Radical Pedagogy
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131911.2019.1654690
https://signsjournal.org/currents-trigger-warnings/pedagogy/
https://www.risd.edu/news/stories/decoloniality-seminar-expands-social-equity-initiative
From this moment of relational and educational uncertainty, upheaval and reverberation, of taking everything we do in person online, arrives the dire need for an emergent and humanizing education approach flux pedagogy.
Flux pedagogy integrates critical relational frameworks into a complex adaptive pedagogical approach that identifies and addresses lived problems as a form of radical learning towards informed action. A flux pedagogy approach supports an inquiry-based, emergent design teaching and leadership mindset that is adaptive, generative, and compassionate; it is a framework for balancing radical compassion for students, colleagues, staff, and self with high-yet-humanely-calibrated expectations for course learning in a moment when people need more of affirming and generative professional spaces. This crisis moment requires that educators learn new skills and mindsets for designing and enacting relational and transformative pedagogies with our students and colleagues even as we lead and teach them specific topics and content areas. The primary dimensions of flux pedagogy are: 1) Inquiry Stance Pedagogy; 2) Trauma-informed Pedagogy, which includes Radical Compassion and Radical Self-care; 3) Emergent Design, Student-Centered, Active Pedagogy; 4) Critical Pedagogy and Storytelling; 5) Racial Literacy Pedagogy; and 6) Brave Space Pedagogy. Each dimension is discussed in the context of COVID-19 and their generative integration—flux pedagogy—is offered a heuristic for equitable, responsive, ethical pedagogies in this pandemic moment. Strategies are shared for enacting flux pedagogy to support the co-construction of courses as online brave space communities of practice through the use of participatory approaches and critical pedagogy practices such as racial literacy storytelling, communal re-storying, counter-storytelling, and critical dialogic engagement peer inquiry groups.
The global rise of ‘neo-populism’, culminating in the election of the populist Republican candidate Donald Trump to the US presidency, has been accompanied by a notable backlash and resistance to what has been categorised as governing/dominating ‘elites’, including HE academic institutions. Populist critiques centre on a perceived climate of censorship on campus in the name of ‘political correctness’. In this paper I examine some of the arguments put forward by proponents and detractors in these debates, utlising some examples from empirical data from a study of online student newspaper posts in 2016 and 2017 from campuses in the US and the UK. In doing so I will be exploring the ways in which the debates are underpinned by distinct gendered, classed and ‘raced’ discourses that are linked not only to differing conceptions of ‘truth’ but also the nature and purpose of learning in the university itself.
This article takes up the theme that a significant but often ignored source for British Cultural Studies began in the interdisciplinary teaching of the Workers’ Educational Association and university extra-mural departments in the immediate post-Second World War years. I deepen this argument by outlining the history of ‘popular education’ in Europe and beyond in the modern period to illustrate how the coming together of subaltern political movements and intellectual inquiry created an independent public sphere of radical self-enlightenment. In this article, by utilising archival and textual sources, I should like to explore whether it may be possible to renew the original project of Cultural Studies through radical programmes of ‘popular’ adult education in the digital age. I see Jim McGuigan’s work as offering ‘resources of hope’, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, for this tradition in the universe of academic Cultural Studies.
Excerpt: In a world where the government breeds dragons to eat people of color, Black women freedom fighters called "Sapphires" cultivate the ultimate survival strategy: they train the dragons. Sapphires strategically satisfy the dragons' hunger for "dark meat" by feeding them soul food.1 Once the unnamed narrator is able to "si[t] astride" the "huge" "beautiful" leader of the dragons named "Queen," the Black women's revolution can begin.2
N. K. Jemisin's short story "Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death" (2019) uses [End Page 298] nonrealist devices to diagnose long-standing structural violences while gesturing toward alternative worlds. In this way, the story enacts Octavia Butler's statement on the imaginative work of speculative fiction: "There's nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns."3 There is "nothing new" about the U.S. state systematically stereotyping and killing Black people. Dragons might as well take their place among linked anti-Black, misogynist, and heterosexist tools of state violence. Just as the story's narrator trains and "si[ts] astride" the very creature designed to kill her, Jemisin also reharnesses discursive violences that mark Black women in particular as angry and expendable.4 Dragons emerge as a nonrealist vehicle asserting the necessity and immanence of "new suns."5 Ending on the cusp of a Black women's revolution, Jemisin's story points to possible worlds that are free of police murders, housing segregation, mass incarceration, and the relentless scapegoating of Black womanhood.
Here I make a brief case for teaching U.S. women's studies with an emphasis on Black feminist speculative fiction—a genre of writing by Black women, cis and trans, that uses nonrealist world-building to do the political work of valuing Black genders and sexualities.6 Nonrealist narrative choices in this context do not signify the unreal but rather illuminate multiple layers of Black life in a real world structured by white supremacy. My texts of focus are Black feminist because they interrogate dominant assumptions at the intersections of race, sex, sexuality, and gender in the interests of Black women's freedom.7
The pedagogical reflections I offer stem from my experience teaching women's studies during the coronavirus pandemic and abolitionist uprisings since spring 2020.8 Like Farah Jasmine Griffin, I have been struck by how Black speculative texts can model "community-building" for students "in the midst of economic, social, political, and ecological catastrophe."9 Griffin ultimately emphasizes how the genre can help students imagine different worlds—"new suns," in Butler's formulation. Yet the white supremacist storming of the Capitol together with the murders of Breonna Taylor, Riah Milton, George Floyd, and too many others have since compelled me to sit longer with the first part of Butler's formulation: "There's nothing new / under the sun." As Saidiya Hartman writes, Black Americans have long "been allowed to die in great numbers without a crisis ever being declared."10 Pandemics past and present only accelerate and expose the realities of institutionalized vulnerability to death.
