Download PDFNicole's Narrative
For me, coalition with my students is deeply entrenched in critical reflection and conversation about positionality (Pouncil & Sanders, 2022). My own identity as a mixed-race, Japanese American is critical to how I approach my classrooms, students, and curriculum. My identity is also critical to how I perceive myself in the university and, surely, how the university perceives me. Alongside my identity, being a graduate student-instructor requires constant reflexivity as I navigate the expectations of the university and my students’ interests within my pedagogy. The balance across requirements, social justice, and student interest differs across institutions, but most difficult are those with the least room for my own intervention against assignments or learning outcomes I deem harmful. Nevertheless, I strive toward coalition with my students in every course I teach.
As a graduate student who has taught first-year writing and other related courses on the West Coast and in the Midwest, the resistance I sense toward my social justice-oriented aims from my students is varied. Unlike Alex’s experiences, my university contexts invited working with much looser expectations. For example, I designed an Asian American solidarity unit that was welcomed at an Asian American, Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI). I have also developed units on specific genres, such as resumes and cover letters or the introduction, methods, results, and discussion research paper structure (e.g. IMRaD), that students met with, admittedly, initial disdain followed by gratitude for the coursework’s role in supporting acquiring on-campus jobs and various internships.
Despite the room I’ve had to grow my pedagogy, being a scholar-teacher engaging social justice and technical skills in my classrooms still harbors the complexities of solidarity-building with students that Alex notes. For example, social justice-oriented pedagogies can invite the centering of marginalized students in a setting where we are traditionally a minority: despite my Asian American unit being taught at an AANAPISI, requiring at least 10 percent of its full-time undergraduate enrollment to identify as any of the named communities, that does not mean the classroom itself reflects that 10 percent. Moreover, social justice work may simultaneously alienate students accustomed to being in the majority or those who are simply from areas or experiences that haven’t invited particular conversations.
To add to this tension in solidarity-building with students who I share positionality with is the greater interest I sense from students for coursework that appears more directly connected to employment. My IMRaD units were centered around a comparison between majors or minors; though tedious for students set on a degree, those still narrowing their choices appeared pleased that a general education course the university required allowed them to focus on a “real-world” decision. Similarly, the course I taught that culminated in the opportunity to interview for employment in the university writing center concentrated on themes like active listening, writing center theory, language justice, anti-racism, and the obvious need for building a consultation toolkit. Broadly speaking, the course taught students both technical and theoretical skills. Managing both, however, was a design of the context, not mine. And so, prioritizing both the technical skills students want with the critical thinking and social justice I value remains a puzzle.
Social justice and technical skills are not at odds with one another in our classrooms or beyond (Katz, 1992; Simmons & Grabill, 2007). And yet, introductory courses and many not-so-experienced graduate student-instructors are asked to wrestle with the fact that the students coming to our courses are paying for our class and want it to be uniquely worth their time—and understandably so—while we are working with curriculum constraints, complex identities and backgrounds, as well as all the other labor required during graduate education. In engaging students with simultaneously social justice-oriented and skills-based pedagogies, I have found myself conflicted. I’m constantly reflecting on how I can effectively build solidarity with my students, student to student, and what it means if my syllabi outline the notion that students and instructor alike are learning together. Moreover, if both learning and coalition are reciprocal, what am I expecting from my students? What am I giving them, and what am I receiving from them? How much learning are my students seeing me do, and how does that affect coalition?