Social Justice Pedagogies: Multidisciplinary Practices and Approaches 9781487552176

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SOCIAL JUSTICE PEDAGOGIES

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EDITED BY KATRINA SARK

Social Justice Pedagogies: Multidisciplinary Practices and Approaches

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2023 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the USA ISBN 978-1-4875-4933-6 (cloth)   ISBN 978-1-4875-5546-7 (EPUB)     ISBN 978-1-4875-5217-6 (PDF)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Social justice pedagogies : multidisciplinary practices and approaches /   edited by Katrina Sark. Names: Sark, Katrina, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230183689 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230183727 |   ISBN 9781487549336 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487555467 (EPUB) |   ISBN 9781487552176 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Social justice – Study and teaching (Higher) – Canada. |   LCSH: Social justice – Study and teaching (Higher) – United States. |   LCSH: Social justice – Study and teaching (Higher) – Europe. Classification: LCC LC192.2 .S63 2023 | DDC 370.11/5–dc23

Cover design: Val Cooke Cover image: iStock.com/Ake Dynamic We wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto Press operates. This land is the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, for its publishing activities.

Contents

List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments  ix Preface  xi  1 Editor’s Introduction  3 katrina sark   2 Resurgent Mobilizations and Decolonial Practices in Education  29 sage lacerte   3  Social Justice Pedagogy: Memorial Work in Action  46 helga thorson   4 It Takes a Village: New Pedagogical Approaches to Collaborative Enquiries with Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants  60 charlotte schallié   5 Historical Objects as Tools for Social Justice: How Holocaust Artefacts Can Bridge Social Justice and Human Rights Pedagogies 74 braden russell   6 Fostering Justice in Learning Relationships among Social Work Students 87 sarah todd   7 Paying Attention to Everyday Discourse: Critical Pedagogies for Disrupting Language and Power  98 beth buyserie and ashley s. boyd

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  8 Writing Fictional Narratives to Promote Social Justice Education: Towards a Heuristic-Dialogic Model of Didactic Design  110 franco passalacqua   9 Teaching Mental Illness through Film and Film through Mental Illness 127 tobias dietrich 10 Future Perfect: Teaching the Power of Emancipatory Imagination 141 nina belmonte 11 Experiencing Social (In-)Justice and Empathy through Drama Pedagogy: Lessons from a Student Theatre Production of G.E. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise 152 elena pnevmonidou 12 Teaching Politically Relevant Authentic Texts: Integrating Social Justice Pedagogies and Literacy-Based Approaches in the Beginning Language Classroom  166 kathryn sederberg and magda tarnawska senel 13 Transnational Hip-Hop and Social Justice Pedagogy: Approaches to Race and Belonging in the Media Studies Classroom  179 didem uca, kate zambon, and maria stehle 14 Podcast Pedagogy: Addressing Populism and Social Justice as Vocal Justice  196 peter schweppe and adrian richard wagner 15 The Integration of Social Justice Pedagogy through Virtual Exchange 216 diane ceo-difrancesco 16  Intercultural Telecollaboration as Social Pedagogy  228 jennifer ruth hosek 17  Fashion and Social Justice: Teaching and Questioning  244 otto von busch 18 Getting Beyond Alterity: Building a Just Post-Fashion Curriculum 257 sandra niessen 19  Social Justice, Intersectionality, and Decoloniality  269 katrina sark Contributors  287

Illustrations

Cover: iStock.com/Ake Dynamic  2.1 Raven Lacerte, co-founder of the Moose Hide Campaign in 2018. Raven Lacerte and her partner Dominic Paul stand up against violence towards women and children on the steps of Parliament Hill at National Gathering in Ottawa, Ontario. With permission by the Moose Hide Campaign.  36 2.2 Sage Lacerte, “Speaking truth to our young ones” at the second Ten Men Community Gathering in Fraser Lake, BC, 2018. With permission by Jamil Mawani of Third Eye Productions. 37 2.3 Women’s March Symposium in July 2018, organized by Katrina Sark, with Indigenous panellists and moderator Lisa Helps, the mayor of Victoria, BC. Photo with permission by Chorong Kim.  39 2.4 Ten Men Community Gathering held at the Fraser Lake Elementary-Secondary School (FLESS) in Fraser Lake, BC, 2018. Organized by the Moose Hide Campaign. With permission by Jamil Mawani of Third Eye Productions.  41 2.5 Sage Lacerte representing the Moose Hide Campaign at UVic`s Sexualized Violence Awareness Week (SVAW) in partnership with the Anti-Violence Project, 2019. With permission by Sage Lacerte.  42 2.6 The Moose Hide Campaign pin is not only a symbol of solidarity, but a commitment to stand up against violence by honouring, respecting, and protecting the precious ones in our lives. With permission by the Moose Hide Campaign, 2019. 43

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3.1 3.2 12.1 12.2 19.1

19.2

Plaque commemorating the Jewish residents and shop owners from Servitengasse 6 in Vienna, Austria, 1938. Photo by H. Thorson.  53 A portion of the “Keys Against Forgetting” memorial on the Servitengasse in Vienna, Austria. Photo by H. Thorson.  54 Illustration by Claude K. Dubois, Akim rennt. Tobias Scheffel, translator. ©2013 Moritz Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. With permission from Moritz Verlag.  171 Illustration by Claude K. Dubois, Akim rennt. Tobias Scheffel, translator. ©2013 Moritz Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. With permission from Moritz Verlag.  173 Women in Business Guide and the Women in Politics Guide as well as the Anthology of Social Justice, Decolonization, and Intersectional Feminisms, created in collaboration with students at UVic. With permission by K. Sark.  276 The Critical Pulse magazine covers, 2020–2. With permission by K. Sark.  280

Acknowledgments

The contributors would like to express deepest gratitude to the following individuals, institutions, and organizations without whose generous financial support, belief in our work, and encouragement the publication of this volume would not have been possible. Thanks to the generous support of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College (in Kalamazoo, Michigan), for their support of this publication, and for their ongoing work in developing and sustaining leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity-building. A huge thank you to Kathryn Sederberg for the application and support! We thank the College of Letters & Science at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, for its support of this publication, their student/faculty research collaborations, which foster global thinking and humanistic enquiry, as well as Peter Schweppe for his generous support and encouragement! A great thank you to our contributors Elena Pnevmonidou, Charlotte Schallié, and Helga Thorson at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria for their generosity, continuous support, encouragement, and kindness! We thank our contributors Sarah Todd at the School of Social Work at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Jennifer Ruth Hosek at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and Diane Ceo-DiFrancesco at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, for their generous contributions and support! And a special thank you to Tobias Dietrich for championing this book, reminding us of the value of social justice work, the importance of supporting each other, and for offering a personal contribution despite the injustices of precarious academic labour.

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Preface

This volume was inspired by the “Social Justice Pedagogies” panel I organized at the November 2018 Pacific Modern Language Association’s annual conference at the Western Washington University in Bellingham. I wanted to bring together scholars and educators interested in the intersections of social justice, teaching that transcends the classroom, creative and performative learning and teaching, field schools, activism, and strategies for community engagement. I invited contributions that could offer theoretical reflections, as well as hands-on ideas for implementation in teaching and research. The conversations that emerged out of our discussion panel included practical suggestions for • place-based learning • experience-based learning of culture and diversity • meaningful ways of including the body in the learning process that does not isolate or exclude • service-learning in the community through work experience and collaborative allyships • empathy-based learning • close collaboration with undergraduate and graduate students on curricular and extracurricular projects and community work • allowing freedom and agency (based on the Montessori model) to push the curriculum to include collaborative project-based and community-based work • radical literacy (see Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo’s TED Talk “What It Takes to be Radically Literate”) • and student empowerment The conversations and collaborations that started that November continued to grow over time in various formats across Europe and

xii Preface

North America and gradually evolved into this volume. The collaborative (rather than hierarchical) nature of social justice-based education within and outside the classroom is the guiding thread across all the contributions. The chapters collected in this volume speak to the ways in which we all want to make our research, our classrooms, and our institutions more just. The idea for this book also emerged from my collaborations with some very inspiring people over the past few years, while I was teaching as a sessional lecturer at the University of Victoria (UVic) in Victoria, BC, where over the course of four years I designed and developed twelve new courses (out of the twenty-five that I taught) for seven different departments in the Faculties of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Business, as well as three new courses for the Division of Continuing Studies. During those formative and inspiring, but precarious and exhausting, years I worked with and observed several colleagues redefine what humanities education can and should do, namely, change the ways we approach our own humanity, vulnerability, creativity, and understanding of justice. As humanities faculties around the globe consistently experience budget cuts, and new investments into tenured positions are deprioritized, while more and more universities rely on and perpetuate precarious labour conditions, the obvious place for change and innovation still remains in and around the classrooms. The resilience and ability to innovate and mobilize knowledge despite cuts and shortages that I witnessed among my many colleagues in Canada and beyond (many of whom are included in this volume) inspired my own resilience and perseverance despite all the challenges due to financial inequity, unsustainable workloads, exploitative wages, institutionalized precarity, and injustice. I benefited from the experience of working under the leadership of Helga Thorson, who, as the former Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at UVic (and a contributor to this collection), was one of the main inspirations for this volume. She taught me that collaborative, rather than hierarchical, leadership, pedagogical practices, and work environments are not only possible but vital. She encouraged me to develop my own vision for pedagogy as a justice-based practice. She is the type of leader who makes everyone around her want to be better educators, better thinkers, better activists, and better people. She inspires and leads by example, mixing solid, unequivocal professionalism and diplomacy with kind encouragement, radical fairness, and great humour. Working with her and watching her work as a teacher, scholar, organizer, and leader was an honour and a pleasure,

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and made me value and develop social justice in my own teaching and organizing practices. My other colleagues at UVic and beyond included both tenured faculty members and graduate and undergraduate students, without whom this book would also not exist (many of them are also contributors to this volume), and who showed me how our different areas of research and expertise could complement and support the ways we conducted research, produced scholarship, designed courses, organized, and built a community within and outside the university. This book is written for and with them. I hope that the spirit of generosity, kindness, support, and collaboration can come through these pages and inspire others. And finally, during the long years of working on this book, as the world around us began to change during the COVID-19 pandemic, the global racial justice movement lead by the #BlackLivesMatter campaign, and the subsequent efforts to decolonize educational and cultural institutions across the globe, our teaching, learning, scholarly, and organizational practices continued to evolve and expand. We hope that the various interdisciplinary approaches and practices in this book can inspire other collaborative projects with a focus on social justice. Katrina Sark, Editor May 2022

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SOCIAL JUSTICE PEDAGOGIES

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1 Social Justice Pedagogies – Editor’s Introduction katrina sark

For me, education is simultaneously an act of knowing, a political act, and an artistic event. […] Education is politics, art, and knowing. (Paulo Freire 2009) Without community there is no liberation. (Audre Lorde 2007) Human Rights [is] a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all ­nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society … shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. (United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948)

Introduction This edited volume provides a rare but necessary perspective on social justice not merely as a theoretical construct, but as a continuous practice that can be applied to all facets of teaching and learning across many different disciplines. While no collection of practices and approaches can be comprehensive in addressing the diverse ways of teaching, learning, community organizing and engagement work, activism, research, and scholarship that aim to further social justice in and beyond the classrooms, this volume is a unique collection of research and teaching expertise that encompasses Indigenous studies, Holocaust studies, gender studies, social work, cultural studies, literatures, critical theory, philosophy, drama pedagogy, film and media studies, fashion studies, and language acquisition

4  Katrina Sark

with new technologies. One of the chapters is written by a scholar from the Faculty of Education who specializes in educating future teachers; the other cross-disciplinary contributors use their research and teaching experience to demonstrate how issues of social justice matter in their various fields, contexts, and practices at various institutions. It was a challenge to bring all these different approaches and ways of engagement under one common denominator, but in this introductory chapter, I provide the common threads of how the contributors challenge hegemonies and aim to change traditional forms of hierarchies in educational institutions and beyond. The goal of this book was to bring together different expertise from many different disciplines that would otherwise not be available together in one book, and to create a wide perspective on what social justice can look like for different educators, organizers, teachers, and learners. Thus, the scope of this book is very wide and touches on many disciplines where social justice is not necessarily the primary approach or common practice, but we hope that this book will be a great resource to many people across many disciplines. The main argument of this book is that pedagogy, and specifically teaching and learning, are relational (Dewey 1938) and contextual (Goffman 1967) – they constitute a process of building relationships between people and knowledge, by fostering a learning community that includes people with many diverse backgrounds and varying perspectives (Rogoff 2003). The contributors to this volume believe that learning is most effective when teaching is not just situated but contextualized in a specific group setting with students/learners, within a specific learning space, social context, location, environment, etc. While many of the multidisciplinary examples presented here centre on higher education in Canada, the US, and Europe, they can also be applied to different liberal arts colleges, CEGEPs, high schools, and other young adult and adult educational frameworks around the world. The emphasis on practice and practical application of social justice pedagogies runs through all the chapters in this collection. All the authors put equity into practice by reflecting on themselves and on the ethical dimensions of education across the humanities and social sciences. In the field of social justice education, theorists (Elenes 2013) have stressed the connection between education and the civic duties to uphold individual and collective human rights. Social justice is defined as “the processes and efforts to ensure that human rights are recognized, and in doing so, seek and struggle for egalitarian societies and practices. Thus, human rights and social justice education should provide philosophical and ethical tools to engage in the struggle to achieve enduring just societies and communities at the local and global levels” (Elenes 2013, 133).

Editor’s Introduction  5

To learn is to step out of our comfort zone, individually and as a group (Vygotsky 1962), through our engagement with the environment, because learning is always activated by social and cultural contexts. Similarly, to teach as a reflective practitioner (Schön 1987), an educator has to build a relationship between knowledge and each student in order to have a more meaningful pedagogical engagement. The contributors to this collection believe in a relational approach to education. When the basis of learning is a relationship, rather than a transactional or unengaged experience, students can better connect to the material, methodology, their environment, and each other. Teaching is always about refocusing our perspective and renegotiating our relationship to the wider world, reflecting on our values, challenging ourselves and others to innovate and push ideas and practices forward – otherwise education stagnates and deteriorates (Shulman 1987; Korthagen et al. 2001). This book argues that relational and mindful approaches to teaching and learning in place-based experiences are essential to how we determine the value of education. The underlying premise of this volume is that education is not a commodity, but a relational and contextual process. As with any meaningful relationship, the quality and value of engagement (in this case of teaching and learning) is determined by our willingness to connect, relate, practice, experiment, challenge and try out new approaches, and retain a reflective and flexible perspective. Each chapter provides different examples of how this relationship can be built, developed, sustained, practised, and nurtured. Intended Audience and Aims This book is intended for a wide audience, and not merely educational professionals, but it can also be of interest to curators, organizers, administrators, activists, policy makers, politicians, project managers, social workers, artists, designers, and other creative practitioners. Its scope goes far beyond the discipline of education. It is meant to inspire us all to see learning and teaching from a wider perspective of justice, inclusion, equity, diversity, and creativity. It will also be of great value to schoolteachers, university educators, researchers, and students, who can take advantage of all the different techniques and methodologies, as well as practical take-aways and tools intended for a diverse audience. Unlike other books on pedagogy written from and for the discipline of education, this volume also bridges academic and non-academic audiences. We want to stress that social justice pedagogies, and specifically teaching and learning, can be investigated and pushed further by educators and scholars without an academic background in education.

6  Katrina Sark

We believe that this multidisciplinarity and diversity of perspectives makes this study more accessible to educators and teachers from any discipline as well as for a wider readership. We want to inspire them to think beyond the disciplinary, locational, logistical, financial, and creative confines of their classrooms, studios, or other professional spaces. But this book is also aimed to encourage a new generation of future educators who are facing a precarious future in terms of employment opportunities, job security, financial stability, equity, global austerity measures, and climate crisis in addition to new and unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the proliferation of new technologies, and media and communication practices that affect our learning and teaching like never before. Moreover, during our work on this volume, the global human rights protests centred around ­#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, climate justice, and Indigenous rights have inspired waves of educational, curatorial, social, political, and other reforms in many institutions around the world. Practices of decoloniality, anti-racism, and intersectionality became at once more mainstream, and simultaneously also more contested in the backlash by right-wing politicians calling for restrictions on critical race studies in the US, limiting freedom of expression with the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning LGBTQ+ instruction in Florida’s primary schools, the decoupling of activism from education (as happened in Denmark in the spring of 2021, when a right-wing politician started publicly attacking the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Difference at the University of Copenhagen in the Danish press). The ongoing defunding, displacement, and closures of social justice-based research institutions and projects, not only in Hungary but also in traditionally liberal democracies based on the rule of law, and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the violently suppressed student protests in Iran have left us all stunned and often disempowered. But the many grassroots movements that have gained momentum through transnational organization, protests, and demonstrations have shown that the values of Humanities education based on social justice and engaged pedagogy need to be extended into all educational systems and made accessible to all. We want to stress the urgency of understanding and developing multidisciplinary education, not only as a fundamental human right but also as a lifelong practice based on justice. Theoretical Frameworks The inspiring values of social justice pedagogy that make up the theoretical framework of this volume include themes of student empowerment

Editor’s Introduction  7

through engagement in the community, transcultural communication, and critical reflections on learning and teaching strategies. In this section, I summarize some of the key pedagogical ideas utilized by several of the contributing authors in order to provide a literature review and connect the various theoretical threads that run across this collection. One of the best-known theorists on social justice pedagogy is Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) continues to influence educators across the globe and across disciplines. The methodology Freire developed in his dissertation (1959) focused on the “pursuit of a fuller humanity” (Freire 2009, 47) that was adopted by various literacy campaigns at that time, but also got him arrested and then exiled from his native Brazil during the 1964 military coup. During his exile in Chile, he continued to develop his work, which remains highly relevant to this day. Freire saw the main task of pedagogy as liberational, and “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well,” because he believed that “only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both” (44) and could stop the cycle of dehumanizing others (47). He specifically stressed that this pedagogy “must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individual or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity” (48) through “critical discovery” (49) and by counteracting oppressive “domination,” in which “the earth, property, production, the creations of people, [and] time […] is reduced to the status of objects” (58). In the current global academic and political landscape, Freire’s theories become most applicable in relation to the paradigm shift of decolonizing pedagogical practice, curricula, theories, and histories, and specifically in Canada after the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Reports and Recommendations of 2015, which set out to promote “healing, educating, listening” and “recommendations for the Government of Canada regarding the Residential Schools system, experience, and legacy.” The final report contains ninety-four calls to action, including the full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In light of the current climate crisis and intrusions on unceded Indigenous lands by multinational and foreign oil interests, the ongoing severity of the systematic injustice in the Canadian justice system’s neglect of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the traumatic impact of the discovered unmarked graves of Indigenous children at former residential schools across Canada, there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of education, reconciliation, and justice for Indigenous communities, and Freire’s work can be a useful theoretical tool in this process. Moreover, as the waves of racial justice protests around the world

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that led to the toppling of statues of colonial and white-supremacist leaders, renaming of streets and institutions, and decolonizing museal collections and institutional practices have demonstrated, there is a great need for social justice-based education and research to help put these theoretical frameworks into practice and into actions. Freire provided a Marxist critique of capitalist oppression, which has always been motivated by the “unrestrained eagerness to possess,” and the possibility to “transform everything into objects of purchasing power,” and which constitutes a “strictly materialistic concept of existence” with profit as the primary goal (Freire 2009, 58). Freire saw resistance to this oppressive reality in political action, which he believed “must be pedagogical action” with the oppressed (66). Thus, he always considered education and political action and even artistic and creative action as intertwined for change to become possible. This action entailed moving away from the traditional “narrative character” of education, in which the task of the teacher was to “fill the students with the contents of his narration” (71), and away from the “banking concept of education,” in which knowledge is “deposited” into the students (72), towards liberating education through “acts of cognition, not transferrals of information” (79); through dialogue (80); and through critical thinking and “problem-posing education” (86). After all, as Freire noted, “no oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: why?” (86). He explained that “the dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep the people from thinking” (149). Fifty years after the first publication of Freire’s work, his understanding of the manipulative strategies of corporate and conservative elites and media still holds true. Knowledge constitutes power, and the manipulation of facts, media representations, and restrictions of access to information are still the primary tools of power manipulation in most countries, including fullfledged democracies. For Freire, the answer to this manipulation was social justice education. In light of our continuous struggles with fake news, media manipulation, lack of media literacy, net neutrality, and privacy negotiations, and as many universities and disciplines embark on various projects of decolonizing pedagogy, curricula, and practices, Freire’s ideas become current and critical once again. Freire, as many other theorists of education, was influenced by the turn-of-the-century philosophies of the founding mother of enlightened pedagogy, the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori. She broke gender boundaries in her own access to university education, revolutionized primary education, established schools, developed her own educational methodology, and was banned by the fascists.

Editor’s Introduction  9

She saw education not as “something which the teacher does,” but as a “natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being,” and which is “not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences” and encounters with our environment (Montessori 1995, 8). Her attention to the context, the conditions, and the environment in which educational practice takes place and the ways in which we all relate to our social, cultural, and natural surroundings paved the way for a holistic approach to pedagogy, and away from what Freire later defined as the “banking” approach of imparting knowledge or information onto students. Thus, Montessori was first to claim that “the teacher’s task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment” made for the students (8). In that sense, she was one of the first educators to advocate for practices of context- and place-based learning, with a special attention to the surrounding conditions and spaces to inform and enrich the learning experience (further discussed in this volume). Montessori’s focus on explorations of our social and cultural environment and our ways of making sense and “order” in the world led her to identify “fourteen universal tendencies” (summarized by Gettman 1987, 185) that also make up the necessary components of social justice education: 1 Exploration – seeking unfamiliar stimuli and searching for new and unknown perspectives 2 Order – orienting ourselves to understand our position in relation to all parts 3 Gregariousness – sharing our experiences of the environment with others 4 Communication – binding participants through shared experiences and increasing relationality 5 Abstraction – constructing an understanding of the world and how it works 6 Curiosity – intellectual desire to know the how and why 7 Calculation – modifying the environment in accordance with our understanding of it for survival and continuity 8 Work – exerting personal effort 9 Repetition – necessary feedback to achieve exactness 10 Concentration – focusing on one step at a time in our work 11 Self-control – directing our efforts towards a specific goal 12 Perfection – seeking perfection, or beauty 13 Creativity – ability to envision a world which does not exist 14 Independence – mastery over our destiny

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These fourteen tendencies guide numerous groundbreaking education systems and approaches to this day. They continue to ground many of the foundations of contemporary educational theories and innovations, and as is commonly known, many key innovators of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries went to Montessori schools. Moreover, Montessori’s insight – that attention to creativity, imagination, and social and natural environments are all connected in order to provide the right conditions for effective education – continues to transform educational methodologies to this day. Building on these foundational theories, feminist scholar bell hooks wrote in 1993 about the influence Paulo Freire had on her as a thinker, scholar, and educator, explaining that “Paulo was one of the thinkers whose words gave me a language. He made me think deeply about the construction of an identity in resistance. There was this one sentence of Freire’s that became a revolutionary mantra for me: ‘We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become subjects’” (hooks 1993, 148). In her Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), hooks first theorized “radical pedagogy” as a concept in which she includes critical, anti-colonial, and feminist perspectives and pedagogies (hooks 1994, 9–10). She stressed that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility” and celebrated “teaching that enables transgressions,” believing that education is the practice of freedom (12). In this work, she also introduced the concept of “engaged pedagogy” that values student expression (20). A decade later, in her Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003), hooks expanded her approach to include “enlightened teaching [that] evokes and invites community” (hooks 2003, xvi). Combining Freire’s Marxist pedagogical theories with intersectional feminism, hooks outlined the connection between democratic education and community building, which “requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination” (36). This in turn, she notes, requires “radical openness” as well as “the will to explore different perspectives and change one’s mind as new information is presented” (48). Finally, in her Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (2010), hooks continued to develop her engaged pedagogy that “highlights the importance of independent thinking” and finding one’s “unique voice” in the process of empowering students because engaged pedagogy “assumes that every student has a valuable contribution to make to the learning process” (hooks 2010, 23). Just as Montessori and Freire before her, hooks advocated for “a radical transformation of education at its roots” as well as for “education as the practice of freedom”

Editor’s Introduction  11

(27) that can help us all counterbalance our various socializations within an exploitative capitalist system that “colonizes minds and imaginations” (35). Her recipe for generating this counterbalance and decolonization includes generating platforms for stories that “help us to connect to a world beyond the self. In telling our stories we make connections with other stories” (53). Echoing Montessori and Freire, hooks also noted that “imagination is one of the most powerful modes of resistance” (61), reiterating that the connection between imagination, creativity, education, and political and artistic action is vital for generating personal and collective growth. Moreover, hooks also stressed the importance of laughter that contributes to learning and to activism, explaining that “when we shift our minds into laughter, we move from the left brain to the right brain creating a whole new place for thinking and dreaming, for creating great ideas” (74). Together, hooks’s three books on pedagogy provide invaluable insight into making education more just, diverse, inclusive, democratic, empathetic, intersectional, and inspiring. As decoloniality, intersectionality, and social justice become more prevalent across varying disciplines and find applications across pedagogical practice and curricula, the theoretical foundations laid out by Montessori, Freire, and hooks, especially when read comparatively and taken as a historical trajectory of social justice pedagogy, allow us to ground our thinking, teaching, and research practices in a theoretical framework that can stand the test of time and shed light on why empowering the new generations in their learning and teaching is vital. More recently, Tracy E. Zinn and Bryan K. Saville, in their article entitled “Interteaching: A New Approach to Peer-Based Instruction” (2007), expand on Montessori, Freire, and hooks’s ideas of liberating education from its narrative and depository character with concrete suggestions that include peer-based methods of learning and the flipped classroom approach, in which the instructor takes on the role of a facilitator of critical dialogue and discussion, providing guiding discussion questions, addressing difficulties and problems that may arise, and providing additional clarifications (Zinn and Saville 2007, 19). The methodology of inter-teaching constitutes a relational approach to learning and teaching and presupposes that students learn more effectively from each other and in their own ways, rather than from merely listening to an instructor. It also allows the instructor to learn from the students as well because critical learning does not stop at any point or any age. Inter-teaching provides more opportunities to create an educational environment and setting in which students can develop confidence and expertise and allows for a more open and inclusive approach.

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Moving beyond the classroom and bridging academic research and educational work with community work is the next critical step in advancing social justice education. M.V. Lee Badgett in The Public Professor: How to Use Your Research to Change the World (2015) provides useful examples of how to use research to make a difference, including building a “network of relationships that extend into the work and institutions you hope to influence” (Badgett 2015, 13), partnering with community organizations or other non-profits on grant applications (60), and building think tanks that can pull researchers and policymakers together (65). Badgett emphasizes the need for a “sustainable engagement,” which includes gaining access to new audiences, developing new relationships, and enjoying intrinsic rewards (such as being part of a social change) (197). Providing opportunities for both teachers and students to experience collaborative and community-based work is vital in making social justice education move beyond the confines of the classroom and opening access to new research and knowledge to larger audiences. But perhaps the most comprehensive study on social justice education practices to date for both educators and students is by Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, entitled Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (2017), which is grounded in the understanding that “social justice illiteracy prevents us from moving forward to create a more equitable society” (Sensoy and DiAngelo 2017, xix). They provide practical guidelines for a critical and intersectional social justice literacy, which include the following (4): 1 Strive for intellectual humility. 2 Recognize the difference between opinions and informed knowledge. 3 Let go of personal anecdotal evidence and look at broader societal patterns. 4 Notice your own defensive reactions and attempts to use these reactions as entry points for gaining deeper self-knowledge. 5 Recognize how your own social positionality (such as your race, class, gender, sexuality, ability status) informs your perspectives and reactions to your instructor and the individuals whose work you study in the course. 6 Recognize that you do not have to agree with concepts under study in order to learn from them. 7 Practice posing open-ended questions rather than closed questions that invite yes/no responses or debate.

Editor’s Introduction  13

8 Practice developing quality questions. […] Use phrases such as, “under what conditions …” and “to what extent” when you ask questions. If someone can respond to the question without ever having read the text, it is not a strong question. They stress the importance of theory in critical thinking, because “whenever we ask ‘how’ or ‘why’ about anything, we are engaged in theorizing” (28). They insist that “language is not a neutral transmitter of a universal, objective, or fixed reality,” but the “way we construct reality, the framework we use to give meaning to our experiences and perceptions within a given society” (70). For them, language is also cultural, “making it dependent on the historical and social moment in which it is used,” and that language goes beyond words to include “all of the ways we communicate with others” (70). This emphasis on decolonizing our language and communication practices is a major thread that runs through many of the chapters in this volume. In fact, drawing attention to just language and communication practices is the most common thread across all the contributions. The history of social justice education shows that educators and theorists have always struggled to convince the greater public of the importance of justice-based education, and it continues to be an ongoing struggle (Hytten 2006). In their work on social justice education, Kathy Hytten and Silvia C. Bettez (2011) provide a discourse review of how social justice education has been defined and theorized, including building expertise for identifying and eradicating all forms of oppression in the practices and policies of institutions, and educating justice-oriented citizens who look at social, political, and economic problems systemically and engage in collective strategies for change (Hytten and Bettez 2011, 8). Lisa Weems (2016) provides a discourse analysis of decolonial education theories and practices, explaining that “decolonization works against the dehumanization and disposability of Indigenous peoples; recovers and reinforces Indigenous knowledges; protects Indigenous jurisdiction over land, water, and agricultural rights,” while “decoloniality refers to the everyday and ongoing efforts to challenge various forms of colonialism or coloniality in the past, present, and future” (Weems 2016, 1). Thus, decoloniality refers to the “active struggle against spiritual, social, political, and psychological colonization of [I] ndigenous peoples and their descendants,” and just as with postcolonialism, “decolonial scholars do not believe that the time of coloniality is over, even in nation-states or spaces that have so-called independence” (Weems 2016, 1). Moreover, decoloniality assumes that social categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are inventions of colonial

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capitalism (2), and actively works against “extraction and destruction of local knowledges, cultural practices, and natural resources” (3). Decolonial education employs “critical and culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy that incorporates the wisdom of elders and community members,” and emphasizes the “retrieval and distribution of subjugated knowledges and histories (5). When taken all together, these educational theories and approaches provide a useful blueprint for how justice-based education can lead to more socially just, democratic, and inclusive social structures. The theorists I chose to highlight here are by no means the only important contributors to the development of social justice education, but when considered together, these theorists provide practical and theoretical frameworks, methods, and solutions that include (among many others) • practising decoloniality and justice • incorporating awareness of place and place-based learning and teaching • allowing freedom for and cultivation of more creativity, imagination, experimentation • engaging with and as a community that transcends the classroom • building bridges between academic and non-academic communities and projects These methods guide my own research and teaching practices and have also influenced many of the contributors in this volume. As the many examples in the following chapters will illustrate, our collective goal was to inspire new ways of thinking, theorizing, researching and practising justice, inclusivity, diversity, decolonization, and creative innovation in our classrooms and our communities. In the following chapters, you will find practical and theoretical engagements with various social justice tools and pedagogies across many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. This volume includes a wide range of contributions, from tenured educators to young scholars and students, all of whom practice social justice in their daily work. The guiding theme in selecting the contributions to this collection was a focus on multidisciplinary educational practices that could help counter the barrage of global injustices and new challenges posed by new media and communication practices, right-wing populism, the climate crisis, colonial ideologies, and intersectional discriminations. The chapters in this volume are meant to inspire inclusivity, diversity, decoloniality, and creative innovation in our classrooms and our communities,

Editor’s Introduction  15

which constitutes only the beginning of moving social justice from a theoretical discourse (within privileged educational environments) towards a social structure that permeates all legal, political, cultural, and social practices. But as many of the contributors to this volume have pointed out, justice and education are inextricably connected. As researchers and educators, it is our collective goal to develop and provide new platforms and strategies for making social justice education more accessible. Chapters Overview The volume opens with Sage Lacerte’s chapter “Resurgent Mobilizations and Decolonial Practices in Education” because decolonizing pedagogical practices and learning from Indigenous expertise is at the forefront of academic progress and innovation in Canada, the US, Australia, and beyond. Sage Lacerte is a Carrier woman from the Lake Babine Nation. She studied at the University of Victoria in the Department of Gender Studies with a focus on Indigenous feminism and cultural resurgence. Since 2017, she has worked as the National Youth Ambassador of the Moose Hide Campaign, contributing to the vision of ending violence towards women and children in Canada. Her chapter invites us to consider how Indigenous and non-Indigenous student activists can meaningfully connect the personal to the political by engaging in social justice pedagogies within and beyond academic spaces. She provides guidelines for critical and theoretical knowledge dissemination and mobilization for student-led community activism in Indigenous contexts through resurgent action and insurgent education. Through her lens as an Indigenous activist and student, she offers resources and points of reference for allies and fellow activists to learn more about how individuals can create positive change using Indigenous and social justice pedagogies within our education. She also examines the collaborative work that the local Women’s March Chapter in Victoria, BC, and the Moose Hide Campaign have accomplished locally and nationally. This volume also includes three chapters on Holocaust education from three different perspectives, expertise, and experiences. Helga Thorson’s chapter, “Social Justice Pedagogy: Memorial Work in Action,” focuses on the potential of experiential and place-based learning as a form of social justice pedagogy. It represents a personal reflection on social justice pedagogy in which the author highlights various elements that come together to inform her teaching. Focusing specifically on two teaching initiatives, the I-witness Field School on Holocaust

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memorialization (which she co-founded with Charlotte Schallié at UVic) and a digital mapping project that serves as a Holocaust memorial in and of itself, Thorson discusses how grappling with historical injustices and their current realities can lead to a realization among learners of the necessity of working towards social justice in the present. Understanding how the past and the present intersect across geographical space, students in her courses come to a better understanding of their own responsibility in the present to act in an ethical and socially just way. Charlotte Schallié is the current chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, and the co-founder (with Helga Thorson) of the I-witness Field School on Holocaust memorialization. Her chapter, “It Takes a Village – New Pedagogical Approaches to Collaborative Enquiries with Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants,” presents insights on her course entitled Teaching the Holocaust offered to advanced undergraduate and graduate students at UVic in the spring of 2019. This seminar introduced students to theoretical approaches, methodologies, and scholarly discourses that interlink teaching and learning about the Holocaust with human rights education. The class explored a variety of sources, both primary and secondary, and discussed how these could be implemented in an educational setting. Focused primarily on material history, the course explored how objects and materials could be used to educate individuals on the Holocaust and create interlinkages between human rights education and Holocaust education. The third chapter related to the Holocaust is by Braden Russell and is entitled “Historical Objects as Tools for Social Justice: How Holocaust Artefacts Can Bridge Social Justice and Human Rights Pedagogies.” It presents a graduate student’s perspective and educational expertise on the Teaching the Holocaust course (taught by Charlotte Schallié in the spring of 2019 at UVic). This chapter provides in-depth analysis on bridging human rights educational frameworks and Holocaust educational frameworks that have often been met with difficulty, as many scholars cite the concern of relativizing the Holocaust and reducing the Jewish experience when connecting it to general human rights education. In his chapter, Russell concurs with the importance of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, yet he contends that human rights and Holocaust education are not at odds with one another. Rather, he claims, they are mutual partners in educating about history and human rights. His chapter provides a unique perspective from a graduate student point of view, working in collaboration with Holocaust survivors, academics, curators, archivists, artists, undergraduate students, and high school students, in an innovative graduate seminar, in which the

Editor’s Introduction  17

class and the instructor attempted to bridge the two theoretical frameworks with material culture and history through material objects. His analysis of the in-class workshops and presentations, on co-facilitating a practicum that took place at Victoria High School, and other experiences provide a unique insight into the potential of bridging the two theoretical frameworks and disciplines ethically. Sarah Todd’s chapter, “Fostering Justice in Learning Relationships among Social Work Students,” switches the focus towards the social sciences and explores the ways in which we can bring attention to and enhance skills for building interpersonal justice in the university-based social work classroom. The author notes that social work students often spend quite a bit of time in their curricula exploring social justice and equity. They also usually come into social work education with a passionate commitment to notions of social responsibility, care, concern, and a desire to help create a more just world. However, the author has observed some worrisome trends in how justice is negotiated in these same classrooms. First, she claims, there often seems to be a peer expectation that a commitment to social justice be consistently performed and that it exist without any doubt or questioning. While not necessarily a problem, this can create a high-stakes situation when students make mistakes. She also noticed that it results in a strong imperative to call out others who say things that are (or are perceived as) oppressive. She found that important practices in the struggle for social justice, these same approaches sometimes close down space for learning about each other and create significant barriers to cultivating interpersonal justice in the classroom. As an educator, she tackles the worry that these dynamics make it difficult for students to see those with differing opinions or visions of justice as complex, fallible, and fully human. This is a concern within democracies generally, but also within professional schools of social work and other disciplines. She argues that if we cannot recognize all people as complex and as often in struggle, even those with whom we disagree or we perceive as having privilege, we risk reinforcing the conceptual and emotional frameworks that allow for dehumanization. Her chapter explores some of the pedagogical practices for sustaining respect or turning back to each other and seeing again with fresh eyes, by deploying the idea of community in various ways, focusing on how to enhance listening skills, and actively engaging in practices that encourage students to share their complexity with each other. The next chapter is co-written by Beth Buyserie and Ashley S. Boyd and entitled “Paying Attention to Everyday Discourse: Critical Pedagogies for Disrupting Language and Power.” It engages with critical

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literature pedagogy and language that is an everyday form of communication, which both reflects and creates people and culture. They argue that words normalize our values, beliefs, and practices so that often those appear as taken-for-granted entities, unquestioned by those by who draw upon them to exist in a shared cultural space. They note that language, historically and in our contemporary context, is used to exclude and include various populations, to uphold dominant narratives, and to rationalize injustice. In this chapter, they describe and explore the social justice pedagogies that they have employed to uproot oppression and unmask privilege particularly as related to language. Both authors teach in the same English education program at Washington State University and focus on the ways they critically approach language in their courses to cultivate students’ awareness and understandings of how language can marginalize as well as how they foster students’ critical literacies related to language and power. First, they describe their focus on grammar to illustrate how everyday linguistic structures can reflect colonizing agendas. They offer teaching strategies related to this exploration, including an examination of current media headlines to expose how syntax affects broader sociocultural concerns such as government responsibility. Then they analyse how the content of language itself upholds binaries and perpetuates unjust ideologies such as heteronormativity and homophobia and focus on building a foundational vocabulary with students. They describe classroom applications and offer exercises such as a heteronormativity scavenger hunt, a brainstorming alternative expressions activity, and role playing for disrupting discourse. Finally, they end with considerations for liberating language and challenging students to move beyond the limits of current speech patterns – to not only imagine different structures and terms, but to integrate more inclusive language into their everyday lives. They encourage students to become language activists, unsettling harmful constructions when they see or hear them, both in the classroom and in everyday discourse. The next chapter, “Writing Fictional Narratives to Promote Social Justice Education: Towards a Heuristic-Dialogic Model of Didactic Design,” is a contribution from Franco Passalacqua, an education scholar and expert based in Milan, Italy, who collaborated with schoolteachers in his country to develop, analyse, and implement the project he describes. He believes that the challenge of teaching, at any level of education, is not only knowing how to foster the students’ desire to learn, but also to allow all students, regardless of their initial cultural, social, and economic circumstances, to construct knowledge that will enable them to become active citizens and to fully exercise their abilities

Editor’s Introduction  19

and rights in public life. His chapter explores a narrative writing project implemented by teachers to generate stories as a didactic precondition that can foster the construction of an initial level of socially just knowledge. In the course of this project, the participating teachers constructed fictional narratives to read to their students in class and used them to mediate the construction of interdisciplinary concepts and to cultivate a critical stance towards the objects of knowledge. To reach this goal, teachers who constructed narratives for imagination had to engage both with the students’ background knowledge, experience, misconceptions, and with their own personal perspective on the world, including personal values that were concealed behind and within the points of view they choose to adopt. But what made this didactic design through narrative writing particularly supportive of inclusive learning was the emphasis on a “handcrafted” process of investigating the students’ experiential world, which helped the teachers thematize their own relationship with knowledge and, consequently, enabled the teachers to design learning experiences that are consistent with active citizenship and democratic values. Tobias Dietrich’s chapter, “Teaching Mental Illness through Film and Film through Mental Illness,” approaches social justice pedagogies from the perspective of film and media studies. It is based on his doctoral research and his work as an educator, researcher, film scholar, organizer, and jury member at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival in Glasgow. The author believes that both media studies and psychology’s work on mental illness in film often stress factual inaccuracies in cinematic implementations that would lead to stigmatization and discrimination of the people afflicted. He stresses that as noteworthy as these findings are, it is imperative to ask from which perspective cinematic representations would be inaccurate or stigmatizing in order to be mindful not to adopt a reality concept that is too simplistic or mis-informed – as has often been done in past studies – mainly by way of clinical theory. His chapter challenges the unilaterality of these approaches. Taking the medium’s specific means and meaningmaking potential into account, it presents three educational and community-based projects at his workplace in Bremen, Germany, that make use of the huge potential impact of audiovisual expression and argues for a more differentiated and inclusive approach to cinematic portrayals of mental illness. Nina Belmonte’s chapter, “Future Perfect: Teaching the Power of Emancipatory Imagination,” approaches social justice education from the discipline of philosophy and asks: How do we move from a diagnostic criticism of the way things are to articulating and implementing

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a more just society? How might an imaginative exercise in thinkingotherwise be a valuable tool for understanding and directing positive change? In other words, what might be the role of imagination in teaching social justice? Belmonte’s chapter explores critical responsibility and the ultimate value of creative imagination for teaching social justice, using as an example the content and assignments of a philosophy and literature course on utopian and dystopian thought. She examines the responsibility of critical thinking and its imminent demand for an “emancipatory moment” to guide us beyond the merely negative critique towards a vision of a better society. She claims that by taking a “step” back from reality, we are able to reflect on injustice, but this gaze must be forward as well as backward if we are to disenthral ourselves from the state of things as they are. In order to truly work towards justice, she believes, we must be able to envision its implementation, not as a blueprint, but as an ideal that draws us ever forward. As an illustration of how this works in a university classroom, she discusses a course on utopian and dystopian thought, which gives students a chance to explore what a “good place” might look like and to imagine their own utopia. There is only one stipulation: the good place must be good for each and every inhabitant. This one rule forces students to consider how a good place must also be a just one and teaches them how difficult it is to balance freedom and fairness. The next four chapters examine social justice pedagogies from the disciplines of German studies and transnational media studies, pushing the boundaries of various methodologies including drama pedagogy, refugee narratives, cultural studies, new media, technology-enhanced education, and podcasting. Elena Pnevmonidou’s chapter, “Experiencing Social (In-)Justice and Empathy through Drama Pedagogy: Lessons from a Student Theatre Production of G.E. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise,” engages with social justice from the perspective of drama pedagogy. The author believes that merely knowing about the injustices other suffer and acknowledging one’s own privileged status does not necessarily transform people, but in fact triggers in most cases what Robin DiAngelo (2018) refers to as “white fragility,” which includes disengagement, avoidance, resentment, and various other defensive responses that relegitimate one’s own status and devalue the experiences of inequity others may suffer. She also believes that intellectual knowledge alone does not suffice to foster a transformative understanding of social (in-)justice but needs to be bolstered by the affective experience of empathy. But empathy here cannot be purely unidirectional, she stresses, as empathy on the part of the privileged for the underprivileged but must be understood intersectionally and intersubjectively. Using the

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experience of a student theatre production of G.E. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, her chapter presents drama pedagogy as a suitable method for fostering intersectional empathy. Pnevmonidou argues that any form of theatre is intrinsically empathetic because it requires perspectivetaking and being in a role other than oneself. The theatre production she carried out with her students had two additional dimensions that made it an ideal case study for empathy in social justice pedagogy: it occurred in a foreign-language-teaching setting and required the collaboration and peer teaching by students with varying levels of language competency; and the play itself deals with racial and religious prejudice. After outlining the theoretical framework for intersectionality, empathy, affective teaching, and drama pedagogy, the chapter discusses the teaching methodologies that were developed for this theatre production and how these methods may constitute the outlines of a social justice-minded pedagogy. Kathryn Sederberg and Magda Tarnawska Senel’s chapter, “Teaching Politically Relevant Authentic Texts: Integrating Social Justice Pedagogies and Literacy-Based Approaches in the Beginning Language Classroom,” focuses on teaching a refugee story through the children’s book Akim rennt (Akim runs) by Claude K. Dubois (2013). Their approach integrates social justice pedagogy with a literacies approach as a means of rethinking the potential outcomes of beginning language instruction beyond linguistic proficiency, with an “add-on” cultural knowledge component. They argue that if social justice education refers to a philosophy of teaching committed to universal human rights, equity, and dignity, literacy-based pedagogical strategies can support instructors in teaching authentic texts dealing with these issues. Such an approach to teaching can challenge students to take a stance on current political debates, encourage them to make connections between local and global issues, and help them to recognize the reciprocal relationship between culture, language, text, author, reader, context, meaning, and interpretation. The authors first describe the connections between the goals and approaches of literacy-based and social justice pedagogies, then they apply this approach through a sample unit on Akim rennt, an award-winning children’s book about a refugee boy. The authors include classroom activities and lesson suggestions, showing how this book provides an ideal cornerstone for a unit on the experiences of war and displacement in the twenty-first century. Didem Uca, Kate Zambon, and Maria Stehle’s chapter, “Transnational Hip-Hop and Social Justice Pedagogy: Approaches to Race and Belonging in the Media Studies Classroom,” is a collaborative essay that compares Black American rapper Joyner Lucas’s “I’m Not Racist” (2017)

