Abstract
The higher-education student body in the United States is increasingly diverse. Diversity and transnationalism are present in the classroom through the increased numbers of students and instructors who are international and/or non-White-identifying. However, syllabi in media, communication, and cultural studies remain centered around an orthodox body of literature that has come to be conceived of as the canon, consisting of scholars who are mostly white, male, and U.S.-American or European. This essay brings communication, culture, and media studies theories into conversation with critical pedagogy to suggest changes in the organization of syllabi and class activities. Namely, I use participatory culture, critical and decolonial pedagogical theories, and Black and transnational feminist pedagogy, to suggest a critical embrace of different as an approach for designing syllabi that center the students rather than the Western-rooted tradition. This paper is part of the critical body of knowledge that pushes for a decolonizing and transnationalizing intervention in higher education.
In the first year of my undergraduate studies as one of a few Palestinian students in the Communication and Journalism major in an Israeli institution, I signed-up for a course on collective memory. I sought to learn more about the role media plays in building, maintaining, or erasing history and uniting people into a group through a shared memory. The first class was a perfect lesson on the foundations. The syllabus, along with the examples discussed in the classroom, were all constructed around literature, religion, and historical events of one group – most of which I knew nothing about. As a student in a class that drew only from the dominant culture and assumed prior knowledge of that culture, I not only felt left out by the lack of diversity/pluralism, but was also restrained from participating in class discussions. I walked out and dropped the class.
A few Falls ago, I found myself at the other side of this scenario when I was a TA for a communication class aiming to develop students’ critical approaches to media and culture. I was surprised when one of my students came to see me during office hours saying she had been struggling to apply some of the concepts to her own examples because “in China there are no race issues like in the U.S.” I should not have been surprised. While our classroom at the time included many students with different cultural ties within and without the U.S., the perspectives represented in the syllabus were almost exclusively based in the U.S. I was able to give the student some examples and supplemental material about race in China, which helped her understand and apply the concepts of the class, greatly improving her grade by the end of the semester. But this work should not be supplemental. Diverse examples should not be set in the margins or in one corner of the syllabus where one week is dedicated to discussing a few non-dominant examples, reaffirming their Otherization.
The higher education student body in the United States has increasingly become more diverse. Both diversity and transnationalism are present in the classroom through the rising percentages of students and instructors who are international and/or non-white-identifying. When it comes to class syllabi, however, another story exists. Syllabi in media, communication, and cultural studies remain centered around an orthodox body of literature that has come to be conceived of as the canon, consisting of scholars who are mostly Western (American or European, white and/or male). So far, universities’ efforts to diversify syllabi have been driven by an interest of competing in the global market for education by attracting international and ethnic minority students (Last, 2018). There is, thus, an urgency in developing ways for creating structurally inclusive syllabi that go beyond “cosmetic” (as per Last, 2018) diversification. In what follows, I suggest a critical transnational pedagogical approach for designing a decolonizing syllabus centered on a critical embrace of difference. I begin by situating decolonial thinking in the scholarly debate on global power and the role of the university within global power dynamics. This is followed by an overview of the role of the syllabus and practices surrounding syllabus design in the fields of communication, media, and cultural studies. I then give an explanation of my approach for a critical embrace of difference in theory and practice.
The question of inclusion in the syllabus is part of a larger discussion around power over pedagogy and knowledge. It is a question of control over perspective, which is enacted in different aspects of education systems, including our syllabi. Global power is not distributed equally. Rather, it operates in a way that is gendered, sexualized, raced, classed, and unequal both within, across, and at borders (Alexander, 2005; Crenshaw et al., 2019; Mignolo, 2000). Often this power imbalance is at the benefit of what is referred to as “the West,” mainly referring to U.S.-American, white, and/or Eurocentric culture. Western scholarship has had the epistemological privilege of dictating what counts as knowledge and centering global knowledge around Western epistemology. This control over knowledge has served Western civilization in its political and economic control (Mignolo, 2000). As a result, critical and informed inquiry of indigenous, minority, international, or other non-dominant cultures is suppressed while Western culture is learned as universal knowledge (Bhambra et al., 2018; Henry, 2005). Continuing to enforce these dynamics is a form of what Crenshaw et al. refer to as “epistemic violence” (Crenshaw et al., 2019: 23). This was well-put by a Palestinian student who described her experience in a doctoral program in the U.S. saying: “They have no idea how much we know.”
