As an elite Jesuit
university, Georgetown not only enjoys access to a large number of young adults
who will go on to work as leaders in both the private and public spheres in the
United States and abroad, but also has the social justice framework needed to
ground a vision of transformative education. Although demographically Georgetown
could certainly be made to better reflect the American population, I chose to identify
changes that could be made within the university as it stands, recognizing the
good that is already being done and thinking about how best to improve upon
that work. Specifically, I propose a series of interviews with professors who
already promote an inclusive pedagogy to provide a paradigm for other faculty
members for thinking about how to teach diversity. This project modifies the
proposal set forth by the Last Campaign for Academic Reform both to address
some of the pragmatic concerns its implementation would raise and to work within
a framework of pedagogical “best practices”—recognizing the value of hearing
from faculty already engaged in this sort of work and moving toward diverse
syllabi and inclusive classroom atmospheres across the disciplines.
This year, the
Last Campaign for Academic Reform has lobbied for a diversity requirement,
citing the preexisting courses at Georgetown that provide an academic forum for
students to engage with issues of diversity, including race, gender, sexuality,
and disability. Although the sentiment behind the proposal is laudable,
especially insofar as it recognizes that many professors already address issues
of privilege and diversity in the classroom, it insists that the requirement
fall on the students to sign up for specific courses, rather than approaching
the issue on the faculty’s side, encouraging professors to design inclusive
syllabi and create classroom dialogue that illuminates, rather than occludes,
areas of difference.
Although the Last
Campaign for Academic Reform has stressed that these diversity courses will not
add to the number of course requirements, the very idea of calling them
“required” courses brings with it new challenges. For one, looking at the
course feedback provided through the Registrar, the prerequisite courses for majors,
requirements in the core curriculum, and introductory-level classes generally
receive lower markings than both upper- and lower-level electives across the
disciplines. Student engagement, measured through hours spent studying and
amount learned, is often significantly lower in required courses than in
electives—even those electives of comparable class size and at the 100- or
200-level. While some faculty members manage to engage students fully in the
materials and receive high markings across the board, these professors remain
the exception. Furthermore, the Last Campaign for Academic Reform has
identified 80 courses that could be cross-listed with the new diversity
requirement, but many are only taught once per year and others still only once
every two years, creating a practical concern about increasing the number of
courses being offered at Georgetown to accommodate the influx of new students
enrolling in a small sub-section of class offerings. While it is technically
plausible that all 1,600 to 1,800 freshmen could fill both of their required courses
over four semesters without creating new courses, the fact remains that other
students already choose to enroll in these classes—students whose needs and
genuine desire to be in the class should not be dismissed so quickly.
For while
Georgetown has a responsibility to expose its students to the realities of
privilege and oppression and begin conversations on diversity and its effects
in the world, we should do so in a way that both preserves safe spaces for
those students who already would have taken now-required courses and creates
spaces for dialogue in courses across the curriculum, recognizing that diversity
does not occur in a vacuum. As it stands now, courses such as “Intro to Queer
Theory,” “Intro to African-American Studies,” and “Intro to Women and Gender
Studies” often function as safe spaces for students who either identify with or
care deeply about these identity groups. While there is value in disrupting the
assumed status quo of unquestioned privilege, that value need not come at the
expense of other students’ needs. In Tendencies,
Eve Sedgwick explains her rationale for teaching one of the nation’s first
classes on Gay and Lesbian Studies, describing it as a way of “keep[ing] faith
with vividly remembered promises…to make invisible possibilities and desires
visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in
where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to
challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so
challenged” (3). Her logic makes visible the stakes of this kind of education,
for this theory—academic as it may be—encompasses a “field where the actual
survival of other people in the class might at the very moment be at stake,”
where certain students approach the material with “sharper needs, more supple
epistemological frameworks” (5). However, the possibility that these classes
might become requirements, become a course used to check the diversity box on
MyAccess, threatens the good that they provide to many of the students on
campus for whom diversity is not a box, but a lived reality. Sedgwick herself
recalled facing outrage after admitting in an interview that she had designed
her course with LGBTQ students in mind. Shocked by the “sense of entitlement
[of] straight-defined students,” she had to confront students accustomed to
enjoying the privileged status of a normative identity demanding a course
“designed…for maximum legibility to themselves” (5). These Georgetown courses,
however, must remain spaces designed for those students who want—and often need—to be there.