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and Turkish-German rapper Eko Fresh’s variation “Aber” (2018) to examine the potential of hip-hop as a vehicle for teaching social justice. As the authors explain, both songs are politically controversial and built on political controversy; both also suggest possibilities for overcoming such controversies through forms of dialogue. While Lucas’s lyrics relate the polarized opinions of a white Trump supporter and a Black Lives Matter supporter, Fresh’s lyrics give voice to opinions of a white supporter of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany) party and a Turkish-German supporter of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan; the song goes further by offering a third opinion – that of the rapper himself – that provides an ostensible middle ground. The authors analyse the different sociolinguistic, political, and national contexts of the videos, which allow for a critical examination of these forms of dialogue both within their individual political climates and transnationally. The videos also raise questions of race, religious identity, and gender in a comparative format. The authors propose activities for two settings: a transnational media studies course taught in English and a contemporary migrant cultures course taught in German. They note that for foreign language classes, teaching critical hip-hop pedagogy in a transnational media studies context facilitates cultural learning that exceeds the goal of fluency and works towards social and cultural competence. For media studies and communication classes, this approach situates discussions familiar to students in the North American context within a larger transnational discussion. They show how hip-hop can be a tool to teach social justice but also point to its limitations, such as the means of production, reception, and access. The authors suggest that the transnationally recognizable text, image, and sound of hip-hop offers productive avenues to teach critical approaches to contemporary media productions and enable performative learning practices that transcend the classroom. Peter Schweppe and Adrian Richard Wagner’s chapter, “Podcast Pedagogy: Addressing Populism and Social Justice as Vocal Justice,” stresses the importance of podcasting for social justice pedagogy in light of German populism that impacted the current political landscape and the resurgent movement on the far right. The authors provide new platforms and strategies for actively getting student voices into critical debates and forging new dialogues about challenging subjects. For them, rethinking social justice as “vocal justice” means countering dangerous speech and increasing the significance of dialoguing about topics such as populism in our classrooms. Building on valuable resources from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching as well as public podcast initiatives from NPR and the New York Times, the authors emphasize the

Editor’s Introduction  23

possibilities to mobilize student voices through short-format podcast projects. As they note, podcasting in higher education not only breaks down traditional notions of classroom spaces but also encourages students to use their voice in public discourses. With those goals in mind, their chapter examines the ways in which podcasts and podcasting can help educators navigate the contemporary landscape of conservative politics and various social justice activist responses to it. In addition, the authors provide a hands-on approach to podcasting about contemporary culture and its responses to conservative politics by showcasing a performative model of learning and literacy that incorporates student voices into critical debates about society and social justice, as opposed to reading or listening about it from the sidelines. As an appendix, the authors include a suggested syllabus and online pedagogical platform that outlines their initial steps in starting a podcast about teaching and learning at Montana State University. Diane Ceo-DiFrancesco’s chapter, “The Integration of Social Justice Pedagogy through Virtual Exchange,” focuses on facilitating dialogues that challenge students to examine issues of injustice and move towards solidarity with marginalized populations. The author claims that the dialogical encounters described by Paulo Freire (2009) engage students in real interactions with others and provide learning opportunities to experience the interconnectedness of our world. Currently, she claims, face-to-face experiential learning opportunities beyond the classroom are offered through service learning, community-engaged learning, encounters on campus, guest speakers, and study abroad programs, all of which can be engaging and impactful for students. Yet, due to barriers such as resources, scheduling limitations, and funding, not all students have access to such learning opportunities. These barriers, however, can be overcome through the implementation of virtual exchange. Her chapter argues that virtual exchange is a means of dialogical encounter that transcends the classroom space, implemented by using simple technology with Internet access. Virtual exchange invokes the integration of virtual interactions into the curriculum. These interactions consist of synchronous and/ or asynchronous sessions conducted during instructional time or as outside-of-class assignments, depending on the time zones involved. They can utilize one or more languages as students from distinct parts of the world complete curricular requirements for their courses. CeoDiFrancesco argues that virtual exchange creates real and meaningful opportunities for students to engage in intercultural communication, analyse their interactions, and critically reflect on the impact of the reciprocal relationship that develops. In an effort to integrate virtual

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exchange into a new seminar course for first-year university students entitled Latino Community as Story: An Immersion Experience, the author collaborated with colleagues at Jesuit universities in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and Nicaragua to create opportunities for intercultural dialogue. The carefully designed virtual exchange sessions highlighted the power of authentic dialogue to transform students’ fundamental understanding of their world and to create a shift in the way they perceived their own context. Through virtual exchange students experienced power and privilege through a different lens and were challenged through personal engagement in a way that could not necessarily have been accomplished solely by discussing course readings. Through the analysis of students’ written reflections, this chapter suggests that the strategic use of virtual exchange can promote a deeper sense of self in a global context and an eye-opening examination of how a student’s small decisions can have an impact far beyond what the student originally imagined. In a related approach, Jennifer Ruth Hosek’s chapter, “Intercultural Telecollaboration as Social Pedagogy,” analyses the benefits of teach-learn practices, by reporting on long-term case studies with the tele-collaborative platform LinguaeLive, and by highlighting how virtual peer-to-peer tandems help level the playing field for participants who do not have access to (near)native second-language speakers and immersive circumstances. While tandems have been around in various forms for decades, they are not yet widely and robustly used. Impediments to uptake include employment precarity; language instructors may be reluctant to expand and flip their classrooms for fear of losing authority or receiving uneven teaching evaluations. Sometimes teachers are unfamiliar with using technology in the classroom or feel ill prepared to deal with authentic input from their students’ peer partners abroad. In response to such quite comprehensible resistance, Hosek’s socially engaged contribution seeks nevertheless to make a research-based, compelling, and incentivizing case, especially to L2 language-culture instructors, for the efficacy of peer-to-peer tandems for language-culture learning and acquisition and the furtherance of social justice.  The author outlines the best practices for tele-collaborations, including pedagogically scaffolded, task-based, peer-to-peer communications organized upon principles that support a diverse public sphere and decrease negative stereotypes between groups who understand each other as different. Hosek’s argument is that such telecollaboration is both exceedingly effective at improving students’ abilities in their L2s and at  contributing  to equity and emancipation in today’s world of globalized hierarchies. Her chapter,  which  explores

Editor’s Introduction  25

uses  of digital media, shows  how this  practice can “decolonize” and “deprovincialize” language-culture learning and acquisition. Finally, I also commissioned two chapters on decolonizing and making fashion studies more just because that is a relatively new direction within an academic field that first had to legitimize its academic rigour, and then establish its own canon and methodologies. Scholarship on decolonizing fashion studies is only now beginning to appear, and the focus of social justice is especially vital in a field that educates the future leaders who can help make that industry more ethical, sustainable, and responsible. Otto von Busch’s chapter, “Fashion and Social Justice: Teaching and Questioning,” argues that there is an inherent tension between fashion and justice. While fashion allows for a certain amount of social mobility, the exclusivity that often defines what is fashionable stands in direct contrast to the ideas of fairness and justice. Most of us think of fashion as shallow, von Busch explains, and this allows fashion to cover up processes of exclusion and segregation, and clothes often serve as an excuse for behaviours that would otherwise be condemned. Having done his PhD in Gothenburg, Sweden, on the theme of fashion and hacktivism, von Busch focuses his teaching on the paradoxes between inclusion and exclusion, elitism, and participation in fashion, and how this is expressed systematically as well as in subjective experience, such as the use of fashion in shaming and bullying. His chapter examines some examples of how to approach fashion pedagogy from a perspective on social justice. Through the course Critical Fashion and Social Justice at Parsons School of Design in New York, von Busch engaged his students to explore how social stratification and aesthetic supremacy are central parts of the value hierarchies promoted though the consumption and everyday judgments we make about clothes. By offering some theoretical background as well as some examples from the class pedagogy, the chapter offers some suggestions of how to invite students to examine their everyday encounters and engagements with the injustices of fashion. Sandra Niessen’s chapter, “Getting Beyond Alterity: Building a Just Post-Fashion Curriculum,” argues that the fashion industry is creating huge problems. Aside from its environmental woes, it dismisses dress systems that are not traditionally considered as “fashion” and undermines non-Western fashion systems. Usually, fashion scholars focus on style and other physical aspects of fashion and not on the political and economic power that fashion uses to expand. Her chapter examines the ways in which fashion discriminates because this is fashion’s power for expansion, decimating the planet and world cultures. She radically proposes recognizing that all clothing systems in the world are equal.

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This allows students to see through the particular processes of Western fashion and gives all students throughout the world equal voice in constructing rational, fair, and diverse clothing systems that can be supportive of people and the environment. In the final chapter, “Social Justice, Intersectionality, and Decoloniality,” I outline my own work and experience as an educator, researcher, and organizer, both at the University of Victoria in Canada and at the University of Southern Denmark. Teaching across multiple disciplines, including culture, gender, media, film, fashion, and technology, for over thirteen years, I developed many tools to help students question gender, race, and class biases, social inequalities and exploitations, the power of media (mis)representations and manipulations, and the constructions of cultural and historical narratives. The various websites and digital projects (like podcasts, videos, magazines) that I help students develop and co-design in my courses allow them to establish digital portfolios, collaborate with local communities and (trans) national networks, and push the limits of what humanities education can offer beyond the classroom. My chapter explores the many ways in which we can put social justice, intersectionality, and decoloniality into practice and continuously propel our theory and practice towards justice. Conclusion Today it is a commonly accepted fact that pedagogy is an art form developed through the interactions between students and teachers, and, as first argued by the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was inspired by the poet Friedrich Schiller, pedagogy is art “in action” (quoted in Herbert 2010, 70). From our own experience, and historical evidence, we all know the value and power of effective, inspiring, and transformative education, and yet, fiscal policies, budgetary cuts, and austerity measures still regulate the ways in which education is administered, valued, and made accessible. Our hope is that the educational examples and tools we have collected in this volume will inspire everyone to see that justice-based education is not a niche area of research and activism, but rather the new norm in a globalized society connected virtually and facing a global climate emergency. My hope is that the various multidisciplinary examples collected here from the experiences shared by all contributors will inspire the readers to take these ideas further, to work more creatively, and to encourage new generations of students to keep bending the arc of the moral universe towards justice.

Editor’s Introduction  27 BIBLIOGRAPHY Badgett, M.V. Lee. 2015. The Public Professor: How to Use Your Research to Change the World. New York: New York University Press. Beyerbach, Barbara, and Tania Ramalho. 2011. “Activist Art in Social Justice Pedagogy.” Counterpoints 403:202–17. Darder, Antonia. 2015. Freire and Education. New York: Routledge. Dewey, John. 1938. Experience and Education. Free Press. DiAngelo, Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. New York: Beacon Press. Dubois, Claude K. 2013. Akim rennt. Translated by Tobias Scheffel. Frankfurt am Main: Moritz Verlag. Elenes, C. Alejandra. 2013. “Nepantla, Spiritual Activism, New Tribalism: Chicana Feminist Transformative Pedagogies and Social Justice Education.” Journal of Latino/Latin American Studies 5 (3): 132–41. Freire, Paulo. (1970) 2009. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. Gettman, David. 1987. Basic Montessori: Learning Activities for Under-Fives. Oxford: Clio Press. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Routledge. Herbert, Anna. 2010 The Pedagogy of Creativity. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1993. “Speaking about Paulo Freire – The Man, His Work.” In Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, edited by P. McLaren and P. Leonard, 146–54. New York: Routledge. – 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. – 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. – 2010. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge. Hytten, Kathy. 2006. “Education for Social Justice: Provocations and Challenges.” Educational Theory 56 (2): 221–36. Hytten, Kathy, and Silvia C. Bettez. 2011. “Understanding Education for Social Justice.” Educational Foundations (Winter-Spring): 7–24. Korthagen, Fred A.J., et al. 2011. Linking Practice and Theory: The Pedagogy of Realistic Teacher Education. London: Routledge. Lauritsen, Peter. 2021. “A democratic society has free universities. Do politicians know that?” Ræson, 9 June. https://www.raeson.dk/2021 /peter-lauritsen-et-demokratisk-samfund-har-frie-universiteter-ved -politikerne-det/?fbclid=IwAR1MJzY1HBDggBMN2oij29auM LlQ_BxHWfnsQgKmba1UyhKvzoFDAOSlB0M. Lorde, Audre. (1984) 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press.

28  Katrina Sark Lund, Kenneth. 2021. “Politicians go after the man, not the ball. It is extremely problematic.” Politiken. 7 June. https://politiken.dk/indland/uddannelse /art8236596/%C2%BBPolitikerne-g%C3%A5r-efter-manden-ikke -bolden.-Det-er-ekstremt-problematisk%C2%AB?shareToken =M701iyAAfIoA. Montessori, Maria. 1995. The Absorbent Mind. New York: Henry Holt and Company. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s Education, Outreach and Public Programming. n.d. “Teaching Resources.” https://education.nctr .ca/. Rogoff, Barbara. 2003. The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schön, Donald A. 1987. Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sensoy, Özlem, and Robin DiAngelo. 2017. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education. 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press. Shulman, Lee S. 1987. “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform.” Harvard Educational Review 57 (1): 1–23. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). n.d. http://www.trc .ca/. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Calls to Action, 2015. http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. http:// caid.ca/DTRC.html. Vulchi, Priya, and Winona Guo. 2018. “What It Takes to be Radically Literate.” TED Talk. 29 May 29. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =Bs2Fv3YiSFM. Vygotsky, Lev S. 1962. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weems, Lisa. 2016. “Decolonial Education at Its Intersections.” Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, edited by M.A. Peters, 1–16. Singapore: Springer Nature. Zinn, Tracy E., and Bryan K. Saville. 2007. “Interteaching: A New Approach to Peer-Based Instruction.” Psychology Teacher Network (Summer): 19–22.

2 Resurgent Mobilizations and Decolonial Practices in Education sage lacerte

Introduction Hadih Sage Lacerte Sahdnee. Loretta Madam s`loo, Paul Lacerte S`ba. Te Be Snaychalya Lekwungen keloh. My name is Sage Lacerte, I come from the Lake Babine Nation in what is known as North-Central British Columbia (BC), the territory of the Carrier peoples. I have inherited my teachings from my mother, Loretta Madam, and my father, Paul Lacerte. This chapter explores Indigenous decolonial pedagogies within and beyond academic spaces by discussing real-life examples of community- and student-led mobilizations grounded on the territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples and across Turtle Island. The practice of offering one’s positionality is a common Indigenous practice that offers context as to who you are, where you come from, and what your intentions are. Throughout my studies at the University of Victoria in the gender studies program, I have come to understand that the institution has conditioned students to announce our positionality in regard to the Indigenous unceded lands that we occupy via territory acknowledgments, then proceed to operate within colonial spaces that perpetuate the state’s dominance over these same Indigenous nations. When addressing the territory that white and non-white settlers occupy, this must be considered a signification that you have now become an international migrant on the territory of that particular nation and must behave accordingly. Therefore, this is not a territory acknowledgment but an assertion of Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty. I am a transnational Indigenous feminist who lives and operates internationally on Turtle Island (also known as North America) between the Lake Babine nation, the WSANEC, Songhees, and Esquimalt nations. I have been a visitor on the Lekwungenspeaking peoples’ territories since my birth and raise my hands with

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respect and acknowledgment of the contributions this has made to my identity as an Indigenous person. It is through these assertions that Indigenous students in the Canadian post-secondary context are shifting the narrative away from neocolonial and false “postcolonial” realities and moving towards realities in the academy and beyond that reflect Indigenous pedagogies, epistemologies, and ways of knowing and being. The stories and events discussed in this chapter occurred prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the economic crisis, and heightened animosity between the US and Canadian state against BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of colour). The nature of resurgent mobilizations and decolonial practices, if not previously, now must modulate to maintain and sustain front-line work while mediating “health and wealth” risks in a COVID world. Community-led mobilizations are entrenched in the fabric of Victoria’s social landscape. Since I was a young girl, I remember marching down Government Street in Victoria, BC, to support human rights and social justice advocacy movements that call on community members to offer their voices and bodies, to occupy physical space and heighten awareness on issues that pertain to women’s rights, Indigenous rights, LGBTQ2S+ rights, and environmental action. The emergence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, the Stolen Sisters movement, and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) mobilizations of 2020 have sparked a call for action that has reverberated across the globe for social justice activists to facilitate community-led mobilizations that create transformative and radical social change. While studying at the University of Victoria, I had the privilege of standing as the National Youth Ambassador of the Moose Hide Campaign (MHC) – an Indigenous innovation and resurgent movement that works to end violence against women and children in Canada, by engaging Indigenous and non-Indigenous men and boys in critical dialogue surrounding gender-based violence with a focus on the language, action, and thought that men have towards women and children that have been impacted by settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and paternalism (Billeck 2018). Men and boys across Canada take a pledge committing themselves to live a life free of violence, which is demonstrated in two ways: wearing the Moose Hide Campaign pin as a sign of action and solidarity and participating in ceremony by fasting with no food and no water for one day. The Moose Hide Campaign hosts two national gatherings annually across Canada, where folks are asked to “take a stand” against violence towards women and children; this meaningful pledge works to make visible the spectrum of gender-based violence that occurs in our country while holding men and boys accountable through this verbal agreement and wearing of

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the MHC pin. My education and activism have provided countless opportunities to apply my traditional Indigenous knowledge, and to reach wide audiences using community events, social media, and interpersonal relationships as an impetus for change. I stood as one of the spokespeople for the MHC on the steps of the BC Legislature and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, where news media caught the attention of the nation and influenced other women of colour to speak out about the multifaceted systems of oppression – women who have been silenced for far too long. I am proud to take the risk of speaking out using decolonial student-led activism to flip the script and allow young activists to stand centre stage and vocalize the lack of justice for racism and genocide that women, people of colour (POC), and more specifically Indigenous women experience within state structures, such as public and private education as well as in the social landscape of Canada. Many Indigenous students and activists have been isolated from their traditional vessels of knowledge formation for generations due to colonization. Today, Indigenous scholars are leading a pivotal shift in universities across Canada to employ an intersectional platform, where Indigenous pedagogies and epistemologies are a trusted source of knowledge production. Indigenous-led movements like the MHC are living examples of social justice and resurgent mobilizations that can be seen thriving in the Indigenous studies program at the University of Victoria, where the practice of “Indigenization” is taking place to ensure that the impacts of social justice mobilizations are made visible on a local, national, and international scale through focused post-secondary curriculum and an increase in Indigenous student and faculty population. By opening our arms to the shift from Western education models and welcoming insurgent forms of education, each of us can become a social justice advocate by simply participating in everyday acts of resurgence. This chapter outlines actions that must be undertaken by Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies in the post-TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada) era to help decolonize educational practices within and beyond academic learning environments by Indigenizing educational pedagogies to include knowledge production surrounding resurgence and movement building at scale. Historical Background and the TRC The Indian Act of 1876 was introduced to eradicate First Nations culture and acquire lands in favour of assimilation into Euro-Canadian society in exchange for the administration of Indian status, the band council system, and reserve lands alongside certain rights and protections for

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Indians (Henderson 2006). Colonialism has had a detrimental impact on Indigenous peoples for hundreds of years since Europeans made first contact on Turtle Island. Colonialism has served as a multifaceted dominance of culture that marginalized and impacted Indigenous peoples’ local economies, spiritual practices, knowledge production, community structures, and governance. Residential schools were created to “eliminate Aboriginal people as distinct peoples and to assimilate them into Canadian mainstream against their will” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 19). This genocidal policy “operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United and Presbyterian Churches” (Nagy and Sehdev 2012, 67) to deny children their language and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. My mother attended the Lejac Residential school. When she arrived, she only knew how to speak the Carrier language, and had the skills to sustain her family from the Lake Babine Nation. Many of her siblings attended this residential school and were subjected to mental, emotional, physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse from the nuns and priests who pushed forward the assimilative agenda of the Canadian government through children’s education. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) produced 94 Calls to Action in 2015 to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation” (TRC2015b, 1–2). Actions 6–12 make specific calls upon the federal government: Action 7 – Eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians Action 10 – Draft new Aboriginal education legislation with the full participation and informed consent of Aboriginal peoples to provide sufficient funding Action 10 iv. – Protect the right to Aboriginal languages Action 10 v. – Enable parental and community control and accountability to fully participate in the education of their children Action 12 – Develop culturally appropriate education programs for Aboriginal students

Indigenous activists and social justice advocates have been conditioned to be silent within the academy. Following an Indigenous world view, it is the responsibility of the collective to create and support networks for celebration or grief in response to the immediate needs of individuals, communities, and mother earth. For example, the Indigenous studies program launched at the University of Victoria (in the fall of 2018) hosted a round-table discussion entitled “Dismantling Gender

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Violence as a Core Resurgence Project,” where Indigenous scholars, students, and activists were invited to speak, offering considerations about what dismantling gender violence looks like in practice. Hosted in the First Peoples House on campus, the witnesses and speakers were offered a safe and welcoming environment that allowed for open dialogue to share vulnerable truths about the nature of gendered violence that impacts Indigenous peoples in academic, social, domestic, spiritual, and environmental contexts. As a key reconciliatory practice in academic spaces, it is necessary to acknowledge non-Indigenous allies who fully participate in round tables such as these and work to disrupt oppressive spaces by educating others on the realities and histories of marginalized people. Harsha Walia is a South Asian author and activist currently residing in Vancouver on the unceded Coast Salish territories. In her book Undoing Border Imperialism (2013), Walia expertly asks two questions in framing leadership: “What precisely does leadership look like?” and “How can it be fostered?” Both focus on the disruption of mainstream discourses that extol Western generosity towards Indigenous peoples and challenge the authority of settler-colonial statehood and its processes of knowledge production. These are key formative questions to ask when looking to build grassroots movements that rely on decentralized leadership models. Many Indigenous peoples’ knowledge production and identity formation are passed down matrilineally – through the female line. Therefore, to align the goals of Indigenous sovereignty, educational objectives, and social justice movements, having women of colour in leadership roles is of the utmost importance to ensure that those we are most accountable to are represented in leadership. Indigenous Resurgence Models in Post-Secondary Institutions and Community-Led Movements In response to the mandate outlined by the Canadian federal government to “continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic” (quoted in the TRC 2015a, 4), Indigenous scholars across Turtle Island have called for the broadening of and a more holistic approach to the concept of “education” to incorporate and perpetuate Indigenous-centred pedagogies (Corntassel and Hardbarger 2019, 109). Creating space for critical political dialogue within the academy is the central focus of critical Indigenous scholars, whose course of action is “geared towards the revitalization of our traditional ways” (Starblanket 2017, 29). Insurgent education is an Indigenous framework of knowledge transmission between

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generations that promote the resilience and sustainability of Indigenous nationhood and cultural continuance (Corntassel and Hardbarger 2019, 94). This action-oriented approach seeks to address power asymmetries that have created disconnections between Indigenous peoples’ community practices and knowledge associated with land that are definitive of Indigenous identity. Cherokee scholar Jeff Corntassel emphasizes the critical need for everyday acts of resurgence and resurgent mobilizations within social justice spheres, where education can serve as a critical site for land-based pedagogies that challenge colonial systems (Corntassel 2018, 87). To operate within a resurgent and decolonial intention, we must acknowledge that the settler location has been shaped by our ancestors who came before us and continue to be shaped today. It is imperative to act in alignment with the notion that the settler colonial reality is a fabricated existence that is enacted by people immersed in the settler colonial manifestation of capitalistic imperialism and recognize that this is a permeable structure that can be dismantled through decolonial intention and actions (Corntassel 2018, 76). Many Indigenous peoples’ educational pedagogies rely on the mutual relationship of power between students and teachers; in a class on resurgence and Indigenous mobilizations, Corntassel explained that insurgent education is an important part of an anti-colonial struggle and of pedagogies of decolonization (2018). By employing this pedagogy, it helps students localize Indigenous struggles by focusing the decolonial gaze to “your own backyard” rather than an imagined colonial world and compels accountability and action to counter contemporary colonialism through critical thought, community action, and political allyship across the globe. Many Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups have responded to these oppressive models of Western settler colonialism with grassroots mobilizations focused on resurgent action. Therefore, in order to establish a deeply rooted action plan for community resurgence, we must turn to the knowledgeable ones from sister acts and mobilizations that work to address Indigenous social justice issues inside and outside of the academy. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is an international instrument that “establishes a universal framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity, and well-being of the Indigenous peoples of the world” (UN General Assembly 2007). Although the Canadian state is not legally bound or obligated to adhere to this framework, accountability can be fostered when Indigenous resurgent mobilization and pedagogical structures focus on particular clusters of articles that pertain to a particular issue or right.

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My family comes from the Carrier territory, which has cultivated sustenance from moose hunting, berry picking, and fishing for hundreds of years. The practice and transferral of knowledge surrounding moose hunting is sacred and is passed on intergenerationally through landbased pedagogies and ceremony. However, thousands of Indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered along Highway 16, also known as the “Highway of Tears,” in BC. In 2011, when my dad and my sister, Paul and Raven Lacerte, were hunting on a logging road off of Highway 16, Raven cried out in hopes of justice for these women, asking what she could do as an individual to start a social movement that would end these racist atrocities from devastating our communities. Her vision was to develop a symbol that could be distributed across the country to change its fabric through governments, education systems, and social networks, and directly impact individuals who perpetrate violence, which resulted in the founding the Moose Hide Campaign. Article 22 of the UNDRIP was taken on as a core value of the Moose Hide Campaign movement, emphasizing that “states shall take measures, in conjunction with Indigenous peoples, to ensure that Indigenous women and children enjoy the full protection and guarantees against all forms of violence and discrimination” (UN General Assembly 2007). Co-founded by Raven and Paul Lacerte on Carrier territory in North-Central British Columbia, the father and daughter team were determined to spread the message of anti-violence across the country by wearing a small square of moose hide that operates as a conversation starter, bridging mechanism, and a symbol of solidarity (see fig. 2.1). The MHC encourages anti-violence through collective consciousnessbuilding, the practice of fasting, and by holding space for intimate and critical conversations between individuals, families, communities, and in government, all of which have resulted in mass mobilizations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous folx with the collective goal of generating a cultural shift that changes how Canadians think and behave. Kinship networks are central to the MHC’s anti-violence work since 84 per cent of police-reported violence against women is perpetrated by intimate partners, friends, and non-spousal family members (Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics 2013, 140). Indigenous feminist scholars Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes call on the resilience of our families to relate with each other in everyday intimate spaces through dialogue, relational accountability, and with the goal of challenging heteropatriarchy to decolonize familial discursive frameworks that promote the compartmentalization and privatization of intimate spaces that subvert extended kinship and Indigenous relationships (Corntassel and Hardbarger 2019, 92).

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Figure 2.1.  Raven Lacerte, co-founder of the Moose Hide Campaign, in 2018. Raven Lacerte and her partner Dominic Paul stand up against violence towards women and children on the steps of Parliament Hill at the National Gathering in Ottawa, Ontario. With permission by the Moose Hide Campaign.

Since 2017, I have had the opportunity to serve as the Moose Hide Campaigns National Youth Ambassador. My role in the campaign works to further develop our K-12 educational curriculum and organizational policies and broaden our “voice” to better work in alignment with feminist theories of gender-based violence on a local and national scale. The Ten Men Challenge is a program designed to engage young men and encourage them to stand up against violence towards women and children by participating in men’s talking circles, learning about gender-based violence along with its history and vocabulary, and participating in culturally informed ceremonies (see fig. 2.2). Ten Men takes on a community-based framework by inviting the friends, families, and surrounding nations to attend a school-wide assembly, where the ten men are able to stand up in front of their peers and take a pledge of accountability that states they will support each other in shaping what healthy masculinity looks like through behaviour and socialization at school and is a “practical example of reconciliation in action” (Moose Hide Campaign). Much of my work operates with one foot in the community and one foot in the academy; each stream has its place, although without the combined forces I would not have the vocabulary and tools from each

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Figure 2.2.  Sage Lacerte, “Speaking truth to our young ones” at the second Ten Men community event in Fraser Lake, BC, 2018. With permission by Jamil Mawani of Third Eye Productions.

basket. When I took on the position as National Youth Ambassador, my vision was to set a precedent for other young activists to gain confidence in making the personal political, politicizing student and community member identities by taking the risk of publicly emerging as a social justice activist. Working in social justice advocacy spaces is often associated with “working oneself out of a job” where we hope to see less need in the future. However, it must be noted that those who work in anti-racist and anti-violence spaces take many risks to hold these positions and are constantly developing networks of grassroots activist projects around the globe that work hand in hand to address power asymmetries. I come from the first generation of my own family, as with many Indigenous families, as one of those who have accumulated enough wealth to move past means of survival and are now able to shift the focus to financial security in the present and for future generations. By reaching out to school-age children across Canada, the Moose Hide Campaign hopes to empower young ones who have reached the

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“glass ceiling” of success in their generation by supplying tools that will lead to higher rates of high school and post-secondary graduation; holistic education that includes cultural competencies; and eagerness to contribute to the cultural shift in Canada that promotes anti-racist and decolonial mindsets. The Women’s March movement is another example of a movement that is “committed to dismantling systems of oppression through nonviolence, resistance, and building inclusive structures guided by self-determination, dignity and respect” (Women’s March 2019). When Kat Sark founded the Victoria Chapter of Women’s March Canada, she created space for me, an Indigenous ally of Black women, Indigenous women, poor women, disabled women, Jewish women, Muslim women, Latinx women, Asian and Pacific Islander women, lesbian, bi, queer, and trans women by including my voice as a tool to weave these communities together through storytelling and critical analysis in the form of workshops, public speaking, and protest that follow the unity principles of the Women’s March movement (Women’s March 2017). The Victoria Chapter supports scholarship and activism that engage in bold resistance and challenge the state’s asymmetrical structures of power primarily visible in education, governance, and Canadian mainstream culture, which promotes violence towards women in the form of police brutality, domestic violence, over-representation in the criminal justice system, and LGBTQ2S+ discrimination among many others. Revolutionary leaders have contributed to this movement by participating in the Women’s March Symposium held in July 2018, organized by Kat Sark, where activists with focus on Indigenous, political, climate, and poverty issues talked about the most pressing issues for women in our communities, and how to create momentum for positive change through a feminist and anti-racist lens, with the mayor of Victoria, Lisa Helps, acting as the moderator of this all-Indigenous panel (see fig. 2.3). Hosting the symposium at the University of Victoria established credibility, while allowing for an eclectic conversation of Indigenous individuals to share their unique needs in a conversational space that was open to all genders provided a bridge between the academic and non-academic communities in Victoria. Creating space for these conversations within and beyond the academy will allow Indigenous and non-Indigenous women a platform to vocalize critical needs and issues, while simultaneously also creating awareness and global networks on social and news media outlets. A fellow student and activist, Linaya Bertschi, used the Women’s March Victoria Chapter as a bridging mechanism, applying the feminist pedagogies learned at UVic to supplement her work as a student organizer

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Figure 2.3.  Women’s March Symposium in July 2018, organized by Katrina Sark, with Indigenous panellists and moderator Lisa Helps, the mayor of Victoria, BC. Photo with permission by Chorong Kim.

collaborating with Kat Sark on building the Women’s March Victoria Chapter. Linaya and I call on each other through our established social justice activist network for support in other student-led endeavours. Relationship building, especially amongst intersectional feminist activists, is of critical importance for the trajectory of women’s rights advocacy movements in order to supplement a healthy and lush ecosystem of informed and engaged networks of “sister” projects. The Indigenous studies and gender studies programs at the University of Victoria have supplemented student’s ability to articulate social justice issues to peers and mentors, who act as change-makers using the academy as a platform for knowledge production and mobility ignition. According to Joyce Green, Indigenous feminism “draws on core elements of Indigenous culture – in particular, the nearly universal connection to land, to territory, through relationships framed as a sacred responsibility predicated on reciprocity and definitive of culture and identity” (Green 2017, 4). Using an intersectional lens is fundamental to structured discourse surrounding the role of activism and social justice within education. Feminism is about advocating for women’s rights and ending gendered oppression; however, intersectional feminism addresses the overlapping intersectionalities of ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, religion, class, and the means by which women experience

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discrimination and oppression. Applying an Indigenous feminist analytical framework that considers the dimensions of colonial violence to our educational objectives as individuals and within collective social justice movements, guides Indigenous feminist praxis “to be free of heteronormative logics of empowerment, include strategies grounded in the resurgence of Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and [is] critically attentive to the ways patriarchy and misogyny affect Indigenous womxn’s lives” (Starblanket 2017, 21). Leanne Simpson discusses how crucial responding to the basic social needs of Indigenous peoples is within Indigenous resurgent movements, stressing that “coming to the state with working alternatives in place, with strong nations, is coming to the state with grounded, authentic Indigenous power” (Simpson 2017, 227). Over the past eight years, the Moose Hide Campaign has nourished a process of scalability, naming key sectors where it is critical to incorporate their message to achieve long-lasting results: launching a K-12 and post-secondary education platform that has become integrated into curricula across the country, engaging in work with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Department of National Defense (DND), faith-based groups, First Nations communities, non-profit organizations, and within federal and provincial governments (see fig. 2.4). By theorizing and establishing a community-based framework that offers individuals, families, communities, organizations, and governments the tools necessary to address, heal, and end experiences of violence, the Moose Hide Campaign offers a unique approach to resurgent action and Indigenous feminist praxis by weaving their mandate into the various structures that oppress women, children, and Indigenous peoples in hopes of decolonizing these “interlocking systems of oppression” (Green 2017, 256). How to Empower Indigenous Social Justice Activists and Non-Indigenous Allies When considering where to begin your journey as a social justice activist or non-Indigenous ally, you can refer to resources or literature to educate yourself on the histories of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and how to move forward with learning and unlearning in a healthy and generative way. Here are a few suggestions: 1 To develop a greater understanding of the contemporary needs of Indigenous peoples, read the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Truth and

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Figure 2.4.  Ten Men Community Gathering held at the Fraser Lake Elementary-Secondary School (FLESS) in Fraser Lake, BC, 2018. Organized by the Moose Hide Campaign. With permission by Jamil Mawani of Third Eye Productions.

Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action. By reading and collectively embracing these new frameworks of accountability, a shift can be made “from the one-sided nature of the relationship so far and allow Indigenous peoples [a new type of relationship based on ongoing mutual accountability and pursuit of equality, safety and justice for all]” (Moran 2018). 2 Storytelling is the means by which many Indigenous nations pass cultural information and educate one another. Indigenous literature is an important vessel for storytellers to regain their voice, which was once taken. Act as a witness and critical reader, rethinking assumptions about Indigenous literature, history, and politics by reading authors such as Maria Campbell, Daniel Heath Justice, Lee Maracle, Thomas King, Richard Wagamese, Jeanette Armstrong, Joyce Green, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Jeff Corntassel, and Eden Robinson, who allow for contradictions, complications, and tensions to remain visible in their work. By reading, listening to, and critiquing Indigenous stories, we are able to shape how we understand the world. 3 Indigenous peoples are under-represented as filmmakers and misrepresented as subjects in Canadian cinema. By celebrating

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Figure 2.5.  Sage Lacerte representing the Moose Hide Campaign at UVic’s Sexualized Violence Awareness Week (SVAW) in partnership with the Anti-Violence Project, 2019. With permission by Sage Lacerte.

Indigenous-made films, stories are able to be captured and shared through the lens of Indigenous directors, writers, producers, and actors on their own terms. Watch film and online content made by Indigenous filmmakers and influencers such as Alanis Obomsawin’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2003), Tracey Deer’s Mohawk Girls (2005), and Miranda de Pencier’s The Grizzlies (2019), who offer their imagined world views that contribute to decolonial ways of knowing and being. 4 As an Indigenous activist, I am always searching for new ways to operate with decolonial intention and action (see fig. 2.5). Seeking out resources to be a strong ally can be challenging as the sphere of contemporary Indigeneity is constantly shifting and growing.

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Figure 2.6.  The Moose Hide Campaign pin is not only a symbol of solidarity, but a commitment to stand up against violence by honouring, respecting, and protecting the precious ones in our lives, 2019. With permission by the Moose Hide Campaign.

In 2019, the Montreal Indigenous Community NETWORK developed the “Indigenous Ally Toolkit” for allies to “understand the role that an individual occupies and plays within the collective experience” (Swiftwolfe 2019, 2). Using a step-by-step guide, the toolkit offers tips on how to act accordingly in spaces where Indigenous folks have been isolated from participating in conversations concerning Canadian histories and contemporary Indigeneity. Allyship can be exercised through simple acts of mindfulness that create safe spaces for Indigenous folks to work and play without discrimination or prejudice. Being an ally is a living document that must be negotiated and revised throughout one’s life; the toolkit claims that “it is crucial to establish a direct line of communication” (2019, 7) with a friend or community organization that is directly involved to facilitate respectful conversation surrounding the recognition of Indigenous nations of Turtle Island, cultural protocols, and traditions, and acknowledging the fact that you are a guest on the land (2019, 7). Conclusion The action plan outlined in this chapter is formed with an Indigenous feminist lens that works to counter Western settler-colonial imperialism and heteropatriarchy for the purpose of encouraging Indigenous

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land-based pedagogies, insurgent education, and Indigenous nationhood to thrive using decolonial intentions as an impetus for resurgent action. Through the implementation of decolonial resurgent activism and self-determinacy, these mobilizations have prevented settler-colonial encroachment on Indigenous territories and bodies while preserving ties to land, kin, culture, and the prospect of futurity (see fig. 2.6). Stemming from Indigenous-led activism and resurgence focused on decolonization, this action plan is a collection of resources for those involved in post-secondary education and activism to contribute to the regeneration of alternative Indigenous worlds. Mussi. Questions for Reflection: 1 Historically, schools and education systems have alienated and worked to destroy Indigenous world views (culture, language, tradition, ways of learning). Discuss ways in which this was done with reference to legislation (i.e., Indian Act) or ways in which schools were run. What were the losses as a result of this for Canada? Source: Beyond 94 Calls to Action: https://media.curio .ca/filer_public/78/64/7864c3fb-c4ec-4991-8e60-df3e754527cf /beyond94guide2e.pdf. 2 How can settlers and allies support the resurgent practices of Indigenous Social Justice Activists? 3 The Moose Hide Campaign’s vision is to end violence towards women and children in Canada by engaging boys and men in conversations surrounding gender-based violence and its origins. In what ways can the campaign engage with K-12 age students to help create a cultural shift surrounding gender-based violence on an individual, community, and national scale? BIBLIOGRAPHY Billeck, Scott. 2018. “Moose Hide Campaign Out to End Violence Against Women, Children.” Winnipeg Sun. September. https://winnipegsun. com/news/local-news/moose-hide-campaign-out-to-end-violence -against-women-children. Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. 2013. “Measuring Violence Against Women: Statistical Trends.” 25 February. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca /n1/en/pub/85-002-x/2013001/article/11766-eng.pdf?st=n4Rl3BTp. Corntassel, Jeff. 2018. Everyday Acts of Resurgence: People, Places, Practices. Olympia, WA: Daykeeper Press.

Resurgent Mobilizations and Decolonial Practices in Education  45 Corntassel, Jeff, and T. Hardbarger. 2019. “Educate to Perpetuate: Land-based Pedagogies and Community Resurgence.” International Review of Education 65 (1): 87–116. Green, Joyce. 2017. Making Space for Indigenous Feminism. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing. Henderson, W. 2006. “Indian Act.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Moose Hide Campaign. n.d. Moose Hide Campaign: Standing Up Against Violence. https://moosehidecampaign.ca/. Moose Hide Campaign. n.d. Ten Men Challenge. https://moosehidecampaign .ca/get-involved/10-men-challenge. Moran, Ry. 2018. “Action and Accountability Are What’s Needed for Reconciliation.” CBC News, 19 March. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous /opinion-action-accountability-reconciliation-ry-moran-1.4568339. Nagy, Rosemary, and Robinder Kaur Sehdev. 2012. “Introduction: Residential Schools and Decolonization.” Canadian Journal of Law & Society 27 (1): 67–74. Simpson, Leanne. 2017. “Twelve Constellations of Coresistance.” In As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, 211–33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Starblanket, Gina. 2017. “Being Indigenous Feminists: Resurgence Against Contemporary Patriarchy.” In Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 2nd ed., edited by Joyce Green, 21–41. Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing. Swiftwolfe, Dakota. 2019. “Indigenous Ally Toolkit.” Montreal Urban Aboriginal Community Strategy NETWORK. http://reseaumtlnetwork.com /wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Ally_March.pdf. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015a. Canada’s Residential School: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Montreal: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada/McGill-Queen’s University Press. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015b. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Toronto: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada/Lorimer. UN General Assembly. 2007. “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” October. https://www.un.org/development/desa /indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html. Walia, Harsha. 2013. Undoing Border Imperialism. Chico, CA: AK Press. Women’s March. n.d. Mission and Principles. https://womensmarch.com /mission-and-principles. Women’s March. n.d. Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles. https://static1. squarespace.com/static/5c3feb79fcf7fdce5a3c790b/t/5c433e85c2241ba6b93 53fce/1547910789489/2019%2BUnity%2BPrinciples.pdf. Women’s March Victoria Chapter. n.d. https://womensmarchvictoria.wixsite .com/home.

3 Social Justice Pedagogy: Memorial Work in Action helga thorson

Think higher, feel deeper. (Elie Wiesel 2012)

Introduction In 2012, I attended a talk by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. When asked what advice he had for the young generation in the audience, he responded: “Think higher, feel deeper.” These four words resonated strongly with me, especially just one year after teaching the inaugural I-witness Field School, a course on Holocaust memorialization which I will describe in further detail below. Listening to someone whose works I had frequently read and taught, I realized that Wiesel had just captured – in four simple words – the very essence of my social justice pedagogy. The goal of my courses is not merely to impart information on the subject matter at hand, whether it is about, in my case, the Holocaust, early twentieth-century German and Austrian literature and cultural studies, or the German language; the goal of my teaching is to engage learners holistically and to provide them with the confidence and courage they need to act with integrity in the communities in which they find themselves. More than anything, I am interested in providing students with the skills and motivation they need to think critically, to act ethically, and to embrace affect and emotion as part of a deep learning process.1 In response to the calls for anti-racist education and activism, both on and off campus, it is essential that we provide learners (which include ourselves as educators) with the skills we need to navigate the world around us and to interrogate the systems of oppression that are deeply embedded in the institutions, organizations, and communities in which we find ourselves. These demands for change have been recently

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strengthened and energized by the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests against anti-Black racism, but also through the Calls to Action in the final reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) in Canada. As an able-bodied, cisgender, white woman who moved to the unceded territory of the Lekwungen peoples and as an associate professor of German studies who teaches at a mid-sized Canadian university, I find it important to increase my own – as well as my students’ – awareness of the spaces and places that we traverse and to determine how we can help shape them so that they are more inclusive, equitable, and just, guaranteeing human rights for all. As an educator, I hope my work will lead to transformation – both on the individual level (my own and my students’) as well as in the context of higher education in general. In this context, transformation includes a motivation to dismantle racism and injustice within our universities and necessitates deep reflections on not only what we teach but also how and why we teach it. In this chapter, I discuss the potential of experiential and placebased learning as a form of social justice pedagogy that treats learners holistically and guides them towards action. Using the I-witness Field School as an example, I discuss how Holocaust education in general, and this field school in particular, helps students become aware of how past atrocities inform the present as well as how our present contexts shed light on how we understand and memorialize the past. Drawing on my own experiences leading four field schools as well as my recent engagement with a digital mapping project with students inside and outside of the classroom, I discuss how conscious acts of remembrance and memorialization create meaning in the present and connections to the past. As a form of social justice pedagogy, memorial work in action has the potential to impact students’ education and change their lives. In this way, transformative learning also has the potential to positively affect the communities in which these students live, work, and play, and also to transform higher education in general. Through my reflections in this chapter, I hope to enter into a dialogue with other educators, from diverse fields of enquiry, about how we can transform higher education in an attempt to imagine and create a better world. Understanding the Whole Person through Reflective Practices In the summer of 2007, I designed and taught a Holocaust studies course in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria (UVic) in Canada. At the end of the semester, several students

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commented that it was the first time they had cried in a course. This experience made me realize that students not only learn through distancing themselves from the subject matter (approaching the material through critical enquiry and rigorous investigation) but also from being affected by it (approaching the material through empathy and compassion). Holistic education encompasses the whole person, it involves developing both the mind and the heart (see Love and Love 1995; Boler 1999; Berman 2004; Ricci and Pritscher 2015), and it entails reflecting on the learning experience. Reflection is at the core of my pedagogy. Reflective learning invites learners to think through their own processes of learning, to understand the value and relevance of what they are learning, and to consider their own responsibilities as learners to the world around them. In most of my courses, I ask students to reflect on the content in multiple ways: from five-minute reflective worksheets to reading journals to blogs or reflective essays. Yet, reflection does not only occur in isolation; it frequently takes place in dialogue with others (Friere 1970; Baker, Jensen, and Kolb 2002; Alexander 2006). I often invite students to share the insights they have gained about their own learning at various functions in the local community. These sessions are not only interesting for the community members, but they encourage students to reflect on the relevance of their learning in their own lives and what it means for the world around them – and to be able to articulate that to a public audience. Re-Envisioning the “Classroom”: Intergenerational, Transcultural, and Place-Based Learning Teaching Holocaust Studies has not only taught me the significance of holistic learning and the value of reflecting on that learning, it has also reinforced the benefits of inter-generational communication, transcultural dialogues, and place-based learning. Part of what makes my Holocaust studies courses so meaningful is that I have been able to invite Holocaust survivors to speak to and engage in discussions with students. However, the greatest challenge that Holocaust educators face today is that we are living in a time where we will soon not have anyone with memories of the Holocaust available to talk about their experiences. In 2010, I began to explore (in dialogue with Michael Gans, who was a graduate student in our program at the time) what the learning environment would look like if we brought students to the sites of the Holocaust. Not wanting to engage in “atrocity” tourism that exploits such sites for macabre pleasure, yet understanding the value of

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place-based learning, we began to think about ways to engage students in Holocaust studies outside the classroom and in ways that promoted reflection and ethical engagement. It was through these dialogues that the I-witness Field School came into being. By visiting sites where the Holocaust occurred in three to four different countries, students learn not only about what happened in the past but also about how the story of the Holocaust is told now in at least three different national contexts. These visits follow a carefully planned series of orientation sessions plus an intensive week of on-campus study designed to engage students intellectually, emotionally, and ethically. In particular, meeting Holocaust survivors from our own community gives students a sense that they have now become the bearers of responsibility in Holocaust remembrance and education. The travel portion of the field school is structured to prompt comparison among Holocaust memorial sites in multiple cities and countries, pushing students to reflect on how the story of the past is told in the present. This comparison is increasingly eye-opening for students as political realities and governments’ corresponding interpretations of history change – such as in Poland, where new laws exist about what can and cannot be said about the Holocaust, or in Budapest, where protesters still gather in front of a national memorial built several years ago that the protesters believe downplays the country’s own involvement in the Holocaust. My own experiences as an undergraduate student studying in Germany and Austria helped me learn about the world in new ways. Being able to visit a German history museum in West Berlin, followed by a visit to its counterpart on the other side of the wall in East Berlin, opened my eyes to the ways in which museums and politics shape our understanding of history. Studying literature and art history in Vienna by visiting theatres, galleries, museums, and significant architectural buildings led to insights that would have been difficult to come by in a traditional classroom setting in North America. Not only do I see the value of “learning out there” (Curran et al. 2019), but I also realize that some of the things that make place-based learning so valuable (student immersion, group rapport, transcultural communication, reflection) are things that I can also bring back to the classroom as well (see Thorson and Harvey 2019; Musisi 2019). In addition, navigating learning through interactions with others across cultures helps bring to light that learning (in both its content and its form) is often a culturally specific endeavour. How and what we learn in our respective school systems varies across time and space. Engaging in cross-cultural interactions helps learners understand these differences and often inspires

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them to think about their own culturally embedded assumptions and presupposed knowledge. Shifting the Role of the Instructor: Increased Student Accountability through Collaborative Learning I view the primary role of the course instructor not so much as someone who imparts knowledge, but rather as someone who facilitates and curates a learning environment that has the potential to lead to deep, holistic learning. In the preface to their edited book entitled Social Justice Education, Skubikowski, Wright, and Graf write that “[a]t its best, social justice pedagogy highlights collaboration within and outside the classroom, transforming the traditional ‘omniscient’ professor/teacher into an informed collaborator in the common pursuit of knowledge” (2010, x). As part of the I-witness Field School, I require students to choose and research one of the sites we visit while in Europe. During the week of classes at UVic, students provide a presentation about their chosen site, distribute a handout for all course participants with the most important information about the site, and lead a short discussion about the site, answering questions that arise. While in Europe, the students become the “experts” on the site they have researched. They prepare the group before the site visit and lead a discussion about it afterward. In this way they not only become accountable for the learning that takes place, but they become personally and academically invested in the subject. This assignment not only increases their excitement for the site visits, but it also serves to build students’ intellectual curiosity, boosts their confidence, and helps them realize that they are part of a learning team – and that each classmate has something important to contribute. They are not merely completing an assignment for a grade but are accountable for providing insights and critical discourse about the sites we visit, whether they are former concentration camps, museums, cemeteries, memorials, or grass-roots projects. Facilitating Transformative Learning: Making Meaning, Taking Action, and Envisioning Change While contemplating the pedagogy and practices of experiential and place-based learning, I have come to understand the importance of transformative learning in higher education.2 Based on the work of Jack Mezirow and his associates, transformative learning is a process of deep learning in which students create meaning and act on their newly negotiated belief systems: “Transformation theory’s focus is on how we

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learn to negotiate and act on our own purposes, values, feelings, and meanings rather than those we have uncritically assimilated from others – to gain greater control over our lives as socially responsible, clear thinking decision makers” (Mezirow and Associates 2000, 8). Transformative learning lies at the core of my teaching philosophy and is the ultimate goal that guides my teaching practices, whether on campus or off. Drawing on the work of Mezirow and others, I see my role as an instructor as providing learners with a space in which they can question their own assumptions, understand multiple perspectives, make meaning in their lives, and help shape the world through their actions. Built on a sense of trust and rapport, the learning atmosphere created sets out to strengthen students’ confidence, to help them understand multiple perspectives as they grasp the complexities of the world around them, and to work not only towards critical understanding but also to imagine ways to effect critical change. In this sense, social justice pedagogy has the potential to be transformative. It involves learning who you are, coming to terms with your place in society (in terms of one’s intersectionality, positionality, and privilege), and understanding current and historical injustices and their legacies. Drawing on the work of Freire (2000), Davis and Harrison (2013) state that “education is never an impersonal or neutral act, but an intensely humanistic and intimate interaction guided by methodological rigour, ethical commitment, respect for the autonomy of the student, capacity to be critical, driving curiosity, awareness of being unfinished, and a deep-seated hope and joy in human capacity to change” (95). In this sense, it can lead to action. Owens, Sotoudehnia, and ­Erickson-McGee (2015) use Robbins’s (2004) metaphor of the hatchet and seed to discuss a field-based learning environment in which learners “wield the hatchet of critical interrogation while nurturing the seed of social justice and active change” (325), implying that the pure act of intellectual deconstruction is not enough without the possibility of becoming involved and cultivating change. Engaging with the Holocaust: Memorial Work in Action In 2018, I took learning about Holocaust memorialization one step further by implementing a research-based project in a combined oncampus graduate and undergraduate seminar on Holocaust and memory studies. In this course, students were able to design and contribute to an actual digital Holocaust memorial. Working collaboratively with the “Servitengasse 1938” working group in Vienna, Austria, the Holocaust and memory studies course began to digitally map one street in

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Vienna, Austria, shortly after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.3 Through the I-witness Field School, I was fortunate enough to meet Barbara Kintaert, a resident of a street called the Servitengasse in the ninth district of Vienna, who several years earlier had asked herself the question: Who was living in my apartment in 1938? This one simple question led to the creation of a working group and a series of memorial projects. The working group that developed decided to confront the city’s past and “dig where [they] stand” (Lindqvist 1979) in order to metaphorically “excavate” the history of their city. Vienna’s ninth district had the second highest number of the city’s Jewish residents before the German invasion of Austria. The street is just around the corner from the Berggasse, where Sigmund Freud lived and worked, and is an important part of the history of bourgeois Jewish culture in Vienna. After researching the history of the residents of one particular building, Servitengasse 6, the working group decided to create a plaque to commemorate its former Jewish residents (see fig. 3.1). First, they approached the current owner of the building, who refused to grant permission. Then they took the project to the city government and received permission to place the memorial plaque on city property a metre away from the building itself. Following the installation of the plaque for building number 6, the working group then extended its research to the entire street. Once the research was complete, another memorial project was installed. This one is titled “Keys against Forgetting,” and it consists of individual apartment keys under glass visible below the sidewalk, with individual names attached to the keys commemorating all 462 original Jewish residents and shop owners on the street who were forced to leave their homes and businesses (see fig. 3.2). Julia Schulz, the artist who designed the memorial, wanted the memorial “to look like an archaeological excavation” (Kintaert 2015, 94). Besides researching the original Jewish residents who lived on the street in 1938, the working group also collected information on the city’s other residents who were forced to live in some of the “communal apartments” set up in the Servitengasse (as a way to isolate the Jewish population, move them away from their friends and neighbours, and congregate them together before they were deported to other locations). It is important to realize that the forced movements and dispossession of the Jewish population were not a simple matter of taking residents from their homes and sending them to concentration and death camps – but there were various trajectories: initial relocations across the city, flights to safety, travel to other countries that were later occupied by the Nazis, and deportations to ghettos, work camps, and death camps.