The university served as a key site where colonialism was developed, produced, and institutionalized as a global project (Bhambra et al., 2018). To this day, the ways power operates are knitted into teaching approaches and what is or is not included in course syllabi. Instructors empower dominant culture when we reaffirm its status as a canon, and – instead of creating an inclusive teaching environment – reinforce the status of non-U.S.-American, non-White, and non-Western literature and students as marginal, Other, or subaltern. I suggest we use our syllabi to open up room for pluralization, for debate, even conflict. This would benefit students’ learning as it would benefit the discipline. The classroom is a space where knowledge is not only shared but is also constructed. It is where certain ideas are questioned and reaffirmed. Thus, a decolonized syllabus also contributes to what Alexander dubbed “new ways of being and knowing.” (Alexander, 2005: 22).
Thus, the push to decolonize the syllabus is part of the larger effort to reorganize knowledge and challenge disciplinary adherence to existing power dynamics (Crenshaw et al., 2019). To decolonize means to delink from colonial thinking (Mignolo, 2000). “Epistemic disobedience and delinking doesn’t mean ignoring or turning your back on Western epistemology. It means to recognize that, for better or worse, Western epistemic hegemony has created more problems than solutions.” (Mignolo, 2000: xxi). To delink from colonial thinking, scholars push for an acknowledgement that knowledge is always already plural and diverse (Bhambra et al., 2018; Chakrabarty, 2008; Mignolo, 2000; Stratton and Ang, 1996). To decolonize knowledge, we must rearrange our practices of knowing by including subordinated knowledge and crossing “the fictive boundaries of exclusion and marginalization” (Alexander, 2005: 22).
Scholars have suggested different approaches to decolonization. Whether it is rejecting colonialism through border thinking and epistemological disobedience (Mignolo, 2000), pedagogies of crossing (Alexander, 2005), transformational feminist pedagogy (Henry, 2005), reorganizing knowledge (Crenshaw et al., 2019), critical feminist pedagogy (hooks, 1994, 2010), pedagogy of the contact zone (Pratt, 1991), what is common to these critical approaches is the push to abandon the “monotheist” approach to knowledge that centers itself around Western thought as a universal canon, and to reassemble it in favor of a “pluriversality” of knowledge, as Mignolo called it; an acknowledgment that different ways of knowing exist and encouraging dialogue between them. This is a more accurate representation of how knowledge is organized – or, rather, disorganized – in the world.
Syllabus and canon
The syllabus presents the learning objectives of a class as well as the plan to reach those objectives, including the content selected for the class and its activities, assignments, and assessments. In this way, the syllabus can serve as a roadmap for the class. Moreover, it reflects what power dynamics the instructor is committed to, both in the classroom and in the field of study. What I mean by this is to remind instructors that in the process of creating a syllabus, they are making choices about what to include in the field, what ideas are paired with one another, and how knowledge is organized. In media studies, communication, and cultural studies, theory class syllabi often adopt a time-sequence order which organizes the material based on chronological order of publication. Diversifying these syllabi often takes the shape of focusing one or two weeks on race and gender or global case studies, while the majority of the syllabus remains centered around white, Western, U.S.-American or Eurocentric knowledge. Decolonization, however, does not take place in one week in the margins of a syllabus. It, rather, calls for rethinking and reassembling the structure of a syllabus – the structure of knowledge, and creating dialogue, which, according to Freire is an existential necessity (Freire, 1999).
While we think we are uniting ourselves as a discipline when we push for creating a singular canon, we are actually marking other positionalities and other ways of knowing as unimportant and marginal. If the syllabus is the backbone or anchor of the knowledge that bounds us, we are better off being bound by our core questions rather than core texts (as suggested in the field of communication by Waisbord, 2019). Anchoring a class in the core questions of the field instead of texts belonging to what is considered the “forefathers” of the field allows room for some of these questions to remain open or unresolved, for different perspectives and approaches to be present at the same time, and is thus a more accurate representation of the field and of the classroom.
Critical embrace of difference
Creating a syllabus that is inclusive beyond the cosmetic “diversity week” demands a critical embrace of difference at the foundation. I use this term to refer to an embrace of the pluriversality of knowledge which is based on an intentional inclusion of diverse positionalities and perspectives. These perspectives must stem from the reading material as well as from students’ own experiences. This approach sees difference as a vital asset for learning, and thus calls on instructors not to push for homogeneity or synthesis but rather to be intentional about inviting heterogeneity into the classroom and not to shy away from conflict (as per Pratt’s approach, 1991).
Moreover, this embrace of difference is critical first of all because it is crucial for decolonizing the syllabus. It is also critical because instructors must constantly be self-reflexive, reexamining the power dynamics in the classroom and their role within them. They must practice flexibility and question if and how their syllabus or class plans need to change.