Andel, Jaroslav, ed. Back to the Sandbox: Art and Radical Pedagogy. U. of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Back to the Sandbox brings together an international group of artists who explore the critical state of education. The exhibition is based on collaborations of prominent artists, scientists and educators and includes works of art, scientific and educational experiments, and archival material. Works by Luis Camnitzer (Germany/Uruguay); James Duignan (Chicago); Priscila Fernandes (Portugal); Michael Joaquin Grey (New York); Ane Hjort Guttu (Norway); Markus Kayser (Germany); Eva Koťátková (Czech Republic); James Mollison (Kenya/Italy); Palle Nielsen (Denmark); and Petr Nikl (Czech Republic) are included in the exhibition. The curator of the exhibition, Jaroslav Anděl, Ph.D., is an independent curator and author of over 40 books on contemporary art. He was artistic director of the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague from 2009 – 2014. “By asking radical questions, art becomes a radical pedagogy which transcends institutional boundaries and inspires mind-changing narratives,” Anděl said.
Freire P. (1985). The politics of education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
Contributes to a radical formulation of pedagogy through its revitalization of language, utopianism, and revolutionary message. . . . The book enlarges our vision with each reading, until the meanings become our own. Harvard Educational Review
Constitutes the voice of a great teacher who has managed to replace the melancholic and despairing discourse of the post-modern Left with possibility and human compassion. Educational TheoryThe importance of the relationship between power and discourse for a radical pedagogy is that it provides a theoretical grounding for interrogating the issue of how ideology is inscribed in those forms of educational discourse through which school experiences and practices are ordered and constituted. Moreover, it points to the necessity of accounting theoretically for the ways in which language, ideology, history, and experience come together to produce, define, and constrain particular forms of teacher-student practice. The chapter critically analyzes the two major discourses of mainstream educational theory. At the risk of undue simplification, these are characterized as conservative and liberal pedagogical discourses. The chapter develops a discourse appropriate for a radical pedagogy, one that draws heavily upon the works of Paulo Freire and Mikhail Bakhtin. Each discourses presented above as part of a radical pedagogy involves a different view of cultural production, pedagogical analysis, and political action.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY, and London: Routledge. 1994.
In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself. "To educate is the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching anyone can learn." Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.
The audiovisual essay has become a central pillar in the way that film, television, and media scholars publish their scholarship, affording an exploration of the ways in which digital technologies offer new modes of carrying out and presenting film and moving image research. An ever-increasing range of technologies now enable scholars in these fields to write using the very materials that constitute their objects of study: moving images and sounds (Grant 2014). The audiovisual essay is also used increasingly in schools, colleges, and universities, in the arts and humanities, as a rich and invigorating “non-standard” form of course assessment and mode of creative and intellectual enquiry. The reason for this development is fourfold:
Applied knowledge and understanding is seen to foster the best learning outcomes;
Assessment logo-centrism is seen to fail many students, particularly those with little cultural capital from low socio-economic backgrounds;
In a highly mediated modern world, where screen presentations occur in all walks of life, the audiovisual essay is seen as an incredibly important transferable tool;
It is born out of a recognition that learning and understanding is not a closed book and that the audiovisual essay fosters resourceful, open learning.
In this teaching dossier, our aim is to explore how school and university teachers and scholars from a range of secondary and tertiary contexts engage with and experience these pedagogical assumptions when teaching with the audiovisual essay. We begin from the premise that this format is uniquely situated to explore the concept of pedagogy itself. In the late 1980s, David Lusted argued that “knowledge needs to be conceived as produced in exchange,” with “all agents in its active production conceived as producers” (1986, 5). Thirty years later, students across a wide range of educational levels and contexts have the skills and technology to be literal producers of digital content—in control of “the gesture of making” that, for Vilém Flusser, constitutes a kind of thinking with one’s hands (2014).
How, then, can the audiovisual essay be understood as a strategy of radical pedagogy that has the potential to powerfully disrupt conventional patterns of knowledge transmission? How does “thinking with one’s hands” challenge the priorities and values that underpin a traditional humanities education by offering up new forms of cultural capital that resist logocentrism? In the context of teaching, these lines of enquiry extend into numerous pragmatic questions. How might the use of the audiovisual essay improve students’ educational experience and learning outcomes? How does this form work with current educational priorities for “authentic” assessment items within the arts and humanities? Do students view the audiovisual essay more favorably than written or examined forms of assessment? And how can this learning format be best explained, assigned, and assessed?