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Figure 3.1.  Plaque commemorating the Jewish residents and shop owners from Servitengasse 6, Vienna, Austria, 1938. Photo by H. Thorson.

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Figure 3.2.  A portion of the “Keys against Forgetting” memorial on the Servitengasse in Vienna, Austria. Photo by H. Thorson.

Working within the microcosm of one street, this digital mapping project sheds light on how the Jewish residents of the Servitengasse were affected by the Nazi terror. Who were the Jewish residents living in the Servitengasse in 1938 and what happened to them in the years following the German annexation of Austria? Were they able to emigrate and make it to safety? Were they deported and murdered? Or were their whereabouts unknown? Mapping this data provides insights into the demographics of the residents and what happened to the Jewish residents of this street during the Holocaust (for example, were men more likely to emigrate than women, were families split apart, were residents moved immediately to communal apartments, ghettos, concentration camps, or death camps?). The mapping project records the trajectories of lives affected by the Holocaust and their complicated paths across the globe or to the death camps. Through our own collaborative decision-making processes, in consultation with the project’s programmer, the students and I had to choose how the data would be presented and mapped online. What aspects

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mattered to us (e.g., gender, family relations, occupation, etc.) and what other issues (e.g., data privacy, the language of place names, etc.) did we deem important? Not only did we all learn a great deal about the past, but we also came to realize that, through memory work, we were actively involved in shaping the memory of the Holocaust for future generations. In so doing, we became personally invested in researching the lives of the Jewish residents of this one particular street, getting to know them by name, and we formed a community of collaborators (from Vienna to Victoria) involved in researching and commemorating the past. Our work on this project allowed us to see the relationship between the past and present in a new light: we continuously reflected on how learning about the past could make a difference in how we view the present, what our responsibility is in the here and now to defy racism, sexism, anti­ semitism, homo- and transphobia, ableism, etc., and we became inspired by realizing that one person, asking herself one simple question (“Who was living in my apartment in 1938?”), could make such a dramatic ­difference in the process of remembering past human rights atrocities. Conclusion Returning to the words of Elie Wiesel and their connection to social justice pedagogy, I aspire as a university instructor to motivate students to “think higher” and “feel deeper” in multiple ways: • I encourage them to think critically: to question the narratives they are told; to challenge their own and other people’s perspectives; and to understand the biases, nuances, and ambiguities in the information they receive. • I inspire them to think higher: to live their lives in an ethical way; to confront bigotry and hatred wherever it occurs; and to think creatively about how to shape the future. • I want them to feel deeply: to listen respectfully to others; to be moved by other people’s experiences; and to reflect on how their own emotions shape their perspectives and sometimes even their own prejudices. All of this reminds me of another famous quote by Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference” (1986, 8). More than any­ thing, I want my students to overcome indifference. I want them to have a better understanding of the world around them, to possess the confidence to assess their own values and perspectives, and to care enough to work for change.

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Deep learning is not easy. It involves challenging who you are as a person, a society, a culture, and sometimes as a nation. Going through this learning process is often not only unsettling but can be deeply upsetting. Yet, at the same time, this type of learning can change the way individuals see the world and their place within it. In many of my courses, it involves confronting the past and re-envisioning the future. Beyond expanding one’s knowledge and skills (as we do in most educational settings), deep learning takes commitment, courage, strength, intelligence, and understanding. The educational challenge is to provide an environment in which deep learning can take place while simultaneously offering students the support they need to take what is sometimes an uncomfortable journey. Some of the most transformative moments of learning can transpire when you step out of your comfort zone. When we travel to Europe to study Holocaust memorials on the I-witness Field School, for example, students not only face the stress of travelling abroad in unfamiliar settings and cultures, but they are also forced to confront one of the darkest periods of recent history. Engaging in the Servitengasse digital mapping project personalized the past by replacing numbers with the names of those who had lived and worked on one specific street in one neighbourhood of one European city. The microcosm of this street brought the horrors of the Holocaust to light and each line of the spreadsheet represented an individual story, often intertwined within a family unit – a story that reflected the consequences of antisemitism and the atrocity of murder and genocide. This type of learning is emotionally and academically exhausting – but I know for me personally, by engaging in deep, uncomfortable learning, I have found myself on new and unexpected paths that have helped me envision my life as well as education differently. By maintaining mentoring relationships with my students that continue well after the course is over, I am also aware of how the transformative learning undertaken in and out of the classroom has encouraged students to act when confronted with injustice and has inspired both ethical reflection and social action. Deep, transformative learning has the potential to lead one towards social change, “to jolt a learner into action” (Thorson and Harvey 2019, 9; see also hooks 1994; Fielding 2001; Brookfield 2005). As an instructor, I aim to provide learners with the right combination of skills that can help them to take action, to show them the benefit of becoming “upstanders” instead of “bystanders,” and to envision new ways of tackling society’s problems. Perhaps, more than anything, I have found that creating an environment in which deep learning can take place involves giving students the confidence they need to realize that their learning

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can make a difference in the world. Correspondingly, as educators, we too need to have the confidence in ourselves to realize that the way we teach also has the potential to make a dramatic difference in the world. Questions for Reflection: 1 What does Wiesel’s quote “Think higher, feel deeper” mean to you in the context of social justice pedagogy? 2 The author of this chapter mentions several teaching approaches and practices that she believes help facilitate social justice pedagogy: holistic learning, individual and collaborative reflection, intergenerational and transcultural learning, place-based pedagogy, experiential learning, active community engagement, and the process of envisioning and cultivating change. How do these elements interact with one another in your own teaching and learning? 3 In this chapter, Helga Thorson describes two different teaching initiatives: the I-witness Field School on Holocaust memorialization and the Servitengasse 1938 digital mapping project. How do these educational experiences help students navigate time and space in order to create a more socially just world in the present? NOTES 1 I would like to thank Lisa Surridge, the academic associate dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, who helped me critically reflect on my teaching pedagogy and educational leadership after I was nominated for the 2019 3M National Teaching Award. Her insights greatly helped me articulate my teaching and leadership philosophy and approach. 2 Here I do not mean the concept of transformation as a marketing device regularly used as a form of branding when advertising short-term offcampus or study-abroad programs, as described by Glass (2019), but rather as the process of developing the space for students to navigate difficult intellectual and emotional terrain as they work towards making meaning in their lives and finding ways to contribute to their communities. 3 Besides the eight students in the course who initiated the project, I was able to hire five research assistants to help proofread and complete the project. I would like to thank André Flicker, Ty Reeves, Davjola Ndoja, Braden Russell, and Lauren Thompson for their research assistance on the digital mapping project as well as the students in the course: Caitlin Burritt, Tessa Coutu, Cheyenne Furrer, Kelsey Kilbey, Jae Kim, Giorgia Ricciardi, and Noga Yarmar. I would also like to express my thanks to Stewart Arneil in

58  Helga Thorson the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria for his work coding the mapping project. Finally, I would like to thank the Office of Research Services at the University of Victoria for awarding me an Internal Research and Creative Project Grant for work on this project. The Servitengasse digital mapping site can be found at https://hcmc.uvic .ca/servitengasse/. BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Robin. 2006. Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk. 3rd ed. Thirsk, UK: Dialogos. Baker, Ann C., Patricia J. Jensen, and David A. Kolb. 2002. Conversational Learning: An Experiential Approach to Knowledge Creation. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Berman, Jeffrey. 2004. Empathic Teaching: Education for Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Brookfield, Stephen. 2005. The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Boler, Megan. 1999. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge. Curran, Deborah, Cam Owens, Helga Thorson, and Elizabeth Vibert. 2019. Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus Study Programs. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Davis, Tracy, and Laura M. Harrison. 2013. Advancing Social Justice: Tools, Pedagogies, and Strategies to Transform Your Campus. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Fielding, Michael. 2001. “Students as Radical Agents of Change.” Journal of Educational Change 2:123–41. Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Books. – 2000. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civil Courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Glass, Michael. 2019. “Transformation in the Field: Short-Term Study Abroad and the Pursuit of Changes.” In Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus Study Programs, edited by Deborah Curran, Cam Owens, Helga Thorson, and Elizabeth Vibert, 231–51. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Kintaert, Barbara. 2015. “Shedding Light on the Past: Digging for Information and Grassroots Memorialization.” In The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Confronting Racism, Antisemitism, and Homophobia through Memory Work, edited by Andrea Pető and Helga Thorson, 88–99. Budapest: Tom Lantos Institute.

Social Justice Pedagogy  59 Lindqvist, Sven. 1979. “Dig Where You Stand.” Oral History 7 (2): 24–30. Love, Patrick G., and Anne Goodsell Love. 1995. “Enhancing Student Learning: Intellectual, Social, and Emotional Integration.” ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports 24 (4): 1–5. Mezirow, Jack, and Associates. 2000. Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Musisi, Nakanyike B. 2019. “The Enlivened Classroom: Bringing the Field Back to Campus.” In Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus Study Programs, edited by Deborah Curran, Cam Owens, Helga Thorson, and Elizabeth Vibert, 66–84. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 2019. Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Vols. 1a and 1b. https:// www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/. Owens, Cameron, Maral Sotoudehnia, and Paige Erickson-McGee. 2015. “Reflections on Teaching and Learning for Sustainability from the Cascadia Sustainability Field School.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 39 (3): 313–27. Ricci, Carlo, and Conrad Pritscher. 2015. “The Path Towards Democracy: Holistic Education and Critical Pedagogy.” Holistic Pedagogy. Critical Studies of Education 1:121–7. Robbins, Paul. 2004. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Malden, UK: Blackwell. Skubikowski, Kathleen, Catherine Wright, and Roman Graf. 2010. Preface. In Social Justice Education: Inviting Faculty to Transform their Institutions, edited by Kathleen Skubikowski, Catherine Wright, and Roman Graf, ix–xii. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Thorson, Helga, and Megan Harvey. 2019. Introduction. In Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus Study Programs, edited by Deborah Curran, Cam Owens, Helga Thorson, and Elizabeth Vibert, 3–22. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Vol. 1 of Summary: Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Toronto: Lorimer. Wiesel, Elie. 1896. “One Must Not Forget.” U.S. News and World Report, 27 October, 68. –  2012. “Elie Wiesel in Conversation with Robert Krell.” The Orpheum Theatre, Vancouver, 11 September.

4 It Takes a Village: New Pedagogical Approaches to Collaborative Enquiries with Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants charlotte schallié

Introduction In this contribution, I discuss a graduate seminar curriculum that integrates born-digital intergenerational life narratives of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. The curricular design is based on my own research practice and expands on a previously offered advanced undergraduate/graduate class entitled Teaching about the Holocaust at the University of Victoria (January to April 2019) that engaged students and Jewish community members with digital pedagogy and 3D technology. In partnership with the university’s Digital Scholarship Commons, I conceptualized a social justice framework in which Holocaust survivors and their descendants participated in a collaborative research and working environment that focused on the digital representation of object biographies. Our project tasked university students to a) create 3D models of physical objects and b) use metadata to tell stories about those objects through Omeka-S exhibition software. The material objects – a Rosenthal porcelain cup, a plush toy from Berlin, a mezuzah from Tállya, Hungary, a candelabra from the Schwäbisch Hall in Germany’s Displaced Persons Camp, and a Soviet ID card for a Polish Jewish forced labourer – were provided by one Holocaust survivor, two descendants of Holocaust survivors, and one archivist. Together with the artefacts’ owners, students mapped the provenance of the objects and conducted historical research exploring contextual narratives while drawing deeper layers of meaning. Furthermore, students were asked to embed the various interrelational configurations of object biographies into their digital exhibits, spatially representing artefacts as archives of memories. Our multifaceted material history project encouraged students to conceive of digitization not just as a preservation technique but as a new research tool allowing us

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to explore the use of object biographies in community-based life writing. Whereas the traditional Holocaust testimony genre is singularly focused on the relationship between the survivor and the interlocutor – the witness and the attuned listener – our approach proposes a new interview protocol that conceives of survivors, descendants, archivists, and students as partners in research and pedagogy. The collaborative nature of our enquiry facilitated a participatory approach to teaching and learning providing our students with the social justice tools to actively shape their own curriculum. As our project critically responds to institutional practices in testimony collection, I will provide a brief overview on how the digital mediation of survivor testimonies has been addressed in scholarly discourse. Next, I will reflect on my own work with survivor testimonies examining how this practice has informed and changed my teaching strategies. In the last part, I will discuss a curriculum design that interlinks theoretical insights of postcolonial intergenerational life story writing (Whitlock 2015; Barnwell 2017), material history (Kopytoff 1986; Hoskins 2009) with participatory research methodology (Bergold and Thomas 2012), and collaborative testimony enquiries (Greenspan (2010, 2011; Greenspan et al. 2014). Video Testimony Genre Although there are a variety of genres of witness testimony, we continue to privilege the traditional videotaped oral testimony model that espouses “factual, narrative recitation of ... Holocaust experiences” (Sheftel and Zembrzycki 2010). Audiovisual accounts favour the performative and rehearsed act of witnessing as they encourage witness-survivors to craft a presentation of themselves within the context of an autobiographical narrative. In this testimonial pact, witness-survivors enact the role of the representational spokesperson who is bound by both a moral obligation and judicial duty to bear witness “by proxy” (Levi 2004, 64). Once such an elevated status is conferred onto the witness-survivor, a core function of the video testimony will be to elicit empathic listening among members of a secondary audience (Baer 2000) who are asked to draw moral, historical, and/or political lessons from the Holocaust. Whereas many scholars have argued that the witnessing process is dialogic and collaborative in nature (Young 1988; Langer 1991; Felman and Laub 1992; Greenspan 1998; Hartman 2002; Greenspan et al. 2014), the actual institutional practice of producing, archiving, and exhibiting first-hand testimonies rarely includes a self-critical reflection

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on interview methodology. First-hand video testimonies – especially those produced by the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive – are mediated by highly structured, regulated, and standardized interview protocols limiting the possibilities of creatively engaging with survivorwitnesses. The testimonies tend to be conceptualized and constructed as self-contained primary sources, or “human documents” ­(Horowitz, in Greenspan et al. 2014, 205) largely erasing “frame conditions” (Hartman 2002, 250) that complicate the transmission of living memory. These frame conditions consist of the intricate interplay between interviewee and interviewer – including paralanguage and non-­ verbal physical gestures and cues – that comprises the full range of the testimony sharing and receiving process. Given the context of an intensely regimented interview protocol, authorial agency is coconstructed and co-mediated by the testimony giver, and the various members of the film editing and production team. However, despite it being a highly collaborative workflow protocol, the final footage conceals these modes of production and dissemination restricting survivor narratives to the roles of musealized “talking objects” (de Jong 2018, 22) and “testimonial subjects” (Shenker 2016, 154). Scholars such as Noah Shenker (2016) and Paris Papamichos Chronakis (2018) offer critical insight into how digital mediation of survivor testimony has created its own normative requirements and paradigms. Chronakis (2018) argues that “more than a mere technique for extracting information, the individual interview has shaped a large part of our conceptual framework and has determined the analytical categories we broadly apply to the study of the Holocaust and its memory” (55). For the last forty years, the ubiquitous adherence to the archival testimony format has set an “industry standard” that has been adopted by all major institutions, teaching museums, and museums dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and memorialization. Consequently, our understanding of how traumatic memory is being recalled, shared, and delivered across digital platforms is inseparably linked to the video testimony genre. The latter conceptualizes a psychoanalytic session within a television interview format envisioning the interviewer as an attuned listener who “comes to partially participate in the reliving of the traumatic experience ... presenting him or herself before the witness as an open and supportive addressee” (Pinchevski 2012, 148). The question of how the off-camera “supportive addressee” facilitates the co-creation of memory as a symbolic placeholder for the viewer is of critical importance – yet the relationship between interviewer and interviewee is not formally acknowledged in standardized oral history protocols. Henry Greenspan notes that the genre of video testimony is

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monologic in nature as “the interpersonal center of gravity is almost always represented in the survivor; not in the relationship between survivor and interviewer (a convention which may itself misrepresent, or at least obscure, the dialogic processes through which testimony is usually constructed)” (Greenspan et al. 2014, 194). Therefore, in order for us to acknowledge the relationship between the teller and the listener in an interview setting, we will need to reflect upon their interaction and interconnectedness throughout the collection and sharing of testimony. Moreover, interview protocols that solely focus on a set of formulaic questions fail to respond to unforeseen interpersonal dynamics and are poorly equipped to address ethical challenges. For example, institutional oral history guidelines rarely address the fact that interlocutors find themselves in multiple, often irreconcilable roles: interlocutors are empathic listeners, secondary witnesses, and researchers or archivists with a research agenda. Acknowledging their own conflicted subject position is an integral component of their testimony gathering; it can neither be eliminated nor overcome. Saul Friedlander (1993) reminds us that “the numbing or distancing effect of intellectual work on the Shoah is unavoidable and necessary; the recurrence of strong emotional impact is also often unforeseeable and necessary” (130). Suppressing one’s emotions is counterproductive insofar as it creates an expectation, or falsely constructed standard, that historical truth can be objectively extracted from the survivor-witness. Reflecting on My Own Research Practice For most of my own oral history practice, I, too, subscribed to such a traditional positivist approach relinquishing collaborative enquiries with Holocaust survivors as too unpredictable and ahistorical. Starting in 2015, I adopted the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s oral history interview guidelines and the USC Shoah Foundation interviews protocols and applied them to my own community-based research project. My partner in research, Agnes Hirschi, and I received funding from the Swiss chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2017 and were tasked to interview twenty Hungarian survivors who received life-saving letters of protection and safe conduct passes (Schutzbriefe, Schutzpässe) from Budapest-based Swiss viceconsul Carl Lutz in 1944 and early 1945 (Hirschi and Schallié 2017). As we were given a relatively short period of time to collect the testimonies in Israel, Switzerland, and the US, the interview protocols allowed us to complete the project efficiently and consistently, ensuring that all witness-survivors were exposed to the same set of questions.

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It was only when I started editing the transcripts that I realized that despite our rigid approach – or perhaps as a result of it – our survivor narratives consisted of associative, repetitive, disjointed sensory-driven memory fragments that lacked a coherent linear structure. In almost every case, these first-hand survivor accounts were “disrupted narratives” (Langer 1991, xi) that resisted a chronological structure of retelling. Although at the end of each testimony giving/receiving session we clarified issues that remained unexamined or were not fully explained, inconsistencies in the testimonial narratives were never the result of factual inaccuracy. The survivors – most of whom were children in 1944–5 – remembered only in flashbacks, and often they recollected emotional responses or visual imagery that could not be integrated into a comprehensive storyline. In the process of conducting these interviews, we learned that these memory fragments were instances of “deep memory” (Langer 1991, 6), representing a child survivor’s attempts to reconnect with experiences that were so profoundly traumatic that they remained severed from the larger situational context. Survivors who were adolescents during the Shoah were more likely to reconnect with “common memory,” reconstructing “detached portraits, from the vantage point of today, of what it must have been like then” (6). Yet, in both cases we noticed that whenever photographs or personal artefacts were shared during the pre- or post-interview stage, survivors expressed strong emotional responses and would provide detailed recollections that seemed not accessible during the formal interview. When we looked together at photographs or examined artefacts, it became also apparent to us that these children and young adults only survived because of others – mothers, siblings, relatives, friends, fellow members in the resistance movement – who took emotional and psychological care of them, sheltered them, and provided them with sustenance. Nobody survived in a relational vacuum – as a matter of fact, survival was only possible because each individual who lived through the Shoah was connected to others who contributed to their survival. Not only did they rely on the kindness of others, they also persevered because of others and retained their human dignity within a network of others who reaffirmed their humanity. The strong emphasis on the “relational self” (Barnwell 2017, 486) became furthermore evident throughout the testimony sharing process. I was constantly reminded that we remember differently when different people are around us. Especially in Israel – where we collected most of the testimonies – the video recording sessions were on many occasions family affairs that took on a ritualistic form as partners and children sat nearby and listened intently and attentively. At first, I was slightly alarmed fearing

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that family members would interfere or object to certain questions and would thus compromise the integrity of the project. This was never the case; they just sat there silently and patiently. I asked myself if it was both a personal and collective act of dutiful witnessing for the purpose of supporting the survivor and honouring the dead. After a while, I experienced these testimonial group sessions quite differently. Each session felt to me as if the presence of the family members constituted a deliberate and purposeful gesture of solidarity. They refused to let their loved one reimmerse herself/himself into the trauma alone and thus created a communal space of remembering and remembrance. At the same time, the community-based experience of familial remembering also facilitated the intergenerational transmission of trauma, which was accepted, in this very moment, as a shared inheritance. In hindsight, I regret that we did not film these testimonial sessions including all participants in the video footage. What we did change, however, was our reliance on the interview protocol. My research assistant, Noga Yarmar, and I simply decided to adapt the protocol to the moment and let the testimony sessions organically unfold. I also started recording all preliminary conversations while we set up the camera, and I asked permission to keep the recording device running after we had formally completed the videotaping. Having not to think and worry about a formulaic protocol, we allowed ourselves to become a part of the communal testimony-sharing session. Once we opted to partake as listeners, we stopped worrying about notions of historical objectivity and accepted the fact that we, too, participated in the process of meaning making. Our newly adopted participatory ethnographic research practice required from us an attuned presence and a level of selfreflexivity that were both deeply engaging and all-consuming. Thus, the more intensely we became involved in the data collection process, the more imperative it became for us to critically examine our own dual role as researchers and co-facilitators of traumatic memory recall. Let me briefly turn to a case study that illustrates how this approach can be both deeply insightful – yielding rich data – and challenging for investigators as it forces us to question our own inherent assumptions and research practice. The interview with ninety-two-year-old Jean Greenstein took place on 7 November 2016 in Tarzana, California. Jean Greenstein was suffering from dementia and was intent on following his own chronological narrative. His son Lawrence, who sat at the table opposite Jean, was concerned that his father might get lost in details or lose sight of the overall objective (to recollect his survival in Budapest). As a result, Lawrence constantly interjected leading questions reminding his father of events that were no longer directly accessible

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to him. What made this interactive process so illuminating for me was that Lawrence – who clearly acted as his father’s memory assistant – prompted a series of recollections that provided insight into how Jean’s memory recall had changed over time. He allowed his father to delve into deep memory, whereas he, Lawrence, added common memory, recounting the events from a contemporary point of view. However, Lawrence’s interventions did not just jump-start his father’s memory; they were also a corrective to a failing memory calling to mind how Jean Greenstein had told his life story in earlier times. Throughout the interview process, Jean Greenstein became repeatedly frustrated with his son’s interferences and insisted on telling the story his way. Lawrence, on the other hand, refused to comply and continued (often quite rigorously) to remind his father of what he wanted him to say or remember. Once I examined the transcript after the interview, I realized that it was impossible to untangle all the different memory layers and conversational exchanges, nor was it possible to distinguish between arbitrary categories such as original memories, metamemory, and post-memory. Had I attempted to remove Lawrence from the video testimony, I would have been left with an incomprehensible memory narrative. In the end, after much deliberation, and in consultation with Jean and Lawrence, I decided to publish the testimony as a conversation between father and son; in my opinion, this was the most truthful representation of their shared interrelational testimonial practice. On a personal level, these field experiences challenged me to reflect on my own research practice, allowing me to conceptualize testimonial narratives as interactive, reciprocal processes. Most importantly, I learned that collaborative testimony enquiries are not just reciprocal between survivors and their descendants but also between the principal investigators and all research collaborators. A commitment to “reciprocity as an ethical basis for research relationships” (Maiter 2008, 308) requires that I will continue to be in conversation with the survivors and their families. Relationship building does therefore not end after the testimonies have been shared and published. It is my responsibility as the lead investigator to reflect on the dissemination of knowledge and share my future findings with all research participants. Pedagogical Implications of Implementing Collaborative Testimony Enquiries into the Holocaust Education Curriculum Bruno Latour’s (2000) insight that “things do not exist without being full of people” (10) was my guiding principle as I co-conceptualized – together with digital scholarship librarian J. Matthew Huculak – a

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born digital object biography project that would interlink testimonial life narratives with material history in our graduate seminar at the University of Victoria (January–April 2019). My decision to defy the constraints of the conventional testimony genre afforded me a teaching strategy to creatively explore the use of artefacts in collaborative enquiries with Holocaust witness-survivors and their descendants. This project grew out of my own video testimony fieldwork with Hungarian Holocaust witness-survivors, which encouraged me to contest the notion of a standardized interview protocol. After each session was over, our interviewees volunteered to share photographs and other artefacts with us. These objects were deeply evocative – in part because they were the last remaining material traces to murdered relatives. I also noticed that survivors often turned to artefacts in order to elicit memories that were too intimate or emotionally taxing to disclose in a traditional interview format. Drawing on these field observations, I designed a course-based interview protocol that would allow my students to enter into a “sustained conversation” with the survivors and their descendants while paying “close attention to process and context” (Greenspan 2011, 89). I thus shifted the methodological focus away from a formulaic interview structure and replaced it with a collaborative testimony enquiry approach that was marked by the three pillars of participatory research: respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. With these objectives in mind, I created a teaching module that acquainted students with various theoretical approaches to material culture (Kopytoff 1986; Woodward 2007; Hoskins 2009). In addition, I co-organized – together with Lara Wilson, Director of Special Collections and University Archivist – a primary source artefact analysis workshop that invited students to closely observe and experience artefacts without the use of secondary sources. With the aim of establishing a concrete link between artefact analysis and Holocaust testimony, I asked one local survivor and a descendant to give guest lectures in our seminar. In each case, the presenter brought several Holocaust-themed artefacts that continued to resonate in their lives. This was a particularly relevant teaching unit as it prompted my students to conceptualize Holocaust testimony beyond a psychoanalytic framework and a regimented set of interview protocols. Once UVic Human Research Ethics Board approval was obtained, students met individually, or in groups of two or three, with the survivors and descendants in person or via Skype. I opted for a semistructured questionnaire emphasizing that students could modify it, or replace it altogether with their own interview questions:

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1 How did you find out about this object? Can you describe it for us? 2 How do you care for this object? 3 Why is this object meaningful to you? 4 What do you know about its provenance? 5 Who made, owned, or used this object in the past? 6 What stories does this object tell us? What stories does it conceal? 7 Why did you decide to keep it/give it away 8 What could young people learn about the Holocaust from examining this object? Once all interviews were transcribed, students scanned the objects in the Digital Scholarship Commons (UVic Libraries), turning them into digital 3D models. Next, students were instructed in how to describe their object using metadata, how to upload that object into a digital preservation platform, and finally how to tell stories about each object so that the public can learn about the material history of an item. In addition, students conducted primary source research and mapped the provenance of the artefacts on Google Maps examining the interwoven histories and life journeys of Holocaust-based objects. All interviewees were given the opportunity to proofread a transcription of the edited interview and comment on the text prior to it being published online. Moreover, any sections from the interview that did not meet the interviewees’ approval were removed. All interviewees were also invited to provide their ongoing input on the digital design of the website. It was clearly communicated that the digital exhibits would only be published once all partners in research signed off on the final reiteration. As students were tasked to self-reflexively enquire into their own research practice throughout the course, a final round of classroom questions concerned theoretical assumptions and methodological bias with regard to how object biographies are mediated: 1 When does the lifespan of an object commence? When does it end? 2 How does digitization alter/extend/constrain the agency of a physical object? 3 Can the life of an artefact ever not be interrelational? 4 To what degree does digitization change the nature of the object/ human relationship? Does digitization redefine the reciprocity between human and non-human “actants”? If so, how? From an instructor’s point of view, most teaching and learning activities in this course were productively completed and successfully realized. All digital exhibit projects eloquently represented the complex

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multilayering of mediated life narratives. Broaching the disciplinary boundaries of the conventional testimony genre equipped students with research tools to engage more purposefully with their research partners. The inclusion of descendants – and in one case, of an ­archivist – illuminated the challenges of intergenerational life writing while bringing issues of representation and interpretation of traumatic memory narratives to the fore. Robert Atkinson (2007) reminds us that “[t]he storyteller is the first interpreter of the story they tell” (232). It is a valuable insight that sheds an important light on our own ­research practice, urging us to critically examine “the constructed, contingent and mutable nature of oral accounts” (Greenspan 2011, 87) as we attempt to create coherent narrative structures out of fractured memories. There are several elements in my curricular design that I would strengthen in future class offerings. Most notably, I would include participatory research teaching strategies that highlight the importance of reciprocity while reminding students that they are engaging with partners in research and not with research subjects. It is a fundamental principle of participatory research and social justice pedagogy “not to treat the research partners as objects of research, but rather as co-researchers and knowing subjects with the same rights as the professional researchers” (Bergold and Thomas 2012). This reciprocity also entails that students and survivors/descendants will co-analyse the transcripts and jointly negotiate “[t]he mediating role of the speaker’s interpretation” (Langer 1991, 198) as well as the use of literary devices when crafting the life stories. Such a research collaboration will only work if all participants are empathically attuned to one another while still retaining an awareness of their own reflective subjectivity. Greenspan (2011) describes this joint knowledge-production process as “‘knowing with’ survivors, as compared with only ‘knowing from’ or ‘about’ them” (87). In order to facilitate the relationship building among the project participants, I would thus schedule project planning meetings and debriefing sessions throughout the semester. I would also ask all participants to keep a research diary and encourage them to share their reflections at individual meetings with one another or in class sessions. As mutually trusting relationships cannot be fostered within a few weeks, we will have to prioritize the partnership building process and devote ample time in and outside the classroom to work collaboratively on the object biography projects. I would also ensure that all participants have the opportunity to discuss their joint research findings in a public forum at the end of semester. This intense focus on interpersonal dynamics is a hallmark of collaborative enquiry

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approaches with Holocaust witness-survivors and their descendants. Thus, in future iterations of this course I will be sure to implement a variety of participatory research strategies responding to the evolving challenges of such a multifaceted approach (for a detailed overview of the fundamental principles of participatory research, see Bergold and Thomas 2012). Given the injustices that BIPOC face on a daily basis as the result of both institutionalized and explicit racism as well as the recent surge of nationalist right-wing populism, xenophobia, and ­antisemitism in Europe and North America, I will also work towards developing community-engaged teaching materials that are more ­ acutely attuned to sociopolitical awareness and adopt narrative e­ nquiry as a human rights tool in Holocaust education. Conclusion Conventional testimonial interview protocols limit our research practice and discourage us from interrogating our own research methodology and inherent disciplinary bias. Moreover, the rigid formality of conventional testimonial practices fails to challenge the power imbalance between the interviewer and interviewee. In this contribution, I propose to develop a collaborative enquiry protocol that acknowledges the contributions of all testimony participants. The term “testimony participants” is not just restricted to interviewees and interviewers but also includes all those who participate in the many-voiced meaning making processes (descendants who facilitate the interview, videographers, editors, archivists, etc.). If we solely understand witness-survivors “as embodiments of larger historical moments” (Shenker 2016, 160), we are unable to experience and represent them as interconnected, yet also autonomous, human beings who choose to create their own life narratives. We always experience our lives in relation to others; any representational form – including the testimony format – is thus a call to critically reflect on its own modes of memory production and dissemination while exposing the very limits of representation. It was my own research with survivors and members of the first and second generation that prompted me to approach the genre of Holocaust testimony from multimodal and multidisciplinary perspectives. Incorporating narrative enquiry methodology and participatory research strategies, I turned to collaborative interview models that could address the complexities of interrelational testimonial practices. As I explored intergenerational life narratives of Holocaust survivors, “objects as centerpieces of emotional life” (Turkle 2007, 6) became an important focus in my research and teaching practice. In the last section of this article, I propose a curricular design and interview protocol that

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creatively employs born-digital object biographies in a graduate seminar at the University of Victoria. Through a self-reflective engagement with material history, students in this class were encouraged to undercut normative testimonial practices and pursue collaborative research enquiries in partnership with witness-survivors and their descendants. Questions for Reflection (Object Biography Questions – developed by Charlotte Schallié, Tessa Contu, Elizabeth Vibert, and Ilona Shulman Spaar): 1 What is the object – focus on size, material, distinguishing features and marks, and/or decoration. Where is it now and how did it get there? How did the object reach its location? What does the context where it was found tell us about the object’s environment and uses? Are there any identifying marks on the object, e.g., a date, a location, a creator’s name, inscribed words? 2 What is the object’s function? Objects may have more than one ­function, some more obvious than others. The primary function of an object is the one for which it was originally made and used. ­Additional uses may have been invented by users – especially in difficult or challenging circumstances. Look for any clues as to how the object might have been used, including in the information source that comes with the object. 3 Who made, owned, or used the object? In what ways can we connect this object to people, and to other objects in the world? ­Consider the economic and social systems that produced the ­object. What technologies were used to make it? Did it have practical, ceremonial, or decorative use, or some combination? What do its markings or other details reveal about the culture that made it (e.g., politics, social dynamics, etc.)? 4 What do the sources provided tell you about the object? How do the sources place the object in historical context? What is that historical context? 5 How might this object function as an object of oppression and resistance? How might it have multiple stories to tell? What can you learn from examining this object? Why and how should this object be preserved and shared with audiences? Dedicated to the memory of Jean Greenstein (1924–2018) The author respectfully acknowledges that her work is grounded in community-­ engaged scholarship and learning. She would like to express her deep ­gratitude to all partners in research: Noga Yarmar, J. Matthew Huculak, Lara

72  Charlotte Schallié Wilson, Lawrence Greenstein, Julius Maslovat, Isa Milman, Uri Berliner, Aubrey Pomerance, Daniel Teichman, Tessa Coutu, Ilona Shulman Spaar, Elizabeth Vibert, Darlene Clover, and the students in the Teaching about the Holocaust advanced undergraduate/graduate seminar (GMST 583/GMST 410; University of Victoria 2019).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atkinson, Robert. 2007. “The Life Story Interview as a Bridge in Narrative Inquiry.” In Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology, edited by D. Jean Clandinin, 224–46. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Baer, Ulrich. 2000. “Einleitung.” In “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen”: Erinnerungskultur nach der Shoah, edited by Ulrich Baer, 7–31. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Barnwell, Ashley. 2017. “Locating an Intergenerational Self in Postcolonial Family Histories.” Life Writing14 (4): 485–93. Bergold, Jarg, and Stefan Thomas. 2012. “Participatory Research Methods: A Methodological Approach in Motion.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 13 (1): n.p., Art. 30. Chronakis, Paris Papamichos. 2018. “From the Lone Survivor to the Networked Self. Social Networks Meet the Digital Holocaust Archive.” Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, no. 13 (August): 52–84. de Jong, Steffi. 2018. The Witness as Object. Video Testimonies in Memorial Museums. New York: Berghahn. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Milton Park, UK: Routledge. Friedlander, Saul. 1993. Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Greenspan, Henry. 1998. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History. Westport, CA: Praeger. – 2010. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony. Saint Paul, MN: Paragon House. –  2011. “Collaborative Interpretation of Survivors’ Accounts: A Radical Challenge to Conventional Practice.” Holocaust Studies 17 (1): 85–100. Greenspan, Henry, Sara R. Horowitz, Éva Kovács, Berel Lang, Dori Laub, Kenneth Waltzer, and Annette Wieviorka. 2014. “Engaging Survivors: Assessing ‘Testimony’ and ‘Trauma’ as Foundational Concepts.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 28 (3): 190–226. Hartman, Geoffrey. 2002. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hirschi, Agnes, and Charlotte Schallié, eds. 2017. Under Swiss Protection: Jewish Eyewitness Accounts from Wartime Budapest. Stuttgart: Ibidem.

Collaborative Enquiries with Holocaust Survivors and Descendants  73 Hoskins, Janet. 2009. “Agency, Biography, and Objects.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley et al., 74–84. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langer, Lawrence L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2000. “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things.” In Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture, edited by P.M. Graves-Brown, translated by L. Davis, 10–21. Milton Park, UK: Routledge. Levi, Primo. 2004. The Drowned and the Saved. London: Abacus. Maiter, Sara. 2008. “An Ethic for Community-Based Participatory Action Research.” Action Research 6 (3): 305–25. Pinchevski, Amit. 2012. “The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.” Critical Inquiry 39 (1): 142–66. Sheftel, Anna, and Stacey Zembrzycki. 2010. “Only Human: A Reflection on the Methodological Challenges of Working with ‘Difficult’ Stories.” Oral History Review 37 (2): 191–214. Shenker, Noah. 2016. “Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide Testimonies.” History & Memory 28 (1): 141–75. Turkle, Sherry, ed. 2007. Evocative Objects. Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Whitlock, Gillian. 2015. Postcolonial Life Narratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woodward, Ian. 2007. Understanding Material Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Young, James E. 1988. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

5 Historical Objects as Tools for Social Justice: How Holocaust Artefacts Can Bridge Social Justice and Human Rights Pedagogies braden russell

Introduction This chapter discusses the graduate seminar called Teaching the Holocaust designed by Charlotte Schallié – she is also a contributor to this volume – which addressed the complexities of teaching Holocaust education in human rights frameworks. This seminar focused on the ways in which material culture and objects could bridge concepts that maintain human rights and social justice, while not relativizing the Holocaust. Recently completing my first year in the Holocaust studies MA program at the University of Victoria, I offer my insights and analysis as a student participant within in-class workshops and discussions as well as a co-facilitator of a pilot curriculum for a high school history course. From my analysis and experience from this interactive seminar, I posit the need for interconnected approaches between Holocaust education and human rights and social justice pedagogies. The importance of bridging these approaches comes at a time that is more vital than before. The rise of the political Right and a global pandemic has heightened racial and ethnic tension across the globe, and instigated an increase in antisemitic acts and an unsustainable acceleration of economic inequality. My chapter offers a way for pedagogues to rethink the rigidity of approaches regarding the Holocaust, human rights, and social justice in the classroom. Each stream holds complexities and uniqueness that they should retain; however, it is in their differences that they can fashion together a response to systemic forms of oppression. Our task as educators, students, researchers, and activists in the humanities is to take a more active role in learning to challenge inequality and violence in our discipline and extend this into our societies. In my contribution, I will first discuss the complexities surrounding Holocaust education, human rights education, and social justice pedagogies.