Critical embrace of difference in practice
Syllabus structure
The organization of the syllabus must not be based on a time-sequence logic, but rather surrounding a single or multiple centers consisting of issues, questions, or problems that concern the topic of the class. Chronological or linear structures of the syllabus benefit dominant power by pushing knowledge into a historicist structure which originated in and serves Western-centric thought (Chakrabarty, 2008; Henry, 2005). A decolonial syllabus demonstrates the diverse ways of thinking about the problems central to the field. Therefore, its structure must be driven by the topic or the questions at the core of the class. Rather than a structure committed to the idea of a singular canon or a linear development of the field, syllabi can include perspectives on a number of issues from different standpoints of various lived experiences.
Separating the material into diverse-non-diverse or local-global creates dichotomous and binary split of categories which serves the politics of domination and colonization (Alexander, 2005). Placing literature from non-Western contexts and/or readings that put dominant ways of thinking into question in the last week or two of a class groups those into a margin and communicates to students that they need not place the same importance to them as the earlier material. A decolonized syllabus refuses a single authoritative voice and deliberately spreads silenced, trivialized, diverse and even disagreeing pieces across the whole syllabus (Dennis, 2018). This encourages students to continually practice critical thinking and questioning, rather than merely acquainting them with the dominant knowledge and thus reaffirming the status quo of power relations. A decolonized syllabus, in other words, recognizes that there is not one canon, but multitudes of ways of knowing which ought to be put in conversation rather than reaffirming one and silencing others (or reaffirming one this week and reaffirming another in the next week). For example, a syllabus in the foundations of cultural studies can be structured in a way that disrupts the mythic narrative that cultural studies originated in Britain and spread from there to its ex-colonies (Stratton and Ang, 1996). Such a syllabus can center its classes around questions like: Why explore culture? What is culture? Who makes culture? And how can culture change? A decolonized syllabus communicates to students that there are different ways of thinking about the same questions and that there can be different, sometimes contradictory, answers. Thus, even if examples that represent students’ own positionality were not included, they will feel welcome in a classroom which demonstrates that difference is valuable for learning.
Disruption in the organization of the syllabus can draw from intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) and transnational queer pedagogy (Atay, 2019). Instructors can group literature based on how vectors of difference (race, gender, nation, etc.) intersect to produce different experiences of privilege and oppression. Atay calls for recognizing layers of oppression and power by decentering white and U.S.-American centric literature and highlighting how power is structured. When it comes to the literature in a syllabus, this means including works that exemplify the different levels where power operates. Moreover, as another alternative to a chronological logic for organizing the syllabus, readings can be grouped together into one unit or one class session to exemplify the different vectors of power related to the same problem or issue at hand.
Building on Chakrabarty’s book entitled Provincializing Europe (2008), I call also for contextualizing Europe. Rethinking the structure of course syllabi and including literature that reflects non U.S.- and Euro-centric experiences are crucial steps to decolonizing the syllabus. However, while literature from Otherized experiences is often held responsible for the labor of giving descriptive background on its context, works that are considered canonical and works discussing U.S.- and Euro-centric experiences are assumed not to necessitate any grounding work on the geopolitical and historical situations in which they were written, or the standpoint of their authors. Instructors can disrupt the status granted to the “founding fathers” of the field by contextualizing their ideas as emergent from a specific time and positionality (Dennis, 2018). Contextualizing Europe reminds students to continue questioning the power this literature holds in the field.
Creating a participatory classroom
Applying participatory culture to the classroom means that we all participate. Instructors are accustomed to requiring participation out of students; attendance, speaking-up in class discussions, submitting assignments, etc. But a few questions arise about the intensity of that participation and the power dynamics related to it: First, are we, instructors, teachers, TAs, lecturers, professors, participating? Here, by participating, I mean engaging in dialogue, listening actively, making students feel heard and accepted, recognizing their needs and challenges, and their unique contributions to the process of learning. Applying Jenkins’s and colleagues’ theorization of participatory culture (Jenkins et al., 2018; Jenkins and Carpentier, 2013) to the classroom means that students are not seen as passive listeners but as active thinkers and vital contributors to the experience of learning. In line with participatory culture, hooks’s approach of “engaged pedagogy” (2010) makes clear that engagement in the classroom refers both to the engagement of the instructor and the students. Furthermore, that the engagement of the students is conditioned upon the engagement of the instructor. Although the “traditional classroom” (as per Henry, 2005) encourages the instructor to remain an unbiased and impersonal source of information, hooks encourages instructors not to shy away from sharing their own stories where they are relevant to the class. Building on that, I argue that embracing difference in the classroom by inviting a variety of voices and experience from different cultures enriches students’ creative and critical thinking, which both encourages them to share their own voice and enhances their grasp of the concepts.
