My teaching rests on two foundations: a commitment to personal sovereignty and consent in the classroom, and an evolving set of hypotheses about knowledge, creativity, and technology in a rapidly shifting landscape.
On Sovereignty and Consent
Imagine ourselves as architects, all armed with a wide range of capacities and powers, embedded in a physical and social world full of manifest constraints and limitations. Imagine also that we are striving to change that world. As crafty architects bent on insurgency we have to think strategically and tactically about what to change and where, about how to change what and with what tools. But we also have somehow to continue to live in this world. This is the fundamental dilemma that faces everyone interested in progressive change.
—David Harvey, Spaces of Hope
A classroom is, or should be, a space of hope. Such a space should not simply be interested in progressive change; it should empower it — for individual students, for the classroom community, and for the culture at large. These beliefs were core to my teaching for many years, and in some ways they still are. I was trained as a college writing teacher in the tradition of Paolo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains foundational for me. I still take to heart the aims (and necessity) of teaching liberation, a term described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed as “…not a gift, not a self-achievement, but…a mutual process.” To Freire, that process is dialogic and problem-posing. It values probing questions over a set of predetermined answers. The classroom is de-centered and primarily interested in collaborative, student-led inquiry. “Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor,” writes Freire. “No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?”
And yet, perhaps fittingly, several decades into my vocational life as a writing teacher, I now question the kinds of questions I have been asking. Freire’s concepts have, in fact, been co-opted by the neoliberal aims of schools at all levels: notions of de-centered learning, of the primacy of collaboration and dialogue, and of problem-posing are all de rigueur in classrooms from kindergarten to graduate school. These “skills” are deemed essential for workers to be of value to employers in an information economy. But somehow authoritarianism and fundamentalism, of all kinds, in various arenas, are on the rise. If my classes are to remain “spaces of hope” in this cultural context, the ideas that have informed my teaching up to this point could use some of the insurgent structural revision Harvey refers to in the epigraph above.
Today, I resonate most with the related terms of “personal sovereignty” and “consent.” I see them as transcended and pluralistic versions of Freire’s somewhat more binary ideas of liberation and oppression.
Personal sovereignty cannot be granted by or ceded to someone else. It is innate, inalienable, individual. There are rights and responsibilities attached to it: the right to self-expression and self-directed learning; the right to test, to experiment; the right to succeed and to fail; the responsibility to listen to others, to tolerate and accommodate divergence, and to include the rest of the classroom community throughout the process. All of this is in service of the dual right and responsibility of a thinking person to make meaning.
More and more, though, I have come to value consent as the key to all of it, particularly in a writing classroom. We grant each other access to our own individual (and, most often, solitary and private) creative processes. This shared experience is not simply intellectual but emotional and, at times, even more numinous than that. We come to the writing classroom with our whole selves. The stakes are always very high. Liberation may not be a gift, but such consent in the writing classroom is. I aim to be mindful of that gift — consciously giving it, graciously receiving it — and I believe my most essential role as a teacher is to conspicuously model that form of mindfulness for the other members of the class.
On Seeking, Searching, and the “End of the World as We Know It”
The essay linked below began as a final project for an Information Science graduate course, but it has become my working articulation of what teaching and learning mean in an era of generative AI, algorithmic search, and information overwhelm. It is not a manifesto. It is ten hypotheses — provisional, testable, evolving.
10 Things I Think I Think About the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
Among the questions it explores:
- What is the difference between seeking and searching?
- How does “reading like a writer” become essential in the age of generative AI?
- What does it mean that search engines are now extensions of human cognition?
- Why might AI hallucination be a feature rather than a bug?
- What happens to expertise when almost everyone has access to almost everything?