This dossier aims to fill the current gap in research on the use, value, and impact of the audiovisual essay on learning and teaching by considering how the format can function as a uniquely empowering and resistant tool within the arts and humanities. In line with the questions above, the dossier is organized into three sections.
In the first section, Liberating Writing, contributors working from diverse contexts all consider how the audiovisual essay can constitute a radical break from the centrality of writing in academic practice. Drawing from their own experience of creating over one hundred examples, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin first present a highly practical set of guidelines for how to develop an audiovisual essay in a mode that does not begin with a pre-scripted text. Recommending instead that creators go straight to the physical process of moving around fragments of image and sound based upon loose ideas and choices, they show how the pattern and structure of the piece can emerge as a “thought process” about screen media that genuinely uses that media’s own language, thereby bringing about an affective work that cannot be reduced to a text-based summary.
In the next essay, Vincent Longo discusses a somewhat different, multimodal approach that he takes with his students at the University of Michigan. Arguing for the pedagogical benefit of exploring the overlap between multimodal composition and the audiovisual essay, Longo explains the strict design and learning goals of a hybrid-style “motif assignment,” employing a three-part script that asks students to think systematically about how the best combination of words, images, and audio can demonstrate their argument.
Writing returns as central to the use of audiovisual essays in the first section’s final essay by Robert Letizi, as he insists upon the relationship between audiovisual essays, literary essays, and cinematic forms such as the essay film. Letizi wrestles with the affordances and hazards of teaching digital topics to a generation who have grown up, by turns, expressing themselves through and deluged by audiovisual media. By drawing attention to the ways in which, for our students, the audiovisual is second nature, he is able to argue that it is writing that has become “defamiliarized and disarticulated.” As such, Letizi’s strategies sit somewhere in between Álvarez López/Martin and Longo: audiovisual expression is the main objective, but students begin their reflective and critical journey through writing, recording their impressions to screening material in a detailed and systematic way.
A concern with how the audiovisual essay relates to written assessment is carried over into the second section, Authenticity and Empowerment. In the first essay, Sean Redmond and Joanna Tai consider how, as an assessment item, the form fosters authenticity in terms of both “real world” relevance and creative criticality. Outlining a pilot study that examines how third year undergraduates at Deakin University, Melbourne, took up and responded to an audio visual assignment with accompanying exegesis, they show how and why students overwhelmingly found the praxis-led task to be a more critically valuable and transferable—more authentic—format than the written essay.
In the next piece, Travis McKenzie offers a view on the authentic possibilities of the audiovisual essay from a secondary school perspective. He shows how Media and English students in years 10–12 are empowered by the format, not only to create a final product that is of a high standard but to plan, collaborate, seek feedback, and revise their work in a way they do not for written assessment.
The final section of the dossier focuses on themes of Creativity and Pedagogy. Sian Mitchell argues that the audiovisual essay can make an intervention in a film production context, in which striking the delicate balance between the teaching of creative and theoretical aspects is an ongoing issue. First, through film analysis, students become aware of how formal and aesthetic choices have implications for the socio-cultural impact of films. Second, students are tasked with research, analysis, and reflection, via the creation of an audiovisual essay built around the notion of “subtext.” For Mitchell, creative practice pedagogy is enriched by audiovisual essay tasks, which have proven valuable for the enhancement of screen literacy and critical thinking. Finally, and linking back directly to the issue’s key theme, Catherine Fowler reflects on how introducing exercises with video editing into her French new wave unit animated her classroom and transformed the potential for radical pedagogy in the seminar space. Explaining how the process of editing gives the sense that the film text is open to everyone in the room despite their knowledge, she shows how the exercise brings the notion of control—by both the filmmaker and the teacher—into question. This effect gives rise to a tangible sense in which student and teacher genuinely work together in producing knowledge, transforming relationships to both learning and teaching.
Suzanne Bost, Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
How might foregrounding the writings of colonized peoples transform the ways we work in the humanities? In an era dominated by loud political rhetoric, Suzanne Bost advocates for quieter modes of scholarship: intellectual humility rather than ego, collaboration and conversation rather than singular argumentation, continual reflection and revision rather than defensiveness, and a willingness to believe in different ways of being and knowing rather than adhering to academic norms. With Quiet Methodologies, she demonstrates practical decolonial scholarship and proposes alternative approaches for fostering meaningful engagement. Turning to feminist, queer, and decolonial writings from Gloria Anzaldúa, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and many others, Bost reflects on what we do when we work with literature, culture, and ideas. She weaves together multiple voices, methods of writing, and culturally diverse epistemologies and uses creative devices such as collage, her own original poetry, revision, lists, images, and conversation to disengage academic thought and writing from colonial theories and archives that have passed as neutral. Eschewing conventional monograph formats, her work embraces a reciprocal and heterogeneous learning process with profound ethical implications. Part of a movement of reimagining research and education through care, Quiet Methodologies is a powerful exploration of the possibilities of criticism during crises. It encourages readers to be visionary and pragmatic, challenging current conditions and offering alternative ideas for the future of the humanities.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.
Soyinka, Wole. The burden of memory, the muse of forgiveness. Oxford University Press, 1998.