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Then, I delve into the literature surrounding material culture and how it can be used to bridge the divide between the two other disciplines. I focus on three major class activities: presenting personal objects by survivors themselves; working and creating “object biographies” with the archive at the University of Victoria; and the observation of high school students working with material objects in a Canadian high school history class. It was through these three seminar activities that I was able to see how objects were able to transfer concepts in teaching the Holocaust historically and bridge human rights concepts. I will conclude with a general analysis and reflection on the seminar and the need for further enquiry into the role of objects in social justice pedagogies. I argue that while Holocaust education in the frame of human rights is still complicated and still requires more research on how to bridge the two disciplines, material culture and the analysis of objects could serve as a point of connection between the two disciplines. Bridging Holocaust, Human Rights, and Material Culture To begin my analysis of how objects can bridge human rights and Holocaust pedagogical approaches, I must first address the intricacies and controversies of the two disciplines. After addressing this relationship, I will introduce concepts of material culture theory and the ways in which it may bridge the two latter fields. The topic of the Holocaust has potential to educate beyond history and create socially aware global citizens in hopes of combatting human rights violations and genocides (UNESCO 2017). However, this target in teaching the Holocaust has become contentious due to the human rights violations that still occur, and “never again” has only become an underlying myth in the international community (Annan 2010). This exposes the contentiousness and problems with the Holocaust being used as a tool for human rights pedagogies. Zevahit Gross (2018) posits the dangers of universalizing the Holocaust for the purpose of combating racism and prejudice, centring her argument primarily on the dangers of diminishing Jewish victimhood and critiquing the comparison of the Holocaust with other genocides due to the uniqueness of Jewish persecution. While I agree with Gross’s case on the potential problems of relativizing the Holocaust, I contend that human rights and Holocaust education frameworks do not stand counter to one another; rather, they are symbiotic concepts within each other. Holocaust-as-history teaches about the events and the slow deterioration of human rights of Jewish citizens and other minority groups that then were deemed non-human, which allowed for genocide. Human rights education promotes respect for fundamental

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freedoms and all human rights in hopes of the prevention of human rights violations (UNESCO 2017). It is difficult to separate the two from having a relationship. That is why I suggest instructors and curriculum developers take a more flexible approach to understanding the two frameworks. The same concerns demonstrated in Gross’s work are also fostered in the work of Monique Eckmann (2010), who begins to clarify the role of human rights pedagogies and the distinctions within the frameworks surrounding human rights pedagogies. She extrapolates the role of learning for, about, and within a framework of human rights and the complexities that are – themselves – intertwined in human rights education and pedagogies. Through these concepts of learning for, about, and within a framework of human rights, she notes that there are possibilities to connect Holocaust pedagogies to human rights pedagogies. Learning about human rights in the context of Holocaust education, as Eckmann states, allows students to see the link between the Second World War and the UN decision regarding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its development from a focus on individual, social, and cultural rights. The limitations she notes are that it only focuses on Holocaust education and becomes difficult for furthering concepts in human rights. The next concept she addresses is learning for human rights in the context of Holocaust education. This concept would require students to become more vigilant about the rights that have been taken away in context of the Holocaust. Eckmann mentions that learning for human rights in Holocaust education becomes very problematic due to its difficulty and limitations of fully teaching Holocaust education, and then elaborates on how the focus of Holocaust education does not directly present chances to experiment with competencies required for actions and/or interventions and instead offers only counterfactuals. Learning within frameworks of human rights is the last concept she brings forth to the discussion. What Eckmann asserts by this is that there must be pedagogical, civic, and legal frameworks that help establish values of human rights. This means including human rights in the educational systems that facilitate democratic structures. She contends that these frameworks allow students to recognize their own discrimination or identify such incidents. It is through the lessons of the Holocaust that such recognition becomes visible to the students and the creation of links to the Holocaust becomes evident. Overall, Eckmann argues that Holocaust education cannot fully complete requirements needed for human rights education yet has the potential to create positive discussion and broaden minds. With the opportunities to broaden student minds, Eckmann and Gross still contend that

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there is a divide between the two forms of pedagogies. This is where I contend that instructors must think differently about Holocaust and human rights curricula and their intertwining. Bridging these two concepts in mutual partnership can illuminate current-day situations. It allows for, to quote Davis and Rubinstein-Avila (2013), a “rhizomatic” approach where instruction on addressing the Holocaust historically and human rights aspects of challenging racism and xenophobia in a network of tumultuous connections grows and recedes in time. Taking this rhizomatic approach in curricula allows for opportunities to bridge human rights education and Holocaust education in ethical ways and to forge interlinkages between these events. Having a rhizomatic form of curriculum or structure on the topic allows for the complexities of the Holocaust, and for any other genocide, to exist and be accepted by instructors and students. It also grants freedom to instructors and students to locate interlinkages between events that can establish links to understand human rights or the abuses of them. This is where I propose that material culture has the ability to bridge this gap between human rights education and Holocaust education practices. Just as personal testimonies and biographies are considered the gold-standard tools to be used in Holocaust education, objects also have this potential in becoming important tools in Holocaust and human rights education. Just as humans have biographies, so too do objects. Anthropologists certainly would affirm that objects can take on certain attributes – such as gender, name, and ritual function – and can acquire their own history, taking on their own agency. Just as human histories are not directly linear, neither are those of objects. Objects progress through varying stages of meaning and value, and they have the potential to illuminate new questions about the era they are from, their owners, their (ritual) functions, and/or their acquired purposes (Hoskins 2006; Harding 2016). Kidron (2012) mentions, in her ethnographic work on descendants of survivors, that family heirlooms and memento mori are ways the past remains present, and that these objects also have the potential for viewers to realize the micro-moments that are intertwined in the large and multifaceted history of the Holocaust. Articles and personal items, having “entanglements” with societies and owners, provide an assortment of refined wealth to the understanding of history (Harding 2016). This is where I believe human rights pedagogies and Holocaust history pedagogies can be bridged. Having students work and extrapolate the stories and create object biographies helps them begin to find out crucial aspects of Holocaust history. This process assists students to build empathy for the time period and the object as well as better

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understand the links between human rights concepts from the past and the present through these personal historical objects. From Theory to Praxis: Reflections on Class Experiences In this section, I elaborate on my experiences as a student participant in three portions of the class Teaching the Holocaust: the survivor object presentations, the construction of my own object biography at the University of Victoria, and the ending elaboration on a practicum that involved teaching the Holocaust and human rights. My goal is to convey how theories surrounding the concept of human rights pedagogies and the Holocaust can be bridged through the experiences of, and reflection on, the class. By connecting theory and praxis and elaborating on these three course activities it highlights the potentials of bonding the theories of Holocaust education, human rights, and social justice pedagogies. Each class experience from this seminar offers innovative insights on new ways instructors can apply social justice pedagogical methods and create interconnected activities that use social justice teaching concepts along with the Holocaust and human rights teaching frameworks. Survivor Object Presentations When the two invited guest speakers, one a Holocaust survivor and the other a daughter of Holocaust survivors, came to our class to discuss their objects, it was in the explanation of their objects that the power of the objects as teaching tools in a classroom setting was revealed. They were invited to discuss how their objects held importance to their family histories and to their personal lives today. It was in these objects that they were able to reconstruct parts of their family’s stories. The second-generation survivor, who was born in a German displaced persons camp, brought her father’s Polish record book containing a picture of her father, a silver candelabra, and a teacup from her late mother’s fine china set. The Polish information book held her father’s picture and a record of his journey throughout Eastern Europe and his experience in the Russian Gulag. The candelabra, which was bought in a displaced-person camp, is still used today as a ritual object in the family, representing the continuation of tradition. The teacup from the china set was also bought in a displaced persons camp, and the set became a personal symbol to her mother’s remembrance. The exercise was for us (the students) to understand that objects are not just collected items on display in museums or housed in archives, but rather

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that they encapsulate their own stories and the stories of their owner(s). During her presentation of her objects, the daughter was able to elaborate on her family’s story, along with her own as a second-generation survivor. In this exercise we were able to create empathy for her and her family’s story through the presentation of her personal objects. The other guest speaker, a Holocaust survivor, brought money that was printed and crafted specifically for the Łódź Ghetto, to which his family was deported. He then was able to show the identity list where his own name was found, as one of the young children detained in Buchenwald. He showed us copies of pictures of his mother, father, and relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust. It was through their descriptions that the memories were passed on to the class; through these objects that history could be grasped, contextualized, and intimately known. It was in this moment that mundane objects, which many individuals may take for granted, actually became precious relics that encapsulated the vignettes of history through the lens of the survivor’s memories. Survivor testimonies are important to the history of the ­Holocaust. The stories behind their and their family’s possessions that survived this era are also significant in elaborating and contextualizing the Holocaust. Possibilities of object investigations in classrooms offer the opportunity of closer understanding of the events to students. Learning about the Holocaust from textbooks, memoirs, and secondary material is also important, but the opportunity to engage personally with an object can offer a more meaningful and empathetic approach to learning about the Holocaust. University of Victoria Holocaust Archive The University of Victoria Library houses a Second World War and Holo­caust object archive, where I and other students were required to work with objects and create our own object biographies; akin to a writer of biography, we were tasked with reconstructing the history and “life” of an object. We answered a range of questions: When, where, and why was our object created? How did it make its way to the archive? What were the stories of the owners of this object? We then were posed questions on how our objects related to human rights: Were these objects used as “objects of resistance” towards human rights violations or were they in turn “objects of oppression”? It was in enquiries that we were able to bridge Holocaust-as-history into teaching the Holocaust as human rights frameworks. Similar to the object presentations that were offered by the two guest lecturers, through the construction of the histories we became aware again that these personal objects in the

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archives still retain memories. It is through the process of building a biography for these objects that we were able to interrogate their historical value and pose questions in relation to human rights frameworks. I was randomly assigned an identification necklace that was used in a forced labour camp, and then I helped analyse a ration card for a Jewish individual. The identification necklace was made up of a small wood placard that had the ID number written on it in pencil. On the top corners were two pieces of string attached to the placard; these strings would be attached to pieces of rope that would connect in the back. It was in creating the biography and in answering questions of where this object came from and why it arrived at its current location that I was able to see another aspect of history and access the personal story of this particular experience in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Another object I was able to research and analyse was a ration card for a Jewish woman in Germany. I was able to uncover the complexities of ration laws in Nazi Germany and even more so how laws were stricter and helped in the oppression of the German Jewish citizens. The object puts in perspective how many grams of milk, rice, bread, and sago were able to be bought on specific days for an individual. It also carried Nazi symbols and the notorious “J,” and the middle name “Sarah” that every female Jew was forced to add to their official documents. The process of building the biography of this object allowed us to contextualize the history of civil society in wartime Nazi Germany and elaborate on the role of Jewish oppression through just one simple piece of paper which exposed the loss of human rights that Jewish individuals experienced in German society. Just as the theory of material culture explains how objects can speak of their owners, they also connect to the social practices of historical periods. In addition to helping students contextualize the time periods that they are studying, objects and material culture can help to build a connection between human rights concepts and abuses. Through my observations and investigation of both objects, I noted the loss of identity of the individuals. The woman who held the ration card was reduced to a “J” and the inmate with the identity necklace was reduced to a number. Both objects elicit the process and levels of dehumanization that occurred during the Holocaust and, as objects of oppression, have the ability teach on the abuses of human rights. High School Human Rights and Holocaust Practicum We implemented a pilot curriculum in a high school class on twentiethcentury history at Victoria High School. The class was scheduled to

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discuss topics of the Holocaust and South African apartheid. This provided an opportunity to create human rights interlinkages between these two genocides without relativizing and comparing each event. A method based on comparison provides an opportunity for these two events to be reduced to “competition of suffering” and does not truly add to historical or ethical understanding of the events. The goal of the practicum was to create interlinkages between human rights violations and craft empathetic perspectives of the two events. From this we emphasized the importance of human rights, using the historical events of the Holocaust and South African apartheid in human rights and social justice frameworks. The opportunity provided at the high school also allowed us to see how human rights and social justice concepts could be implemented in a history class and how a “rhizomatic” approach to human rights interlinkages between the Holocaust and South African apartheid could be created. Material objects, I argue, are powerful pedagogical tools in ways of teaching history along with creating interlinkages between human rights educational frameworks and Holocaust educational frameworks. Objects have the ability to play an important role in humanizing the events to learners. Simple objects that hold these memories and histories of victims or survivors in a way pose the mundaneness of objects in question, and through an exploration of such an object they then can create empathy with the owner(s) of the object, the object itself, and the larger historical time period. Through the creation of empathy for the object, history can then be connected to human rights educational frameworks, where students can identify abuses of human rights during the Holocaust and then have the ability to link, not compare, these identified characteristics to other genocides and human rights violations. This allows for an innovative approach with the potential for bridging human rights educational frameworks to Holocaust educational frameworks in an ethical and valuable manner. We saw many students show the ability to develop empathy for the history and the objects and create interlinkages between the Holocaust historically and human rights concepts. The linking of human rights was further developed when they then created interlinkages between South African apartheid and the Holocaust. However, we did see some struggles in the beginning, when students wrestled with understanding the historical importance of objects and then with linking them to human rights concepts. Some students struggled to see the historical value that objects have in the creation of historical narratives, and it also became apparent that this began to hinder the creation of empathy for the historical time period, the object, and the owner, within some students. On the end of

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instructors, we should give introductions to how objects bring valuable information to history and then go through with students at large on how to analyse objects through an object biography questionnaire. This way students work as a class and do not feel lost when they begin to take on object analyses on their own. Our observations from the pilot program were motivating in that we found how Holocaust objects may be tools for teaching the Holocaust historically while also including human rights interlinkages. The students were tasked with looking up the historical significance of their object through individual learning and by creating an object biography. Guided by an object analysis worksheet, they were asked questions that would help them brainstorm and create a final project at the end of the pilot program. One of our main goals, as facilitators of this pilot project, was to see if they would be able to establish empathy for the objects themselves, for the histories of the individual owners, and for the topic of the Holocaust, and then bring in human rights interlinkages when final presentations were given. With the aim of creating interlinkages to human rights concepts, the project was tied in with a component of South African apartheid. Though the project was abstract at first for the students, once they started researching their objects with the material provided to them, I observed that many were engaged with the objects and the histories surrounding them. Over the three-week program, many objects that were once deemed mundane were given life, once the histories of the owners were uncovered and the story of the object was revealed. Several students gained empathy for certain objects and realized that these objects were more than just, for example, a mirror, or a postcard, and that these items “lived” through these times of hardship and were important pieces of their owner’s past and present. In one such case, a student chose to research and investigate a leather suitcase that was taken by a child on the Kindertransport – the organized rescue of children from Nazi-controlled areas in the months before the Second World War began. At first, there was not any empathy for the object, and it was a struggle to excavate the history and memories held by the object. Noticing their struggle, I helped guide them by discussing the general facts about the object and its relationship to its owner, and then helping them formulate answers and ideas to the object biography. It was through student-centred learning approaches that the student was able to find the importance of the object as historically valuable, and also gain empathy through engagement with the memories and stories of the owner of this leather suitcase. They became the expert on their object and were able to transfer the knowledge of the object to

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their classmates in the final presentation of their object. Through this experience, I could see the underlying importance that objects have in teaching history and creating empathy for historical events. Historical items have the ability to familiarize history to the learner and transfer the idea that small objects, which are easily taken for granted, can contain so much history, meaning, and memories. Another student who chose a burnt page of a siddur – a Jewish prayer book – as their object was not only able to bridge empathy of the object and its historical value, but also able to understand human rights interlinkages. It was in a discussion of how their project and investigation was going that I observed their understanding of how this object was able to connect to human rights concepts such as religious freedom and expression. In his secondary research surrounding his chosen artefact, he further elaborated, recognized, and connected the object to the concept of freedom of religious expression and the persecution of the Jewish community on both religious and ethnic grounds. He understood that Jews in this time period were no longer able to truly practice their faith openly in society, thus a basic human right was taken from anyone deemed Jewish. The object and the research surrounding it prompted them to make the connection between the Holocaust historically and the concept of human rights. Just as the pilot program recognized opportunities in which objects can be positive tools for teaching the Holocaust and human rights, it also brought up some hurdles that still must be addressed in making this linkage through social justice pedagogies. The pilot curriculum showed that in some cases empathy was not established in the students’ relationship and investigations of the object, which meant the human rights aspects of the program were lost or indistinguishable in the historical learning portion of the program. One student I observed chose a postcard from a family member that was sent to Auschwitz. The object’s history was very complex in terms of when the object was sent, what location it was sent from, and what exactly happened to the sender. In hopes of trying to guide them, frustration ensued, and the student got more discouraged when asked to create inferences about the object, and issues around it could be classified as an object of resistance or as one of oppression. This brought up the issue that objects cannot really bring about teaching a wider picture of the Holocaust and can risk frustrating learners, which inhibits the establishment empathy for this time period, diminishing interlinkages with human rights. In future practicums that focus on objects, we must be mindful of the complexities of the objects themselves in the context of the broad history of the Holocaust. While giving an

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overview of the historical time period is important and necessary, instructors must engage students to be aware that there are many exceptions to the overarching narrative concerning the history of the Holocaust. Not every persecuted individual experienced the same type of persecution. Instructors need to be aware that the objects they may be using in class may have complex or sometimes “limited” histories. They need to decide whether the students are on a level to work with objects that have easier histories to ascertain more complex incomplete histories. Working through an object biography together as a class on an example object can be beneficial for students. This presents the instructor’s insight where students could have troubles in understanding the history of the Holocaust and the connections to human rights. The connections between the genocides was another obstacle that became apparent in the pilot program with the high school students. The two topics being taught side by side seemed very confusing for students in their investigations of the objects. While the students from both of the groups presented their final projects on their respective topics and created the human rights interlinkages between them, the format has the potential to become problematic, where each group would lack in-depth knowledge of the other respective group’s topics. This could become a problem in cases where curricula require in-depth knowledge of certain events. However, that does not mean curricula could not use objects in focusing on one respective topic to teach history and human rights through objects. Just as one important successful takeaway of the practicum is the ability students gained in recognizing and identifying human rights interlinkages between the two genocides through their own investigation of their objects. Teaching through and with objects has the potential to be an innovative way to expand and connect Holocaust education and human rights education. Teaching through objects offers new ways history can be taught through inter-exchange between students. They were able to learn from one another through their individual object presentations on specific topics and then bridge what they learned from one another to the larger human rights concepts. Adding material culture to classrooms provides the opportunity for students to become the historian and expert on their object, which they educate their peers in the class. Conclusion Holocaust and human rights educational frameworks do not have to counter one another. As I have elaborated on the literature concerning

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Holocaust education and human rights education, they have the ability to become intertwined on ethical grounds that neither relativizes the Holocaust nor creates a “hierarchy of suffering.” This possible remedy is to incorporate material culture and objects into helping contextualize the history of the Holocaust as well as conceptualizing human rights education, and thus helping to bridge the two disciplines. As a participating graduate student and facilitator, I was able to understand the extent to which objects have the power to share memories and histories about the topic of the Holocaust through the personal object presentations and the creation of object biographies. I can also attest to the complications of teaching human rights frameworks surrounding the topic of the Holocaust through observing the practicum in the high school history classroom. While more research and scholarship are needed in bridging these two complex fields through material objects and material culture, scholars and educators have opportunities to begin investigating and developing curricula that can broaden scholarship on this topic. One meaningful takeaway is the importance of experiential learning for students, and the amount of knowledge on history and human rights one can take away from investigating objects. This method of teaching with objects and material culture offers vast opportunities to have students engage in discussing and examining human rights in the open environment of a classroom. It also revealed that students are willing and eager to participate in challenging discussions surrounding history and human rights. Any instructor wishing to add material culture to their syllabi or curricula should be aware that this is possibly the first time their students have worked with objects as primary sources to history. It may be best to have an introduction to objects and how and why they are important for history and human rights. Be patient and locate difficulties as students investigate their chosen objects and guide them to questions and answers that help in connecting to human rights. One major takeaway I found during this seminar was teaching material culture in classrooms offers not only insights on history and culture but also has the ability to extend further to educate audiences on contemporary global issues and advocate for social justice. Questions for Reflection: 1 How does object-based analysis help us better understand the

Holocaust? 2 How does object-based analysis help us understand other forms of oppression and other atrocities?

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3 How can the tools and methodologies of Holocaust education be useful in other educational fields? 4 If you had the choice to choose your object again, would you? Why or why not? What were the benefits or obstacles of your object to understand the Holocaust? BIBLIOGRAPHY Annan, Kofi A. 2010. “The Myth of ‘Never Again’.” New York Times, 17 June 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18iht-edannan.html. Davis, Bryan, and Eliane Rubinstein-Avila. 2013. “Holocaust Education: Global Forces Shaping Curricula Integration and Implementation.” Intercultural Education 24 (1–2): 149–66. Eckmann, Monique. 2010. “Exploring the Relevance of Holocaust Education for Human Rights Education.” Prospects 40 (1): 7–16. Gross, Zehavit. 2018. “The Process of the Universalization of Holocaust Education: Problems and Challenges.” Contemporary Jewry 38, no. 1 (April): 5–20. Harding, Anthony. 2016. “Biographies of Things.” Distant Worlds Journals no. 1: 5–10. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/dwj/issue /view/2920. Hoskins, Janet. 2006. “Agency, Biography, and Objects.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley et al., 74–84. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kidron, Carol A. 2012. “Breaching the Wall of Traumatic Silence: Holocaust Survivor and Descendant Person–Object Relations and the Material Transmission of the Genocidal Past.” Journal of Material Culture 17 (1): 3–21. UNESCO. 2017. Education about the Holocaust and Preventing Genocide: A Policy Guide. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000248071.

6  Fostering Justice in Learning Relationships among Social Work Students sarah todd

Introduction I am writing this reflection, drawing on almost two decades of teaching social work at a Canadian university. I bring to my teaching practice a commitment to critical and post-structural theories. In the following chapter, I reflect on my efforts to foster relational justice in the social work classroom, which I hope is of value to educators and students alike. In 2022, our communities have a heightened awareness of our vulnerability to viruses, war, and inequality, and, at such a moment, I think it is helpful to draw our attention to the ways we enact political commitments in the everyday practices of our lives and how we might work carefully in relationship with each other to enhance dignity, selfworth, and justice in what limited communal spaces we have left. In times of significant social disruption, we are all uncertain. In this chapter, I consider whether it is possible that a path to social justice might be found by moving into that uncertainty and pushing gently against our tendency towards certainty as a means to stabilize our own identities and visions for the future. Specifically, I use this chapter to explore the ways in which I bring attention to, and enhance skills for, building interpersonal justice in the university-based social work classroom. In the School of Social Work where I teach, many students come into the classroom firmly committed to social justice activism (see also Hudson 2017, 1966; Gair 2017, 173). Their ideas about social justice are usually congruent with Iris Marion Young’s (2012) articulation of justice as involving a redistribution of resources and recognition and respect for marginalized and oppressed groups. Students also usually come into social work education with a passionate commitment to notions of social responsibility, care, concern, and a desire to help create a more just world. However, while

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these students are often highly skilled at recognizing systemic inequality and the marginalization and oppression of groups, they seem far less attuned to how justice is also imagined and rehearsed through interpersonal and small group power interactions such as those that take place in classrooms. In community work, we often refer to these experiences as “prefigurative politics” or the modes of organization and social relations that people practice so that they can strive to make an imagined future a reality (Boggs 1977, 98). The social justice-oriented classroom, as a learning community, is one space where people experiment with how we might prefigure a just society. My concern is that the prefigurative politics that I often see rehearsed in social work classrooms are ones that I believe unintentionally create barriers to larger social justice projects. Others teaching in social work classrooms have observed similar dynamics. In a study by Esmeralda Chapa (2014), exploring the salience of university professors in the work of social justice, one professor observed that “there is a tendency for those who have social justice leanings to demonize people who have privilege and power. And yet, demonizing other people is inconsistent with the very idea of social justice” (37). I suggest that the current discourse of social justice activism extends this judgment beyond those who are privileged to others who don’t or can’t perform social justice activism in the way that is perceived as most appropriate. What also interests me is that this is replicated even in classrooms where there are few significant differences in visions for social justice. This classroom dynamic is both a microcosm of the contemporary political and social context and shaped by the particularities of social work education. We are at a moment in time where progressive activism has firmed up the boundaries around who counts as a social justice activist, while at the same time creating increasingly rigid ideas of how someone who articulates themselves as progressive must speak and act in order to have continued membership in progressive communities (Lee 2017). This seems to coexist with a belief that those outside of specific social justice communities and their allies are not people to engage in conversation but are rather a threat to justice and must be treated with suspicion and blame (Manji 2019, 16). This is not a wholly new phenomenon. There have been multiple social justice movements throughout history that have had a similar thrust towards righteousness and even dogma, but there do seem to be some particular features of the contemporary context that have amplified these dynamics (e.g., social media). This general context is interwoven with social work’s own ambivalence as it is a profession that uncomfortably balances commitments to

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social justice with its function as an arm of the state, often operationalizing the force of the state on vulnerable groups. This is evidenced in the profession’s roles within corrections, education, child protection, and beyond (Pon et al. 2017, 70–1; Chapman and Withers 2019, 14). It is also grafted into the profession’s historical relationship with Indigenous peoples (Blackstock 2016, 116). I think that for students who come to social work to professionalize their commitment to social justice there is a strong desire to “not be that kind of social worker,” and the contemporary political discourse gives them a framework through which to discern and mark who those kinds of social workers are and to distance themselves from them. This type of desire for absolution from the injustices of the world often underpins why social work is a desirable profession, but it can also be quite problematic and not particularly useful as it tends to remain self-focused and fosters interpersonal competitiveness to perform as the most progressive, often by naming others is insufficiently progressive (Todd 2011, 130). To be fair to students and educators alike, the professional stories we tell ourselves in social work tend to suggest that there are two paths of social working: one is perceived as individualistic, conservative, and complicit, while the other as radical, progressive, and outside oppressive relations. These stories, like all stories, are fabrications, and increasingly scholars are writing new narratives, suggesting that those doing front-line individualized practice are also engaging in practices that are important to achieving social justice, and that those who are working upstream with communities and policies are also implicated in oppressive relations (Chapman and Withers 2019, 29). These new, more complicated stories make different demands on the profession and students, creating space for connection where there was competition, but also requiring that we collectively grapple with our own complicity in oppressive relations and how to gently, but firmly, work against this without claiming innocence. Given these dynamics, I would suggest that social justice-oriented classrooms like those in social work have a particular responsibility to deepen the democratic struggle for social justice by relying on an integration of critical enquiry (Wilson et al. 2020) with practices of cultivating our own curiosity (openness to learning) and compassion (openness to caring about those who are different from who we are regardless of who they are). The Students in the Classroom The social work classrooms in which I teach often have large groups of young students who come to social work because the profession holds

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the possibility of building a career that aligns with social justice politics and students’ commitment to challenging inequality. There are others in the class, some of whom are mature students, who often communicate feeling a bit out of step with what they see as youthful activism, have questions that push into grey areas, or do not use contemporary socialmovement terminology when articulating their thoughts (i.e., what does it mean to be “woke”?). This can be read by more activist-oriented students as signifying a lack of commitment to a cause or as ignorance of an issue (which it may be). Other students are very quiet in class, which is sometimes perceived as (and may well be) evidence of not sufficiently speaking out against injustice and oppression. Another group of students come to social work because they care about people, but they do not necessarily link that with a secular social justice frame. Sometimes that desire is rooted in commitment to a religious or cultural community that may not be “progressive.” At other times, students come from a background in the armed forces, from rural communities, or from other more conservative communities where ethics and practices of caring are rich and sustaining but don’t fit easily with social justice activism. And finally, for some students their commitment to social justice is a personal one, rooted in their own experiences of suffering that they have not yet (and maybe will not) connect to the political struggles of other groups’ suffering. The journey that I would suggest they might benefit from is to explore how each of these commitments to humanity, however varied or limited they might be, could be loosely woven together to build stronger, more resilient, creative, and playful movements for justice. The alternative, to judge and school each other on appropriate commitments to particular visions of social justice, seems to only narrow our support and the possibilities of justice we are working towards. Interestingly, among and between these varied students, I see quite a bit of commonality and fluidity in their conceptions of social justice, but I am continually surprised by how quickly groups of students can organize into a fixed hierarchy of progressiveness. It is often done quite politely through unspoken practices of distancing, but nonetheless has a visceral effect: tension in the room often shifts palpably as different people speak and patterns of silence are entrenched. This type of prefigurative politics also results in a strong imperative to call out others who say things that are, or are perceived as, oppressive. While often important practices in the struggle for social justice, these same approaches sometimes close down space for learning and connection. Once someone in the class is perceived as not adequately aware of, or committed to, certain social justice projects, it is often challenging for students (and sometimes even me as an instructor) to foster curiosity and to try to

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understand them better. Interactions become risky when one worries that respectful engagement with these students’ ideas might be characterized as (or actually serve towards) creating an unsafe space for other students or as putting into question one’s own commitment to social justice. And in this dance, the opportunity to cultivate interpersonal justice (Holtz and Harold 2010, 340) in the classroom is constrained. As an educator, I worry that these dynamics have a number of problematic effects. First, it makes it hard for us to listen to each other; second, it tends to quickly escalate intellectual conflict; and third, it seems to be difficult for students to see those with differing opinions or visions of justice as complex, fallible, and fully human. In the rush to ensure everyone adheres to a particular vision of justice, I worry that the classroom can foster a level of indifference to others’ struggles. The power inequalities and the dogma that we believe we are struggling against are re-enacted and rehearsed rather than deconstructed and reimagined. If we cannot recognize the humanity of everyone, and that those with whom we disagree or we perceive as privileged and/or ignorant and/or tone deaf have something to teach us, we risk reinforcing the conceptual and emotional frameworks that allow for dehumanization. I worry about justice being negotiated through relational patterns that exacerbate our distance from each other, particularly in pandemic times of social distancing. There often seems to be a peer expectation that a commitment to social justice be consistently performed and be without any doubt or questioning. Even in the classroom there seems to be little tolerance for imperfection, within oneself or others. This can create a high-stakes situation that prevents students from taking chances for fear of risking their membership in the community of progressive students. I am increasingly having to integrate into my pedagogy time to support students in facing that fear, to cultivate gentler, more self- and other-forgiving voices to help them develop skills to cope with social distancing and shaming and support them in increasing their capacity to sustain themselves through such experiences. I do this work because it seems not only congruent with a desire for social justice, but also as necessary to building social movements. To me, social justice work involves pulling people together, not creating political spaces of exile. These aspects of the explicit and implicit curriculum have come to be central in my efforts to crafting interpersonal justice in the classroom. Classroom Strategies for Transformation In trying to develop pedagogical strategies that support social justice, I have found critical theory, which I rely on heavily in my teaching, to

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have some limitations. While critical theory is helpful to deconstruct large-scale power relations, it offers little support for hope, creativity, and imagination, and few tools to help us heal from injustice and restore the humanity of the pieces of ourselves that are oppressed or oppressive (Wong 2018, 258–9). While the conceptual work on microaggressions (Sue 2010, 28–39) has helped increase my awareness of the pain that can be inflicted through relational practices in the classroom and the severe impacts this can have on members of marginalized groups, when taught in isolation, it seems this concept can create a space where students are so concerned about making a mistake that might hurt a member of a marginalized group that they disengage from the pedagogical conversation. At times such silences are useful, as people need to learn and make space for marginalized voices. However, I also see them thwarting the possibility of transformation as people are not invited into progressive movements. Instead, they avoid progressive movements because the cost of making mistakes is so high. In this context, the need to develop pedagogical practices that sustain “respect” or a turning back to each other and seeing again with fresh eyes (Manji 2019, 15) seems centrally important. Educators and students also need to find ways to hold with gentleness the emotions that come with the wounds of oppression and decolonization (Wong 2018, 258). I have spent the past few years considering how to explicitly put this into practice in the university classroom so as to facilitate the kind of transformative pedagogy that I am interested in. The following are some imperfect strategies with which I have been experimenting. The Classroom as Community One strategy that I attempt to use in the classroom is making the learning community explicit, engaging in activities that encourage students to share the complexity of who they are with each other so as to challenge assumptions. I use an exercise called community bundling when, after some time together, I see that smaller networks have formed and people’s opinions about each other have firmed. I ask everyone to bring in something personal from their lives and to tell the class a story about this object. It never ceases to amaze me what we learn from each other’s stories. I explicitly ask students after that exercise to take care of those stories and to consider how these narratives disrupted what they had perceived about other people in the room. I use it to encourage us to push beyond our belief that we can see who other people are, to instead understand that the full humanity of others is always beyond our grasp, and that the more open we are to connection, the richer the social justice we can imagine.

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Managing Conflict Sara Schulman (2016) suggests that at “many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve” (17). I see this happening when students bring ideas or ask questions that create discomfort; they are quickly perceived as threatening or harmful. In many classes, I spend some time exploring how social work as a profession has overreacted to difference and encourage students to see this as an extension of how, as a society, we overreact to difference, often with challenging consequences. The challenge is that when conflict is perceived as harm and abuse, then it justifies harmful and abusive responses (19). I often put these ideas in conversation with the literature on microaggressions (Sue 2010, 28–39) to see how we can hold both as true, and at the same time work to transform conflict into something that is workable. I often turn to mindfulness literature (e.g., Block- Lerner and Cardaciotto 2016; Berila 2016) in an attempt to open up a pathway forward. Diane Hamilton suggests that one of the ways to make conflict more workable is to “let go of the notion that something or someone is wrong or bad” (2013, 3). Instead, she suggests that if we can remain with the discomfort, we can look for insight and understanding that can then allow for a different response than one out of habitual pattern. This pushes sharply against social justice literature (e.g., Hill Collins 2013; Bell et al. 2016), but I suggest it encourages us to create visions of social justice that are as complex and multifaceted as the injustices we are facing. It also means having conversations to support students to be less fearful and to embrace a politics of imperfection as a social justice project. It is less about trying to get everyone to understand a particular theory of the world and to instead tentatively rehearse an imperfect and different one. This is a collective project. As Schulman (2016) argues, “it is the community surrounding a conflict that is the source of its resolution” (20). It is the learning community itself that “holds the crucial responsibility to resist overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives of understanding and complexity” (20) so that we can articulate our shared responsibility in repairing and creating alternatives. Teaching Listening Increasingly, I find myself pausing in courses as I realize that I need to create space to integrate exercises on mindful listening into the classroom. Being a mindful listener, Rebecca Shafir (2000) suggests, “allows us to do more than take in people’s words; it helps us better understand

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the how and why of their views. When understanding occurs, a sense of calm is achieved on both sides, even if no point of agreement is reached. From understanding, respect, and trust for one another are possible; we are free to open our minds and widen the scope of potential solutions” (12). I have begun reorganizing classroom exercises, assignments, and rubrics so that the value of being able to see beyond one’s own point of view, to incorporate and learn from others that you disagree with, has become explicitly more important than being right. Increasingly, I create exercises to ask students to practise how to listen to that which offends them, and to suspend the need to be offended or judge what is being said; to instead aspire towards respectful listening and cultivating a curiosity to know and understand the speaker. I often provide students with a series of first-person narratives to listen to. In these narratives people express views about social issues that counter the normative social justice discourse. I work with students to think about how their feelings of discomfort in listening to these ideas might be a useful indicator of an invitation to try to search for understanding and connection without seeing this as necessarily condoning or agreeing with the ideas. I ask students to take care to choose a narrative that they politically disagree with rather than one that speaks to their personal identities and experiences. These often feel like risky exercises to do in a classroom, but out of these exercises, we often have very interesting conversations about what it means to listen to a point of view we fundamentally disagree with in understanding our own biases. The task is for students is to listen and observe, but to suspend judgment. I use Shafir’s (2000) work to ask students to become more aware of their internal voices, which can make it hard to listen. As a group, we discuss strategies to quiet those voices so as to listen better and foster curiosity. Students are invited to think about how they might enter into a relationship with the narrator, critique their ideas, but to listen without shaming so that connection and transformation might be possible. Conclusion I find the contemporary social justice classroom worrisome, for increasingly I feel that our striving for a perfect social justice has come at the expense of developing skills for interpersonal justice, which I understand to be equally as important. What I am suggesting for the social justice classroom is not the sole way I think we need to engage with diversity and justice in the classroom. I don’t have specific recommendations for other classrooms as I believe we all have to feel our

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way through this and it is through the stumbling around that possibilities for social justice, fleeting as they may be, emerge. As Manji (2019) so simply states, “honest diversity needs diverse forms of advocacy” (167). However, what I am suggesting is that whether you imagine yourself as primarily a learner or an educator, or hold steadfast to the combining of those identities, we all need to find some spaces where conversation – talking, listening, and learning – across different identities and ideas is rehearsed and our skills for doing so are enhanced. I think it is incumbent upon us as members of democratic societies to explicitly foster these skills as they seem particularly fragile at this moment. This is not with a goal of perfecting our struggle for social justice in the classroom, but rather, as Alexis Shotwell (2016) suggests, embracing a politics of imperfection where the world we are working towards is as imperfect as are our attempts to achieve it (204). In my classes, I have become increasingly concerned about how I can teach students that justice requires caring about the people with whom you passionately disagree. It also requires balancing a gentle reflection on one’s own complicity, an openness to compromise as more important to justice than righteousness, and a hopefulness that if we do the hard work of treating each other respectfully, justice will flourish. Such ideas are both at the heart of higher education and also disruptive of it. What does imperfection mean in institutions that rely on evaluation systems that reward an ever-increasing ability to articulate the vision of justice that one’s instructor and discipline holds dear? How do we uphold rigour, while also letting go of our own disciplinary beliefs in a vision of righteous justice? Applied disciplines like social work rely heavily on the thinking of a range of disciplines. We are one of the many professions that take the ideas of the university out into the world, often to inform our work with the most vulnerable. It seems to me that the classroom is an important place to nourish the possibility of creating justice in those relationships and that this practice is as important as grappling with the big ideas of what that justice might be. Questions for Reflection: 1 What strategies might you think an educator could use in the classroom to hold in balance the need to name social injustice and microaggressions with a mindfulness commitment to suspending judgment and fostering curiosity and compassion? 2 If a classroom is a space for pre-figurative politics, how can we enhance the potential of classrooms to practise greater justice?

96  Sarah Todd 3 What strategies could you imagine using to cultivate a “politics of

imperfection” within the academy’s commitment to notions of truth and excellence? 4 What are some of the limits and problematics of the pedagogical strategies discussed in this chapter? What are some alternatives you could think of to fostering interpersonal justice in the classroom? BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Maurianne, and Lee Anne Bell with Diane J. Goodman and Khyati Y. Joshi, eds. 2016. Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Bell, Lee Anne, Michael S. Funk, Khyati Y. Joshi, and Marjorie Valdivia. 2016. “Racism and White Privilege.” In Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, 3rd ed., edited by Maurianne Adams and Lee Anne Bell, with Diane J. Goodman and Khyati Y. Joshi, 133–82. London: Routledge. Berila, Beth. 2016. Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education. London: Routledge. Blackstock, Cindy. 2016. “Does Social Work Have the Guts for Social Justice and Reconciliation?” In Social Work Ethics: Progressive, Practical, and Relational Approaches, edited by Elaine Spencer, Duane Massing, and Jim Gough, 115–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Block-Lerner, Jennifer, and LeeAnn Cardaciotto. 2016. The MindfulnessInformed Educator. London: Routledge. Boggs, Carl, Jr. 1977. “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control. Radical America.” 11 (November), 100; cf. Boggs, Carl Jr. 1977. “Revolutionary Process, Political Strategy, and the Dilemma of Power.” Theory & Society 4 (3): 359–93. Chapa, Esmeralda. 2014. The Salience of University Professors in the Work for Social Justice. Spokane, WA: Gonzaga University. Chapman, Chris, and A.J. Withers. 2019. A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gair, Susan. 2017. “Pondering the Colour of Empathy: Social Work Students’ Reasoning on Activism, Empathy and Racism.” British Journal of Social Work 47:162–80. Hamilton, Diane. 2013. Everything Is Workable: A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution. Boulder, CO: Shambhala. Hill Collins, Patricia. 2013. On Intellectual Activism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Fostering Justice in Learning Relationships  97 Holtz, Brian, and Crystal Harold. 2010. “Interpersonal Justice and Deviance: The Moderating Effects of Interpersonal Justice Values and Justice Orientation.” Journal of Management 39 (2): 339–65. Hudson, Kimberly. 2017. “With Equality and Opportunity for All? Emerging Scholars Define Social Justice for Social Work.” British Journal of Social Work 47: 1959–78. Lee, Frances. 2017. “Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice: An Activist’s Plea for Change.” Sunday Edition, 12 September. https://www .cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-september-17-2017-1.4291332 /excommunicate-me-from-the-church-of-social-justice-an-activist-s-plea -for-change-1.4291383. Manji, Irshad. 2019. Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Pon, Gordon, Doret Phillips, Jennifer Clarke, and Idil Abdillahi. 2017. “Who’s Protecting Whom? Child Welfare and Policing Black Families.” In Doing Anti-Oppressive Practice: Social Justice Social Work, 3rd ed., edited by Donna Baines, 77–88. Halifax: Fernwood Press. Schulman, Sara. 2016. Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty to Repair. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Shafir, Rebecca. 2000. The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sue, Derald Wing. 2010. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Todd, Sarah. 2011. “That Power and Privilege Thing: Securing Whiteness in Community Work.” Journal of Progressive Human Services 22 (2): 117–34. Wilson, Tina, Sarah Todd, Katherine Occhiuto, and J.Z. Garrod. 2020. “Social Workers as Double Agents: Critical Inquiry, Social Work Education and the Youth Question.” Social Work Education: The International Journal 29 (1): 85–96. Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita. 2018. “Please Call Me by My True Names: Decolonizing Pedagogy of Mindfulness and Intervening in Critical Social Work Education.” In Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization, edited by Sheila Batacharya and Yuk-Lin Renita Wongs, 253–78. Athabasca, AB: AU Press Young, Iris. 2012. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

7 Paying Attention to Everyday Discourse: Critical Pedagogies for Disrupting Language and Power beth buyserie and ashley s . boyd

Language, an everyday form of communication, both reflects and creates people and culture (Gee 1996). Words normalize our values, beliefs, and practices so that often those appear as taken-for-granted entities, unquestioned by those by who draw upon them to exist in a shared cultural space (Grossberg 1994). And yet, critical scholars have well documented the connections between language and power, showing us that language is anything but neutral or value free (Delpit 1995; Fairclough 2015; Freire and Macedo 1987). Rather language, historically and in our contemporary context, is used to exclude and include various populations, to uphold dominant narratives, and to rationalize injustice (Kumashiro 2008). As such, it is key that educators employ critical pedagogies in our classrooms to help students understand the importance of language. Through social justice pedagogies, we can begin to uproot oppression and unmask privilege particularly as related to language. In this chapter, we describe the ways we critically approach language in our courses to cultivate our students’ awareness and understandings of how language works. Both authors teach in the same English teacher preparation program in a large university in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Beth identifies as a white, first-gen, bisexual, cisgender woman raised in a predominantly white area in the Pacific Northwest during a time where whites valued colourblindness as the ultimate form of racial equity. Her subsequent experiences learning and teaching in critical education programs challenged this dominant narrative and reinforced her commitments to equity and social justice. Ashley identifies as a white, cisgender woman raised in the southeastern United States. Ashley’s experiences growing up in a racially segregated town, attending a critically oriented teacher education program, and teaching high school in rural North Carolina, where she saw how inequity is reproduced, engendered her commitment to social justice pedagogies.

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Like all institutions of higher education, ours is located on Indigenous lands, specifically the traditional homelands of the Nez Percé. Mirroring the larger population of teachers (NCES 2017), our students are predominantly white, although we have seen a growing number of Latinx students across our university in recent years. Our program requires that students take four pedagogy courses, including a grammar and general methods course. In what follows, we describe activities from each of those courses in which we address language and power. While our work is situated in teacher education, we feel that the methods we share in this chapter are not limited to this context but can be adapted to other disciplines, as language constitutes the ways we make meaning and interact with others. We are thus writing for anyone interested in unpacking discourse with students, and we hope to encourage more critical dialogue in classrooms about the ways language influences our understandings of the world. While this explicit focus is perhaps not as common in the humanities and the social sciences, we believe that it actually fits well – a small pivot to power in the studies of society and how authors rely on language would incorporate the attention to social justice we advocate here. Colonization and Voice: Examining the Grammar of Language In this section we describe our explicit focus on the teaching of grammar to illustrate how everyday linguistic structures can both maintain and disrupt colonizing agendas. As key scholars on language and writing argue, standardized English and the teaching of composition have consistently been used as a tool for colonization, both of people and language (Canagarajah 2006; Villanueva 1997). In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) emphasizes how writing itself continues to contribute to colonization. Smith cites A. Nandy to briefly discuss the “‘grammar’ of imperialism,” emphasizing how “there is a deep structure which regulates and legitimates imperial practices” (29). While Smith’s reference to grammar here refers to all aspects of imperial order and social constructs, the clear connection between language and colonization makes the teaching of grammar – often a required course or component in many English education curricula – a problematic task for the teacher committed to social justice pedagogies. Therefore, for this chapter we are particularly interested in how the teaching of grammar itself in secondary and post-secondary classrooms both reinforces and potentially challenges colonial agendas. Our goal is to pay attention to our everyday language practices as a way to make space for disrupting these agendas.

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In this first section on colonization and voice, we focus specifically on the grammatical concept of active and passive voice. Active and passive voice – verb and sentence constructions that allow a writer to either emphasize or minimize a subject’s role in a particular action – play a highly influential role in the way histories and stories are narrated, interpreted, and acted upon. Because active and passive voice are ubiquitous in standardized English sentence construction, their influence on colonial ways of thinking often goes unnoticed in our everyday language practices. Paying attention to the connection between colonization and sentence structure can better help students to understand the continuing influence of language on systems of oppression as well as help students understand and rhetorically negotiate key grammar concepts in their writing. Grammatically, the concept of active and passive voice can be challenging for many students to understand. While students may understandably have difficulty recognizing that a passive sentence must include the verb “to be” connected with a past participle form of a verb (Haussamen et al. 2003, 103), students can and do more easily understand the usefulness of the passive voice to denounce responsibility for a particular action. The famous “Mistakes were made” example quickly illustrates for students how a person or organization can downplay their responsibility for an action while still communicating information. Though many teachers admonish students (incorrectly and unrhetorically) to avoid the passive voice, the passive voice has many rhetorical possibilities; similarly, the active voice is not rhetorically neutral. While some pedagogical materials, such as Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers, ask students to consider how the construction of a particular sentence either specifies or masks who is responsible for a particular action (Haussamen et al. 2003, 28–9), rarely do grammar teaching materials specifically connect the concept of active and passive voice to language, power, and colonization. To address this gap, below we describe how we focus our grammar pedagogy course to interrogate the connection between colonization and grammar, specifically in terms of active and passive voice. Class Context Throughout the course, students are asked to read a number of articles on language and power, including excerpts from Geneva Smitherman’s reflections on the “‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’: A Retrospective” (Smitherman 2015), A. Suresh Canagarajah’s “The Place of World Englishes in Composition” (2006), and Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?” (2011). We also combine

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these theoretical readings with the Grammar Alive! text (Haussamen et al. 2003), which maintains that students must not only be familiar with standardized English, but that students should also recognize and appreciate the multiple varieties of world and American English available to them as writers and speakers. These collective theoretical and pedagogical readings ask students to question the connection between language practices and colonization while foregrounding the teaching of grammar. Over the course of the semester, we have multiple activities and lessons that connect the teaching of grammar to language, power, and social justice, and we now share some of these teaching strategies. Analysis of Textbooks and Literary Texts As the students in our English education courses often include both English/language arts and history/social studies secondary education majors, for this lesson we look to history textbooks and young adult historical fiction to find authentic examples of active and passive voice, and how each is used to mask or expose colonization, both historically and in the present day. Historical fiction we might point to includes Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata or Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan. For the textbook activity, we use the open-source textbook on ushistory.org, though students are encouraged to bring in other textbook examples when available. Rather than set this activity up to simply critique, bash, or praise a particular text, we engage in this activity to attend to the nuanced meanings communicated in both the active and the passive voice. We begin with the sample passive voice construction of “the people were oppressed” to ask both what information the sentence masks and what important information it exposes. We compare that sentence with “the people resisted” to illustrate the grammatical differences between active and passive voice as well as the rhetorical possibilities. We then read brief excerpts from Smith’s discussion of history in Decolonizing Methodologies, where Smith writes, “history is also about power. It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others” (2012, 35). Recognizing that history is a story of power, we begin our analysis. In the past, students have pointed to and discussed the social justice implications of excerpts such as these from a US history textbook: Moreover, the Native Americans, who had allied themselves with the French during the Seven Years’ War, continued to fight after the peace had been reached. Pontiac’s Rebellion continued after the imperial powers

102  Beth Buyserie and Ashley S. Boyd achieved a ceasefire (italics in active voice, and one conveying an act of Indigenous resistance that students rarely learn about, though the name of tribes involved are omitted, http://www.ushistory.org/us/9a.asp). Slave ships were packed full of captured Africans to ensure maximum profits for the ones selling the slaves at auction (passive voice, which in this sentence omits the slave traders’ responsibility, http://www.ushistory. org/us/9a.asp).

