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Let me begin by looking all the way back to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was first published in 1968, which I read for the first time in autumn 2019 in the second year of my M.A./Ph.D. program in a feminist pedagogy class. In his critique of the banking model of education—in which the teacher’s job is to narrate knowledge that students passively memorize monologically—Freire proposed what he called a “problem-posing education,” in which students are encouraged to “perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves,” to “single out elements from their ‘background awareness’ and to reflect upon them” so that “they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (83). This act of perceiving critically the way one exists in the world is a reorientation of what reading and literacy mean, that “reading the word” is intimately intertwined with “reading the world” (Freire and Macedo 23). Literacy is not merely about reading words on paper, but also about actively making sense of the social phenomena in the real world that we live in, to potentially enact social changes. Thus, if education is to be a practice of freedom (hooks), it should first and foremost be about fostering a critical consciousness about the world and how we exist in it, including the systems of oppression that bind us.
This essay concerns itself with this act of reading the world towards a critical consciousness necessary in education as a practice of freedom, the identity work underlying this reading practice, and the affective consequences of it—especially as it relates to international graduate teaching assistants (GTA) and marginalized students. More specifically, this essay looks at how the practice of reading the world can be fostered through one-on-one interactions between marginalized students and international GTAs as teachers, such as in student conferences or tutoring sessions. I argue that critical consciousness needs identity work, which I define broadly as the consideration and negotiation of someone’s sense of self, lived experiences, and position in society, for the purposes of understanding one’s place in the world and what they are enabled to do. International GTAs are well-positioned to perform identity work toward critical consciousness because of the lived experience and orientations afforded by their status as graduate students, their experience in crossing borders, and any marginalization (racial, linguistic, cultural, epistemic) they may be subject to. Taking as a starting point the work of decolonial scholars such as Walter Mignolo, I examine how geo- and body-politics of knowledge (Mignolo) undergird the kind of identity-as-pedagogy (Morgan) available to international GTAs in efforts to foster critical consciousness in their students. Put simply, this means considering how one’s sense-making is influenced by their geopolitical and social locations (geopolitics of knowledge), as well as their embodiment and the lived experiences felt through their bodies (body-politics of knowledge). This sense-making then becomes a resource for identity construction that in turn can be performed strategically in pedagogical situations, as a pedagogical resource (identity-as-pedagogy). Hence, this essay adds to the body of work on the potential of international GTAs in rhetoric and composition pedagogies (e.g., Nasih Alam on facilitating conversations on race and inclusivity; Xuan Zheng on fostering a translingual approach; and Aleksandra Kasztalska on overcoming stigma against non-native English writers).
After highlighting the resources that international GTAs bring in the identity work related to the fostering of critical consciousness, I also attend to the affective tensions that result from students’ critical reading of their worlds and the systems of oppression they are subject to. Drawing from the work of the queer theorist Eve Kosofski Sedgwick, I argue that critical readings of the world need to be balanced with reparative practices that reframe students’ subjectivities on positive terms, to offset the discomforts that may arise from an acute awareness of one’s oppression. Here, I highlight reparative practices as a foil to critical practices. While critical practices are oriented toward recognizing systems of oppression, reparative practices center the positive resources that one already possesses in spite of their condition of oppression.
Due to the importance of considering positionality and lived experiences in discussions of teacher identity and teacher-student relationships, my methodology is largely autoethnographic (Holman-Jones et al.). That is, I reflect on my interactions with the students I have worked with, bringing as illustrations two case studies from my experience as an international GTA and scholar.