Secondly, Jenkins and Carpentier explain that a culture can be more participatory or less so depending on the level at which it is open for participants to impact decision-making processes. This raises a question regarding the limits of the participatory classroom. In other words, the instructor remains a figure of authority and the person who makes the final decisions. However, instructors can make the classroom more participatory by engaging students at the meta-pedagogical level, explaining the choices of content, assignment, and class policies, and demonstrating flexibility and openness in these decisions. Changes in the syllabus that occur after the instructor is familiar with students’ prior knowledge – those that are based on their strengths and interests – create a more participatory culture in the classroom and thus encourage students to be more involved in their learning process.
A Korean international graduate student explains what the Western-centric classroom experience has meant for her saying: “As an international student, I sometimes do not feel fully comfortable to share examples from my experience (either from my country or as an international) or feel confused when illustrative examples in the discussion are too US-centric.” This quote leads to the third question on participation: how do we create a classroom that is equitable in its participatory culture? A critical embrace of difference can be expressed through openings for participation in class activities that bring forth the experiences of the students and their different learning strengths. Hooks encourages class discussions, which can be preceded by small group discussions of two-three students. In addition, hooks suggests writing and reading paragraphs together to bring forth the power of each student’s voice and create space for everyone to share. These exercises can be reflections on the class material, an application of it to the students’ own life experiences, or an initial analysis of a complex issue, etc. Furthermore, using examples based on present cultural trends, news, and current events that are connected to the students’ interests and experience can serve as another way to demonstrate inclusion and an application of class material the students’ varying experiences. The instructor can connect the students to the material by sharing examples they know themselves or they could assign the students the task of bringing examples themselves. For example, the collective memory class I signed-up for could have benefited from examples that demonstrate practices related to collective memory from different cultures, such as how Japan dealt with the memories of World War II, how collective memory can be deliberately changed or attacked such as during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or how enslaved people were disconnected from their collective memory.
The validation of students’ knowledge and experiences further encourages participation. The “traditional classroom” view of the instructor as the sole figure of authority concerning knowledge in the classroom pressures instructors to avoid situations where they are reaching an unknown area, fearing shame or humiliation. In contrast, a critical embrace of difference in the classroom recognizes that participants have different areas of strength and expertise and welcomes information from any participant, thus viewing knowledge as a shared effort.
Engaging students in the pedagogy and metapedagogy of a course aims to deepen their understanding of power dynamics. However, students who feel uncomfortable discussing issues like power, race, and class, that touch on the personal realm often use course evaluations as a venue to take their frustrations out on instructors (Bernal and Villalpando, 2002). This poses a risk to instructors, especially women, Black instructors, and instructors of color who receive more biased or discriminatory course evaluations (Bernal and Villalpando, 2002; Huston, 2006; Reid, 2010). Since institutional interpretation of these evaluations often takes them as neutral meritocratic measurements of the instructors’ teaching skills, they devalue the scholarship, service, and teaching of instructors of color (Bernal and Villalpando, 2002). This has created a dynamic in which universities’ reliance on course evaluations as part of the structure for hiring, tenure, and promotion reinforces lack of parity in the university (Huston, 2006). The participatory classroom can grant students more agency in voicing their frustrations or discomfort in class discussions or assignment instead of course evaluation. Another suggestion that can alleviate the risk of retaliatory course evaluations is to teach students about the structural role of evaluations and how they have served as a discriminatory tool. While a deep investigation of the structural limitations faced by instructors is outside the scope of this paper, part of the broader aim of a critical embrace of difference is to contribute to change at the structural level.
Conclusion
In this essay I present a critical embrace of difference as a foundational approach for decolonizing the syllabus by making it more inclusive, reorganizing it, and promoting a more participatory classroom. These ideas are not without caveats. Decentering, decolonizing, and questioning structures of power is an emotional and personal labor. An engaged and participatory classroom is a place where there may be discord, even conflict. Jenkins states that “there’s nothing about participation that guarantees a progressive outcome” (Jenkins and Carpentier, 2013). Similarly, as a participatory classroom encourages students to question power structures, it may provide space for oppressive voices to speak up. Beyond the discomfort of facilitating a discussion where conflict might arise, disturbing structures of power is a task which can pose a professional risk, especially for instructors who self-identify with a group that is not part of the dominant structure. Despite these caveats, however, it is important to remember that in the practice of teaching, the instructor is not only sharing existing ideology, but is also participating in the production and perpetuation of ideology. As a key part of this practice, the syllabus can be a decisive tool for disturbing and reassembling ideas. Designing a syllabus is an opportunity for us, as instructors, to think about what we want the future of knowledge to look like, and to facilitate opportunities for ourselves and our students to participate in producing new ways of being and knowing.