In these conversations, we are careful not simply to decry historical oppressions and trauma that contradict our social justice philosophies; since our university, students, and teachers are predominantly white, simply pointing out injustices without navigating the accompanying pain, oppression, and trauma is not helpful. Rather, we look to these and similar examples to discuss how both injustices and acts of resistance are communicated in our everyday discourse. Analysis of Current Headlines Intentionally comparing the language of history textbooks (which can portray historical oppressions as static rather than ongoing) to the news headlines of the present day can help students and teachers recognize how our everyday discourse patterns are connected. After students search historical texts for the ways in which active and passive voice might both mask oppression and signal resistance, students then turn their attention to current headlines. We discuss how headlines might intentionally utilize the passive voice so that the object of the action is foregrounded, as in the sample headlines describing “Trapped boys found in cave” rather than “Rescuers find trapped boys in cave.” Though the first headline is in the passive voice, it does emphasize the boys rather than who rescued them, and we often use this type of example to discuss the rhetorical possibilities available to the author. What should be emphasized given the nature of the story or event? What is the article about, the boys or the rescuers? As writers, whose perspective might they choose to emphasize and why? However, as before, we move beyond these relatively accessible topics and research headlines that connect more specifically to social justice and injustices. Students are asked to pick a historical event and analyse a variety of headlines that represent the event; frequent events over the years have included Hurricane Katrina, the Flint water crisis, the way stories of sexual assault survivors are portrayed in the #MeToo movement, the resistance efforts of the Standing Rock Sioux, and the cover up of shootings of young Black men and women and the rise of the Black Lives Matter

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movement, most recently protesting the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade. In each of these stories, we discuss whether the language and rhetoric of the story portrays the people as victims or as activists. In addition to active and passive voice, we also examine other questions that connect the teaching of grammar to social justice: Who is the subject? Whose perspective is omitted and how is language used to perpetuate that omission? Who is the author of the article and whose perspective do they represent? In this way, we encourage students to also examine history and the processes that undergird such events. We, of course, also analyse the most current headlines as well for these questions. However, we have found that it is important to connect headline language usage across time periods and events so that students recognize that the language of oppression is systemic rather than isolated – and that the language of resistance is powerful. Revision As Linda Christensen (2000) in Reading, Writing, and Rising Up points out, we must do more than simply critique a text; instead, lessons and activities should give students possibilities for resistance and hope. Therefore, we recommend that all these activities end with revision. After the students find and analyse examples of language and power, they are tasked with revising the language in the text to potentially disrupt our everyday discourse practices. However, their task is to do more than simply revise at the sentence level. In other words, simply changing a sentence from “the people were oppressed” to “the people resisted” is a good start but may not be enough to disrupt colonial ways of thinking. What else, we ask, must be revised? In our revisions, we also strive not to simply create a binary between passive voice/bad and active voice/good. Instead, as our students quickly learn, language and grammar should be taught rhetorically, and all rules and conventions can (and should) be “broken” when used for rhetorical purpose. Therefore, if passive voice exists, there are rhetorical reasons for it. In the case of colonization and language, passive voice can also be used to ensure that the focus of the passage remains on the Indigenous peoples and that, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith emphasizes, Indigenous peoples must remain the focus of the story. The Gender Binary and Heteronormativity: Examining the Content of Language Beyond linguistic features including active and passive voice, the content of our language itself upholds binaries and perpetuates unjust

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ideologies. In this section, we continue to explore how language can oppress individuals, but we here focus on how we work with students to unpack how language upholds the gender binary and promotes heteronormativity, which can be defined as “a way of being in the world that relies on the belief that heterosexuality is normal, which implicitly positions homosexuality and bisexuality as abnormal and thus inferior” (Blackburn and Smith 2010, 625). The artificial separation of gender into only cisgender men and women in many facets of life, such as in clothing stores, bathrooms, and in sports, creates the notion that this separation is somehow natural and the way things should be. We want our students to challenge these notions and to realize that in fact dominant notions of sexuality and gender are socially constructed. Class Context Our general English methods course focuses on how to teach as well as what to teach. We thus study a variety of social justice pedagogies in addition to literary and informational texts, and we include both culturally accessing pedagogies (Dyches and Boyd 2017), such as culturally responsive teaching (Gay 2010), and critical pedagogies, such as critical literature pedagogy (Borsheim-Black, Macaluso, and Petrone 2014). Students read from these theoretical texts and apply those to literature, both from the canon and beyond. We emphasize the need to know who our student populations are and to value them, and we encourage our students to build curriculum that includes relevant content that meets their needs and teaches about the world. Modelling Vocabulary Usage At the outset of our courses, and before our first class, we invite students to send us an email with their correct name and gender pronouns. We include a model, using ourselves, such as, “I go by Ashley and my gender pronouns are she/her/hers.” While this notion has been referred to as preferred gender pronouns, we use correct to avoid the narrative of choice that is often used to undermine individuals who identify in varying ways along the gender spectrum. This sets the tone from the beginning that we are allies and allows us to ensure that on the first day we are calling students what they feel they should be called, especially if there are discrepancies on our rosters. This also allows students to individually and privately share their pronouns if they do not wish to do so publicly and for the course instructor to set the pattern of calling a student by their identified name and pronoun.

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In this way, we model culturally responsive teaching (Gay 2010) before we even teach about it. As we introduce the importance of language explicitly in our course, we explain to students how, as individuals and in society, words construct our understandings of people, events, and places. To begin to acquaint students with these ideas and to hone our focus on language and heteronormativity, we engage them in a series of exercises with vocabulary that may or may not be familiar to them. We provide an envelope with terms and definitions – such as “privilege,” “intersectionality,” “queer,” “and cisgender” – cut apart, and ask the students to match them with one another. Some students are quick to pair the meanings with the terms while others struggle, uncertain or inexperienced with particular terms. We emphasize as we go over each that this is meant to provide a foundational vocabulary so that we can further discuss these topics. We also share words with students that are outdated or offensive (GLAAD n.d.) and explain the reasonings behind those. For instance, because of its medicalized history, “homosexual’ is a label that affronts some men who prefer to identify as “gay.” We remind students that it is always best practice to allow individuals to identify themselves. Analysing Discourse in Society As we explain heteronormativity, we ask students to consider how spaces uphold and perpetuate the gender binary. Students first brainstorm how their high schools were heteronormative. In small groups, they recall sports divisions, prom kings and queens, and the authors they read. We then send them on a “heteronormativity scavenger hunt” (Pennell 2017), having them explore our own context for the many ways it reflects assumptions about gender. In doing so, we hope to make the familiar strange, to have them focus on and investigate the spaces they take for granted and engage in daily. They often return seeing anew, critiquing separations of sororities or fraternities and questioning locker rooms and campus facilities. We ask students to consider how language specifically creates these spaces. How do we know who they are created for – who has access to them? What materials are distributed that describe these spaces to us? We then transition to asking students about common expressions and phrases in our society that are offensive, such as “that’s gay,” and we invite students to brainstorm alternative phrases. We then dig deeper, challenging them to think beyond phrasings that are blatantly insulting and asking them to research expressions in media or from

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their everyday lives that construct realities in ways that we take for granted (Gee 1996). The mere greeting “hey guys,” for example, illustrates how the masculine is universal in discourse in our society. Furthermore, when individuals participate in air travel, the flight attendant announces that “women are allowed a purse and a carry-on bag, while men are allowed one personal item and another bag.” Students bring these instances to the class for exploration and dissection, considering what assumptions are made in these, who they exclude, and how. We then turn this critical lens to the English literary canon and examine whose voice is most represented and how, and we investigate most frequently taught text lists as well as the types of narratives (such as the hero’s journey or the damsel in distress) that are often represented in mainstream works. Revision Finally, we engage students in role playing for disrupting discourse. We ask them to consider the expressions and spaces they have explored up to this point and to choose one and imagine a scenario in which they might address the inequity perpetuated or how they might ask for change. Students envision meetings with school officials to request gender inclusive bathrooms, having researched policies and procedures beforehand to bring to their meetings, or they invent ways to intervene when individuals, such as their friends or parents, use harmful terms or expressions, calling attention to the ways the person’s language is oppressive. During this exercise, we discuss with students the value of not only deconstructing discourse but of reconstructing, of envisioning ways that language can be more inclusive and affirming. We believe having students actually practise these actions is absolutely key to effecting change. Conclusion Over the years, we have discovered that the more abstract discussions on language and power are more and more well received by students. This is reassuring, as it appears that more students are coming in committed to teaching social justice pedagogies. However, we do need to make sure that the day-to-day teaching – both in our current classroom and in our students’ future classes – foregrounds language and power. Focusing on language is even more important in our current context as we adapt to our ever-changing society and one that is responding to a global pandemic and continued civil unrest related to racism and systemic oppression. As we forge ahead in the neoliberal struggle,

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attention to the ways the dominant narratives shift and affect marginalized populations and helping students revise and reconstruct those narratives for equity and justice are key. As we have emphasized throughout this chapter, there are multiple approaches teachers and students might take to foreground social justice and equity in our pedagogies. To begin, teachers might ask guiding questions such as, “in what ways do our everyday language practices reinforce or normalize concepts like colonization and heteronormativity? How can our everyday language practices disrupt language and power? Recognizing that language and power are constantly shifting, how can we continue to challenge ourselves to notice and disrupt our everyday discourse patterns?” As teachers and students engage with these questions, teachers can ask students to read or reread an authentic text to pay attention to its everyday language use. Students can write a reflection or short analysis of the text and then revise a portion of the text to challenge concepts of colonization or heteronormativity in its language use. Teachers might then invite students to present their findings to their classmates and collectively reflect on how the revision disrupts language and power and discuss what else in the text still needs to be challenged. If we do not unpack those aspects of language that are often taken for granted and go unseen in our society, we do little to disrupt equity but instead uphold the status quo. In other words, we must continually strive to model and practise social justice pedagogies that are grounded in awareness of language and power; otherwise, we are simply talking about the importance of social justice in our teaching without doing social justice. And we must provide students with the opportunities to do their own disruptive work as well, to become language activists and unsettle harmful constructions when they see or hear them, both in the classroom and in everyday discourse. Questions for Reflection: 1 How can language help us in our current context as we adapt to our

ever-changing society responding to a global pandemic and continued civil unrest related to racism and systemic oppression? 2 In what ways do our everyday language practices reinforce or normalize concepts like colonization and heteronormativity? 3 How can our everyday language practices disrupt language and power? 4 Recognizing that language and power are constantly shifting, how can we continue to challenge ourselves to notice and disrupt our everyday discourse patterns?

108  Beth Buyserie and Ashley S. Boyd BIBLIOGRAPHY Blackburn, Mollie V., and Jill M. Smith. 2010. “Moving Beyond the Inclusion of LGBT-Themed Literature in English Language Arts Classrooms: Interrogating Heteronormativity and Exploring Intersectionality.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53 (8): 625–34. Borsheim-Black, Carlin, Michael Macaluso, and Robert Petrone. 2014. “Critical Literature Pedagogy: Teaching Canonical Literature for Critical Literacy.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 58 (2): 123–33. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 2006. “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued.” College Composition and Communication 57 (4): 586–619. Christensen, Linda. 2000. Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching about Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools. Delpit, Lisa. 1995. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: The New Press, 1995. Driskill, Qwo-Li. 2015. “Decolonial Skillshares: Indigenous Rhetorics as Radical Practice.” In Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics, edited by Lisa King, Rose Gubele, and Joyce Rain Anderson, 57–78. Logan: Utah State University Press. Dyches, Jeanne, and Ashley Boyd. 2017. “Foregrounding Equity in Teacher Education: Toward a Model of Social Justice Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (SJPACK).” Journal of Teacher Education 68 (5): 476–90. Fairclough, Norman. 2015. Language and Power. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo Macedo. 1987. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Gay, Geneva. 2010. Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press. Gee, James. 1996. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. GLAAD. n.d. “Glossary of Terms–Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Queer.” https:// www.glaad.org/reference/lgbtq. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1994. “Introduction: Bringin’ it All Back Home – Pedagogy and Cultural Studies.” In Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, edited by Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, 1–25. London: Routledge. Haussamen, Brock, et al. 2003. Grammar Alive!: A Guide for Teachers. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Janks, Hillary. 1993. Language, Identity and Power. Swindon, UK: Hodder and Stoughton. Kumashiro, Kevin. 2008. The Seduction of Common Sense: How the Right Has Framed the Debate on America’s Schools. New York: Teachers College Press.

Paying Attention to Everyday Discourse  109 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2017. “Fast Facts: Teacher Characteristics and Trends.” https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display. asp?id=28. Pennell, Summer Melody. 2017. “Training Secondary Teachers to Support LGBTQ+ Students: Practical Applications from Theory and Research.” High School Journal 101 (1): 62–72. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books. Smitherman, Geneva. 2015. “‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’: A Retrospective.” In Students’ Right to Their Own Language: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Stacy Perryman-Clark, David E. Kirkland, and Austin Jackson, 140–9. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Villanueva, Victor. 1997. “Maybe a Colony: And Still Another Critique of the Comp Community.” JAC 17 (2): 183–90. Young, Vershawn Ashanti. 2011. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” In Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, 61–72. Logan: Utah State University Press.

8 Writing Fictional Narratives to Promote Social Justice Education: Towards a Heuristic-Dialogic Model of Didactic Design franco passalacqua

All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions. It is the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic or social nature which constrain the freedom and equality of citizens, thereby impeding the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic, and social ­organisation of the country. (CONSTITUTION OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLIC–Article 3) Schools are open to everyone. Primary education, given for at least eight years, is compulsory and free of tuition. Capable and deserving pupils, ­including those lacking financial resources, have the right to attain the highest levels of education. (CONSTITUTION OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLIC–Article 34)

Introduction The challenge of teaching, at any level of education, is knowing how to foster the students’ desire to learn (Dewey 1936). The parallel challenge from a social justice education perspective is allowing students to construct their own individual learning paths regardless of their non-academic circumstances (whether cultural, social, or economic). Another challenging aspect of teaching is allowing the students to autonomously deploy their learning to benefit the community and inspire social change. The question is, what do we, teachers and educators working in nursery, primary, and secondary schools and even universities, mean when we use such expressions as “benefit the community” and “inspire social change”? What does “benefit the community” mean when we teach in a school within a town or in a neighbourhood deeply

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marked by social inequalities or racial disparities? What is meant by “inspire social change” if we work with socially privileged students who have never experienced any racial discrimination? The most difficult task for a teacher is to allow all students, regardless of their initial cultural, social, and economic circumstances, to learn contents and construct knowledge that will enable them to become active citizens in the community (Meirieu 2004; Torney et al. 2001) and allow them to fully exercise their abilities and rights and participate in public life outside the protected space of the school and away from the reassuring supervision of their teachers. This chapter investigates the ways in which we can reflect on teachers’ and the school’s ability to mitigate the differences in the students’ non-academic learning opportunities through the action of selecting learning contents and designing learning scenarios. How can schools and teachers promote a social justice education approach that is both sensitive to the unique positions and contributions of each student/group of students (Honneth 1992) and able to foster, within the framework of active citizenship education, the disagreement between opposing perspectives and values (Rancière 1995)? The chapter will also explore narrative writing as a didactic design strategy teachers can use in order to stimulate interest among students and bring forth conflicting views, and as a practice that requires teachers to analyse their own choices in deciding what knowledge and types of knowledge to be taught. For example, what might students gain from knowledge of the migrations occurring in Europe over the last sixty years? What episodes of social and racial violence in the US in 2020 might serve in a discussion of historical causes of contemporary cultural inequalities? How does this knowledge relate to the students’ background and to the community? What impact can the learning of the given knowledge have on the community? These questions characterize the design process of teaching and, more specifically, they are closely related to the didactic transposition process (Chevallard 1985) and the choices that teachers bring to bear on the “selection of knowledge to be taught” (Martinand 1983). In these first steps of the design process, the focus of the teachers’ work is not on making knowledge accessible to students, but rather the deconstruction of their own positioning towards the knowledge selected to be taught. These questions, moreover, delineate the space for reflection offered in this chapter, where I address them with particular regard to social justice education within the framework of active citizenship. I focus specifically on the educational potential inherent in the creative act of constructing stories and in the narrative experience (Van Oers 2007; Nicolopoulou 2007; Bruner 1987, 1991) as a way of emotionally interacting in order to understand the other’s point

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of view (Caracciolo 2014). Narrative experience, both creating a narrative and listening to a narrative, is defined here as a precondition for the effective implementation of the school’s mandate to provide civic and citizenship education and to inspire students to consider – and to act against – social inequalities. First, because it offers students an immersive, situated, and captivating experiential encounter with knowledge (Caracciolo 2014; Gallese 2005) and with different perspectives on knowledge, often completely impossible to get close to under “real life conditions.” Secondly, because giving narrative form to what they intend to teach enables teachers to experience the construction and reconstruction of knowledge. In sum, narrative experience can be described as a safe space where it is possible to make the experience of oneself (understanding one’s own values, feelings, perceptions) through the experience of the other, as through the empathic power of the relationships between the reader’s worlds and the narrative world, and between readers and characters. The questions that I set out to address in this chapter thus concern the role of narrative writing in guiding teaching practice towards the achievement of learning and social justice objectives as well as how structuring knowledge as a narrative can help students to incorporate what they learn into their own personal framework of knowledge and life experience in parallel with that of their own communities as well as the global community (De Vecchi, Carmona-Magnaldi 1996). How can knowledge narratively transformed by teachers help students experience conflicts and disagreement with other perspectives? Even prior to that, how can narrative writing help teachers become so passionate about and critical of the knowledge they wish to teach (Shulman 1986) that they will present it in a way that is fresh and multiperspectival, as opposed to dogmatic and tailored to the needs of a specific group of students living in specific community setting? The theoretical discussion in the next sections of the chapter is intended to open up avenues of reflection on these questions and is complemented by references to school projects in which teachers constructed fictional stories that were then read in the classroom and used for teaching and learning purposes. Teachers as Builders of Imagination Machines The teaching method briefly outlined in this section has been implemented in the context of research projects that I have conducted in collaboration with primary and secondary teachers over the past four years with a focus on investigating how “knowledge to be taught” (Chevallard 1985) may be constructed using narrative composition strategies.

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In this work, I conceptualized the narratives created by teachers as living and critically constructed “content knowledge” (Shulman 1986), as opposed to impersonal content knowledge constructed by someone else, abruptly separated from its context of use, and “ready to use.” Over the course of these projects, the participating teachers composed fictional narratives to read their students in class, using them to mediate the construction of interdisciplinary concepts. My role was to help the teachers analyse this experience of conducting didactic design via narrative writing, to explore with them how this approach had impacted on their students’ learning, and to enquire into the relationship that they themselves had established with narratively reconstructed knowledge. More specifically, I ran a didactic design laboratory where teachers engaged in multiple design activities to cultivate a critical stance towards the objects of knowledge offered to their students. During this project, the teachers shared a topic that they wished their students to learn; selected the core conceptual nuclei of this topic; made up a story that put the selected conceptual nuclei in narrative form; adapted their style of writing to suit the students in their class and their specific community of origin; and read the story to the students and asked them to give feedback on it then to work on it, designing new stories or continuations of the initial story based on input received from the students and based on the students’ new learning. To illustrate this approach to didactic design more clearly, let us consider a narrative writing project implemented by the teacher of a class of fourth-grade children. Over a period of several months, the teacher constructed a twelve-chapter story that touched on a set of historical, scientific, and philosophical topics, with the aim of getting the students to learn and construct a number of interdisciplinary concepts (such as “method,” “truth,” “opinion,” “transformation,” “cruelty,” and “goodness”) and to develop a critical approach with respect to their knowledge of these concepts. The teacher read the chapters to the students in a serial format – following each reading, time was allotted for comprehension and group discussion – and then went on to construct them based on how the students’ learning path was evolving. The writing of the stories was guided by constant pedagogical documentation (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 1999) of the learning path: the teacher recorded the students’ reasoning session by session – collecting both their written notes and transcripts of some class conversations and discussions – and examined them regularly for the purpose of making learning visible to students (Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison 2011) and wrote new story chapters with storylines designed to challenge students’ hypotheses in which characters repeated or reformulated the students’ thoughts and statements in order

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to reflect the current stage in their learning process. Hence, the story was a sort of open-ended script that could take different forms to the extent that the teacher listened to and embraced the students’ initial knowledge base, and that could take different narrative directions as a function of the learning journeys undertaken by the students. The Fictional Character as a Mediator of Learning: The Dialogue between Ian and Geskiedenis In addition to pedagogical documentation, which serves to make the students’ learning visible and to inform the design of subsequent learning activities and stories (Ritchhart and Perkins 2008; Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison 2011), teachers who use narrative writing as a mode of didactic design have access to another powerful device for facilitating and monitoring learning: the main character of the story, with his or her thoughts and actions. In the story that we have taken as our case study here, the main character throughout all twelve chapters is Ian, a tenyear-old boy who is extremely inquisitive in nature: Ian encounters a host of other characters, some of whom are very strange, who pique his curiosity and stimulate his reasoning processes about the story’s learning contents. The rapport that the students developed with Ian was reinforced by the teacher’s decision to make the characters’ thoughts transparent, by means of dialogues or inner monologues (Cohn 1978). This strategy not only fostered a process of perceptual and sensory immersion in the protagonist’s lived experience, but also contamination by his thinking (Caracciolo 2014). Below, I offer a short extract from a story chapter in which the teacher wished to play back to the children’s arguments that they themselves had put forward earlier in the project; the aims of this particular chapter included initiating exploration of the concept of “cruelty” and bringing to light the students’ pre-conceptions and misconceptions surrounding this theme (Vosniadou 2008; Pozo amd Gomez Crespo 2005). The teacher tapped into the students’ prior knowledge by raising the topic with them before writing the chapter, during a discussion based on a previous chapter of the story. The following brief excerpt from that discussion illustrates the narrative and didactic strategies deployed by the teacher to progressively align Ian’s thinking with that of the students: teacher: What caused this cruelty? You said envy, to conquer wealth. And then, we asked ourselves whether early humans, who hadn’t yet gotten wealth, were cruel. A. thinks they weren’t. S. thinks that they were, because in any case they had to fight for food and other things.

Fictional Narratives and Social Justice Education  115 a.: Yes, but when they were already wealthy, the Sumerians already had plenty of riches. s.: At the time, even though they didn’t have weapons, they were able to kill [one another]. a.: Yes, but why [would they], if there was no wealth? teacher: Ok, A. says what was the point in killing one another if there was no wealth? Does cruelty only depend on wealth? s.: One person had something, and another person didn’t have it, so envy arose. p. As A. said earlier, if you’re dying of hunger, it’s not cruel to kill an animal. teacher: OK, so what is cruelty? p.: I think cruelty was killing on account of envy and I think that killing animals to eat them wasn’t cruelty. e.: I think that cruelty can also be towards animals, because if you put yourself in the shoes of the animals and someone eats you, are you going to be happy?

Partly in response to the teacher’s reformulations and linking together of their different positions, the students began to reason about the notion of cruelty. Furthermore, the students proposed a reading of the concept of cruelty and being cruel that varied as a function of the situation affecting the subject, whose life might be in danger or who might be forced to compete with other subjects for their property, etc. The teacher drew on these elements to design one of the central chapters in Ian’s story; in this chapter, which mainly takes the form of a dialogue, the teacher leads the protagonist to reflect on the concept of cruelty and on its relationship with envy and the survival instinct, thanks to questions posed by another character, Geskiedenis, an elderly lady whom Ian nicknames the “wise old one”: ian: Mmm, you know I think that humans probably became cruel on account of envy, because they wanted wealth and power and weren’t content with the small things they had! geskiedenis: And so, you think humans have always been cruel? ian: I don’t know, perhaps long ago when there were no riches, they weren’t cruel. It’s also true that even though there was no wealth, humans needed to eat and so they fought for food and killed animals! geskiedenis: And do you think that killing animals for nourishment was cruelty or not? ian: No, I think it wasn’t, because they did it to survive. But nowadays, humans kill animals just for fun or to make leather and jewellery out of

116  Franco Passalacqua them and this is cruel. And then if you think about it, cruelty can also be towards animals, because if you put yourself in the shoes of the animals and someone eats you, are you going to be happy? geskiedenis: The discussion is getting interesting, Ian! You know there was a philosopher called Spinoza, who used to say that there is actually no such thing as evil, but that it depends on our point of view. For example, if a lion eats a man, that’s a bad thing for the man but great for the lion!

Geskiedenis’s contributions to the dialogue prompted Ian first to examine the anthropological origin of cruelty (“and do you think humans have always been cruel?”) and subsequently to reconsider cruelty in light of different conditions of existence (“Was killing animals for nourishment cruelty or not?”) and different perspectives. We might say that the teacher wished to draw out, through the words of her main character, the contrasting positions her students had expressed during the previous discussion, and that she used Geskiedenis’s questions to elicit further reasoning. Ian, represented in this excerpt as in dialogue with someone who urges him to reason and stimulates new developmental trajectories, was conceived by the teacher as a strategic means of tapping into the students’ thinking, while Geskiedenis’s didactic role – which might be compared with that of the teacher – was to shift the students’ learning into their zone of proximal development. As we can see, Ian’s lines are built upon the students’ own words. The teacher’s aim here was to facilitate further reflection on the part of the students and link the evolving story with elements of the thinking of philosophers from the history of Western thought. The story characters act here as mediators between the students and knowledge, or rather, between the students and two specific phases in the knowledge-construction process: their initial review of their ideas and preconceptions about the causes of human cruelty, and the subsequent linking of their arguments to the thinking of well-known philosophers, starting with Baruch Spinoza. The function of the story characters, especially the main character, is to make their learning path to date manifestly visible to them. We might say that the characters – in keeping with the cognitive psychology studies Mar and Oatley (2008), who see fictional characters as providing personified access to the minds of others and to narrative scenarios, and with the work of Cohn (1978), Palmer (2008), and Caracciolo (2014) on the narrative strategies that generate processes of empathy during narrative experience – play a role of simulated scaffolding, given that they sustain developments in the students’ learning via a sort of perceptual duplication of their thought processes and those of the students. This phenomenon whereby the students simulate the characters’ thought

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processes, known in narratology as “mental simulation” (Palmer 2008; Zunshine 2006; Caracciolo 2014) or “mind-reading” (Gallese 2005), is key to the activation of empathic modes of learning and of teaching processes that leverage the students’ strategies – which can display considerable individual variation – for constructing relationships of meaning with the characters and, through them, with knowledge. The teacher in our example also uses these empathetic strategies to foster distancing and metacognition processes, that it to say to trigger progressively greater mindfulness on the part of the students with respect to the quality of their reasoning and the transformation that it has undergone in the course of the learning process (Perkins 2009). Narrative Teaching and Learning: Empathy as a Precondition for Social Justice Pedagogy In recent years, the relationship between empathy and narrative experience has been at the centre of a broad interdisciplinary debate concerning the so-called problem of other minds, i.e., whether and how we can truly access the thinking and emotional states of others (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Goldman 2006; Gallese 2005; Hutto 2011). While narrative studies have a long tradition of examining the discursive strategies offered to narrative audiences by stories – which allow readers or viewers to put themselves in the characters’ shoes, experience the characters’ sensations, perceive the characters’ fears, and simulate the characters’ thoughts – and numerous attempts (to date inconclusive) have been made to assess the impact of reading experience on empathy (Gallagher 2012; Keen 2006), only recently have scholars of education begun to reflect on the potential of empathy on teaching design process ­(Rivoltella 2014). In this chapter, I attempt to show that the act of writing a fictional narrative may help the teacher to gain greater insight into his or her students’ thinking and to support further developments in their reasoning and learning. Hence, there is a dual empathetic mechanism at work in the teacher’s narrative writing practice. First, the teacher must simulate the students’ thinking to construct characters and narrative events that they will be drawn to engage with. Second, the students activate empathetic processes as they interact with the story. But why should we encourage this empathetic approach to didactic design? What makes didactic design through narrative writing particularly supportive of inclusive learning? How can a teacher’s engagement with the students’ reasoning promote a learning experience suitable for each student? The answers to these questions are highly pertinent to some of the prerequisites for social justice education as well as to

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aspects of the aforementioned mandate of schools to provide citizenship education, especially the inclusion of all students in the learning process, the recognition of the unique contribution of every student, and the consideration of the disagreement with other perspectives as a crucial didactic principle. For the purposes of this chapter, we assume that teachers engaging in didactic design based on the construction of fictional narratives take these prerequisites into account: • Investigating the students’ experiential world is a key precondition for building knowledge: designing learning paths via the construction of story characters and narrative events leads teachers to reflect on their students’ prior knowledge – both formal and informal – with a view to devising scenarios that are accessible to all students and have the power to arouse their curiosity and interest. While writing a story with the aim of launching a learning path about preColumbian civilizations, the teacher is naturally inclined to ask a series of questions: What do the students know about pre-Columbian, Indigenous civilizations? What civilizations have they heard of? How do they imagine that these peoples lived, in what areas of the continent of America, and what customs do they believe they had? What is left today of their Indigenous culture, their languages? What hypotheses have they formulated – or what hypotheses are they able to formulate – about these people’s disappearance and extermination? How might they imagine an Inca warrior’s encounter with Francisco Pizarro’s army on the evening of 16 November 1532 during the massacre of Cajamarca, their first time ever being confronted with horses and giant cannons? This decentring exercise by the teacher consists of focusing on the students’ experience outside of school in order to link it with the proposed learning contents and is a crucial prerequisite for truly inclusive didactics. But how can writing fictional stories facilitate this condition, which is key for all kinds of teaching, and not only narrative learning activities? First, to have evocative power, a narrative must appeal to the experiential background of its audience: “A repertoire of past experiences and values that guides people’s interaction with the environment” (Caracciolo 2014); making this experiential background emerge helps students to build connections between the world of education and their everyday lives outside of school, independently of the opportunities for knowledge construction afforded to them by their families (De Vecchi and Carmona-Magnaldi 1996). Secondly, given that learning new content – especially concepts – starts from recognition and subsequent restructuring of one’s preconceptions

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and misconceptions (Vosniadou 2008; Pozo and Gomez Crespo 2005), the use of stories at the start of a knowledge-building journey facilitates this process of conceptual change and reinforces students’ progressively developing capacity for abstraction, allowing them to distinguish between opinion and informed knowledge (Sensoy and DiAngelo 2017). Narrative writing helps the teacher to decide how best to support this transformation of the students’ prior knowledge, how to facilitate its emergence in as rich and detailed a form as possible, and subsequently how to formalize it. • Leading students to construct an independent and meaningful relationship with knowledge by designing a narrative based on learners’ prior knowledge and experience not only acts as a bridge between school and non-formal knowledge but also makes learning a meaningful experience because it “relates knowledge to the student’s total persona” (De Vecchi and Carmona-Magnaldi 1996, 22). Furthermore, the fact that the students experience empathy with story characters and immerse themselves in the narrative scenarios helps them to form a deep and meaningful bond with the knowledge they are acquiring; indeed, narrative experience – whether reading or listening – is a form of embodied knowledge with both cognitive and perceptual/sensory dimensions (Noë 2004; Gallese 2005; O’Regan, Myin, and Noë 2005). Immersion in narrative scenarios is a form of situated learning (Robbins and Aydede 2008) – albeit simulated in nature – which enables students to construct an authentic, as opposed to artificial and cold, relationship with the “knowledge to be learnt” (Chevallard 1985; Perrenoud 1998) and makes it easier for them to formulate direct connections between this knowledge and their everyday experience. However, reading or listening to a story is not enough for deep conceptual learning to take place; rather it represents the starting point for the gradual assimilation and abstraction of learning contents. Hence the narrative learning must be followed up with forms of distancing – via the students’ written reflections, group discussions, supplementary materials from books or other sources – designed to foster such processes of abstraction and generalisation (Rossi 2011). • Recognition of their own positioning as teachers in relation to the knowledge to be taught – having to construct a story forces teachers to choose not only the narrative events and scenarios composing the fictional piece, but also the perspective they wish to offer on the learning contents. This choice of the perspective to be brought to bear on the target knowledge is clearly bound up with the teacher’s construction of the story characters. Teachers need both to identify

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their own positioning in relation to given learning contents and recognize their own stance as one of many possible perspectives. When writing a story – for primary or secondary students or for some other level of schooling – how might a teacher frame the process of plastics recycling? Should she offer arguments for making the world “plastic free” or tell the story of a little plastic bottle from when it was manufactured until it was discarded on a derelict street? Should she describe the transformation of plastic waste from the point of view of an environmental activist or from that of a sanitation worker who nightly collects mountains of rubbish bags filled with plastic and other materials from the streets of our suburbs? From the viewpoint of a fisherman off the southern coast of Vietnam who daily contends with nets full of plastic but no fish, or from that of an urban-dwelling Western child whose only association with recycling is an image of a big machine that squashes plastic? How might the perspective of a penguin colony nesting on one of the many islands of plastic and other waste – the so-called Pacific trash vortex – that float around the Pacific Ocean help teachers and students to reflect on their relationship with environmental pollution and on their own everyday consumption of plastic? The Founding Principles of Didactic Design to Promote the Learning of All Students Narrative writing and the process of tuning into the students’ perspective as described above should not be understood as an early phase of didactic design that ends when the story is read to students; rather, they are an integral part of a flexible design process (Nikolova and Collis 1998), within which stories are constructed either for a specific teaching-learning activity or as part of a narrative learning path whereby, lesson after lesson, stories are written, or rewritten, based on input collected in the teaching-learning context, on students’ emergent perspectives and preconceptions. This approach to didactic design, informed by a heuristic-dialogic model (Cottini 2008; Stenhouse 1975) that departs to some degree from more classical models such as backwards design (Wiggins and McTighe 1995) or instructional design (Smith and Ragan 1999), allows narrative writing to be conceptualized as the construction of an open-ended screenplay that can take different forms to the extent that it listens to and embraces the world outside the school walls. In sum, this heuristic-dialogic model of didactic design – which we have seen here applied to a narrative approach – rests on four key principles that are logically interconnected:

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• Flexibility as a permanent feature of the teacher’s design work: While in the backwards design (Wiggins & McTighe 1995) and instructional design models (Gagné and Briggs 1974; Winn 1995), the variables in the teaching-learning process are both generally defined and connected to one another in a linear and preordained fashion, in the heuristic model these variables are viewed as continuously evolving and interacting, therefore, it is impossible to define them a priori (Gregory 2016). In other words, for the didactic and narrative dimensions of the story construction process to be fully activated, teachers must engage with their students “in the flesh” and discover step by step the variables pertaining to their specific environment; if there is no interaction with the teaching-learning context, the design of the story will not develop to the full of its educational potential. How – we must necessarily ask ourselves – can one allow for flexibility in teaching-learning activities and design while, at the same time, being careful to define and monitor the desired learning outcomes? The answer is by identifying learning content and objectives that are both salient to the context, adequate for this group of students, and epistemologically founded. • Selecting and narratively transforming learning content: If the structure of the learning path cannot be determined a priori, and the story is not understood as a stand-alone learning experience, but rather as part of a broad teaching-learning framework within which the teacher can take different trajectories, it is crucial for teachers to choose learning content and learning objectives that are “epistemologically founded.” That is to say a) personalized, based on independent research and study of the teacher and not merely constructed around a set curriculum or a given teaching material; b) the outcome of a process of epistemological vigilance (Chevallard 1985; Brousseau 1986) supporting identification of the conceptual nuclei of the chosen content and their narrative transformation; c) critically explored with a view to bringing to light the teachers’ own positioning and values with respect to the knowledge they intend to teach; and d) in continuity with the learners’ prior knowledge and experience so as to engage the students more effectively in the learning process. • Making learning visible so that no student will be left behind: The practice of documenting the students’ thinking in terms of their preconceptions, misconceptions, implicit theories, reasoning around a question or hypothesis, is an intrinsic component of conducting didactic design by writing fictional narratives. This work of collecting information to make the students’ learning visible (Perkins

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2009) also contributes to making inclusive learning concretely possible as well as to allowing the teacher to write stories that are tailored to a specific classroom context and to a specific learning trajectory. The teacher’s ability to capture and rework the learning data that progressively emerges from the setting and from the students’ interaction with knowledge is crucial to successful implementation of this model of didactic design and to effective leverage of the recursive dimension of narrative writing. • Teaching tailored to the individual student: The metaphor of the tailor-made suit draws attention to teachers’ responsibility to make choices that truly fit the students they have in front of them, who will differ from one class to another and from year to year, in terms of their learning styles, cultural interest, and family backgrounds. It is likely not feasible to provide customized didactic design for each individual student; but for this very reason, it is of fundamental importance to design teaching strategies that facilitate the construction of diversified learning paths, which are not modelled on a single standard procedure or on a preordained teaching structure but can adopt alternative trajectories towards the same learning goals. Writing fictional stories, like other didactic methodologies, supports this kind of inclusiveness because it allows the students to form their own connections with knowledge and allows the teacher to select and “handcraft” such opportunities for encounter. Conclusion In this chapter, I set out to show that when teachers design narrative learning experiences for their students, the act of writing, and especially the act of “putting knowledge into perspective,” they are inherently led to “handcraft” their students’ encounter with learning contents. And these encounters are crucial as they help students to acquire the perspective of a citizen – a citizen of both the world and of a specific community – and a perspective that will allow them to implement what they learn in school in facing the challenges that our society urgently requires us to address, from the effects of climate change on our and future generations to the construction of a global community to enacting radical change in tackling racial and social inequalities. In other words, the act of narrative writing places considerable onus on teachers to help their students develop critical thinking skills and bring these skills to bear on phenomena in the world around them, whether they be historical, social, biological, physical, economic, geographic, or mathematical,

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and on the relationships, as citizens of a local and global community, in which they engage with these phenomena. To do this, however, teachers who build imagination machines must engage with their own personal perspectives on the world, with the personal values that are concealed behind and within the points of view they choose to adopt and subsequently make their story characters and thereby encourage their students to adopt. Herein lies the professional challenge for teachers that I have briefly explored in this chapter. Only after thematizing their own relationship with knowledge and ways of learning about the world and only after investigating the origins of their own assumptions about teaching and learning and the impact of their own social and cultural background can teachers design learning experiences that are coherent with the learning objectives and citizenship goals they wish to pursue. Without this tirelessly critical gaze on the part of teachers, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to promote the conscious practice of active citizenship and democratic values that schools are mandated to instil in students in order to help inspire them to enact social change. Questions for Reflection: 1 It is truly possible to promote active citizenship and social justice education – say, to fully allow students to learn critically and to be able to deliberate in their public life – in a non-democratic learning environment such as school? 2 How can narrative writing help teachers to become so passionate about and critical of the knowledge they wish to teach that they will present it to students in a way that is engaging and multifaceted as opposed to dogmatic? 3 How can narrative experience help students, regardless of their social, cultural, and economic backgrounds, to have an authentic access to formal knowledge and to offer them different perspectives that deeply engage with disciplinary contents? BIBLIOGRAPHY Audigier, François. 2000. Basic Concepts and Core Competencies for Education for Democratic Citizenship. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publications. –  2007. “L’éducation à la citoyenneté dans ses contradictions. ” Revue internationale d’éducation de Sèvres 44:24–35. Balibar, Étienne. 2001. Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple. Paris: La Découverte.

124  Franco Passalacqua – 2012. Cittadinanza. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Brousseau, G. 1986. “Foundations and Methods of the Didactics of the Mathematics.” Researches in Didactics of the Mathematics 7:33–115. Bruner, Jerome. 1987. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 54:11–32. –  1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1): 1–21. Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Chevallard, Yves. 1985. La transposition didactique. Du savoir enseignant au savoir enseigné. Grenoble: La Pensée Sauvage. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cottini, Lucio. 2008. Progettare la didattica: modelli a confronto. Rome: Carocci. Dahlberg, Gunilla, Peter Moss, and Alan Pence. 1999. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Postmodern Perspectives. London: Falmer Press. https://books.google.dk/books/about/Beyond_Quality_in_Early _Childhood_Educat.html?id=b4WRAgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book _description&redir_esc=y. De Vecchi, Gérard, and Nicole Carmona-Magnaldi. 1996. Aiutare a costruire le conoscenze. Florence: La Nuova Italia. –  2002. Nicole. Faire construire des savoirs. Paris: Hachette. Dewey, John. 1936. “Characteristics and Characters: Kinds and Classes.” Journal of Philosophy 33 (10): 253–61. Gagné, Robert M., and Leslie J. Briggs. 1974. Principles of Instructional Design. Oxford: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. 2nd ed. Milton Park, UK: Routledge. https://www.academia.edu/206868 /Gallagher_S_and_Zahavi_D_2008_The_Phenomenological_Mind_2nd _Ed_2012. Gallagher, Shaun. 2012. “Empathy, Simulation, and Narrative.” Science in Context 25 (3): 355–81. Gallese, Vittorio. 2005. “Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4:23–48. Goldman, A.I. 2006. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx .doi.org/10.1093/0195138929.001.0001 Gregory, Gayle H. 2016. Teacher as Activator of Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Hutto, Daniel D. 2011. Review of The Extended Mind, ed. Richard Menary. Analysis 71 (4): 785–7. https://philpapers.org/rec/HUTTEM. Keen, Suzanne. 2006. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative 14 (3), 207–36. Honneth, Axel. 1992. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fictional Narratives and Social Justice Education  125 Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. 2008. “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (3): 173–92. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi /full/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x. Martinand, Jean-Louis. 1983. “Questions pour la recherche: la référence et le possible dans les activités scientifiques scolaires.” In Recherche en didactique de la physique: les actes du premier atelier international, edited by G. Delacôte and A. Tiberghien, 227–49. Paris: Editions du CNRS. Meirieu, Philippe. 2004. Faire l’école, faire la classe. Paris: ESF. MIUR. 2012. Indicazioni nazionali per il curricolo della scuola dell’infanzia e del primo ciclo di istruzione. Rome: Le Monnier. Nicolopoulou, Ageliki. 2007. “The Interplay of Play and Narrative in Children’s Development: Theoretical Reflections and Concrete Examples.” In Play and Development: Evolutionary, Sociocultural, and Functional Perspectives, edited by A. Göncü and S. Gaskins, 247–73. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Nikolova, Iliana, and Betty Collis. 1998, “Flexible Learning and Design of Instruction.” British Journal of Educational Technology 29 (1): 59–72. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. O’Regan, J. Kevin, Erik Myin, and Alva Noë. 2005. “Skill, Corporality and Alerting Capacity in an account of Sensory Consciousness.” Progress in Brain Research 150:55–68. http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/cons+cog /cc_oregan.htm. Palmer, Alan. 2008. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Perkins, David. 2009. Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Perrenoud, Philippe. 1998. “La transposition didactique à partir de pratiques: des savoirs aux compétence.” Revue des sciences de l’éducation 24:487–514. Pozo, Juan Ignacio. 1999. “Más allá del cambio conceptual: el aprendizaje de la ciencia como cambio representacional.” Enseñanza de las ciencias: revista de investigación y experiencias didácticas 17:513–20. Pozo, Juan Ignacio, and M.A. Gomez Crespo. 2005. “The Embodied Nature of Implicit Theories: The Consistency of Ideas About the Nature of Matter.” Cognition and Instruction 23 (3): 351–87. Rancière, Jacques. 1995. La Mésentente. Politique et philosophie. Paris: Galilée. Ritchhart, Ron, M. Church, and K. Morrison. 2011. Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Ritchhart, Ron, and David Perkins. 2008. “Making Thinking Visible.” Educational leadership 65 (5): 57–61. Rivoltella, P. Cesare. 2014. La previsione. Neuroscienze, apprendimento, didattica. Brescia, Italy: La Scuola.

