Download PDFTactically Transgressive Teaching
The answers to the questions we have each posed aren’t clear-cut. But we argue that the framework of tactically transgressive teaching we pursue provides graduate student-instructors ways to engage our varied institutional contexts safely and productively.
In tactical technical communication’s nascence, Kimball (2009) builds off de Certeau’s (1984) ideas to illustrate that strategies are institutional, while tactics are individual. Specifically, Kimball (2009) discusses understanding “technical documentation culturally–how deeply documentation can be integrated into the lives and fantasies of people in contemporary culture as they go beyond user-as-practitioner to user-as-producer and user-as-citizen” (p. 82-83). This dynamic reveals the importance of context and culture for tactics that we find critical for our transgressive teaching framework. For us, tactical technical communication becomes a framework for teaching which enables graduate student-instructors to work within the constraints of the neoliberal institution through individualized tactics in their classrooms. In short: these teaching practices are tactical because they go beyond user-as-practitioner or user-as-producer, playing with the boundaries surrounding student-as-learner and instructor-as-expert. We as graduate instructors must know when to transgress against rules and structures, and when to make room for our students to act as experts, teachers, and co-conspirators in a socially just classroom.
To be a tactically transgressive instructor likely means working within an oppressive system—even if only to undermine it in small but critical ways. This could be as simple as deciding when to enforce an attendance policy, or it could take the form of broaching difficult conversations while still remaining visibly within the lines of policy and university rules. We suggest similarities between la Paperson’s model of hotwiring (2017) and Kimball’s (2017) tactical technical communication framework. Whereas Kimball is specific that tactical technical communication is about writers “sharing technical information for their own purposes” (p. 1) rather than through or for official purposes, we propose that the essence of tactical technical communication can be “hotwired” for social justice-oriented pedagogy. In other words, to be tactically transgressive is to understand our limits as students, instructors, and people in order to act for ends beyond the classroom or institution. There seems to be something unique about our role as graduate student-instructors that distinguishes us from other non-tenured instructors, though we do not diminish or discredit their positionality as likewise precarious members of the academy. Rather, we suggest
Coalitions, Publics, and Social Justice Technical Communication
Though the classroom is not necessarily a public space, the writing classroom prepares students for responsibly engaging with publics (Grabill & Simmons, 1998). hooks (1994) identifies the classroom as a communal space, and scholarship on publics and coalitions (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Chavez, 2011; Walton, Moore, & Jones, 2019) show why classrooms must take up issues outside of them, blurring these publics and spaces together. The classroom is not an inherently just space; social injustices may be reproduced and reified in the classroom (Agboka, 2018; Katz, 1992; Legg & Strantz, 2021; Sackey, 2018), and instructors must take great care to not only avoid harmful or unjust pedagogies but to actively engage students and agitate towards social justice. Pedagogy must not merely allow students the chance to engage with social justice, but should be transgressive in nature, when possible.
The differences between merely allowing students the chance to engage with social justice and transgressing in service of social justice are questions of comfort and discomfort, and great care. To transgress necessarily involves agitating in some way, even if these transgressive attitudes are not obvious at first glance. Merely lecturing students is not inherently transgressive, though it may appear so to students who resist reflecting on hierarchies and (their own) dominant positionalities.
Resistance, Positionality, and Risk
Following Restaino (2012), we see graduate student-instructors as situated in the in-between of students and instructors. Using Hannah Arendt’s theory of labor, work, and action, Restaino mentors four graduate student-instructors during their first semester teaching, finding that they are “unquestionably still ‘in process’” (2012, p. 58) as they develop teacher identities. With several years of teaching experience between us, the process of developing teacher identities did not end alongside the conclusion of the first semester of teaching.
Complicating our developing student-instructor identities, we are allowed relatively little power within the institution, even in our classrooms. We are expected to defer to “official” university policy, and we only sometimes have room to design curriculums that reflect our research or values. Even though the classroom is a politicized space (Berlin, 1988), to discuss political issues is distasteful at best and potentially harmful at worst. We often cannot alter 100- or 200-level courses or innovate pedagogically, making it more difficult for us to learn or push the boundaries of our pedagogy. This is further compounded by issues of power, positionality, and privilege (Walton, Moore, & Jones, 2019). The role of graduate student-instructor is an assemblage of tensions and contradictions between our positionalities, our roles within the university, and our capacity to act as instructors. Where does our commitment to stand for social justice end–and how do we uphold that commitment when it is in tension with a university’s policies?
The assemblage of our positionalities may cause us to encounter harms or injustices. Instructors who are (multiply) marginalized contend with microaggressions and macroaggressions relating to race, gender, ethnicity, and other identities. At the same time, instructors must also consider and anticipate the issues (multiply) marginalized students face. As student-instructors, lines can blur and be uncomfortable to navigate when we negotiate being an ally to students while also taking care of ourselves–further complicated by the invisibility of positionality and privilege. Moreover, in line with policies set by our institutional contexts, we may also be expected to reproduce injustices–such as the ways that racism permeate educational spaces (Moore, 2018)–or act in other harmful ways towards our students. We are, however, simultaneously disempowered to address these harms without opening ourselves up to further risk. Haywood (2019) writes that collaboration should avoid “surveillancing and silencing” (para. 7), and community-based practices require us to think through “how our practices are directly tied to the ethical obligations we hold in leveraging our power and positions to support the folks we desire to collaborate with” (para. 7). Collaboration, then, requires thinking through our relationships to position, privilege, and power as graduate student-instructors in our universities. We must assess our situations and be reflexive as we consider potential harms toward our students and ourselves.
The risks of entering coalition are complicated by our individual identities as well as the in-between student-instructor positionality. Managing the tensions of developing social justice-oriented pedagogies within institutional or departmental expectations of the courses they ask us to teach requires different levels of emotional labor and even harm depending on the student-instructor’s lived experiences. For example, a course that expects conversations about language justice or writing experiences might be comfortable for either of us but be very uncomfortable for graduate students with identities both similar and different from ours. Meanwhile, managing the tensions between course expectations and students’ own expectations or needs requires us to make decisions that jeopardize care or social justice over institutional requirements–and vice versa. If I (Alex) highlight specific instances of racism in order to invite reflection, I must do so without commodifying the experiences of my students, thus alienating them, and without being so facile that my classroom fails to foster community or address oppression meaningfully. Though sometimes we make the choice to resist the University à la a “soft” policy or other blurred lines, other times, as our narratives illustrated, students resist us. While I (Nicole) strive to develop syllabi and course reading lists which center diverse authors and rich experiences, a conversation about privilege and its “peculiar benefit[s]” (Gay, 2012, para. 3) might alienate students who feel accused or confuse students with marginalized backgrounds or experiences. Decisions that go into our syllabi or those that we make in conversation during class time might jeopardize our careers after completing our graduate degrees, be it an immediate student report to our supervisors or institution or gradually through anonymous evaluations. How do we simultaneously give our students, both individually and collectively, what they want or need from the course and each class session while ensuring our job security, our safety in the classroom?