I found the Kiang piece, “Crossing Boundaries, Building Community” very insightful. It detailed a phenomenon that I’ve noticed through my time in graduate school— that, unfortunately, there is little incentive or benefit in traditional tenure-focused promotion to spearhead or otherwise engage with community concerns that ensure students of color are mentored, uplifted, and listened to. While I was horrified by Kiang’s story about the tenure-track professor waving off the very Asian-American students he was initially devoted in advocating for, I can’t fully condemn the professor— jeopardizing your footing in the department by stretching yourself out too thin helps no one, either. Kiang’s posed solution, folding in inclusive practices to your scholarship and teaching from the start instead of seeing it as additional effort on a too-full plate, makes sense to me. So I’d like to open this question up to the class—especially to the students of color, but everyone is invited to respond: what are ways that we, as a community, could transform our pedagogical and scholarly practices to organically advance these efforts of equity and inclusion— while also making sure our personal trajectories stay healthy?
“Public pedagogy for Hall represents a moral and political practice rather than merely a technical procedure. At stake here is the call not only to link public pedagogy to practices that are interdisciplinary, transgressive, and oppositional, but also to connect such practices to broader projects designed to further racial, economic, and political democracy, to strike a new balance and expand what Stuart Hall and David Held have called the ‘individual and social dimensions of citizenship rights.’” (143)
I’d be interested in applying this notion of the “public pedagogy” to the Kiang reading— paying special attention to the “interdisciplinary, transgressive, and oppositional” aspects as well as the emphasis on “projects designed to further racial, economic, and political democracy” that public pedagogy can hold. How did (or didn’t) Kiang’s pedagogical practices that he detailed in “Crossing Boundaries” showcase these aspects of public pedagogy? How can we focus on our own pedagogical practices to exemplify traits of “racial, economic, and political democracy”?
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