Furthermore,
conversations on issues of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, class,
(dis)ability, and other identity categories should span the curriculum, rather than
only existing in isolation in an “Intro to x
studies” course. Issues of privilege and oppression always occur in context,
and allowing students to recognize these intersections will best prepare them
to become understanding citizens who understand that the fight for social
justice is not only waged in obvious situations, but also in the workplace, classroom,
and everyday interactions. Thus, I propose interviewing those professors who
are already integrating these topics into their classrooms and using these
interviews as the basis for a resource guide for faculty to consult while
designing courses and reflecting on how to promote inclusive pedagogical
practices. Although many resources exist online, the most commonly referenced guide—the
University of North Carolina’s Center for Teaching and Learning’s Teaching for Inclusion: Diversity in the
College Classroom is
quite outdated, having been written in 1997, and unreflective of the specifics
of Georgetown’s campus and culture. A handbook featuring interviews with
current Georgetown faculty about their own courses would not only provide a
more accurate view of the current situation, but also include information for
campus resources, groups, and staff that would best equip professors with the
information they need to begin these conversations in their own classrooms.
I have spent the
past few months working with the Doyle Fellows Program to identify and
interview professors who have introduced elements of inclusive education into
courses in disciplines typically assumed to be antithetical to diverse
curricula and syllabi, including the Theology, Government, and Philosophy
Departments. While professors often make this move quite apparent from the very
title of the course—“Smart, Female, and Catholic,” “Judaism and Gender,” and
“Gender in Justice”—at other times they have found ways to queer the canon,
introducing units or conversations on race, sexuality, and disability, among
others, into courses such as “Literary History I and II,” “Religion in American
Political Life,” and “Foundations in Biology” without sacrificing academic rigor
in the process. Significantly, each professor that I interviewed has discussed
the importance of integrating questions of diversity as a paradigm or a full
unit within the first half of the course, lest it become an obligatory “race
day” or “gender class” tacked on at the very end of the semester. While many
reflected on the challenges they have faced finding materials to represent
authors of diverse backgrounds, especially the first time teaching a new class
on a subject with fairly homogeneous “accepted” materials, such as early
literary history or Talmudic studies, they also stressed the value they found
in the challenge. One professor, after devoting a unit of classes to discussing
the history of oppression at play in the recent shootings of unarmed black men,
received emails from multiple students telling her how much it meant to them
that they were able to have these conversations in a classroom setting and to
see that their professors cared about these issues. Although professors may
well be in contact with others within the department or a few colleagues across
campus, these examples of inclusive curricula within historically whitewashed
fields often remain common only within self-selecting circles. Georgetown’s
faculty, having nearly doubled in size over the past few decades, no longer
enjoys the ease of access that could break down departmental lines to allow for
school-wide conversations. A handbook, however, would be able to integrate
resources, materials, and reflections on strategies with commentary specific to the Georgetown community, including an intimate
knowledge of the typical classroom atmosphere, the school’s demographic make
up, and the campus resources and offices available to help facilitate these
conversations.
Most important,
however, are the impacts I hope that interviewing professors and creating a
resource guide could have on campus. If these interviews spark conversations
among the faculty and inspire even a fraction of those who see them to think
about how to integrate conversations about privilege and diversity into their
courses, they will have made a significant and lasting change on campus. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
argues for a vision of “education as the practice of freedom,” as opposed to
the standard view of “education that merely strives to reinforce domination”
(4). To grapple with the legacy of injustice that President DeGioia has called
us to confront, we must partake in hooks’ vision of “education for critical
consciousness [that] can fundamentally alter our perceptions of reality and our
actions” (195). Introducing conversations about privilege in the classroom and
sculpting a syllabus to include historically marginalized voices—be they raced,
gendered, classed, or sexed others—force students to question their assumptions
about who has a right to be heard in the academy. As hooks explains,
“Progressive professors working to transform the curriculum so that it does not
reflect biases or reinforce systems of domination are most often the
individuals willing to take the risks that engaged pedagogy requires and to
make their teaching practices a site of resistance” (21). In asking professors
to commit to making their classrooms spaces for conversations about diversity
and to working toward a progressive vision of education, Georgetown would
reinforce its role as a Jesuit institution rooted in social justice activism.
And these conversations, in turn, would work to build trust and foster relationships
across community lines and allow for the productive interchange of ideas—an
ideal upon which the very institution of higher education rests.