126  Franco Passalacqua Robbins, Philip, and Murat Aydede, eds. 2008. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rossi, P.Giuseppe. 2011. Didattica enattiva. Complessità, teorie dell’azione, professionalità docente. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Sensoy, Özlem, and DiAngelo, Robin. 2017. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education. 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press. Shulman, Lee S. 1986. “Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching.” Educational Researcher 15 (2): 4–14. Smith, Patricia L., and Tillman J. Ragan. 1999. “An Introduction to Instructional Design.” In Instructional Design, edited by P.L. Smith and T.J. Ragan, 3–16. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Stenhouse, Lawrence. 1975. An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London: Heinemann. Torney-Purta, Judith, Rainer Lehmann, Hans Oswald, and Wolfram Schulz. 2001. Citizenship and Education in Twenty-eight Countries. Civic Knowledge and Engagement at Age Fourteen. Amsterdam: IEA. United Nations. 2015. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. United Nations Resolution A. RES/70/1, New York. Van Oers, Bert. 2007. “Helping Young Children to Become Literate: The Relevance of Narrative Competence for Developmental Education.” European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 15 (3): 299–312. Vosniadou, Stella, ed. 2008. International Handbook of Research on Conceptual Change. New York: Routledge. –  2011. “Reframing the Classical Approach to Conceptual Change: Preconceptions, Misconceptions and Synthetic Models.” In Second International Handbook of Science Education, edited by B. Fraser, K. Tobin, and C.J. McRobbie, 119–30. Dordrecht: Springer. Wiggins, G., and J. McTighe. 1998. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Winn, William. 1995. “Instructional Design and Situated Cognition. Paradox or Partnership.” In Instructional Design: A Reconsideration, edited by B.B. Seels, 159–70. Englewood, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

9 Teaching Mental Illness through Film and Film through Mental Illness tobias dietrich

Introduction Mental illness is a social category that still hinders people in their everyday life. Not because they are labelled and excluded – at least not only – but because mental illness is still something that is considered from a primarily biomedical point of view, which still follows the logic that illness is something that needs to be cured, or that gives you the right for medical and psychological treatment; that is, it is something that diverts from normal. Mental illness can be chronical, it can be non-­ curable, it can even be something that affects us in everyday life, not only in clinical encounters. Pushing illness into the clinical realm, however, conceals that illness and health are poles of a spectre on which we all oscillate (Antonovsky 1987). Instead of pushing illness away from life experience, Antonovsky’s model enables us to understand illness as a not-to-be-eliminated part of our life, as something we all will encounter in one way or another. The question therefore is not only what this illness is, and how we can recognize it, see it, and battle it, but how do we understand it and from which contextual baselines do we encounter it. What is the political, social, historical, and cultural background that modulates our experience, that – according to Foucault – made it possible for our view on mental illness to emerge, that build the ground base on which medical and psychological theories can make their deductions (Foucault 2015, 89).1 This particular question of how cannot be rendered in medical terms or psychological explanations, as this interrogative mode implies aesthetic terminology and formal-orientated descriptions. Before we start to clear out or realign something, we should aim to characterize our relation to it, what it means to us. The appropriate methodology therefore seems to be provided by the humanities and visual culture in particular, for they seek to explore our relationship to

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the visually organized world, as they offer concepts that take into account the wider contexts in their historical and aesthetic development. Whereas film studies has been developed through categories of difference in terms of gender and sexual orientation, ethnicity, social class, and disability – film studies is one of the first academic disciplines that both originated with and informed feminist theory – mental illness as social category has only been part of the discussion from the perspective of discrimination and stigmatization. Mental illness has not been extensively surveyed as an aesthetic problem because it often risks being traced back to clinical concepts. Anna Jamieson’s (2020) recent meta survey draws together the perils of statically diagnosing historical and fictional figures, coming to the conclusion that “thinking about our own subjective bias and unconscious attempts to frame certain individuals as patients, sufferers, agents, or survivors – all with specific conditions, disorders, and emotions in tow – allows us to uncover whether we employ various diagnoses to better suit our conclusions and politics, celebrating or rejecting specific illnesses in favour of others” (Jamieson 2020). What follows, hence, is an understanding of mental illness that is linked to an individual who is afflicted for various and possibly unknowable reasons. What is forgotten is its social and political impact, because as long as one person is suffering from mental illness, with its consequences in established forms of discrimination and exclusion, we all are in peril of this experience. Teaching film is an excellent method to sensitize people to the ways in which we compartmentalize others; to help us see the structures of our society. Yet teaching film is more than analysing stylistic means and emphasizing historic canons; it is an exercise in questioning prefiguration and circumstances that modulate our experience of reality. It is analysing how societal, ideological, scientific, political, religious, and economical ways are being articulated, and shedding light on the bigger contexts behind meaning. A positive educational practice, for me, is thus constituted by both giving voice to students who experience social injustice in the context of mental health and helping others to put their own actions and behaviours into context. Teaching social justice as a historical concept allows us to see that prior political and scientific battles weren’t a given, but dependent on historical, sociocultural, and political circumstances and that, therefore, we are capable and responsible to shape and reflect our own determinants and the society we want to live in. I use audiovisual media for its capability to reveal these structures and to connect people, and I teach its mechanisms to make people understand the specific influence cinematic representations have on our understanding of mental health. Hence, my task as a

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film studies scholar and instructor is not to understand which or why illness is happening, but to contribute to the holistic comprehension of mental illness that exceeds clinical theory and subjective biases, and applies to other realms of life experience. If we were to analyse cinematic portrayals based on the potential of right or wrong representations of people with mental illness, we would be stuck within the binary order of medical theory and would get lost within its static conflict between the commitments of political correctness of normativity and so-called deviation. And we would be stuck because we could never get beyond the medical construction of reality, thus reproducing the problematic process of stigmatization and discrimination in the media – an academic and pedagogical dead end that most media scholars in different disciplines of the last four decades tended to navigate themselves into. Their arguments that it is necessary to challenge stigmatization and to change public awareness are noteworthy and highly important. Yet these results also remain biased and unilateral. Moreover, mental illness differs from chronic diseases in terms of complexity of reasons and factors that still are not grasped completely by medicine, of the experience of felt infinite struggle, instead of an experience of limitedness and of its corporeal or experiential manifestation – mental illness defies representation, another conflict that is not to be solved by clinical theories, but by means of visual culture. So, instead of asking what the film does wrong, I am going to present three interventions from my educational, academic, and activist work that shed light on what film can make right with regards to not ­portraying but reflecting and conveying mental illness. In this chapter I will reflect on employing filmic analytical instruments and methods to raise awareness and help students and audiences develop an understanding of both clinical content, formal conditions, and aesthetic representation. Originating from my work within the humanities, this chapter is addressed to campaign workers and cultural mediators who use film and the arts media reflectively to raise awareness for mental health and create first steps of accessibility to a field that affects all of us. Curating Depression As a community organizer, I curated film screenings entitled Depri-­ Dienstag (Doom Tuesdays, or Depressive Tuesdays) that took on depression and mood disorder between the poles of clinical statements and cinematic experience. The film series was open to the general public and also accompanied by a university film course entitled Depression and Affective Disorders between Clinical and Everyday Life Forms of

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Experience. It comprised fictional and documentary films, conventional narratives, experimental and essayistic approaches. I started this program to open up a conversation on depression in the media that is not unilaterally informed, but rather combines approaches of support services, psychiatric aid, and self-care groups with cinematic concerns to get a bigger perspective. The film series pursued two goals. On the one hand, it sought to inform wider audiences about depression, for which we collaborated with guiding local social and psychiatric institutions, such as the Bremer Bündnis gegen Depression/Stiftung Deutsche Depressionshilfe (a local branch of the German Depression Support Foundation), GAPSY (Ambulant Psychiatric Service), and the Institute for Public Health and Nursing Research at the University of Bremen. On the other hand, I wanted to open up the discussion about the impact of health and illness on cultural and social life and vice versa. That is why guests from this field of work, such as KulturAmbulanz Bremen (a place of learning, commemorating, and creativity at the intersection of health, education, and the arts), the humanities, and the media were also invited. These and other partners were involved because we considered it necessary and indispensable to discuss the topic with the audience from a professionally balanced and well-informed point of view. The discussions in the first half of the program also focused on perspectives on psychic crises as the expression of a crisis in European society. For example, the screened films dealt with reliability in science (Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, 2011; see full filmography below) or with generational separation caused by psychosis or postwar exile (Maria Bäck’s Mamma Är Gud [Mother Is God, 2014], and Kathy Leichter’s Here One Day [2012]). These films reflected their circumstances of being made under pressure from production companies during the global financial crisis of 2007–8, which is thematized in the plot (the Dardenne brothers’ Deux jours, une nuit [Two Days, One Night, 2014]; see Dietrich 2019); or they tell the story of a stigmatized girl fighting for her sovereignty and independence – a story that is not coincidentally set and made in Catalonia (Carla Simón’s Estiu 1993 [Summer 1993, 2017]). The second half of the program was dedicated to forms of detention as effect and cause of mental illness, comprising compelling documentaries, such as French photographer Raymond Depardon’s 12 jours (12 Days, 2018), Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei’s Royahaye dame sobh (Starless Dreams, 2016), to animated articulations of isolation and loss, as in Between Sand and Tides (Rui Fan Wang, 2016) or Lima (Afshin Koshanbakht and Vahid Jafari, 2015), and engaging dramas like Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011), The Fire Within (Louis Malle, 1963), or Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012). With these perspectives,

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illness obtained a different, reflective meaning. This film program was organized in collaboration with the local Bremen community cinema, CITY 46, with monthly screenings from April 2018 until February 2019. Based in the German 1970s cinema movement, this community cinema prioritizes films thematically selected and dedicates its work to current social and political discourses, so that its program ranges from old and silent films to classical, political, and experimental film forms. Understood as its educational mandate, this cinema also invites filmmakers and experts, hosting school screenings or educational accompaniments. Linked to my university film course, we analysed the screened films’ content and form, contextual inscriptions, and conventions, contextualized them, and provided wider access through theoretical readings by Alain Ehrenberg (1998), Byung-Chul Han (2015), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield (2007), Julia Kristeva (2007), W.J.T. Mitchell (2012) and others (see bibliography below). Both the post-screening talks and the in-class discussions revealed a deep need for articulating inner thoughts on the films and in public beliefs. In what follows, I will outline one analytical exercise that went very well and even surprised the students to see how deep film can go. Following the screening of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), we had an enriching discussion about the film in general, its metaphors, its dialectics, the narrative arrangement, and the meaning of depression for the protagonist, Justine (Kirsten Dunst). I then sought to push the class a bit further to conduct a joint in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the first scene, when the audience gets a first grasp of Justine’s condition – it is revealed throughout the duration of the film, and equally well exposed in its profound psychical vehemence. This scene shows Justine at her wedding table together with her groom (Alexander Skarsgård), her spiteful and egocentric parents (Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt), and her sister and brother-in-law, who orchestrate the wedding party (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kiefer Sutherland). It quickly becomes apparent in Justine’s inward gaze that she is hiding something behind her smile. After a first rewatching, the students got to task in analysing the behaviour of the six figures. For this, I divided the class into six groups, one for each character, and let them watch the scene again. The groups discovered the relations between Justine and her reserved and cynical mother, her demanding sister, and subdued yet aggressive brother-in-law, and noted that both her father and the groom appeared more absent. We ended up agreeing that depression is portrayed here as something that emerges less in a clinical than in familiar context, which characterizes the relatives in their contradictory function as both possible reason and emotional support for mental illness. Thus, the students received

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a deeper understanding of the mechanism of mental illness in the social interactions and expectations of the self. Through close watching, the class understood how the freely moving, anthropomorphic handheld camera and editing created intimacy and isolation simultaneously and identified this conflict as a formal transcription of an expression of depression. As a whole, one of the film program’s most compelling results (and one that requires further elaboration) was the contrariness of emancipating analysis from clinical language and theory and getting to the edge of articulation when describing depression in its cultural and aesthetic extents. This showed that neither public discourse nor film scholarly instruments possess a proper terminology and modes of expression of mental illness, although there is more to experience by way of audiovisual representation. Exploring the Aesthetic Terminology of Mental Illness I framed this conflict in the title of my film course: History and Aesthetics of Mental Illness in Film. Hitherto, film history had been constructing mental illness as a concept accompanied by knowledge from backgrounds that are informed mythologically (silent film), psychoanalytically (1920s–40s), anti-psychiatrically (1950–70s), and neoliberally (since the 1980s) – the latter referring back to positive psychology and new therapeutic approaches of empowerment and self-agency (Wulff 2008). Of course, the periods cannot be clearly separated and are still complementing one another. Long before the anti-psychiatric movement, there were films both in Hollywood as in European cinema deprecating psychiatric institutions (Anatole Litvak’s 1948 drama The Snake Pit, or French director Georges Franju’s La tête contre les murs [Head against the Wall, 1959]). It would be too simple to say that these scientific movements informed the overall representation of mental illness during a certain period; in fact, they have been necessary to make the subject easily understandable to an audience that is part of a certain historic context. So the question is, how can we de-clinicize the history of mental illness? What methodological tools and concepts can we use? What do we need to describe the object of investigation on its own terms? How can we render our knowledge watertight, and what do we need to do in order to avoid tautological definitions and scientific nullity? As a film scholar, I strive to propose and teach the aesthetic functions as means to confront these questions with an elementary toolkit that is useful to describe and make visible the representational codes that shape the public image of mental illness. The title of my current film course, History and Aesthetics of Mental Illness in Film, therefore must not be understood

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as unifying the histories and aesthetics of mental illness, but opposing them, and thus considering them contradictive. I do this by selecting a corpus of films that approach or employ images of insanity with an artistic or expressive interest that will be juxtaposed with films closer to clinical descriptions in order to understand the mechanisms of both ways of narration. Thus, this selection differs from the Depri-Dienstag filmography in its historical and cultural-­geographic extents (see the film list below). The class is supposed to deduce aesthetic and historical perspectives from the film examples in combination with readings on mental illness and more vague concepts of madness in society, cinema, and culture (Artaud 1958; Foucault 2006; Fuery 2004; Johnstone 2018; Sontag 1988). In order to carve out the aesthetic dimension of mental illness, we need to consider it in its function that lies in informing our knowledge of film practice and perception. Not only do films reflect their generated nature at the conversion with peaks of mental illness, as do The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (directed by Robert Wiene, 1920), Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), Images (Ro­bert Altman, 1972), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), Ich seh Ich seh (Goodnight Mommy; Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2014), Le secret de la chambre noire (Daguerrotype; Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2016), or Postcards from London (Steve McLean, 2018), referring back to the photographic medium and extending meaning in a formal, non-linguistic dimension, they also employ mental illness to think about film itself, the conditions of our perception, the organization of experience and formal prefiguration of representational processes. So we need to ask not only what we learn about mental illness from film, but also the other way around, what do we learn about film production and cinematic reception from witnessing mental illness. For example, Postcards from London is about a young British homosexual named Jim (Harris Dickinson) who moves to the city and joins a delicate group of sex workers who are requested by mostly bourgeois men to talk about fine arts as a call for substance in a superficial world and as the only erotic stimulation. In this new art world, Jim’s rare mental condition, the Stendhal syndrome, manifests itself every time he is confronted with what they call “real” art. He fades in front of the “masterly perfection” of artworks and starts to dream about the artwork. Staged as a tableau vivant with reflective dialogues on art, the film’s daydreams let Jim become art in the actual moment of his illness, opening up a form of rethinking the relation between medial and psychological representations of mental illness. More precisely, Jim finds himself several times in a scene in which he is modelling for the artist of the painting he just blacked out to; arguing with the artist about the political implications and aesthetic consequences of his creative decisions

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and artist-muse-hierarchies alike, Jim comes into conflict with his assigned role as model. As we can see here, the state of being mentally ill becomes a reflective space on the creation of art: in this state, a static painting is transferred into an animated tableau vivant and functions as a commentary on the narrated story since many of the conflicts of the artists and other co-models deal with Jim’s interaction with his clients and intimates; yet even more, this state is connected to the essentials of film itself by its conflict over the possibilities of stillness and movement. In Postcards from London, mental illness is assigned to a complex and improbable meta-level, opening up a heterotopic platform of cinema’s discussion about its own means, that is, about particular means that are constructing the audience’s experience of mental illness. Consolidation in the Academic Field This class was also designed to prepare the students for the attendance at the 25th International Bremen Film Conference, which I would like to flag as the third example of my academic work. Conducted from 5 to 8 May 2021, the conference was entitled “Mind/Screen: Mental Illness and Film” and is an annual cooperation between the University of Bremen and the CITY 46 cinema, initiated in 1995 to address different subjects related to cinema and society. The symposium brought together academic talks and film screenings, filmmaker Q&As, and audience discussions (for more, see Dietrich and Pauleit 2022). The format provided the requirements for place-based learning and for this reason is unparalleled. It presented a critical selection of rare and historic films that can otherwise hardly be seen in a media- and material-­ compatible way – that is, projections on a big screen, with decent sound quality, an introductory note, and a post-screening discussion – e.g., the long-lost Japanese avant-garde silent film Kurutta Ichipeiji (A Page of Madness; Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1926), Dialogues with Madwomen (Allie Light, 1994), or the autobiographical documentary Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003). Settled between an academic approach and a public/community outreach orientation, it is open to both academic and non-academic cinema-going audiences. This edition aimed to interrelate different theoretical and methodological approaches and perspectives on mental illness in its relation to audiovisual media in order to sharpen its terminology, classifications, and aesthetic framing. The goal was to perform an inventory of the current transdisciplinary positions in a cinematic tradition that reveals and keeps on contouring limitations of scientific and clinical disciplines of mental illness. Furthermore, we expected a funded discourse

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on sharpening the languages oscillating between different concepts of description, construction, categorization, and operationalization of the topic for epistemological purposes. The conference considered film as discourse per se because its strength lies in making visible, archiving, reconciling, and reflecting other discourses and their negotiation processes. Film offers the possibility to shed light on fundamental practices employed by other disciplines to capture their practice of exposing, comparing, differentiating – all originally aesthetic practices that cannot be described by biomedical, psychological, or sociological instruments. The conference was linked to my dissertation entitled “Aesthetic Dimensions of Mental Illness,” in which I analyse the cinematic forms of portraying, reflecting, negotiating, and conveying mental illness through the critical close readings of a corpus of auteur films that approach mental illness with a reflective, artistic interest. Conclusion Film is capable of expressing complicated feelings and contradictory states of being, and by witnessing the journeys of fictious characters or protagonists in a documentary or experimental film, people afflicted get the opportunity to find words for their own inner states. Teaching mental illness in film is an important task because film studies is not yet fully aware of the topic. Surveys in media studies either see this subject generally from a medical or moral point of view. Although both claims have their raison d’être, focusing only on them neglects an essential part of the discussion: that this is film, a piece of art beyond simplistic meaning-making, and causal thinking, an aesthetic construct that brings along its own regulatory systems, its autonomous modes of expression and meaning-making, and its own context. Either one could consider these idiosyncrasies as ignorant of clinical “facts” – or one could acknowledge these characteristics as contributions of equal value to a process by which the clinical dimension becomes framed, multilayered, and understood from socio-historical and cultural perspectives, and therefore questioned for its claim to truth. Instead of the attempt of the clinical discourse to diminish illness, the aesthetic discourse can unveil the disease (Kristeva 2007, 237) and enable us to capture the subject matter in its complexity and contrariness. This approach is expected to help those afflicted with mental illness who have difficulties accepting their affliction as illness. Hence, in order to obtain a bigger picture of the mental illness imaginary, teaching mental illness through film needs to arise out of the focus on the filmic medium as a place where we are brought together with different threads of how the

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information of mental illness is organized. Questions that help carving out those threads in film analytical exercises could include: • In which context does mental illness appear (familiar, political, medical, plot or genre related)? • Who is in control of the narrative (physician, therapist, patient, ­family member, director)? • What are the overall social structures in which the characters ­encounter mental illness (religious, economical, neoliberal, povertyor work field–related, educational)? • When does mental illness become central or even essential to the plot or character development and to what extent is this point linked to a cinematic form, to its limits or possibilities? • Does mental illness function as metaphor, and if so, what for? • Is it employed to oppose different world views? How would they be negotiated? • What stylistic means are used to portray and convey the experience of mental illness? Does their use differ from conventional functions? • Can blank spaces or ellipses be identified, and if so, what is their meaning? For a wider and conclusive discussion, questions have been proven instructive, such as: • How do you evaluate a film’s potential to observe, show, and ­accompany the characters and plot development? • What methods can help us describe and reflect on films watched? • To what extent is a film’s audiovisual language able to bring ­together people who have mental illness and those who don’t? • What boundaries and limitations can a cinematic perspective have? More than finding out stylistic forms and their conventions, studying film is about testing possibilities and developing an attitude towards the things and people one is addressing. For students, it is important to look behind the mechanisms that produce and reproduce the structures of a world they were born into. Using the example of mental illness, categories of difference can be analysed, understood, and questioned in the context of everyday life. Mental illness needs to be considered both at the intersection of identity politics and in its particularity of its contradictory nature and its potential to challenge a rational perspective of the world as the only truth. Watching and analysing mental illness is therefore particularly useful for many young students, as it allows them

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to acknowledge their own transition from the interest in a fascinating object to a sophisticated stand on how we encounter the environment in general and why we are intrigued by it. Acknowledging this shift in one’s own inner stance enables students to engage with their own experiences and identities or with those of others who have experienced mental illness, from a different perspective, and allows us all to develop a deeper understanding of social justice. As my projects have shown, part of my pedagogy is to take students out of the academic course setting and let them engage with more diverse cinema audiences and post-screening discussions. This ideally helps them to both bear and relate to first-hand testimonies and to elaborate their own speaking about mental illness. By addressing the cinematic mechanisms that not only form but also expose and mirror our understanding of mental illness and identity politics, I ask the students to transfer their trained analytical skills to their very environment, to the social mechanisms that create their encounter with the mentally ill – be it on screen, in the street, or in the mirror. Questions for Reflection: 1 How do you evaluate a film’s potential to observe, show, and accompany the characters and plot development? 2 What methods can help us describe and reflect on films watched? 3 In how far is a film’s audio-visual language able to bring together people with and without mental illness? 4 What boundaries and limitations can a cinematic perspective have? NOTE 1 “Foucault’s central and most original thesis is the following paradox: ‘that which is made, the object, is to be explained by what the making has been at every moment in history; we are mistaken when we imagine that the making, the practice, is to be explained on the basis of that which is made’” (Djaballah 2008, 221). BIBLIOGRAPHY Antonovsky, Aaron. 1987. Unraveling the Mystery of Health: How People Manage Stress and Stay Well. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

138  Tobias Dietrich Bödeker, Alina, and Katrin Brinkhoff. 2003. “Der Blick in die Köpfe. Darstellungen psychischer Andersartigkeit im Spielfilm: Eine psychologisch-filmwissenschaftliche Analyse.” In Film- und Fotoanalyse in der Erziehungswissenschaft: Ein Handbuch, edited by Yvonne Ehrenspeck and Burkhard Schäffer, 183–201. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Dietrich, Tobias. 2019. “Depression as Aesthetic Answer to the Socioeconomic Crisis in Two Days, One Night.” In Contemporary European Cinema: Crisis Narratives and Narratives in Crisis, edited by Ana Corbalán and Betty Kaklamanidou, 106–18. London: Routledge. Dietrich, Tobias, and Winfried Pauleit, eds. 2022. Kopf/Kino: Psychische Erkrankung und Film. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Djaballah, Marc. 2008. Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. New York: Routledge. Ehrenberg, Alain. 1998. The Fatigue of Being Oneself: Depression and Society. Paris: Odile Jacob. Foucault, Michel. (1961) 2006. History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge. –  (1954) 2015. Psychologie und Geisteskrankheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Frank, Arthur W. 2013. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fuery, Patrick. 2004. Madness and Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Spectatorship and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Burnout Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horvitz, Allan V., and Jerome C. Wakefield. 2007. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hunsaker Hawkins, Anne, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, eds. 2006. Teaching Literature and Medicine. New York: Modern Language Association. Jamieson, Anna. 2020. “The Perils and Possibilities of Retrospective Diagnosis.” The Polyphony. 4 August. https://thepolyphony. org/2020/08/04/the-perils-and-possibilities-of-retrospective-diagnosis/. Johnstone, Fiona. 2018. “Manifesto for a Visual Medical Humanities.” 31 July. https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2018/07/31/manifesto -for-a-visual-medical-humanities/?utm_source=feedburner&utm _medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+medical-humanities%2Fblogs +%28Latest+from+Medical+Humanities+blog%29. Kristeva, Julia. (1987) 2007. Schwarze Sonne: Depression und Melancholie. Frankfurt: Brandes + Apsel. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2012. Seeing Madness: Mental Illness, Media, and Visual Culture. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Sontag, Susan. 1965. “Marat/Sade/Artaud.” Partisan Review 32: 210–19. – 1988. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Teaching Mental Illness through Film  139 Woods, Angela, Felicity Callard, and William Viney. 2015. “Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks.” Medical Humanities 41 (1): 2–7. Wulff, Hans Jürgen. 2008. “Individualisierung des Leidens: Motive und Stoffe der Psychiatrie im Film seit 1980.” Medienobservationen. http://www .medienobservationen.lmu.de/artikel/kino/kino_pdf/wulff_psychiatrie.pdf.

Filmography Depri-Dienstag 12 Days/12 jours, directed by Raymond Depardon, France 2017, 86 min., documentary. Between Sand and Tides, Rui Fan Wang, Singapore 2016, 4 min., animation. Burnout Society/Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, Isabella Gresser, Germany 2015, 61 min., essay film. The Fire Within/Le feu follet, Louis Malle, France 1963, 108 min., drama. Here One Day, Kathy Leichter, USA 2012, 76 min., autobiographical documentary. Lima, Afshin Koshanbakht and Vahid Jafari, Iran 2015, 14 min., animation. Melancholia, Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany 2011, 135 min., drama. The Middle of the Night Is the Beginning of the Day / Die Mitte der Nacht ist der Anfang vom Tag, Michaela Kirst, Germany 2016, 78 min., documentary. Mother Is God/Mamma Är Gud, Maria Bäck, Denmark 2014, 30 min., autobiographical documentary. Oslo, August 31st/Oslo, 31. august, Joachim Trier, Norway 2011, 96 min., drama. Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell, USA 2012, 122 min., drama. Starless Dreams/Royahaye dame sobh, Mehrdad Oskouei, Iran 2016, 76 min., documentary. Summer 1993/Estiu 1993, Carla Simón, Spain 2016, 94 min., drama. Two Days, One Night/Deux jours, une nuit, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, France, Italy 2014, 90 min., drama.

History and Aesthetics of Mental Illness in Film 12 Days/12 jours, directed by Raymond Depardon, France 2017, 86 min., documentary. Aguirre, the Wrath of God/Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, Werner Herzog, Germany, Mexico, Peru 1972, 91 min., drama. Almayer’s Folly/La Folie Almayer, Chantal Akerman, Belgium, France 2011, 127 min., drama. Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, USA 1979, 183 min., drama.

140  Tobias Dietrich Arirang, Kim Ki-duk, South Korea 2011, 100 min., autobiographical documentary. Gaslight, George Cukor, USA 1944, 114 min., drama. Head Against the Wall / La tête contre les murs, Georges Franju, France 1959, 95 min., drama. Images, Robert Altman, UK, USA 1972, 101 min., drama. Mother Is God/Mamma Är Gud, Maria Bäck, Denmark 2014, 30 min., autobiographical documentary. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade/Marat/ Sade, Peter Brook, UK 1967, 116 min., drama. Melancholia, Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany 2011, 135 min., drama. Model Childhood, Tim Mercier, UK 2018, 19 min., autobiographical documentary/animation. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, Werner Herzog, USA, Germany 2009, 91 min., drama. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Miloš Forman, USA 1975, 133 min., drama. A Page of Madness/Kurutta Ichipeiji, Kinugasa Teinosuke, Japan 1926, 60 min., experimental film. Red Desert/Il deserto rosso, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France 1964, 120 min., drama. Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette, USA 2003, 91 min., autobiographical documentary. Titicut Follies, Frederick Wiseman, USA 1967, 84 min., documentary. A Woman Under the Influence, John Cassavetes, USA 1974, 155 min., drama.

10 Future Perfect: Teaching the Power of Emancipatory Imagination nina belmonte

Introduction How do we move from diagnosing injustice to building a just society? Is this possible without an initial leap of creative imagination aimed not at what is, but what could be? In other words, what might be the role of imagination in teaching social justice? This chapter will make a case for the critical responsibility and ultimate value of creative imagining for teaching social justice. Such an imaginative exercise is rare, indeed often frowned upon, in courses in critical thinking and philosophy, but it must become an essential element in pedagogy if we are to steer a course through the crises of pandemic, war, the revelations of horrific past injustices, and world-wide social unrest. To find our way forward, we must not only look back at where we have been but imagine where we could be going. This chapter aims to convince educators to make a space alongside the identification and analyses of social injustices for imagining what justice might look like. In making this case, I do not claim to know the sufferings of others, or to speak for them. As the child of poor and immigrant parents, I am no stranger to prejudice, or the physical, emotional, and mental damage inflicted by economic hardship. As a woman of European heritage raised in the US, I am also aware of my social privilege, the great gift of my scholarship-funded education, and consequently the responsibility incumbent upon me. My intention here mirrors this double-sided perspective: I am committed to engaging in a profound and critical confrontation with our sociopolitical tradition as well as providing an opportunity to dream beyond it towards a future perfect. I will begin by setting out the responsibility of critical thinking not just to think against, but to think otherwise – i.e., its immanent responsibility to an “emancipatory moment” to guide us beyond negative

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critique towards a vision of a better society. As an illustration of how this might work in the classroom, I discuss a university course that I teach in utopian and dystopian thought. I briefly outline the course readings that provide students with a “training” in social and political imagining, then describe creative assignments that allow students to integrate the ideas generated from their studies and bring them to life, including a final assignment to imagine their own “good place” or utopia. I then present some students’ responses to the assignment’s only rule, which is also the one true ground rule of social justice: that the “good place” must be good for each and every one. “Critical” Responsibility and Creative Practice We normally think of “critical” thinking as the ability to analyse and distinguish as well as to judge, or decide. Indeed, the original Greek (kritikos from krino) means both. One classroom text currently in use, The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims, “explores the essentials of critical reasoning, argumentation, logic, and argumentative essay writing while also incorporating important topics … such as ‘inference to the best explanation,’ scientific reasoning, evidence and authority, visual reasoning, and obstacles to critical thinking” (MacDonald and Vaughan 2019, back cover). The necessity of training in these skills is incontestable. But it might not be sufficient if we are to change our society for the better. Critical thinking about justice cannot be limited to diagnostic criticism, or “fault finding” (Williams 1976, 75–6). As Michel Foucault (1997) insisted, we must move beyond “the little polemical activities that are called critique” (24). The relative benefits and harms of what is or what has been do not necessarily say anything about what could be and hopefully will have been in the future – a free and just society. True critique includes an emancipatory movement towards the future that implies the possibility of thinking otherwise. Truly critical thinking must have a sense of the future perfect. In the 1930s, Max Horkheimer proposed the idea of a “Critical Theory” – as opposed to traditional, objective-scientific theory – as an open-ended, cultural socio-economic analysis of the individual’s constitutive relationship to its world. Though the term “critical theory” would become the name for the work of all the members of the “Frankfurt School” and their descendants, the words are initially not a proper name but a description that is applicable beyond the work of specific persons. For Horkheimer, “the” critical theory (a theory that would be critical) is distinguished from “traditional” theory by 1) its immanence

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(it is not alienated or separated from socio-economic realities); 2) its incompleteness (it can never have totalizing efficiency); and 3) its emancipatory aim (its goal is not explanation or domination, but resistance, and transformation). It is this last element that articulates the responsibility to move towards social justice that is incumbent upon truly critical thinking. The critical theory, according to Horkheimer, will indeed be a “supra-disciplinary research with practical intent” (Kellner 1989, chapter 8), but it will be “dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life” (Horkheimer 1995, 199). In his essay “The Concept of Man,” and again later in a note from 1961–2 entitled “On Theory and Practice,” Horkheimer claims that the responsibility of a critical theory is already presented in Immanuel Kant’s famous essential questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? and What can I hope? The third question includes the other two while going beyond them to rebel against reality as it is. “The mind that transcendentally determines and empirically reflects the world also sees to its practical improvement” (Horkheimer 1978, 215). Thus hope – that is, an affirmingly negative relation to the present – plays a role in all critical analysis. It is absolutely imperative that critical thinking, while grounded in the analysis of reality as it is, be guided by reality as it is not yet, as it might be. Truly, the responsibility of critical thinking is first of all resistance; critique must question dominant concepts and practices and refuse to sanction things as they are. This is a responsibility to be “negative,” to be “free-from,” whose source is the self-distancing at the centre of reflective thought. But freedom-from must also be freedom-towards if we are to disenthral ourselves from the state of things as they are. Seen in this way, the emancipatory movement, as that in the name of which the present is critiqued, is inherent to critical thinking itself, not as some kind of logical ideal or blueprint to be actualized, but as an open-ended affirmation that interests and challenges us and pulls us ever forward. As Adorno (2005) said, it is only a thinking “whose results are not stipulated” that can find a way out. Such an imaginative thinking is itself a form of practice. Seen in this way, creative imagining is not an extra-intellectual capacity, a tool to be used for moral instruction, therapeutic expression, or training in problem solving (though related to all of these) but rather an integral aspect of thinking itself, thought’s direction, “the source of knowledge, not its imitation” (Sutton-Smith 1988, 7). Indeed, understanding and discovery cannot be strictly logical; if so, every new thought would be immediately accessible through deduction or induction. On the other hand, imagination cannot be solely fanciful. Rather, creative thinking always involves a context (Barrow 1988, 89) and a

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familiarity (Alexander and Shoshani 2010, 28) as well as a kind of poetic attention or “attunement” (Zwicky 2015, 6), and a break with the past that is both meaningful and unpredictable. On the basis of what is familiar, seeing it intimately and otherwise, thinking moves towards the new. Creative imagining has the structure of metaphor and the feel of a gestalt shift. It reimagines the familiar in new terms, or it imagines the unknown in terms of what is known, redescribing by reinterpreting – what Paul Ricoeur calls “interanimation” (Ricoeur 1975, Study 6). This seeing as and seeing differently is the “inspired art” of poet and philosopher alike (Ricoeur 1975, Study 1). As Aristotle put it, phantasia is what moves living beings to reach beyond what they already know (On the Soul 3.10.433a–b). Creative imagining can change the way we make sense of what we know. In her new book The Experience of Meaning, Jan Zwicky claims that we experience meaning fundamentally as “gestalt perceptions” – that is, “the apprehension of structure, whole and unmediated” – through a kind of insight rather than logical, analytical, or discursive thinking. Zwicky’s discussion includes mathematical proofs and scientific paradigms as well as poetry and philosophy, and it allows her to counter the now-dominant paradigm of verbal processing with a vision of the world as “an immense complex of subordinate and superordinate gestalts” that are “in motion.” She offers this new “grammar of thought” as an answer to, and perhaps a corrective for, the analytical, logical model of reason and the “ideal of mechanization” (2019, 32) that has contributed to the present technocracy and environmental destruction. To see a thing, a structure, or a world as an integrated whole is essential to valuing it as such. To see a familiar whole in a new way (say, through the form and possibility of a just society) can shift our experience and our valuation of the whole as well as its discreet elements. A critical imagining that reflects upon the real in an evaluative step back guided by principles of justice can affect such a shift, revealing how the familiar world might be otherwise. This shift cannot be given via instruction; it is not a skill, or information to be handed down. In the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, “the good is outside the space of facts” (Culture and Value 3e, quoted in Altieri 1990, 234). As teachers, we can only prepare the ground and point the way. Imagining the Good Place/No Place Years ago, while teaching an introductory course in political philosophy, I was struck by how eloquently students could express what was wrong with society – and how incapable they were of articulating what

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would be better. This phenomenon is perhaps a prejudice of our culture’s faith in a certain understanding of rational utility that conflates “pragmatism” with pessimism. My challenge would be to design a course that would encourage students to reimagine the real, to give them the opportunity to think and write outside of the usual frameworks and give them some direction in how to do so. The course would have to include the study of others who had attempted such a reimagination, and assignments that lifted the usual academic restraints and expectations, without encouraging nonsense. The result – which I have taught most recently as a course on philosophy and literature – is an exploration of philosophical, political, and fictional depictions of utopias and dystopias, culminating in an inclass, space/place creative design exercise, and a final creative writing assignment that asks students to explain or portray a “utopia” of their own design. I must note here that I am taking “utopia” in the sense in which Sir Thomas More first intended (in a scholarly joke with his friend Desiderius Erasmus), exploiting an ambiguity in the English transliteration of Ancient Greek (u can be eu or ou) to connote a “good place” that is “no place.” In other words, a “utopia” is a good place (not a perfect place) that need not be constrained by the limits of immediate reality. Readings for this course are designed to give students a sense of what is involved in the process of imagining a good society, and to give them a sense of what others have imagined in the past. We read More’s Utopia carefully and critically early on in the course. It is still a surprising and entertaining text and clearly demonstrates the way in which every imaginary community is generated in response to particular urgent issues of its time. Most of the other utopian examples are then paired with their dystopian parodies, to illustrate the challenges and dangers involved. Thus, Plato’s Republic is followed by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which adheres to Plato’s laudable ideals of “stability” and “justice” by means of the terrifyingly efficient mass production of humans. Excerpts from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Thomas Hobbes’s claims about humanity’s “State of Nature” are followed by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, whose children first forge and then destroy the social contract. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is followed by two relevant short stories: the image of equality as the lowest common denominator in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” and the absolute value of the singular in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” (a miraculous short story that also confronts our cynicism and our expectations from the utopia genre). Ernest Callenbach’s clever but outdated Ecotopia is

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read in conjunction with readings from Murray Bookchin and Arne Naess; and a short exercise on “technotopias” and “trans-humanism” requires students to gather examples from online, then consider a surprisingly prescient story from 1909 by E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” that describes the potential isolation and passivity arising from our dependence upon technology. These readings provide a catalogue of different approaches, along with a toolbox of social structures, and instructive negative examples, while also highlighting the difference between philosophical reasoning and creative imagining. Class discussion is free and broad spectrum, addressing the content and the context of the texts as well as their form, style, and effectiveness of expression. The texts often give rise to heated, polarized political debate that challenges students to improve their skills at listening, asking questions, and disagreeing without rancour. Late in the semester (when students are generally overwhelmed and fall behind in their reading) there is a two-day, in-class art design exercise that asks students to generate plans of ideal dwellings, neighbourhoods, and cities. This exercise gives students a chance to explore what a good place might “look like.” Upon arrival in the classroom, students are divided into groups, given paper, coloured pencils, Legos, and whatever other materials might be available, and free access to the blackboards. They are encouraged to move around, to discuss, to envision, to draw and build. Besides providing a welcome respite, this interlude encourages students to visualize the crucial relationship between ideas of social justice and the physical and natural environment. The total freedom from traditional physical and intellectual expectations of the university classroom at first disorients students, who have been taught to sit quietly and listen. But often the very act of breaking the spatial rules of the classroom results in a reconception of their sense of the environmental relations that would have to ground any just human community. The final assignment of the course – to describe/portray your own vision of a utopia – takes shape in relation to all previous course material but asks students to take risks and go further. In this assignment, all social and political structures, practices, and mores are up for examination and change. Students are granted total freedom in their choice of format and content; their project can be an essay, a play, a story, or even a video or series of paintings (with written explications). They are also encouraged to liberate themselves from the constraints of society as it is or has been – their vision of a good place can be one without marriage, without schools or fossil fuels or without money. The only limits are the limits of their imagination.

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There is, however, one stipulation – a signpost or direction. The “good place” must be considered good by every inhabitant: each and every one, however one imagines them. Which means that the pleasures and privileges of some cannot be had at the expense of others. Thus, the assignment is akin to John Rawls’s “thought experiment” in A Theory of Justice, which articulates a definition of justice as the “greatest equal liberty” (Rawls 1971, chapter 47). Rawls employs the imaginary “device” of a transcendental “original position” (a kind of unnatural state of nature) in which decisions of distributive justice are to be made behind a “veil of ignorance.” Behind this veil, “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1971, 11). The creative utopia assignment differs from Rawls’s thought experiment, however, in its positive, personal, and particular nature. Instead of abstracting particular individuals from their contexts, students are invited to reimagine the context – a context fostering not so much the “greatest equal liberties” as the reality of a functioning, just community. This is an attempt to avoid abstraction that “whitewashes” real differences of race, class, gender, sexual preference, etc. (see Mills 1998). Some Utopias I have taught this course several times now over the years at three different universities. Students generally enjoy the juxtaposition of philosophy and literature, and the creative freedom of the final project. Of course, there are always students who are unable to resist the retreat into cynicism. In every class, some students insist that they cannot imagine a utopia (often claiming the futility of the exercise) and instead create dystopias as their final projects, dystopias which are themselves interesting for what they reveal about students’ concerns and fears about the future. But there are many more positive visions, some of which have been extraordinary, and most of which fall into three general categories, which I offer here with some examples: 1 Pragmatic Visions Closely Related to Real Communities of the Present: For example, an intentional community on a private island, bought by a group of diverse but like-minded individuals. Their community is based on consensus government, equal obligation to work as well as to resources, sustainable agriculture, natural power

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sources. Or the very specific vision of an older student, who had lived in New Zealand, and imagined a possible future for that country, renamed “Aotearoa.” In this future, the Green/Maori coalition wins the election and institutes policies that build a sustainable, ecologically minded community organized on principles of mutual aide, “low growth,” spiritual awakening, and balance with nature. There is complete equality and a guaranteed minimum income. The project took the form of a research paper given by an imaginary future historian at an academic conference. The “paper” included careful political details based on actual current events such as the WAI 262 initiative (a shelved initiative put together by women). 2 Pragmatic Utopias Tied to a Particular Aspect of Justice as ­Fairness: For example, one disabled student created a community where everything was accessible for all types of disabled people, from blind librarians and waitresses to construction workers in wheelchairs. This student had severe dyslexia, so her project took the form of a video recording, composed as an online tour guide for visitors. Another student imagined a totally gender-free society, wherein all options were available to all people. There were no pronouns, even within families, and there were no gendered names (mother, father, etc.); everyone was simply referred to by their names. Family structures were many and various. They were governed by a scrupulously representative (according to race, wealth, ethnicity) council, no one majority allowed to take over. Everyone was required to work at a job for which they were best suited (decided by the community). If an individual wanted to change jobs, they were required to work and train. All work received equal wages – the only means of acquiring more wealth was to spend more time working. Taxes gathered twice yearly were redistributed equally as “allowances.” This community attempted to be ecologically just as well – all homes were constructed of renewable natural materials and were powered by wind turbines and solar panels. 3 Freely Imagined, Utopian “Science Fiction”: These more fanciful utopias are often predicated upon a faith in miraculous technological advances, or an incorruptible artificial intelligence to solve humanity’s problems. Often they are reminiscent of films or books, adapted to a social justice perspective. For example, the story of “Oaken Valley,” a small community in the Pacific Northwest, with a population of five hundred living in large domes, surrounded by gardens and wilderness and powered by geothermal heating and a windmill farm. Its people spend their days working in the arts, gardening, and maintaining the windmills. All needs come from a mechanism they call “The Maker” – a black square device

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(much like the obelisks in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey), which can break down all matter into components and rebuild it into anything. This “Maker” had destroyed all capitalist economies when it was invented, and now all people enjoy its bounty, taking part in conceiving and designing technologies and other goods to be produced (though people still value things produced by hand, or food grown the old way). Because of this situation of abundance, communities broke into smaller and smaller units, as people moved around to find like-minded fellows. The result was a global anarchist federation of tribal-like societies, whose practices of sharing all information and technologies led to peace and prosperity without governments or military (though perhaps a certain lack of privacy). Without scarcity or nations, there was no poverty, starvation, or war. Some fully imaginary communities evoke a reverential naturalism. One beautiful, poetic vision told the story of a community once wholly dependent upon technology, whose source of power stops. Those people who do not choose to stay and perish go in search of help and meet others who have also lost power and are searching. They join together and begin wandering. They are forced to live off the land. They see a bird riding the breeze and begin to follow where the wind takes it. They develop an intimate, respectful relationship to the land, remaining nomadic and without a “footprint,” on the model of some Indigenous North American communities. One of the most exciting aspects of teaching this course is watching students become more engaged with the course material as they begin to imagine their own good place. Often, they will come repeatedly to office hours to discuss new thoughts or new challenges. They are amazed and troubled by how difficult it is to articulate a truly just community and how strongly they feel about particular details. Their projects are examples of what Altieri calls “expressivist ethics,” though powered not so much by agency as discovery (Altieri 1990, 225–53). In light of their own creative struggles, they find themselves reinterpreting the course readings and re-evaluating the society around them. Their discoveries can surprise even themselves – which is perhaps the measure of truly imaginative thought. Conclusion We cannot afford to bypass an education in rigorous, diagnostic analysis of social injustice. But if we are to transform society, we cannot stop at exposing past injustices; we must also encourage students to envision that good place towards which we struggle, and by the light of which

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we critique the present. Truly critical thinking contains within itself an emancipatory movement: an imperative towards the future perfect. Providing the examples and context of creative social and political thought, allowing “freedom-from” the weight of a utilitarian pragmatism, and giving place for creative imagining in the classroom offers students a rare opportunity to define for themselves, from their own perspectives and situations, their “freedom toward.” The imperative to include each and every one requires them to see from the perspectives of others, and classroom discussion can augment this empathy. This does not distract them from the obligation to clearly see their present reality and work towards social justice; it rather shows them the direction. Critical, creative imagining is not a flight of fancy; it is an apprenticeship to hope. Questions for Reflection: 1 How does critique imply a responsibility to the “future perfect?” 2 What is the value of imagining socially just contexts rather than principles? 3 How does the freedom from traditional academic expectations aide and enact imagining social justice in the classroom? 4 What other course themes might lend themselves to imagining the good society? What might be some provocative texts and assignments? BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Critical Models. Translated by Henry Pickford and Lydia Goehr. New York: Columbia University Press. Alexander, Gadi, and Yakir Shoshani. 2010. “Dialectic Explication of Creativity.” In Engaging Imagination and Developing Creativity in Education, edited by Kieran Egan and Krystina Madej, 17–32. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Altieri, Charles. 1990. Canons and Consequences. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Barrow, Robin. 1988. “Some Observations on the Concept of Imagination.” In Imagination and Education, edited by Kieran Egan and Dan Nadaner, 79–90. New York: Open University Press. Bookchin, Murray. 1971. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley, CA: Ramparts. Butler, Judith. 2002. “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.” In The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, edited by David Ingram, 212–28. Oxford: Blackwell.

Teaching the Power of Emancipatory Imagination  151 Callenbach, Ernst. 1975. Ecotopia. New York: Bantam. Forster, E.M. 1909. “The Machine Stops.” Internet Archive. www.archive.org. Foucault, Michel. 1997. “What Is Critique?” In The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 41–82. New York: Semiotext(e). Golding, William. 1999. Lord of the Flies. London: Penguin. Horkheimer, Max. 1978. Dawn and Decline. Translated by Michael Shaw. New York: Seabury Press. –  1995. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Critical Theory, 188–243. New York: Continuum. Huxley, Aldous. 2007. Brave New World. New York: Vintage. Kellner, Douglas. 1989. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Le Guin, Ursula. 2004. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, 277–86. New York: Harper Perennial. MacDonald, Chris, and Lewis Vaughan, eds. 2019. The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engel. 1992. The Communist Manifesto. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Mills, Charles. 1998. “Non-Cartesian Sums.” In Blackness Visible, 1–19. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. More, Sir Thomas. 2010. Utopia. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Naess, Arne. 1995. “Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement.” In The Deep Ecology Movement, edited by Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue, 49–53. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Plato. Republic. 1968. Translated by Allan Bloom. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1975. The Rule of Metaphor. Translated by Robert Czerny et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1988. “In Search of the Imagination.” In Imagination and Education, edited by Kieran Egan and Dan Nadaner, 3–29. New York: Open University Press. Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. 1961. “Harrison Bergeron.” Internet Archive. www.archive. org. Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zwicky, Jan. 2015. Alcibiades Love. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2019. The Experience of Meaning. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

11 Experiencing Social (In-)Justice and Empathy through Drama Pedagogy: Lessons from a Student Theatre Production of G.E. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise elena pnevmonidou

Introduction Social justice pedagogy is a critical, utopian, activist pedagogy. It ­understands learning and teaching as political practices embedded in structures of power and privilege that uphold and perpetuate social, economic, and cultural inequities. Social justice pedagogy also holds that, to the extent that it is institutionalized, all education is political (Breunig 2017, 259). There is no politically neutral pedagogy. In fact, to uphold the guise of political naivety and to leave politics out of the classroom is itself a political – and oppressive – pedagogical gesture. For in not explicitly and self-consciously reflecting on its own embeddedness in hegemonic structures, naive pedagogy legitimates these very same structures by replicating the inequities that exist in society as the unchallenged norm in the classroom. Social justice pedagogy, by contrast, views the classroom as a counter-hegemonic space and education as the means to social change (Breunig 2017, 260). Critical awareness of social injustices and one’s own complicity in various forms of systemic oppression coupled with the purposeful practice of inclusivity in the classroom provide the impulse for activism towards a socially just world. This framework dramatically reconfigures the space of the classroom. Instead of merely being in class and taking in educational content provided by the instructor, students experience learning as a dynamic movement through the space of the classroom and out into the real world: an unprejudiced looking around, a critical looking in, and a community-building reaching out. There is, however, a gap between the theoretically stated goals of social justice pedagogy and how the theory plays out in the classroom.

