build solidarities, imagine possibilities, and engage in struggles toward more liberatory futures. As such, I think geographical teaching can never simply be a "philosophy," conceived of as a generalisable or universal set of theories. Instead, geographical teaching should be a "philosophy of praxis" (a la Gramsci), whereby theories are never separate from practices, which are integrally and immanently connected to political struggle.
Teaching as praxis suggests that how we theorise about teaching should be deeply connected to how we teach, what we teach, and what we hope to achieve by teaching. In order to empower students to change society, it is important to start from where students are, from the common senses they have acquired from their secondary schools, social organisations, sport clubs, friend groups, social media platforms, and churches. While common senses can be diffuse and contradictory, they contain kernels of good sense as well honed through their everyday experiences of living, working and observing the world. From such kernels of good sense, a group of students can translate back-and-forth between their everyday practices and theoretical knowledges. In this way, learning is not uni-directional (from teacher to student) but co-produced through all of the experiences that we bring into the classroom space. In this way, we can collectively begin to illuminate the oppressions of daily life and the local and global power structures that maintain severe inequalities. In the following paragraphs, I offer my philosophy of praxis using concrete examples of how I help students envision and practice ways of changing the world.
The point is to change it. -Marx
I endeavour to teach students about the ways global racial capitalism has come to dominate the world, producing the inequalities we tend to accept as "natural". For example, in my second year course, I developed an entirely new block on "Livelihoods." In it, I show how capitalist conceptions of livelihoods, while very dominant in our lives, are a relatively recent phenomenon. We discuss how people in Africa and elsewhere have had very different ideas and practices about how to sustain life. Often referred to as "precolonial," we problematise how this category collapses at least 250,000 years of history and millions of square kilometres of diverse geography into a singular time and space defined solely in relation to European colonisation. We then explore how the diversity of these livelihoods were curtailed as capitalism and colonialism reshaped the world through the dispossession of land, the commodification of labor, and the articulation class with race, gender and cultural differences for profit. We then consider how these political economic relations still affect our lives today, albeit in new ways, including the ongoing casualisation and informalisation of work, the rise of unemployment, and the assumption that we should take on debt to pay for the things we need to survive. We end the block by reading utopian African literature and political theory and discussing its ongoing relevance (or not) for today. Through my course design, I try to work from my student's own common sense about their everyday experiences to build a more critical consciousness. I want students to understand the political histories of livelihoods, so that they also understand how the inequalities we experience today are not "natural" but produced. In the evaluations, many students called the block "eye-opening," "informative," enabling "one to think broadly and understand the world around them better."
(Social) space is (socially) produced. -Lefebvre
Geography also helps us thinking about how our everyday spaces are socially produced. Using basic geographic concepts, I teach about how power operates in and through space in ways that are not readily apparent, but that we all consent to every day. In my third year class, "Problematising the City in Africa," I often use the classroom itself as an example to explain this, asking students what spatial forms establish me as the "expert" and them as the learners. They readily describe the immediate environment, mentioning things like the stage, computer, passwords, locks, riot screens, private security, but also less tangible things like my authority to issue marks, the universities authority to levy fees, and a range of unspoken indicators of class, race and academic privilege. I then try to use the pedagogical encounter to build an educational environment that models social and economic justice and non-hierarchical learning, by transgressing the boundaries we identified. In large classes, this means getting off the stage, running up and down the stadium seating, and even, at times, asking two students throw apples across the room to their peers who answer questions. All of these unexpected ways of using space, break down expectations around who is supposed to do what and be where in the classroom. Beyond these small gimmicks, I use the first few minutes of each class period to break students into groups and ask them what they felt were the main learnings from the previous lecture. I ask groups to share what they came up, enabling them to explain the lessons in their own words and celebrating their expertise. I also ask students use my first name to interact with me as a peer and co-producer of knowledge, not as an authority figure. I try to take the power and secrecy out of marks by ensuring that all assignments go through several drafts and rounds of feedback, enabling students to improve. In all of these ways, even in large lectures, I can start to teach about the way space is organised to bolster power and how we can try to break down such hierarchies by changing space. The classroom is, of course, a small example, but I hope that they can see how we can produce space differently at significantly larger scales.
The "Hidden" Curriculum.
Geography also helps us think about where academic knowledges and expectations are produced. I recognise that not everyone has had an opportunity to learn to read and write at the level we expect -- and yet, these are rarely explicitly taught at university. Many (though not all) of my students come from low-income communities and under resourced secondary schools. They matriculate without having the opportunity to develop critical reading and writing strategies to help them succeed. I seek to demystify reading and writing by offering mini-lectures on foundational skills, with detailed instructions and corresponding assignments. For example, in my Honours "African Urbanisms" course, I have a series of small, daisy-chained tasks about how to read an article. If in the first week we talk about where to find the basic bibliographic details of our key readings, then in the second week students have to demonstrate that they can do so themselves in our next key reading. If in the second week we talk about how academic publication works, in the third week students have to identify if our key reading is from a special issue in a journal or a chapter in a book – and so on. We go on to talk about how to identify arguments, how to understand who an author is engaging with, and how to evaluate evidence. The most difficult skill, of course, is helping students learn to put several articles in conversation with one another, recognising both the similarities and differences in the readings. I teach this by asking each student to choose readings for one or two weeks related to the theoretical themes of their research projects (i.e. urban subjectivities, the neoliberal city, etc). I work with them one-on-one to develop a presentation to deliver in class in the relevant week. During this time, we talk through how the readings are related to each other and their own research data. The final assignment is to produce the literature review of their dissertation in small parts, which we peer review and develop each week. In this way, the class becomes a collaborative effort, where we all help each other to advance their own research projects. Students have told me I was the first instructor to explain how they should approach difficult texts – a skill which helped them participate more fully in other courses and feel more confident engaging with students and faculty across campus.
Bread-and-Butter Issues.
Finally, I have developed my teaching praxis in the classroom and out. Beyond traditional classroom instruction, I work with students to apply for scholarships, graduate programs, and NGO placements to make sure that their education connects to the next steps in their lives. I also support students who are navigating financial insecurities or coping with safety concerns in times of crisis. As an example, my time at Berkeley, Milo Yiannopolous and other right-wing grandstanders came to our university ostensibly to prove that campuses were curtailing free speech. However, as part of their visit, they doxxed trans and undocumented students to create immense anxieties and insecurities amongst the student body. I participated in organising efforts to protests their visit, defend campus against militarised police, and ensure vulnerable members of our campus community were as safe as possible. I held my classes at a theological college a few blocks from campus and offered extra student consultation hours for anyone who could not come to campus. Likewise, I was teaching as a postdoctoral fellow at UWC when the pandemic hit in 2020. I had watched US universities close two weeks earlier and knew we would follow. I printed out hard copies of readings for students in my Honours seminar and sent them home for the semester. When lockdown began, most of my students had no access to internet at home and were unable to travel to public internet hotspots. While students would eventually be provided with data, before support was available, I phoned them each week to understand their accessibility needs and discuss readings and assignments. Most students were able to continue the course, reporting: “phone calls during office hours to check in and to get feedback were highly appreciated. Speaking to your lecturer on the phone brought an element of closeness and that someone is there in terms of a support system. It made a hard experience less lonely.” In the classroom and out of it, I am committed to providing students with tools for learning and studying deeply to confront systems of oppression.
