How do I teach popular culture without becoming a victim of it?
Bridget Cauthery
This winter term that has just come to an end is one that I will not likely forget any time soon. Yes one of my courses ballooned to 700 students across 20 sections, yes I had four new TAs to train and support, yes Moodle gave me some headaches, but none of that was unusual – stressful yes, but not unusual. What was unusual was being “called out” for the material I teach no less than four times this term. That is a new record.
I pride myself on being accessible and responsive to my students but when a student or a TA contacts me by email and says “I have a problem with x content in your course” I go on high alert. I respond even more quickly than I normally do. I validate the student’s decision to contact me and invite the student to meet face-to-face as soon as possible. These are not only teaching moments, these are moments that, if not handled swiftly and tactfully, in an age of “call-out culture” could be ruinous to my career.
I teach courses in dance studies. Sounds innocuous enough, I know but what I actually teach is culture as performed through the medium of popular and traditional dances. My aim is to challenge students to become critical consumers of visual culture and, as a result, we discuss the myriad of ways that bias, discrimination and stereotype intersect and pervade the very activities that entertain us. We talk about race, gender, power, class, sexuality, ability and ethnicity – all the major touchstones of critical theory. As a result, we enter into contentious and potentially controversial territory that can make students and TAs uncomfortable. But that is the point – to destabilize the ways we see the world and the things we take for granted about people other than ourselves and consider how our own positionalities might be culpable in perpetuating bias, discrimination and stereotype.
As a white, heterosexual, settler woman privileged by my race, my education and my upbringing, facilitating these conversations is, to put it mildly, fraught. I do not pretend to know what it is like to be a person of colour, to be a member of the LGTBQ community, to grow up poor, to have grown up without access to good schools, comprehensive healthcare or clean water, to not be fluent in one of Canada’s official languages, or to be discriminated against for the way I speak, move, believe or celebrate. But I can and do create opportunities for dialogue about these realities and help students to navigate their own responses to perceived difference. This is what I teach, how I teach and it is not a responsibility I take lightly or wish ever to be dissuaded from pursuing.
In all four instances the call-outs were resolved and, in the process, the students and I gained insight from each other and learned something important. The exchanges, though charged and sometimes emotional, were respectful and ultimately all participants wanted the same thing: to be heard and to effect change. As long as those are the goals, I am all for it. What worries me is if some student, some day, does not give me the opportunity to meet them halfway. With this in mind, I question how I continue to facilitate conversations about important subjects when students’ desire to model social consciousness trends in popular culture may undermine their own education. It’s a dilemma that diluting the content of my courses will not solve. Through maintaining a commitment to teaching boldly, I actively promote an integrity of response where debate, infused with self-reflexivity, are the keys to pro-active pedagogy.
About the Author
Dr. Bridget Cauthery is a dance and cultural studies scholar focusing on the impact of neo-coloniality and the processes of globalization on contemporary and popular dance practices in the Global North. She teaches in the Department of Dance (AMPD) and in 2018 was the recipient of the President’s University-Wide Teaching Award for Part-Time Faculty.