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This gap is a recognized problem, and research has begun shifting away from theoretical debates about concepts to developing practical teaching tools through which to connect the real-life experiences of learners to the broader social critique and vision of a just society (Lindquist 2004; Zembylas 2012). This chapter primarily aims to contribute to praxis. Using the case study of a student theatre production of G.E. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779) in the context of the course Performing German Drama in the fall of 2017 at the University of Victoria, the article presents drama pedagogy as a viable and potentially transformative methodology for social justice-minded teaching. In particular, this chapter aims to address the reluctance on the part of educators not experienced with applied theatre to explore performance-based teaching, by demonstrating the utility of drama pedagogy especially for social justice education. A difficulty that social justice educators often face is the resistance to any systemic analysis of the causes of oppression. As Barbara Applebaum insists in Being White, Being Good (2010), acknowledgment on the part of majoritarian groups of the moral responsibility for the injury their unearned privileges inflict on others is vital if we are to make any progress in race relations (2010, 4), but the call to acknowledge responsibility triggers avoidance and aggressive defensive reactions that only deepen the divide. Yet, with the dramatic global rise in far-right populism and race-, gender-, and faith-based violence and hate crimes, we urgently need effective social justice education, now more than ever. One reason for the defensiveness and reluctance to engage in a systemic analysis may be the inevitable power differential that exists in the classroom between the students and the instructor, who may come across as patronizing and moralistic, depriving students of the agency they need to engage in a sincere and critical introspection. I hope to encourage social justice educators to experiment with performance-based teaching, for as the case study of the Nathan-project will show, drama pedagogy levels power relations in the classroom and provides a model for cooperative learning that builds both the students’ and the educators’ confidence to take risks in how they engage with “otherness.” Drama Pedagogy Drama pedagogy is a methodology for learning and teaching creatively by means of dramatic performance. Fundamental to drama pedagogy is the distinction between product- and process-oriented drama (Kao and O’Neill 1998; Schewe 2012, 12–14). Product-oriented drama aims to stage a theatrical production of high-performance quality in front of an audience. While it can also culminate in a theatrical production, the

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main goal of process drama is learning by performative means in a setting where the learners are both the audience and performers acting in different roles. Drama pedagogy thus views learning not merely as an intellectual process, but as a shared lived experience. Drama pedagogy has made an especially significant impact in the area of foreign language learning, commonly referred to as L2, where it is now common practice to include role play and other performative elements in the language learning process. Drama pedagogy has been so impactful in L2 teaching because it adds a bodily dimension to the encounter with material that students experience as difficult, abstract, and alien – and a foreign language and the culture it conveys are experienced as alien and alienating. Learning has long been recognized as a process in which learners bring diverse capacities to bear. Howard Gardner (1983) refers to these as “multiple intelligences,” and identifies in particular linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, and interpersonal intelligences. In complementing the linguistic and intellectual aspect of language with performative interactions, L2 teachers enable students to develop non-verbal and bodily communicative skills that are vital for a fuller, interpersonal engagement with a foreign language. Erika Piazzoli (2011), for example, has found that role play generated an “affective space” that was safe and supportive (562), produced more spontaneous communication, and overall reduced “language anxiety,” which is a recognized significant obstacle to foreign language learning (561, 565). Role play is also a fundamentally empathetic act as it puts one in the situation of taking and indeed living another’s perspective, and drama pedagogy is accordingly seen as especially valuable in fostering intercultural learning, which requires a mediation between the familiar self and an alien other (Bräuer 2002). With this pedagogical framework in mind, the course Performing German Drama was designed to appeal to German students of various language competency levels by offering them an opportunity to connect foreign language learning with cultural production. However, the Nathan-project reached beyond the parameters of foreign language learning into the realm of social justice pedagogy due to the subject matter of the play and its overt treatment of race-, gender-, and faith-based strife; the heterogeneous make-up of the student body; and the political context in 2017, that is, the Muslim travel bans in the aftermath of the US elections and the rise of far-right extremism, religious hate crimes, and more overt use of misogynist public discourses around the world. Drawing on this experience, this chapter asks the following questions: How does the collaborative problem solving and cooperative learning of drama pedagogy transfer to the social justice-minded classroom? How can drama pedagogy provide a

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learning environment in which students feel safe to engage with issues of race, religious prejudice, and gender bias in a way that encourages critical introspection, instead of triggering defensiveness? How do we foster empathy? These questions are especially pertinent today, as we are counting down the weeks to the next US election against the backdrop of a normalization of detention centres and informal concentration camps for migrants and refugee children; intensified racial tensions between a broadening Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and a more overtly violent white supremacist backlash against BLM; and a global pandemic that has revealed very starkly the pre-existing, but previously more hidden, social cleavages and inequities. As our societies become more polarized, divided, angry, and violent, formulating a viable pedagogy of cooperation, safe peer-supported intellectual risk-taking, and empathy has indeed become a matter of acute urgency. The examination of the utility of the Nathan-project as a model for fostering a more empathetic engagement with social justice issues must especially show how drama pedagogy is able to address the targeted and selective ways in which we express or deny human fellowship and empathy when grappling with race, gender, privilege, and oppression. It is also vital to abandon any binary assumptions and to recognize the intersectional and relative nature of how we experience privilege and oppression as well as our intensely emotional, affective investment in our sense of self, whether we consider ourselves privileged or oppressed. Megan Boler and Michalinos Zembylas (2002) therefore define social justice pedagogy as a “pedagogy of discomfort” that “requires not only cognitive but emotional labor” (108) on the part of both those in privileged positions and those who experience marginalization and disempowerment (113). This work requires emotional labour because of “the deeply embedded emotional dimensions that frame and shape daily habits, routines, and unconscious complicity with hegemony” (108). As Layla F. Saad (2020) argued more recently in Me and White Supremacy, there is simply no way around the discomfort of this emotional work because facing and undoing internalized biases and buried memories of either experienced or perpetrated racism is not achieved simply by means of intellectual, theoretical thought but is fundamentally an emotional, and therefore deeply unsettling, experience. As Zembylas (2012) also points out in a separate study on anti-racism work in the classroom, the emotional complexities also stem from the traumatic nature of racism. Learning about the injuries of others is “‘knowledge of injury’… however, this ‘troubled knowledge’ is emotional for everyone, not only for the apparent victims of racialization” (188). Thus, “classrooms are not homogeneous environments with a common understanding of

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oppression, but deeply divided places where contested narratives are steeped in the politics of emotions to create complex emotional and intellectual challenges for educators [who] themselves are often carriers of ‘troubled knowledge’” (118). To account for this complexity, Zembylas recommends a pedagogy of strategic empathy that is responsive to the differentiated viewpoints and emotional experiences that make up the classroom space. White Fragility, Misogyny, and Privilege These questions address a fundamental problem that social justice educators often face, namely, the resistance on the part of learners to engage empathetically with others and the defensive impulses that are triggered when learners are asked to interrogate their own social status and assumptions about race, gender, and diversity. Another way to think of it is as an incongruity between the ideals that inform social justice pedagogy and the classroom realities. The idealist vision of social change through education presumes that understanding, or what Paulo Freire referred to as “conscientalization,” triggers a desire to act (Roberts 2015, 380) and that social justice is a widely shared goal. Yet we cannot assume that if some people only knew how unjust our society is for others, they would want conditions to change. To the contrary, people in positions of power and privilege are rarely transformed when presented with information about the injustices that others suffer. Even in the face of compelling evidence, far from stimulating empathy and a desire to accommodate, awareness about social injustice and one’s own complicity in it triggers avoidance, disengagement, and defensiveness. As Robin Diangelo (2018) shows in White Fragility, in settings that are manifestly inequitable, the mere presence of racialized individuals, even if they only constitute a small minority, causes the majority group to experience “race-based stress” (99). If attention is drawn to the ubiquity of white supremacy in these settings or the racialized minority shows ambition to break down barriers and disrupt the status quo, the stress manifests in emotional displays of rage and resentment (96). White fragility is a strategy employed by those in positions of power to deflect attention away from the systemic causes of injustice, to relegitimate their privilege, and to assert their experience as the colour-blind universal norm. White fragility delegitimates any claim that race is a marker of difference and the cause of systemic injustice, thereby devaluing and negating the experiences of those who suffer injustice. White fragility thus expresses a fundamental lack of empathy with others.

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However, as Kate Manne (2018) shows in her exploration of misogyny, in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, which demonstrates how misogyny deploys similar strategies as white fragility, the issue of empathy is connected to the more fundamental problem of how the concept of the human being is codified socially. According to the “humanist account” (146), the lack of empathy displayed by people in privileged positions is due to an inability to recognize racial and gendered others as fellow human beings, who are therefore attributed with “a nonhuman, animal ‘essence’” (138). By this logic, once recognized as fellow human beings, “our empathetic nature,” as David Livingstone claims, would prevent us from committing race- or gender-based violence (138). Arguing against this position, Manne emphasizes the selective nature of misogyny and racism: race- and gender-based violence is not universal and undifferentiated, but targets only some individuals, namely, those who draw attention to the systemic nature of oppression and thus challenge the system itself. As Manne writes, misogyny is not a set of values, but a “political phenomenon … the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance” (33). Therefore, “misogyny primarily targets women because they are women in a man’s world” (64), that is, specifically those women who intrude into a sphere from which they are systemically excluded or included only in a subordinate role. The same would hold for racialized individuals in white majoritarian settings. Manne therefore insists that the attribution as non- or subhuman and the resulting lack of empathy are also not universal and undifferentiated, but particular and selective. In other words, the issue is not an inability to empathize with others due to a failure to recognize them as fellow human beings, but rather the deliberate strategic dehumanization of people who are most certainly recognized as fellow human beings with “an incipient human status” that they are subsequently “degraded from” (164) as a consequence of having challenged norms and intruded into spheres of privilege from which they are excluded.

Nathan-Project The toolset of drama pedagogy can bolster the broader framework of social justice pedagogy. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779) is the most important tolerance play of the German Enlightenment. It is set in twelfth-century Jerusalem during the reign of Saladin, a space of immense turmoil of the crusades and hostility driven by imperialism, cultural prejudice, and religious fanaticism. Lessing looks back to this period through his values of universal humanism, rationalism, and

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tolerance, and presents in the character of the Jewish merchant, Nathan, an exemplar of the measured and compassionate pedagogue whose utopian call for a tolerant humanity still today remains but an ideal awaiting its realization. Yet the play is also shaped by its own racial, gender, and cultural biases and uses pejorative gender-, race-, and faith-based language whose explicitness is shocking to a twentyfirst-century reader. Thus, it is not simply its utopian call that makes Nathan the Wise such a suitable play for social justice-minded teaching, but also the fact that it is a deeply flawed play that does not provide easy answers for how to navigate issues of race, prejudice, and identity. Indeed, when it is used not as material for reading and discussion alone, but for a theatrical performance, Nathan the Wise puts students in the situation of having to embody characters, values, and language with which they will not identify and find offensive. The students were also acutely aware of their own historical moment: the course took place in the fall term of 2017, less than a year after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the president of the United States. This was a time of a palpable rise in vitriolic misogyny, antisemitism, and Islamophobia triggered by Trump’s policies, such as the so-called Muslim ban (Executive Order 13769), and the legitimating of far-right discourses by his government. Grappling with racism, religious prejudice, and gender bias through a conflicted eighteenth-century play and against their own disquieting political backdrop thus amplified both the students’ sense of urgency to deal with these issues and the discomfort in dealing with them. Adding to the discomfort was the challenge of being “othered” as a group by the simple fact of being pushed outside of their linguistic and cultural comfort zones: Almost all participants were foreign-language learners with different levels of German competency and coming from different academic backgrounds. The success of the production thus depended on their willingness to work with each other and their limitations, and on the extent to which the staging concept reflected the affirmation of the diversity and differences that made up the community of learners. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise is an epic play that deals with large-scale themes of human history and clash of civilizations, but it does so within a small-scale setting of intimate family relations and revolves around the following main characters: Nathan is a wealthy Jewish merchant committed to unprejudiced rationalism and emotionally tempered judgment. Recha is his daughter. She is a Christian child whose family was killed by Saladin’s army. Nathan adopted her and raised her in the Jewish faith. When the play begins, we learn that Recha almost died in a fire but was rescued by the Templar. The Templar was part of a group

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of insurrectionists who were captured after attempting to reignite the war by breaking Saladin’s truce. The Templar witnessed the execution of his fellow fighters but was spared in the last minute by Saladin, who saw a resemblance to his dead brother in the Templar’s face. In addition to the conflicting emotions of gratitude and hate for Saladin, the Templar resents both Recha for being a Jew in need of his help and himself for having helped her. Daja is a widowed Christian woman and the servant of Nathan, whom she resents for having turned a Christian girl to the Jewish faith. Saladin is a Muslim conqueror stylized as an enlightened absolutist monarch maintaining a fragile coexistence of the three religions in Jerusalem, but also able to enforce his rule by means of violence and arbitrary power games. In need of funds, he plans to entrap Nathan by asking him to answer the question of which of the three religions he believes to be the true faith. Sittah, Saladin’s sister, secretly manages Saladin’s government and finances behind his back while he is distracted by his personal and emotional preoccupations as well as visions to attend to the mundane and pragmatic aspects of governing. Sittah craves recognition of her accomplishments that is denied to her on account of her gender. The play is set up for a tragic ending. All characters are caught up in religious, racial, and gender biases, and their personal resentment of each other only grows as they experience power differentials that they are unable to overcome. Even Nathan, who comes across as a rational and compassionate pedagogue, carries within himself the traumatic memory of having witnessed the slaughter of his entire family. The tragedy is averted in the last minute because Nathan’s storytelling of the famous “Ring Parable” enables him to skilfully avoid committing to any one religion and because an investigation into the Templar’s identity reveals him and Recha to be siblings and, in fact, the children of the brother of Saladin, who is their uncle. Yet the play remains a tragedy in spite of this ending. For though, as the stage directions state, “The curtain falls to silent, repeated hugs from all sides” (Lessing 1984, 118), this is not a cheerful celebration of intercultural harmony, but an awkward coming-together of people who until this moment only knew how to think of each other resentfully. Far from overcoming race-, gender-, and faith-based strife, the play brings the nature of the strife in stark relief. All characters personify stereotypes: Nathan is the antisemitic stereotype of the wealthy, cunning Jew; Recha is the helpless woman; the Templar is the righteous Christian, hateful of all “others”; Saladin and Sittah embody the Orientalist stereotype of the Muslim whose sophistication gives way to an inherently “barbaric” temperament; and Daja embodies the misogynist stereotype of the disempowered, petty,

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and devious woman. They all must now embrace and love each other because they are family, but the curtain falls before we are able to gain any insight into how hate is supposed to turn into love. However, while the play clearly does not offer any solutions for how to overcome race-, gender-, and faith-based strife, it does give us insights into the human, that is, psychosocial and emotional dimensions of having one’s identity caught up in power structures, prejudice, and stereotypes. For in addition to the stereotypes that they embody, the characters are also burdened by what Zembylas (2012) calls the “troubled knowledge” (118) of traumatic injury that they have either suffered or caused. Be they victims or perpetrators, they call out for an empathetic engagement with their predicament. Approaching the play through a performative pedagogical framework, instead of the standard toolset of literary analysis and critique, did indeed enable the students to gain an emotive and empathic access to the play and its characters. Pedagogical Tools I began with an exercise meant to familiarize students with the bodily experience of basic emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, etc. I assigned each emotion a set of numbers from one through twelve and, as the students stood in a circle, I said these numbers in different sequences and asked them to localize the emotions on their body. This activity gave students a sense for the bodily dimension of feelings and an understanding of how quickly emotions shift. We then undertook a micro-­ level textual analysis of what emotions motivate individual words or word clusters within a sentence, realizing again that a single sentence can convey a multitude of emotions. We applied this analysis, for example, to the opening sequence of the play, where Daja comes to greet Nathan: “It’s him! Nathan! Thank God you’re finally back” (Lessing 1984, 23). Due to the exclamation marks, we know that Daja is intensely emotional, but as became apparent in the course of the micro-analysis, she is not feeling one single, homogeneous emotion, but rather a range of unstable, shifting, and conflicting emotions, such as relief, fear, anxiety, and remembered trauma. Moreover, being the least sympathetic and most immutably prejudiced character in the play, Daja also invites a prejudiced characterization, as the reader can easily reduce Daja to her cultural biases. The aim of the performative engagement with Daja thus was to enable students to appreciate the complexity of her character. After the micro-level analysis of the opening words, students stood silently in the pose of Daja waiting for Nathan, while I read a series of what Susanne Even (2008) calls “empathy questions” (164–5), such as,

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Where are you standing? Are you relaxed or tense? Have you been standing here long? Do you often stand here? Are you alone? Are you often alone? Why did you come here? Where did you come from? What is your outlook on life? Students expressed surprise about how many conflicting emotions this exercise evoked in them. Daja is a European Christian who lost her husband to the crusade and now works as a servant for a Jew. This Jew trusts her, the Christian, with the care of his daughter, and trusts her not to betray the secret of Recha’s identity. Daja continually struggles to temper her prejudices, longing to return to Europe, and resentment of Nathan. The play begins just as Daja is about to report to Nathan that she almost failed in her duty of care for Recha, who almost died in a fire. As the students stood in the waiting pose and heard the empathy questions, all this information, which had seemed abstract and incidental when they initially read the play, became viscerally relevant as they embodied Daja and empathized with her. Daja remained a flawed, unsympathetic character to them, but the empathy exercise humanized her to the students, who now understood the trauma and grief in which her biases and character flaws originated. We did such micro-level textual analyses with many critical sequences in the play as well as empathy work with all the characters, and also enhanced the emotive connection to the characters with kinaesthetic learning, by attaching specific facial expressions, gestures, postures, and movements to specific charged words or micro-sequences. This approach humanized the outwardly stereotypical figures of Nathan the Wise, and even as they criticized and, in the cases of the Templar and Daja, objected to them, the students also felt affection and attachment for the characters. While doing this very close, introspective engagement with the troubled characters that populate this ambivalent play, we also reached out to students in the course Introduction to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which my colleague, Shamma Boyarin, taught in the same term at UVic. Three of his students visited our course several times and as peer-teaching consultants, giving presentations and fielding questions about each of these religions, and engaging my students in conversations about Lessing’s representations of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim people. In addition to helping us unpack some core issues within the three religions, these peer teachers enabled my students to interrogate their assumptions about the religions and broadened their sense of belonging in a community of learners. Working with fellow students who were studying the “real” religions also validated my students’ sense of the relevance of their work with Lessing’s imaginary fantasy of a potential cross-cultural and interfaith encounter in twelfth-­century Jerusalem. Given the political realities of 2017, grappling with the

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problematic characters of Nathan the Wise was important anti-racism work that urgently needed to be done. And as the students’ sense of community deepened, they took more initiatives to work cooperatively and to support each other as they navigated the disturbing racism and biases expressed in the play. This cooperative social justice work manifested itself in the dramaturgical choices the students made. Regarding the unsympathetic, racist character of Daja, for example, the students made the choice to cast her as a duet, the chorus of “The Dajas,” which is quite original in the performance history of the play. One reason for this dramaturgical choice was so that we could gesture towards our contemporary reality and make a critical commentary about “alternative facts” and trolling, fake news that define the landscape of our political discourses today. The Dajas always walked and talked in unison or echoing each other, and they always carried a large tabloid with sensationalist headlines around, suggesting that they had no opinions of their own, but only perpetuated prefabricated tropes. Referencing both the Western military engagement in the Middle East and Donald Trump’s favoured news channel, the students decided to call The Dajas’ tabloid Der Wüstenfuchs, the “Desert Fox.” In addition to this contemporary political reference, there was also a more pragmatic reason for this dramaturgical choice: the character of The Dajas was performed by two students who only had a very basic, beginner-level command of German, and they struggled both with the complexity of Lessing’s German and with the racist and bigoted discourse that they had to embody. Holding the tabloid made it possible for the students to read from the script, instead of having to learn it by heart, which would have been very difficult, and they were able to give each other emotional support and many good laughs as they unpacked and rehearsed together the very troubled script of The Dajas. Conclusion In retrospect, considering the profound and nuanced engagement the students accomplished with the language, the emotions, and the trauma of race-, gender-, and faith-based violence, I cannot imagine this being accomplished in any way other than by performative means. Had we only resorted to the tools of literary analysis and critique of culture and ideology, I am sure that we would not have ventured as far into this terrain and, if pushed beyond our comfort zones, there would have been instances of avoidance and defensiveness. The performative engagement with this material, by contrast, gave the students the

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confidence to take risks, knowing that they were doing difficult, unsettling, and at times discouraging social justice work, but that they were facing it together. The Nathan-project holds some good lessons for all participants in social justice-minded classrooms, be they educators, members of majoritarian groups, or members of minority groups. I have taught this drama course four times now, and each time, I am awestruck by how much I learn from the students. Performance-based teaching truly levels the power differential between the teacher and students. Though at the beginning of the course I come with some clear ideas about the material, the course goals, and the methodology, the more familiar the students become with the material and the more comfortable they feel about drama pedagogy methods, the more they take over the progression of the course and the more my role diminishes. Performance-based teaching and learning empowers students by giving them agency to make their own dramaturgical choices and to take responsibility for how they decide to enact their engagement with the material. Moreover, they do not engage as isolated, and therefore vulnerable, individuals, but as a community consisting of different individuals with different experiences and perspectives. This chapter discussed the aversive reactions that a call to acknowledge moral responsibility may trigger. The distinct quality of drama pedagogy is that it produces learning as an embodied experience. This embodiment is a productive act of taking ownership because the students not only take in but also put out their learning on stage, and they do so collaboratively. Taking ownership of educational material performatively thus is also an act of “owning up,” of taking responsibility collectively. This co-creative ethical process also implicates the teacher, who relinquishes the role of moral authority and participates in the learning process as a collaborator, open to learn from others and to be transformed in the process. Questions for Reflection: 1 Raising awareness about inequity often triggers disengagement, avoidance, or defensive reactions and emotionally charged resentment among those in privileged positions. Merely knowing about the injustices “others” suffer does not transform people, but may in fact trigger “white rage.” How do we foster empathy in the context of teaching social justice? 2 How does the collaborative problem-solving and cooperative learning of drama pedagogy transfer to the social-justice-minded classroom?

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3 How can drama pedagogy provide a learning environment in which students feel safe to engage with issues of race, religious prejudice, and gender bias in a way that encourages critical introspection, instead of triggering defensiveness? BIBLIOGRAPHY Applebaum, Barbara. 2010. Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy. Idaho Falls, ID: Lexington Books. Boler, Megan, and Michalinos Zembylas. 2002. “Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Difference.” In Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change, edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas, 107– 30. New York: Routledge. http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=https:// www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780203465547. Bräuer, Gerd. 2002. Body and Langauge: Intercultural Learning through Drama. New York: Ablex Publishing. Breunig, Mary C. 2017. “Critical and Social Justice Pedagogies in Practice.” In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, edited by Michael A. Peters, 258–63. New York: Springer. https://link.springer.com /referencework/10.1007%2F978-981-287-588-4. Diangelo, Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston: Beacon. Even, Susanne. 2008. “Moving in(to) Imaginary Worlds: Drama Pedagogy for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning.” Unterrichtspraxis 41, no. 2 (Fall): 161–70. Gardner, Howard. 1983. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books. Kao, Shin-Mei, and Cecily O’Neill. 1998. Words into Worlds: Learning a Second Language through Process Drama. New York: Ablex Publishing. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1984. Nathan der Weise. Edited by Christoph E. Schweitzer. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp/Insel. Lindquist, Julie. 2004. “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations: Working through the Paradoxes of Strategic Empathy.” College English 67, no. 2 (November): 187–209. Manne, Kate. 2018. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piazzoli, Erika. 2011. “Process Drama: The Use of Affective Space to Reduce Language Anxiety in the Additional Language Learning Classroom.” Research in Drama Education 16 (4): 557–73.

Experiencing Social (In-)Justice and Empathy  165 Roberts, Peter. 2015. “Paulo Freire and Utopian Education.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27: 376–92. Saad, Layla F. 2020. Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognize Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World. London: Quercus Editions. Schewe, Manfred. 2013. “Taking Stock and Looking Ahead: Drama Pedagogy as a Gateway to a Performative Teaching and Learning Culture.” Scenario 7, no. 1 (January): 5–23. Zembylas, Michalinos. 2012. “Pedagogies of Strategic Empathy: Navigating through the Emotional Complexities of Anti-Racism in Higher Education.” Teaching in Higher Education. 17, no. 2 (April): 113–20.

12 Teaching Politically Relevant Authentic Texts: Integrating Social Justice Pedagogies and LiteracyBased Approaches in the Beginning Language Classroom kathryn sederberg and magda tarnawska senel

Beginning language instruction of German at North American universities is rooted in communicative and task-based approaches, focuses on the exclusive use of the target language, and aims at developing linguistic proficiency and cultural competency. Naturally, understanding and implementation of these teaching principles will vary depending on the individual institution, department, and instructor. However, nearly all beginning language courses rely on commercial textbooks to provide vocabulary and grammatical content, and thus to structure the course. Students learn the target language in their first semesters through communicative activities usually centred on personal and university life, daily routines, professional plans, hobbies, and travel. Students implement simple grammatical structures and vocabulary to greet one another, describe their classroom, draw family trees, portray friends, express food preferences, characterize holidays, and talk about clothing. In this regard, commercial textbooks designed for the college market do not differ greatly from textbooks for younger learners, although both groups diverge significantly in their cognitive capacities, experiences, and knowledge about the world. The culture “boxes” in college-level textbooks introduce themes that are more relevant and interesting to adult learners, but they avoid controversial issues and are usually treated as “add-on” items rather than guiding principles to organize the course. Topics reflecting current political and social realities such as forced global migration of refugees, the long-term impact of imperialism and colonialism, climate change, #BlackLivesMatter, anti-­ racism protests, and other social justice issues are absent from language textbooks, as if students and the communities whose languages they are learning were living in an apolitical, one-dimensional, and static

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world. By excluding politically relevant topics, removing the complex web of subcultures, and presenting monoethnic, monocultural, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied characters who are citizens of the respective nation state, most introductory German language textbooks create a shallow and simplistic image of the target culture that reinforces precisely the notions, images, and interpretations that we would like our students to recognize as marginalizing, stereotyping, and rooted in colonial ideologies. The emphasis on consumption, superficial daily activities, and relationships of soap-opera quality inherent in most beginning language textbooks1 infantilizes their audiences and deprives students of intellectually stimulating and politically relevant content.2 Such textbooks do not adequately address the cognitive capacities of college populations or engage and develop skills vital to educating critically thinking citizens. Nor do they centre the topics relevant and interesting to our increasingly politicized students, who demand more of their instructors and institutions. On the contrary, these books, and therefore beginning language curricula, reinforce an image of a superficial and simplistic pseudo-reality that does not exist. If language courses are to remain a part of language studies and humanities departments and not be relegated to separate language institutes or replaced by commercial online language programs geared towards business and travel, language educators must actively intervene by restructuring their curricula and by selecting course materials that are politically relevant, personally significant, and intellectually stimulating (see also Tarnawska Senel 2020, 65–6). Through the case study of a unit on the children’s book Akim rennt (Akim runs) by Claude Dubois (2013), this chapter presents an approach to teaching beginning language that combines social justice and literacy-based pedagogies. Although our focus is on beginning German, this unit could easily be replicated in other language courses. Integrating social justice pedagogy with a literacies approach can challenge students to take a stance on current political debates and make connections between local and global issues of contemporary relevance, while also fostering the development of linguistic proficiency. Social justice pedagogies are rooted in the desire for just and equitable societies and the conviction that education is the most important step in that direction. Such education focuses on a holistic development of students, engages them in the teaching process, and provides them with the tools necessary to recognize, understand, and change the oppressive institutions and systems that perpetuate inequality and injustice. Hence, social justice pedagogies help students deconstruct their own subjectivities, reveal systems of domination and their intersectionality,

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analyse institutional frameworks, and expose underlying ideologies (see also Tarnawska Senel 2020, 70–1). We are white, cisgender, female faculty members teaching a diverse group of students at institutions of higher education in North America, and we are committed to interrogating and decentring whiteness and ethnonationalism in our curricula and in the field of German studies. We hope that this contribution will be relevant beyond our own field, as other instructors of language and literature seek resources for re-evaluating their course objectives and incorporating social justice topics. If social justice education refers to a philosophy of teaching committed to universal human rights, equity, and dignity, literacy-based pedagogical strategies can support instructors in teaching authentic texts dealing with these issues. Literacy-based (also termed “multiliteracies”) pedagogy in the language classroom focuses on the use of cultural texts not “for the sake of practicing language […] but to engage [students] in the thoughtful and creative act of making connections between grammar, discourse, meaning, between language and content, between language and culture, between another culture and their own – in short, making them aware of the webs, rather than strands, of meaning in human communication” (Kern 2003, 42). As Kern argues, introducing literacy-based curriculum in beginning language courses broadens the scope of the learning objectives beyond acquiring separate language skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) and includes an analysis of ideologies as well as historically and culturally specific contexts within which these texts are situated. Using literary and non-literary texts from the beginning requires critical thinking, textual interpretation, and recognition of “learners’ agency in the meaning-making process” (57). Reading authentic texts in the target language is at the core of the literacy approach because it can facilitate content-based instruction, engagement of more complex cognitive skills, and recognition of the reciprocal relationship between culture, language, text, author, reader, context, meaning, and interpretation. Social justice and literacy-based pedagogies overlap in their emphasis on students’ empowerment and agency, as evidenced by Swaffar and Arens’s (2005) notion of literacy: “Literacy describes what empowers individuals to enter societies; to derive, generate, communicate, and validate knowledge and experience; to exercise expressive capacities to engage others in shared cognitive, social, and moral projects; and to exercise such agency with an identity that is recognized by others in the community” (2). The development of literacy-focused approaches to teaching beginning language courses that emerged in the late 1990s was motivated by the desire to overcome the split inherent in many departments between teaching

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language skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening comprehension) in lower-division and literary analysis in upper-division courses (Byrnes 1998, 278). Teaching beginning language courses within a social justice framework is a more recent phenomenon that arose primarily as a reaction against marketing language learning in terms of cognitive or professional development and lucrative opportunities on the job market (Osborn 2006, 1–20; Reagan and Osborn 2019, 77–83; Tarnawska Senel 2020, 64–5). Both literacy and social justice approaches address the evident need (and desire) to rethink pedagogy and content for beginning language courses, while revealing discrepancies between learning objectives for these courses and the ideals of college education. Most recently, calls to “diversify and decolonize” the German curriculum (including lower-­ division language classes) are a more radical attempt to reframe and redefine college-level language education and its outcomes.3 Macedo (2019) argues that to avoid reproducing colonial and imperial values language teaching must “be informed by a radical language pedagogy that respects and celebrates the language practices that students bring to school and makes concrete such values as solidarity, social responsibility, and creativity” (12). Similarly, Claire Kramsch (2019) asks “what it would take to decolonize foreign language (FL) education and reinstate the learning and teaching of foreign languages for bringing about peace and mutual understanding, rather than for enhancing one’s status among the national elites or for gaining a competitive edge in the global market” (51–2). An answer might indeed lie in a combination of literacy-based curriculum and social justice pedagogy. The unit on a refugee story presented in this chapter is an example of a practical application of such an approach in beginning German. Sample Unit: Teaching Claude Dubois’s Refugee Picture Book In alignment with Swaffar and Arens’s (2015) argument that reading is “the key to cultural and language literacies” (78) and even beginning language learners can and must be exposed to authentic literary texts, we sought to engage students with a politically relevant topic through an authentic literary text at an appropriate linguistic level. The picture book Akim rennt (Akim runs) was first published in French as Akim court in 2012 by Belgian author Claude K. Dubois, three years before the height of the European migrant crisis of 2015–16. The book has been translated into Spanish (Maribel G. Martínez) and German (Tobias Scheffel), and in 2014 won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Youth Literature Prize). Dubois dedicates the book to her mother, who

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was five years old when German soldiers occupied their home and took her family members prisoner during the Second World War. She was not reunited with her parents until five years later, a traumatizing experience that she often related to her daughter (quoted in von Selchow and Dubois 2017). This personal family history led Dubois to create a picture book depicting a story of a child in wartime. The story begins in an unnamed village on a river, where we see the small boy Akim playing with a toy boat. The peaceful scene is soon disrupted as airplanes appear in the sky and bomb the village, sending the people fleeing. Akim runs and is separated from his family; he returns home to find it destroyed; he encounters dead bodies; frightened and alone, he seeks refuge in an abandoned house where he is cared for by another woman. The sparse text segments supplement the images, telling how Akim is taken prisoner by soldiers, escapes, and joins a migrant caravan (see fig. 12.1). Eventually the exhausted group of refugees reaches a camp staffed by an aid organization where they are given food and shelter. Akim, however, remains distraught and isolated and is unable to play with the other children. Finally, at the book’s end, Akim’s mother is found, and he is able to run into her arms. Throughout, the author-illustrator Dubois uses sombre, sketch-like illustrations that have been compared to the socially engaged works of German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz (Cramer 2018, 234). The small, ninety-three-page picture book contains only twelve pages with text, which makes the book accessible to young children and to beginning language learners. In teaching this picture book in beginning German, we have taken what Terry Osborn (2006) calls a “thematic transitional strategy” (68), utilizing a commercial textbook as well as a range of supplemental materials to foreground relevant social justice themes, such as the fate of civilians during war, displacement and migration caused by military conflicts, the global refugee crisis and varied national responses, separation of parents and children during war and migration, border crossings, and war trauma. To begin the unit, students spent time in groups sharing their background knowledge about these topics in English. Using data from the UN Refugee Agency, the class located current armed conflicts around the world, discussed statistics about current refugee groups, and generated a list of unique challenges facing child refugees (family separation, trauma, dependency on adults, disruption in education, illness, etc.). According to the UNHCR, over half of the nearly 25.4 million refugees worldwide are under the age of eighteen. Students were also asked to discuss the political, historical, and cultural reasons for a unit on refugee experiences in a German class. While students

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Figure 12.1.  Illustration from Claude K. Dubois, Akim rennt. Tobias Scheffel, translator. © 2013 Moritz Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. With permission from Moritz Verlag.

could name the legacies of National Socialism and the Holocaust as well as Germany’s current role in the European Union, the instructors also explained Article 1 of the German Basic Law about the dignity of human life and Article 16 about the right to asylum. As part of the pre-reading lesson, students also viewed images from the book and described the colours (or rather lack thereof) and emotions expressed in the drawings, noting that the almost exclusive use of black, grey, beige, and white as well as depictions of terror, loneliness, and trauma are not typical for a children’s book. After the pre-reading session, students worked closely with the text inside and outside of class time, through literacy activities that “engage learners in the processes of interpretation, collaboration, problem solving, and reflection and self-reflection” (Paesani, Allen, and Dupuy 2016, 155). Although most beginning language curricula are based on the methods of communicative language teaching, and students focus in the first years on oral proficiency, we wanted to ensure students would work with authentic texts long before reaching intermediate or upper-division coursework. As Paesani, Allen, and Dupuy argue, it is crucial to prepare students to read and interpret texts from the beginning, because “linking communication with textual interpretation and analysis encourages a more holistic, multimodal view of language” (148). Students were able to work with Akim rennt after five to nine weeks of instruction (ca. 18–45 hours). We tested this unit at both a large public university (UCLA) and a small liberal arts college (Kalamazoo College). Our students read Akim rennt over the course of three to five class

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sessions, preparing the reading outside of class with instructor-created scaffolded worksheets to guide reading comprehension and provide essential vocabulary as they follow the story of Akim, who is separated from his family and joins a group of refugees seeking safety. They draw on cultural knowledge about war, displacement, and refugee aid, and they learn the vocabulary to describe the complex emotions of a boy who is isolated and in need of help. Such reading activities prepare students for further work in class by combining cultural and language literacy goals (with a focus on forms such as personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, coordinating conjunctions, modal verbs, question formation, and negation). Tasks such as vocabulary sorts, true/false questions, and text matrices help beginning learners read for meaning and make form-meaning connections. Proper scaffolding and task design ensure that students are able to work productively with the book without feeling overwhelmed by the new vocabulary. Swaffar and Arens (2005) remind us that “[t]here is scarcely a right or wrong text for a particular learning level, but there are definitely right or wrong tasks applied to a text” (61). Hence, instructors who may be hesitant to teach authentic texts in the first semester only need to develop suitable activities and adjust the tasks paired with texts. The choice of this picture book also helps to develop students’ visual literacy, as the author cleverly shows and conceals key aspects of the refugee story. Students were often asked to match images in the book to sentences from the text passages, and the reverse, noting how the images at times depict what is narrated, and at other times provide additional information not found in the text segments. Homework and in-class activities guide students through detailed and critical readings of the text and images, and also ask students to interpret ambiguous images such as the book’s final drawing of a tree, the symbolic meaning of the stuffed animal, and the book’s happy ending as Akim is reunited with his mother. Instructors also asked students to reflect on the images, for example, to identify and describe an image that they find powerful and explain why. Many students chose the page with Akim standing over a dead body (see fig. 12.2). When soldiers discover Akim and several other civilians hiding in an abandoned house, they take the children prisoner and force them to work. The images do not show what happens to the adults who were hiding with Akim and the reader does not find out. However, this omission allows students to discuss the dreadful and all-too-familiar war narrative of rape and murder. When asked to provide possible real-life scenarios for the scene, students mentioned not only Syria and Afghanistan, but also European colonial conquests, such as the French invasion of Algeria. While discussing Akim’s arrival

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Figure 12.2.  Illustration from Claude K. Dubois, Akim rennt. Tobias Scheffel, translator. © 2013 Moritz Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. With permission from Moritz Verlag.

at the refugee camp, students were asked to consider hypotheses: Why does Akim not play with the other children in the camp? What might he be thinking about? Why are there four images that correspond to one sentence? While working with the book, students were often asked to summarize or renarrate the story through a particular character’s first-person perspective, such as that of Akim, a fisherman who helps migrants cross the river, or the doctor in the refugee camp. These literacy-­oriented tasks not only reinforce first- and third-person verb forms, but they also ask students to imagine the story through different points of view, which requires interpretation beyond surface-level plot. The story is narrated in the present tense through short sentences that focus on actions and emotions (“Er hat große Angst. Er will zu seiner Familie” [He is very afraid. He wants to find his family], “Eine Ärztin kommt und spricht mit ihm” [A doctor comes and talks to him]). Drawing vocabulary and verb forms from the text and from the worksheets, students recycle and transform this language into simple sentences that reinforce the key vocabulary. These activities, exemplary of “transformed practice,” allow students to use language meaningfully and creatively, and to apply what they have learned through interacting with the text (Paesani, Allen, and Dupuy 2016, 39). Similar to the drama pedagogy Elena Pnevmonidou describes in her contribution to this volume, role play, or perspective taking, helps ensure that students engage meaningfully and affectively with social justice topics (see chapter 11 in this volume). In ongoing efforts to develop holistic language curricula,

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Swaffar and Arens (2005) argue that even beginning learners must be given “building blocks” to develop interpretive reading skills, “to ask literary questions and begin to develop literary interpretations” (91). Interpretive tasks not only help bridge the gap between lower-division and upper-division language courses, but we also found that given the opportunity to analyse imagery and text from the book, students were highly motivated in class as well as emotionally and intellectually engaged. Throughout this unit, students also participated in activities focused on real-life events related to the topics of the book and based on news images and headlines. These topics may include policies regarding refugees in the EU and the US, the separation of children and parents at the US-Mexico border, the conditions in temporary US refugee housing, criminalization of help for refugees, death of refugees and migrants while trying to reach or cross the border in the US and in Europe, and the role of aid organizations such as the Red Cross or Sea-Watch. For example, students were shown photographs of young children at the US-Mexico border, alongside images from Akim rennt, and were asked to discuss similarities and differences. Such activities help students make comparisons between different national and transnational contexts for immigration today, and to recognize ongoing relevance of this topic. Helping students reflect on these issues is not only a crucial part of providing tools for critical analysis and developing higher-order thinking skills from beginning language instruction onwards, but also an invitation to empathetically engage with global challenges that might be alleviated by an inspired action of informed and caring people. As Hackman (2005) argues, “tools for action and social change [are] critical to help move students from cynicism and despair to hope and possibility” (106). Including tools for action is a crucial difference between teaching culture in the language classroom and social justice education in the language classroom. Critical awareness and education are a first step in helping students recognize their important role as engaged citizens (see also Tarnawska Senel 2020, 77–9). For the final assessment, students were asked to write a review of the book (ca. 170–300 words) and conclude whether or not they would recommend reading this book to children. This task requires that students combine an analysis of the text with a reflection on its meaning, impact, and potential audiences (see also the work on transnational media studies by Didem Uca, Kate Zambon, and Maria Stehle in chapter 13 of this volume). To familiarize students with the genre of a review we analysed sample reviews such as those on Amazon.de for other children’s books and discussed key components such as introduction, plot

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summary, and conclusion. We found that our students were able to successfully complete the task: students could make astute analysis of the book’s illustrations using supporting details and examples, provide a summary of the story’s plot while recycling new vocabulary about war and forced migration, and express a personal opinion about the book and its relevance for various audiences. Conclusion: Implementing Culturally and Politically Relevant Content Step by Step Calls for implementation of literacy-based approaches and social justice pedagogies as well as for “diversifying and decolonizing” lower-­ division German curriculum exemplify a deeply rooted dissatisfaction of many faculty members with language courses driven by commercial textbooks that often perpetuate colonial and exclusionary ideologies. There is an anecdote about a school board member who deemed studying a second language useless for students who would never leave the US, and who was told that the students’ intention not to travel abroad was precisely the reason why they should study a second language (quoted in Omaggio Hadley 2001, 345); the anecdote drives the point home that language teaching at the collegiate level is about more than teaching the language as a means of getting around in a different country. In the last decades, instructors have sought methods for teaching language in and through cultural topics and for centring the cultural, historical, and political content of target language communities. While this shift has been a step in the right direction, it did not eliminate the void stemming from the massive unfulfilled potential of institutional language education that many teachers perceived. Content-based instruction and literacy-based pedagogy were yet other steps bringing us closer to redefining beginning language instruction as a place where students learn not only to speak, read, write, and understand oral communication, but also to think critically, analyse literary and non-literary texts, and make connections between different cultures and ways of creating meaning. Social justice education takes content-based instruction one step further by asking students to think about issues of equality and human rights in the language classroom (for more on teaching about human rights discourse as intersected with racism and xenophobia, see Braden Russell in chapter 5 this volume). It also broadens the notion of literacy “as both a set of competencies to be learned and a crucial condition for developing ways of intervening in the world” ­(Giroux 2011, 103). In learning a new language, students reflect on the intersections between language, culture, and power, and instructors

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need to help them see the value and real-world relevance of learning additional languages. By applying social justice frameworks to language pedagogy, we can encourage students “to question critically the institutions, policies, and values that shape their lives, relationships to others, and their connection to the larger world” (101). Instructors often feel frustrated by the desire to implement content-­ based and literacy-focused curriculum that is aligned with social justice pedagogies when faced with their day-to-day classroom practices and textbook-driven instruction, especially at the lower levels of the curriculum when students have limited language resources and teachers complain about the perpetual lack of time to “cover” the material. The need to revise curricula can feel like an insurmountable task. However, authentic texts such as children’s books can provide a framework for building critical literacy skills starting in the first weeks of a language class. Instructors should ask themselves: How can we use authentic materials to help motivate students to see language learning as relevant and important, even at beginning levels? What politically and socially relevant topics and corresponding vocabulary are best suited for a literacy-based curriculum and social justice pedagogy in the beginning language classroom? And how might units such as this allow language faculty to make connections to other units across campus and in the community? Following Reagan and Osborne (2002), we believe that small changes in the curriculum and day-to-day instruction, such as including politically relevant authentic texts and topics, posing questions related to social justice issues, and empowering students to intervene in the world, can have a large impact: “Foreign language educators can implement critical curriculum pieces incrementally, beginning at any time. The dialogical or change-oriented focus of the classroom activities becomes a critical pedagogy immediately accessible to practitioners” (72). This chapter offers one model for a unit that centres social justice questions in the language classroom, and we hope that others will take this approach and continue the work of restructuring beginning language curricula to reflect the needs of our complex contemporary world. Questions for Reflection: 1 In what ways can politically relevant authentic texts help and cope with social change and social conflict? 2 How can we use authentic materials to help motivate students to see language learning as relevant and important, even at beginning levels?

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3 What politically and socially relevant topics and corresponding vocabulary are best suited for a literacy-based curriculum and social justice pedagogy in the beginning language classroom? 4 How might units such as this allow language faculty to make connections to other units across campus and in the community? NOTES 1 Authors of this chapter are most familiar with textbooks for German language instruction, however, commercial publishers use a similar format for their Spanish and French editions. 2 Two recent alternatives to traditional textbooks, an open online curriculum created by feminist faculty, Grenzenlos Deutsch (grenzenlos-deutsch.com), and a textbook, Impuls Deutsch 1: Intercultural, Interdisciplinary, Interactive (Tracksdorf et al. 2019), consciously work against reinforcing a simplistic view of culture that excludes or marginalizes minorities of German speakers. 3 The scholarly collective known as “DDGC” (Diversity, Decolonization and the German Curriculum) arose out of a series of conferences 2017–19. See https://www.ddgccollective.org/. BIBLIOGRAPHY Byrnes, Heidi. 1998. “Constructing Curricula in Collegiate Foreign Language Departments.” In Learning Foreign and Second Languages: Perspectives in Research and Scholarship, edited by Heidi Byrnes, 262–95. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Cramer, Gabriele. 2018. “Migration und Flucht in Bilder- und Kinderbüchern.” In Migration, Flucht und Vertreibung: theologische Analyse und religionsunterrichtliche Praxis, edited by Annegret Reese-Schnitker, Daniel Bertram, and Marcel Franzmann, 233–46. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Dubois, Claude K. 2013. Akim rennt [Akim runs]. Translated by Tobias Scheffel. Frankfurt: Moritz Verlag. Giroux, Henry A. 2011. On Critical Pedagogy. New York: Bloomsbury. Glynn, Cassandra, Pamela Wesely, and Beth Wassell. 2018. Words and Actions: Teaching Languages Through the Lens of Social Justice. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Grenzenlos Deutsch: An Open-Access Curriculum for Beginning German. Britt M. Abel and Amy Young, Project Directors and Lead Authors. grenzenlosdeutsch.com/. Hackman, Heather W. 2005. “Five Essential Components for Social Justice Education.” Equity & Excellence in Education 38: 103–9.

178  Kathryn Sederberg and Magda Tarnawska Senel Kern, Richard G. 2003. “Literacy as a New Organizing Principle for Foreign Language Education.” In Reading Between the Lines. Perspectives on Foreign Language Literacy, edited by Peter C. Patrikis, 40–59. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kramsch, Claire. 2019. “Between Globalization and Decolonization. Foreign Languages in the Crossfire.” In Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages, edited by Donaldo Macedo, 50–72. New York: Routledge. Macedo, Donaldo, ed. 2019. Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages. New York: Routledge. New London Group. 1996. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66 (1): 60–93. Omaggio Hadley, Alice. 2001. Teaching Language in Context. Boston: Thomson Heinle. Osborn, Terry. 2006. Teaching World Languages for Social Justice: A Sourcebook of Principles and Practices. Mahwah: NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Paesani, Kate, Heather Willis Allen, and Beatrice Dupuy. 2016. A Multiliteracies Framework for Collegiate Foreign Language Teaching. Boston: Pearson. Reagan, Timothy G., and Terry A. Osborn. 2002. The Foreign Language Educator in Society: Toward a Critical Pedagogy. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. –  2019. “Time for a Paradigm Shift in U.S. Foreign Language Education? Revisiting Rationales, Evidence, and Outcomes.” In Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages, edited by Donaldo Macedo, 73–110. New York: Routledge. Swaffar, Janet, and Katherine Arens. 2005. Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum: An Approach Through Multiple Literacies. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Tarnawska Senel, Magda. 2020. “Social Justice in the Language Curriculum: Interrogating the Goals and Outcomes of Language Education in College.” Diversity, Decolonization in German Studies, edited by Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj, 63–82. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tracksdorf, Niko, Nicole Coleman, Damon Rarick, and Friedemann Weidauer. 2019. Impuls Deutsch 1: Intercultural, Interdisciplinary, Interactive. Stuttgart: Klett. UNHRC. 2019. “Figures at a Glance.” 19 June. www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures -at-a-glance.html. von Selchow, Stephanie, and Claude Dubois. 2017. “Menschlichkeit schulen. Französische Illustratorin Claude K. Dubois und ihr Kinderbuch über Flucht.” In chrismon plus. Das Evangelische Magazin, October 2017. www. chrismon.evangelisch.de/artikel/2017/36026/franzoesische-illustratorin -claude-k-dubois-und-ihr-kinderbuch-ueber-flucht.

13 Transnational Hip-Hop and Social Justice Pedagogy: Approaches to Race and Belonging in the Media Studies Classroom didem uca , kate zambon , and maria stehle

Als allererstes wollt’ ich klarstellen, dass ich Ekrem Bora heiß’ / Deutscher Staatsbürger, ich frag’ euch, was soll der Scheiß? / Ihr kennt euch doch so lang, reißt euch endlich mal zusammen / Alles chill, Digga, reicht euch erst die Hände und entspannt / Ihr habt auf einmal Streit, die Masse ist entzweit / Ich dachte, dieser Fight ist seit den Achtzigern vorbei / Ich sitze schon mein ganzes Leben zwischen diesen fucking Stühlen. (Eko Fresh, “Aber”) (First I want to make it clear, my name is Ekrem Bora / German citizen, I ask you, what is all this bullshit? / you’ve known each other so long, now pull yourselves together / everything chill, big guy, reach out to each other and relax / all the sudden you’ve got a grudge, the masses are divided / I thought this fight was settled in the eighties / I have been sitting between these fucking chairs my whole life.)

Introduction The lyrics quoted above begin the third and final section of TurkishGerman rapper Eko Fresh’s song “Aber” (2018).1 After the song gives voice to the opinions of a white supporter of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany) party and a Turkish-German supporter of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the song offers a third opinion – apparently that of the rapper himself – that provides an ostensible middle ground. This song sets the stage for a transnational comparative analysis of the problematics and possibilities of cross-cultural dialogue in white supremacist societies. Using classic hiphop techniques, this song cites and transforms Black American rapper Joyner Lucas’s song “I’m Not Racist” (2017), which portrays a dispute

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between a white Trump supporter and a Black Lives Matter supporter.2 Fresh’s intervention as a third voice is the most striking structural and narrative difference between “Aber” and the song that inspired it. By borrowing and altering the format and discourse of Lucas’s song, Fresh translates the polarized political landscape of the US into the German context but breaks up the overdetermined binaries of contemporary political discourse. Critical analysis of this multidimensional artistic intervention allows students to explore and connect the functions of racism and struggles for social justice across national contexts. The two songs are politically controversial and built on political controversy; both also suggest possibilities for overcoming such controversy through forms of dialogue. They present dialogues as conversations between two or three voices/sides that meet on an equal playing field. In our unit, we propose a close analysis of these songs and their relationship to each other and to broader political questions in order to facilitate critical engagement with the reductive parameters the songs propose; critical hip-hop pedagogy teaches the importance of attending to questions of power and inequality – in this case, white supremacy – rather than creating false equivalencies that whitewash social injustices. The similar formal elements and the different sociolinguistic, political, and national contexts of the videos allow for a critical examination of dialogue both within their individual political climates and in their transnational references: the staged dialogue as exemplified in the videos, the critical dialogue between the videos and their audiences in the process of reception and circulation (see Kahnke and Stehle 2011), and the transnational, translingual, and transcultural dialogue between the two songs and their contexts. Analysing the verbal discourses in the videos creates what Mikhail Bakhtin terms “dialogic potential” (Bakhtin 2010, 419), by offering the opportunity to engage questions of race, religious identity, and gender in a comparative, transcultural, and translingual format. When instructors employ critical hip-hop pedagogy, learners begin to read these songs as “social phenomena” (Bakhtin 2010) and thereby uncover the structures of power that set the parameters for the dialogues presented in the songs. We then position our discussions within the context of critical, anti-racist pedagogies and research about hip-hop pedagogy and briefly analyse the songs, videos, and respective political contexts before offering teaching suggestions for a transnational media studies classroom (adaptable for a German studies course). The three authors of this chapter come from different perspectives, disciplines, and backgrounds. Maria Stehle and Didem Uca are German studies professors; Maria Stehle is a white German who moved to the

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US for graduate school and whose research focuses on German and European film, literature, and media studies in transnational contexts; Didem Uca is a Turkish-Arab-American who has lived and researched in Germany on multiple occasions and whose research focuses on intersectional approaches to post/migrant cultures; Kate Zambon is a white American scholar of communication studies whose research focuses on race and representation in European media. We wrote this article before the spread of a global pandemic and before the protests following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer; both events highlight racial and economic injustices and the deep divides that characterize the political landscape in the US under the Trump administration. Black Lives Matter protests were held around the world and some of the largest demonstrations outside of the US were held in German cities, including Berlin and Munich. The German protests expressed solidarity with Black communities in the US while also pointing to the complex ways in which anti-Black racism, racism against other communities of colour, and police brutality are perpetuated in Germany and across Europe, where these realities are often erroneously considered by white Germans and Europeans to be strictly American problems. From our different personal, professional, and disciplinary perspectives, we develop a pedagogy that draws attention to both the similarities and differences in the manifestations and experiences of white supremacy and racism – and resistance by communities of colour – in American and German contexts with the purpose of developing a way to devise an explicitly intersectional, anti-racist pedagogy that critiques reductive political perspectives and fosters critical media literacy. Our pedagogical strategies aim to disrupt disciplinary boundaries and reimagine a humanities curriculum that is not restricted by geopolitical divides but imagines connections and critical communication across linguistic and geographic boundaries to help build a more socially and racially just world. Hip-Hop: History, Pedagogy, and Social Justice Hip-hop has long been employed as a pedagogical tool, finding applications in classrooms and youth cultural centres where groups of young people write their own songs, record, and perform in breakdance competitions in the US (see Rose [1994]; Akom [2009]; Rodriguez [2009]; Williams [2009]; Low [2011], Peoples [2008], Hill [2009]) and in European contexts (for discussions of the German context, see Zambon and Uca [2016]; Stehle [2012]; Soysal [2004] and hip-hop artists such as Samy Deluxe, Lady Bitch Ray, Brothers Keepers, or

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Sokee). The main challenge is to avoid exploiting popular music and culture in the classroom to appear “cool” or to boost attendance or enrolment numbers; such pedagogical appropriation “de-legitimizes Hip Hop itself as an important cultural and artistic form and promotes superficial understandings of cultural practices” (Buffington and Day [2018]). They strip hip-hop of its historically political, antitraditional roots. Instead, in his detailed ethnographic approach, Marc Lamont Hill (2009) starts with the “complex relationships that young people form with hip-hop culture” to examine hip-hop-based education and the “cultural stakes attached to such interventions” (xvii, 2). According to Hill, hip-hop as critical pedagogy investigates identity negotiations and “popular culture as complex and contested site for both resistance and domination” that therefore necessitates “multiperspectival analyses,” as opposed to reductive textual approaches (6, 7). Similarly, in his study on hip-hop in high school education, B.E. Low (2011) argues that it is precisely “the culture’s complex and contradictory politics of representation on issues such as gender, violence, sexuality, materialism, race, and language” that “make[s] hip-hop so pedagogically vital” (1). Low thus calls for hip-hop pedagogy based on Paulo Freire’s (2005) concept of critical pedagogy and emphasizes transdisciplinary, intersectional approaches that centre “on the experiences and knowledge of students of color” and are committed to social justice with an “emphasis on problem-solving methodologies, dialogism” (Low 2011, 20). In sum, culturally sustaining pedagogy teaches appreciation rather than appropriation (Buffington and Day 2018); critical hip-hop pedagogy goes beyond narrow textual critique to teach complex dialogue. It is within the context of culturally sustaining, critical, intersectional, hip-hop pedagogy that we conceptualize our unit on “I’m Not Racist” and “Aber.” The next section briefly analyses and contextualizes the two songs before concluding this chapter with suggestions for their use in media studies and German studies classrooms. Two Songs and Their Contexts US American rapper Joyner Lucas’s “I’m Not Racist” (2017) earned the artist Grammy nominations for best rap song and best music video in 2018. Certified sales are 500,000 and the video has been viewed on YouTube over 140 million times (May 2022). In an interview, Jewel Wicker asked Lucas about the message he was trying to convey with his polarizing song and video. Lucas responded:

Transnational Hip-Hop and Social Justice Pedagogy  183 We have to live in a world with people that we don’t like. We have opinions that we don’t agree on. But we still [have] to live together. And we have to figure out how we’re going to continue to live together under the same roof. That’s the message I wanted to convey: “Let’s agree to disagree and move on.” (Wicker 2019)

This response reflects one of the critical issues with this song: the idea that simply allowing “both sides” to speak constitutes equality and fairness. But what does it mean when the speech of one party dehumanizes the other while the other is arguing for their basic human dignity? What are the consequences of hearing these positions and simply “agreeing to disagree”? How does this format for dialogue that promises to offer “equality” actually serve to deepen inequities? In an era of emboldened racism in the public sphere, this song opens up excellent opportunities for understanding how norms of fairness and balance in public discourse can obscure and even support white supremacy. “I’m Not Racist” takes a dialogic, presumably “balanced” perspective although it lets the white male character wearing the MAGA hat “speak” first, setting the terms of the dialogue. In the video, the actor, lip-syncing Joyner, argues against the “double standard” preventing white folks from using the n-word (while using the word repeatedly), and then expresses a litany of stereotypes, apologism for police brutality based on respectability politics, and grievances against social welfare programs and immigration. He ends with a sudden turn, stating, “But there’s two sides to every story / I wish that I knew yours,” inviting the second character to respond. The track seems to see no irony in the fact that the first man’s confident verbal assault ends in a falsely humble, allegedly open-minded invitation for the second, marginalized individual to perform intellectual and emotional labour to convince the former of his humanity. As the first character pulls up a chair, ostensibly ready to “know” his interlocutor’s side, the claim “I’m Not racist” is repeated, though his facial expressions and demeanour suggest throughout that he is quite convinced of his racist beliefs. A Black character, also lip-syncing Joyner, offers a rebuttal to the white character’s comments that nevertheless validates many of his most problematic points, including the former’s characterization of dysfunction in Black communities and their reliance on government assistance, while offering an explanation and contextualization for this dysfunction. As cultural commentator Damon Young (2017) puts it, “his overall rebuttal is more ‘Racism is why I do these bad things’ and not ‘Actually, most of us don’t do those bad things you think we all do’.” He concludes by mirroring the end of the white character’s segment, rapping “I’m not

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racist / But there’s two sides to every story and now you know mine / [...] Agree to disagree, we could have an understandin’ / I’m not racist.” These lines lead to the white man extending his arms to the Black man and, in a scene that strains credulity, they hug. This song provides rich terrain for analysis, particularly because of its flaws in dealing with anti-Black stereotypes. The Black character describes his experiences of racism but does not call the white character out for the racist falsehoods riddling his statements. Rather, he embodies the kind of “Black person” the white character’s speech conjures. To have a Black character recite the defensive line “I’m not racist,” usually uttered by white people before they make racist statements, reads as a lazily constructed parallel. Most of the Black character’s speech responds directly to the accusations recited by the white character, but does not stereotype white people, nor does he deconstruct the white character’s premise or the falsity of his denial of racism. Thus, the parallel, dialogic use of the title phrase demonstrates Lucas’s problematic reliance on false balance and false equivalency. If these are two equal but opposing sides, then logic dictates both must be equally (not) racist. This is a false premise not only because, as Roussell et al. (2019) have recently argued, in a white supremacist society, it is not possible for racially marginalized individuals to be racist against white people; it is a false premise because, while the white character is attacking the humanity of the Black character based on his racist assumptions, the Black character is simply arguing for his own (and the Black community’s) dignity and right to life. To set up these positions as equivalent is an egregious inequity. It is ambiguous whether or not the characters, with this hug, choose to agree or agree to disagree, nor is it clear what they should even agree on, and reviews clearly disagree about the song’s message and value. Indeed, it spurred strong reactions in viewers and reviewers, if the multitude of reaction videos, remixes, reviews, and comments serve as any indication. Indicative of the polarized opinion, one reviewer called the song “hopelessly outdated” because it pores over “the same tired debate about being racist” (Guan 2017), while another described it as “brutally honest,” “necessarily uncomfortable,” and even “uplifting,” showcasing “the urgency of impactful change” (Orcutt 2017). These reactions provide substantial fodder for students to examine not just the text itself, but its reception and circulation. Particularly in light of the 2020 uprisings against the long and painful history of the statesanctioned murder of Black people, the conclusion of the song is baffling: as Black communities contend with daily acts of racist violence within a white supremacist society, what meaningful solution and

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resolution can be achieved by a Black person hugging a white supremacist? This hug encapsulates the absence of any political call for anti-racist action and structural change in this song. Ongoing police brutality against Black Americans and vigilante murders of anti-racist protesters shine a hard light on the callousness of this fictional “solution” in response to the deadly reality. Turkish-German rapper Eko Fresh’s variation “Aber” (2018) creates one response, echoing Lucas’s structure and aesthetics in his song, except that he gives a third character, Ekrem Bora – the “real” name of the artist himself – the last lines. This German transformation of the song pits a white supporter of the right-wing populist AfD against a politically and religiously conservative Turkish-German supporter of Turkish nationalism. From the outset, Eko Fresh’s version thus challenges the false equivalency of Lucas’s version by pitting two right-wing nationalists against each other. Yet even here, the validity of the equivalency is up for debate, considering the strong political and socio-economic advantages enjoyed by the white AfD supporter. By inserting a third voice, Eko Fresh’s intervention targets the false premises underlying the arguments of both the white and Turkish-German characters. Eko Fresh’s video has more than 12 million views on YouTube (May 2022) and also polarized the press and fans. The left-leaning weekly paper die tageszeitung, expresses appreciation for the song(s) but fundamentally misunderstands the way in which rap and hip-hop cultures borrow, cite, and reframe each other: In beiden Musikvideos rappt dieselbe Stimme wütend aus zwei verschiedenen Mündern. Hass, Vorurteile, Verachtung. Die Songs spiegeln die Zerrissenheit der Gesellschaft und haben eine wichtige Message, die hoffentlich viele erreicht. Dennoch wäre es schön, wenn Eko Fresh beim nächsten Song eine eigene Darstellung einfiele – ganz ohne abzuschauen. (Köhler 2018) (The same angry voice raps out of different mouths in both music videos. Hate, prejudice, and contempt. The songs mirror the divisions within society and have an important message that hopefully reaches many. It would be nice, though, if Eko Fresh could come up with his own representation in his next song – without copying.)

The writer is apparently unaware of hip-hop conventions of referencing, sampling, and rewriting discourse and misses the way in which the controversy within Lucas’s song adds complexity to “Aber,” a discursive strategy crucial to the narrative of hip-hop as an agonistic, dialogic

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art form. By directly citing and transforming Lucas’s script, Eko Fresh connects forms of racism and right-wing populism transnationally, demonstrating thematic and logical continuities without glossing over contextual particularities. Eko Fresh opens up the opportunity for critical comparisons, contesting European race-blind mythologies that create a false distinction between the supposedly legitimate European demands for cultural homogeneity and indefensible American racism (El-Tayeb 2011). The positions presented in Fresh’s song are fundamentally and politically different than in Lucas’s as they contrast two nationalist views; yet Eko Fresh’s analysis might also appear to be falsely “balanced,” giving lip service to anti-immigrant sentiments. Fresh’s rigorous and passionate engagement makes it clear, however, that he is not attempting to present an objective truth but rather a clearly located, subjective yet sound set of arguments. The addition of the third voice changes the outcome and impact of the song. Fresh’s closing argument analyses and calls out the inaccuracies and false premises in both of the nationalist positions. Similar to Lucas, however, Fresh is already presumed to be “biased” in favour of his ethnic group, which means that, in this third voice, Fresh negotiates a complex set of racialized expectations, many of which centre on Orientalist binaries around culture and religion. Therefore, it seems that he has to present the flaws of both sides in order not to be dismissed as simply biased or radical or “reverse-racist.” Joyner Lucas puts any such expectations on the viewer or listener, which means he avoids becoming a “token other,” who is expected to be the “good” mediating voice of, in the case of Eko Fresh, the model multicultural citizen of Germany. Beyond immediate reactions ranging from praise to disapproval for some of the reasons we summarize above, critics pointed to the importance of the larger context surrounding this song: the debate about German national soccer player Mesut Özil, who had long been a fan favourite and held up as an example of “successful” integration.3 However, before the 2018 World Cup, Özil’s loyalty became a subject of national speculation after he posed for a photograph with Turkish president Erdoğan. Shortly after Eko Fresh’s track was released, Özil quit the national team, citing frustrations with racism within the German national soccer association (see Zambon 2022). The way in which Eko Fresh creates a mediating position takes on a different connotation in this context, seemingly in defence of Özil, as it suggests that there are different positionalities outside of the binary of “racist” and “Turkish nationalist.” Indeed, Fresh even states that it is unfair to write Özil off “nur weil er ein Selfie teilt” (just because he shared a selfie). While Özil’s

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relationship with Erdoğan and with Turkish-German cultural politics is certainly more complicated than a simple “selfie,” the critique of the German public’s readiness to reject and expel Özil still stands. Our short critical readings and contextualizations of these songs offer glimpses into the complex social, dialogic relations between and beyond them and uncover the gaps in their reductive dialogic structures. With their emotionally charged forms and their contested reception, the songs offer a point of entry for teaching the complexities of the politics of appropriation, dialogue, and intersectionality in the college classroom. Further, students will make connections to current political events; in the year 2020, this would certainly include a discussion of the Black Lives Matter protests and their political reception in the US, in Germany, and globally. Pedagogy and Complex Dialogue Our suggestions for a classroom unit in the transnational media studies classroom focus on how critical readings of these videos and texts and their cultural appropriations create avenues for “complex cultural dialogue” (Benhabib 2002) about the various sociopolitical issues they raise, including nationalism, racism, white supremacy, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and religious fundamentalism. These songs lend themselves to teaching about mechanisms of positionality, power, and discursive distortion in popular culture and the media more generally, illustrating how “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality” (Mann and Ornstein 2012). However, their dialogue format risks reinforcing a dangerous tendency of contemporary discourse: equating the racist ideologies of Trump and the AfD with the anti-racist ideologies of Black Lives Matter and pro-immigrant, anti-Islamophobia groups in Germany, as though the rhetoric were equally harmful on both sides. We thus urge students to “resist the coercive forces within dialectic/dialogue” and to “conceptualize tactics for negotiating [...] troubled identifications” (Ratcliffe 2005, 8). Where Ratcliffe calls for “rhetorical listening,” our pedagogical applications call for critical listening, engaging, sampling, and speaking to uncover structures of power and inequality. Understanding the problem of false balance is a crucial task for defending civil rights and liberal democratic institutions against the rising tide of illiberal democracy globally. Thus, decoding the flawed logics underlying the structure of the song can help students identify similar patterns that contribute to normalizing racism and socio-economic inequality in public discourse more generally.

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We propose a unit that begins with a selection of theoretical background readings to provide the critical language students will need to analyse the songs, such as the classic text “Myths” by Roland Barthes and Benhabib’s (2002) work on complex cultural dialogue. To sensitize students to different forms of racist narratives at work in the two national contexts, students could read selections from Robin Diangelo’s (2018) White Fragility, which is written about the US context but has transnational applicability, and selections on Orientalism by Edward Said and Dag Tuastad (2003) to help interpret the German context. While these readings highlight the emergence of context-specific racist discourses, students should be pushed to identify how such discourses also echo each other and travel between contexts. If the unit is devoted more time, an optional additional activity would be for students to read review texts that take various stances using Stuart Hall’s “EncodingDecoding” framework. In the class session following the introductory readings, students are exposed to the two songs and create collaborative annotations to connect, compare, and contrast them. For an English-language media studies classroom, students would be provided with a translation of the German lyrics including glosses of unfamiliar concepts and contexts. The students’ task would be to identify the narratives of self and other from each position, to explore what cultural dialogues they mirror, and to examine how they are intertwined with narratives and cultural myths and can be read intersectionally with relation to gender, class, nationalism, race, religion, and political/social legitimacy. Students listen to and watch the music videos of both songs. In a “hot take” journaling activity, students reflect on their initial impressions and responses to the song(s) that we will explore in this unit. We suggest the following questions as prompts: As you are listening, try to observe how the song makes you feel. What lines stand out to you? What do these lines make you feel? What are your impressions of each of the characters in the song? What do you think about the format of the song? Do you think this song is fair or unfair to either or both of the characters? Which, if any, of the arguments made by these characters are familiar to you?

Making personal connections to material is an important first step in student learning. Ideally, returning to this journal entry at the end of the unit will allow students to realize how much they missed in their initial responses to the song and how much they have gained through a methodical, theoretically engaged exploration of the material.

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In the next class session, students are asked to explicitly connect Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) to the two songs. They will discuss the use of voice and perspective in both songs while paying close attention to questions of social positioning, power, intersectionality, and race. Possible questions are, Does the additional voice in Fresh’s song disrupt the false equivalency and objectivity bias problems from Lucas’s song? How so? What voices and positions are missing in each of the songs and how could other/additional perspectives shift the discourse? Additionally, students can examine the politics of media reception and circulation by reading reviews of the songs and music videos texts that take various stances, applying Stuart Hall’s “EncodingDecoding” framework to contrast a review consonant with the artist’s apparent preferred meaning (e.g., the review in Revolt [Orcutt 2017]) and an oppositional reading (e.g., Young’s 2017 critique). Finally, by looking at the comment section on YouTube, students discuss which reception is more evident among YouTube commenters.4 A German-language class could focus more on the reception and circulation of Eko Fresh, including the video’s circulation among far-right AfD supporters in edited form. They would then be asked to consider how Eko Fresh’s song responds to and contends with Lucas’s.5 As a unit capstone, we suggest collaborative annotation projects for both songs and the respective videos. Based on class discussions and prompts, students collaboratively create critical annotations using a platform such as Perusall, which allows students to annotate and respond to each other in real time. Each group will be assigned a theme to examine in both songs/videos. Such themes might include the following: What histories do these interlocutors bring to the table and how do these histories relate to labour and exploitation? How do the songs depict issues of ghettoization/segregation, poverty, and violence? How do they depict gender roles, gender relations, and family? How do they address whiteness and entitlement? Students can employ class materials and/or be required to find supplementary primary and secondary sources to construct their analyses. As a final step, each group will present their findings and arguments about the ways in which the selected themes appear in both songs. The objective of the capstone is to allow students to draw connections between both contexts; recognize national, linguistic, and political differences; discuss differences in form and voice(s); and connect critical, theoretical, artistic, and activist interventions into contemporary discourse. The aforementioned activities could be assigned as group or individual tasks, interchangeably, and shared on a common drive for critical

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discussion. The multivocal approach in the songs could be reproduced through careful attention to the different readings by the students and their respective positionalities. A similar unit could be taught in a German cultural studies class, where students could analyse Eko Fresh’s song in its original German, read sources in German, and delve deeply into the complex intercultural dialogue in which the song participates. Thus, the upper-division L2 classroom becomes a site for critical pedagogy across boundaries; it transverses the confines of national contexts and languages and expands our concept of language teaching towards teaching for cultural and social competency. Social justice pedagogy, in the language and in the media studies classroom, is not just teaching about voice and power but also about reflecting on how we come to have a certain voice. Ultimately, in all of these settings, the goal is to teach about dialogue and coercion, to hone critical listening and reading skills, to engage and contend, as we seek to uncover the structures of power. In this process, we assume we will encounter various levels of discursive interventions and shifts, and also, as intended, levels of discomfort. There are limits, however, to making discomfort a tool for critical pedagogy. First, while critical and deconstructive in approach, selecting these two songs contains the risk of reinforcing the rhetoric of “good people on both sides” – it highlights the emotional and intellectual labour required of marginalized individuals to advocate their own humanity. While it is pedagogically productive to pose the question of whether such dialogue can ever truly occur an on equal footing, bringing this question to the classroom risks that we, yet again, expect the bulk of the emotional labour from students of colour, minorities, and other marginalized people in the classroom to deconstruct harmful hegemonic perspectives with which they are already constantly confronted. Second, we must ask: Where are the women’s voices in this discourse, and how are they mobilized as political and rhetorical objects in each song? The Black Lives Matter movement was founded by three Black women, yet their voices are absent from Joyner Lucas’s song and video. In Eko Fresh’s song, the conduct and control of women provides a key site of struggle between the first two men, but women do not speak on their own behalf. As instructors, we must also ask when the value of deliberative discourse and complex cultural dialogue is outweighed by the danger of providing a platform for illiberal ideologies. How, for example, do we present the views of white supremacist characters without the risk of normalizing them? There is also potential risk for instructors who are precariously situated (adjunct, contingent, graduate student,

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pre-tenure, etc.) in engaging students in such emotionally fraught and polarizing content. These risks are further multiplied when the instructor is underrepresented in the academy and/or intersectionally marginalized. Finally, with regard to both students and instructors, we must ask whose opinions on the issues these songs raise will be taken as “rational” and whose will be seen as “reverse racist” and/or “politically correct.” Explicit connections to political events and situations need to be handled carefully and respectfully, with the instructor’s own positionality in mind. It is crucial that the voices of students of colour be supported and amplified while recognizing that they should also be shielded from undue (and potentially traumatizing) burdens of representation. It rests on the instructor to tease out these dynamics without causing harm or shutting down discussion. Both the songs and videos and the critical dialogue about and between them are limited by their “both sides” format and consequent support of false balance. Yet they also effectively demonstrate how hiphop creates a transnational public, wherein the concepts and experiences of nationalism and racism resonate across lines of linguistic and cultural difference. Critical hip-hop pedagogy means that we call attention to these limits, gaps, and erasures, and that we create space for thinking differently to create potent, multivocal critiques of polarizing and reductive political-cultural landscapes. Questions for Reflection: 1 How can critical hip-hop pedagogy help us detect the cultural and social gaps and erasures, and help us create space for thinking differently? 2 How can critical hip-hop pedagogy help us understand the multivocal critiques of polarizing and reductive political-cultural landscapes? 3 What histories do these interlocutors bring to the table, and how do these histories relate to labour and exploitation? NOTES 1 A different version of this chapter has been published in Unterrichtspraxis 55, no. 1 (Spring 2022). Reprinted here with permission. 2 It is actually the white protagonist who ascribes the Black protagonist within the Black Lives Matter ideology; the fact that the latter mirrors the white protagonist’s first lines in a defensive manner suggests that this may

192  Didem Uca, Kate Zambon, and Maria Stehle not be a proactive self-identification, yet the song lyrics make this somewhat ambivalent. 3 This status as “model of successful integration” was made explicit in 2010 through the introduction of a new category in the Bambi awards, ­Germany’s oldest media award program. Özil was the inaugural winner in the category “Integration,” despite the fact that he was born and raised in Germany. 4 Additional resources for the English-language classroom could include Joyner Lucas “Dear America” (music video); Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” (music video); White Right: Meeting the Enemy (film, dir. Deeya Khan, 2017, 60 min); The Objectivity Illusion – Lee Ross (TED Talk); “White Privilege” by Kyla Jenée Lacey (poem). For context on the German Black Lives Matter demonstration, students might read Berlin sees fresh Black Lives Matter protests. 5 Additional materials for the German-language classroom could include information about Turkish German identity formation and discourses of white privilege, for example, “Zwischen den Welten: Deutsch-Türken in Zeiten des Özil-Rücktritts”; “Deutschtürken über Erdoğan”; excerpts from Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, eds., Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage, 2019); Excerpts from Ferda Ataman, Ich bin von hier. Hört auf zu Fragen! (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2019). Additional resources for discussing racism and anti-racist activism in Germany could include definitions of PoC that tie together the Anglo-American and German contexts, for example, “Hä? Was heißt denn People of Color?” by Tina Adomako; PoC/Person of Color (also the video at the bottom, English with German subtitles); Glossar für diskriminerungssensible Sprache; and websites of organizations such as Initiative schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Afro-German activist organization); Generation ADEFRA (Afro-German feminist activist organization); Schwarz Rot Gold video series (interviews of contemporary Afro-German figures); and the Germania video series (interviews of prominent individuals of migrant heritage, including Eko Fresh). BIBLIOGRAPHY Akom, Antwi. 2009. “Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Practice.” Equity and Excellence in Education 42 (1): 42–66. Andreotti, Vanessa, Sharon Stein, Cash Ahenakew, and Dallas Hunt. 2015. “Mapping Interpretations of Decolonization in the Context of Higher Education.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4 (1): 21–40. –  2016. “Research and Pedagogical Notes: The Educational Challenges of Imagining the World Differently.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 37 (1): 101–12.

Transnational Hip-Hop and Social Justice Pedagogy  193 Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2018. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. 1st ed. New York: Liveright. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brust, Imke. 2013. “Transnational and Gendered Dimensions of Heimat in Mo Asumang’s Roots Germania.” In Heimat Goes Mobile: Hybrid Forms of Home in Literature and Film, edited by Gabriele Eichmanns and Yvonne Franke, 170–89. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Buffington, Melanie L., and Jolie Day. 2018. “Hip Hop Pedagogy as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy.” Arts 7 (4): 97. El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Freire, Paolo. 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Guan, Frank. 2017. “Joyner Lucas’s Viral Hit ‘I’m Not Racist’ Is Exhausting.” Vulture, 4 December 4. https://www.vulture.com/2017/12/joyner-lucas -viral-hit-im-not-racist-is-exhausting.html. Hill, Marc Lamont. 2009. Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity. New York: Teachers College Press. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practice of Freedom, London: Routledge. – 2003. Teaching Community. A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. Hoyler, Michael, and Christoph, Mager. 2005. “HipHop ist im Haus: Cultural Policy, Community Centres, and the Making of Hip-Hop Music in Germany.” Built Environment 31 (3): 237–54. Kahnke, Corinna, and Maria Stehle. 2011. “Made in Germany: The Politics of Teaching German Popular Culture in the 21st Century.” Unterrichtspraxis 44 (1): 115–22. Köhler, Charlotte. 2018. “Neuer Song von Rapper Eko Fresh: Klug, aber abgeguckt.” Die Tageszeitung: taz, 25 July 2018. https://taz.de/Neuer-Song -von-Rapper-Eko-Fresh/!5519902. Kraidy, Marwan. 2005. Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Low, Bronwen E. 2011. Slam School: Learning through Conflict in the Hip-Hop in the Spoken Word Classroom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Low, Bronwen E., and Emily Petchauer. 2013. Schooling Hip-Hop: Expanding HipHop Based Education across the Curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press. Mann, Thomas E., and Norman J. Ornstein. 2012. “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem.” Washington Post, 27 April. https://www .washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the -problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html.

194  Didem Uca, Kate Zambon, and Maria Stehle Orcutt, K.C. 2017. “Joyner Lucas Releases ‘I’m Not Racist,’ a Powerful Visual Exploring Race Relations.” Revolt, 28 November. http://web.archive.org /web/20180807001911/https://revolt.tv/stories/2017/11/29/joyner-lucas -releases-im-racist-powerful-visual-exploring-race-relations-0700438d4b. Pennay, Mark. 2002. “Rap in Germany: The Birth of a Genre.” In Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA, edited by T. Mitchell, 111–33. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Peoples, Whitney A. 2008. “Under Construction: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Black Second-Wave and Hip-Hop Feminisms.” Meridian. 8:19–52. Ratcliffe, Krista. 2005. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Riegel, Christine, and Thomas Geisen, eds. 2010. Jugend, Zugehörigkeit und Migration: Subjektpositionierung im Kontext von Jugendkultur, Ethnizitätsund Geschlechterkonstruktionen [Youth, belonging, and migration: Subject positioning in the context of youth culture, ethnic and gender constructions]. Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer VS. Rodriguez, Louie. 2009. “Dialoguing Cultural Capital and Student Engagement: Towards a Hip Hop Pedagogy in the High School.” Equity and Excellence in Education 42 (1): 20–35. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Roussell, Aaron, Kathryn Henne, and Karen S. Glover. 2019. “Impossibility of a Reverse Racism Effect: A Rejoinder to James, James, and Vila.” Criminology and Public Policy 18:E5–E16. Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. London: Vintage Books. Schloss, Joseph G. 2014. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middletown: Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Simpson, Patricia. 2005. “Manche Menschen werden Brüder: Contemporary Music and New Fraternities.” German Politics and Society 23 (2): 50–72. Soysal, Levent. 2004. “Rap, HipHop, Kreuzberg: Scripts of/for Migrant Youth Culture in the WorldCity Berlin.” New German Critique 92:62–81. Stehle, Maria. 2012a. Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture: Textscapes, Filmscapes, Soundscapes. Rochester, NY: Camden House. –  2012b. “White Ghettos: The ‘Crisis of Multiculturalism’ in Post-Unification Germany.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15 (2): 167–81. –  2014. “Teaching Spaces: A Critical Reflection on Spatial Exploration Exercises as Teaching Tools.” In Social Justice and the University, edited by Job Shefner et al., 280–94. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stein, Sharon, and Vanessa Andreotti. 2017. “Afterword: Provisional Pedagogies Toward Imagining Global Mobilities Otherwise.” Curriculum Inquiry 47 (1): 135–46.

Transnational Hip-Hop and Social Justice Pedagogy  195 Tuastad, Dag. 2003. “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s).” Third World Quarterly 24 (4): 591–9. Tuzcu, Pinar. 2017. Ich bin eine Kanackin: Decolonizing Popfeminism – Transcultural Perspectives on Lady Bitch Ray. Transcript. Wicker, Jewel. 2019. “Joyner Lucas on Going Independent and His Controversial Grammy-Nominated Video.” Billboard 131, no. 2, 26 January 26, 40. Williams, A. Dee. 2009. “The Critical Cultural Cipher: Remaking Paulo Freire’s Cultural Circles using Hip Hop Culture.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 2 (10): 1–29. Young, Damon. 2017. “The {roblem(s) with Joyner Lucas’ ‘I’m Not Racist,’ Explained.” The Root, 20 November. https://www.theroot.com /the-problem-s-with-joyner-lucas-im-not-racist-explain-1820888539. Zambon, Kate. 2022. “Controlling Definitions: Racism and German Identity after Mesut Özil’s National Team Resignation.” In Football Nation: The Playing Fields of German Culture, History, and Society, edited by Rebeccah Dawson, Bastian Heinsohn, Oliver Knabe, and Alan McDougall, 119–40. New York: Berghahn Books. Zambon, Kate, and Didem Uca. 2016. “Patriots and Pedagogues: Cultural Institutions and the Performative Politics of Minority German Hip-Hop.” International Journal of Communication 10:726–47.

14 Podcast Pedagogy: Addressing Populism and Social Justice as Vocal Justice peter schweppe and adrian richard wagner

Introduction In recent years, populist shifts in the German political landscape have revealed resurgent movement and violence on the far-right. From the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA)1 protests of 2014–16 to the recent victories of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany) party, Germany has faced uncomfortable social and electoral realities in its run up to 2021 when Angela Merkel stepped down as chancellor and the transition into the new coalition government led by the SPD’s Olaf Scholz began. Indeed, conservative populism has showed how large-scale protest waves and spikes in traditionalist public sentiments are effectively pushing their way into everyday political consciousness and discourse. As Patricia Anne Simpson argues, “the political lexicon of far-right rhetoric derives its considerable and persuasive force from normalizing and mainstreaming extremist views” (Simpson 2016, 36). Since then, the 2022 war in Ukraine has opened up new discourses around energy politics, boycotts on Russian oil, and the economic fallout that would, or will, certainly follow in Germany. In response to this rise in populism, farright rallies and protests have been met with significant counter-rallies and counter-protests. Organizations like the Center for Political Beauty and street artists like Barbara have given German political activism new life. And yet, all of the turbulence in this seemingly new Germany makes it difficult to stay on top of the news and events, let alone address them meaningfully in a contemporary German studies course or other humanities course. But with so much at stake, questions of how or whether to address the current phenomenon of conservative populism in the university classroom have become increasingly vital for social justice education. To what extent should the humanities devote time

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to contemporary politics? Why study populism as opposed to a more established subject like poetry or philosophy? How does Germany’s past uniquely (and urgently) influence its present? To address these questions, our chapter examines the importance of forging curricular time for the subject of populism and in the same breath making space for student voices in critical social debates by listening to and creating student podcasts. In the age of COVID-19, expanding the realm of possibility for constructive debates that podcasts enable plays a role in the necessary adaptation of learning experiences that the contributions in this edited book each represent. As authors of this chapter and devotees of education and new media, our interest in this approach stems from the recognition that curriculum in the twenty-first century must change, but also a deeper curiosity about the ways humans communicate and understand each other. Our chapter thus surveys the possibilities and challenges student podcasting offers as a model of social justice pedagogy and a method of engaging with a more diverse spectrum of voices near and far. In turn, we explore the steps educators in German studies might consider as they design podcast dialogues for student bodies that are as mobilized around causes such as anti-racism, climate change, and growing inequality today as ever before. From bell hooks’s exploration of “love” (2003) to Kevin Kumashiro’s “hope” (2004) and Patti Lather’s “getting lost” (2007), emergent frames within social justice education have effectively scrutinized systems of inequality, oppression, and privilege in and out of the classroom. Such frames have not only helped empower the rights of disenfranchised and marginalized communities but also the imperative of enacting and upholding a pedagogical practice as teachers. As Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo (2009) assert, “just agreeing that social justice is important is not enough without the practice of social justice” (350). By examining how teachers can facilitate the practice of engagement in the classroom, this chapter outlines some of the ways social justice pedagogy extends and implicates higher education outside of the classroom, while at the same time challenging some of the common assumptions we educators tend to make. For example, we note that social justice education has valuably drawn attention to the plurality of races, sexualities, beliefs, classes, abilities, and even nations, but, generally speaking, we could do a better job of publicly acknowledging these pluralities. To that end, we acknowledge that the land on which we write and record/listen is the traditional hunting territories of the Apsáalooke, Niitsítapi, and others who have been here long before us and still share it with us today. Acknowledgments like this one can constructively open doors by helping deconstruct inequitable systems that have to date influenced

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and permeated education. In terms of canon and curriculum, too, a heightened focus on what goes into spaces of learning harks back to the work of Gayatri Spivak, who reminds us that “the matter of the literary canon is in fact a political matter: securing authority” (Spivak 1999, 182). Critiquing, vetting, and retweaking the canon – critically asking what makes it into our syllabi and how it gets treated in class – becomes a practice of social justice, one that helps orient our work and goals on a day-to-day as well as a program-wide level. As a whole, then, arguments like these lend social justice practitioners in higher education an opportunity to reflect on the mission of the humanities as well as the need to rethink its political matter. As we propose in this chapter, social justice practice can pedagogically cultivate political matter by creating critical space for student voices. Here, the notion of “voice” is not limited to audible contexts but also metaphorical contexts of human rights. For the purpose of this chapter, we acknowledge and welcome the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community into the discussions to which we refer; the terms “voice” and “podcasting” accordingly serve as points of departure for social justice-oriented practices that span audible, accessible, and civic frameworks. As we envision, such practices tend to involve a willingness to forgo privileges associated with familiarity of teaching or learning style as well as method or material. An authentic pedagogy of social justice means questioning that which is familiar to us – materials, activities, curriculum, course dynamics, identities (student, teacher, institution alike) – and asking how that familiarity might help or hinder student learning in constantly evolving sociopolitical environments where being willing to risk a new idea can become a vulnerable and empowering exchange. Hence, by augmenting notions of voice and risking unfamiliar exchanges in and out of the classroom, our vision of social justice pedagogy for the twenty-first century rests on something more than student engagement; rather, it recognizes the profound role that student voices can play in revitalizing humanistic thinking through public dialogue and intentional listening sessions. Making Space for Voices One constructive way to retool and facilitate student exchanges in the classroom is through podcasting. Ever since its beginnings in 2004 when the word “Podcasting” was first used in a Guardian article, the medium has gained a lot of traction, from “World Podcast Day” to Nielsen reports recently citing a “one-in-five American” weekly listener rating (Hammersley 2004). While this popularity has turned the podcast into

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a cultural phenomenon for listeners, it has also turned podcasting into a phenomenon for creators. For starters, the transition from broadcast to podcast fundamentally alters the way we interact with and think about traditional media such as the radio or television, which leave less room for interaction. With a computer or cell phone today, the possibilities for recording, mixing, and uploading content make the podcast medium accessible and relevant for retooling curricula to include alternative formats and media of student expression. Asking students to produce their own podcasts invites them to join fellow students and instructors to extend the classroom and increase community involvement, whether through interviews or the very nature of publishing a podcast. For scholars like Lily Claiborne, John Morrell, Joe Bandy, and Derek Bruff (2020), shifting learning experiences from the “confines of the classroom” to the world at large fosters processes of discovering how higher education can engage community as well as engage with community. Such engagement democratizes and bridges formal spaces of learning with public spheres of discourse. In addition, the process of podcasting creates space for student voices to connect. In one sense, focusing on students’ space for speaking and listening critically in a public format empowers them in their learning and their ability to dialogue, which embodies Paulo Freire’s radical pedagogy of love. While uncertainties, fragilities, and disagreements can indeed arise from dialogues, Robert Nash, DeMethra LaSha Bradley, and Arthur Chickering (2008) point out the magnitude of value that comes with “(igniting) the fire of conversation about difficult topics so that every participant in the moral conversation leaves the experience both affirmed and informed” (2008, 33). As learning objectives for a course, these conversations give students a chance to reflect on assumptions they bring to the classroom themselves in order to better understand how they hear and speak to other students. Staging critical and challenging dialogues in this manner puts these learning objectives into a larger framework of higher education, if not also democratic society. How to facilitate this kind of understanding in the higher education classroom remains a debatable topic in and of itself. In his podcast conversation with Sam Harris and Michael Weiss, for example, Yascha Mounk raises concerns about how identity politics have impacted our ability to debate. As Mounk puts it, I’m struck by the fact that a good number of my students for example probably hold the view that it would be very difficult for a diverse group of people in the United States today to come together and have a real good faith debate about big political issues in which they obviously

200  Peter Schweppe and Adrian Richard Wagner bring in their personal perspective but in which we are not talking about everything through an explicitly identity lens. And yet that is the experience I have every time I teach. (Harris 2019)

While Mounk’s experiences in the classroom may not reflect the political matter of a social justice pedagogy, it does emphasize the importance of journeying together through the process of difficult conversations with our students – we prepare them for getting their voices into social discourses and thereby substantiate the dialogue as a humanistic value of new and, hopefully, improved understanding. With this in mind, we turn to the concrete ways that podcasts and podcasting can help teachers navigate and engage with one example of a contested contemporary issue: far-right German populism. Making Curricular Time for Populism Whereas neo-Nazi rhetoric from fringe political parties like the National Democratic Party (NPD) has long stood in close relationship to violence,2 the recent murder of prominent Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician Walter Lübcke by a right-wing extremist crystallizes a disturbing trend of violence on the right. In her report for the Brookings Institute titled “German Radical Right Threatens the Survival of Democracy,” Constanze Stelzenmüller urges us to consider that “the first murder of a politician by a right-wing extremist in Germany’s postwar history could be a political earthquake in the making.” Unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that this depiction is not so exaggerated. Following the recent publication of the 2018 “Report on the Protection of the Constitution,” Germany’s domestic intelligence service noted the high degree of radicalism, declaring approximately 24,000 rightwing followers, 12,700 with potential for violence and 900 with legal weapons (Bundesamt 2019, 10). Whereas the report could not estimate the number of illegal weapons, it did observe that “[the far-right’s] affinity for weapons represents a considerable potential threat” and that many individuals own weapons illegally (18). For organizations like the fast-growing “Reichsburger,” which rejects all authority from the German government and administration, building and arming an army for a “day of reckoning” remains a large part of their extremist platform. According to a December 2018 report in the Deutsche Welle, “the anti-government group has grown by 56 percent to 15,600 members [in 2018]. Security services are concerned that propaganda about a “Reichsbürger army” will inspire attacks” (Schumacher 2018). Meanwhile, a recent poll by the German public opinion group Civey showed that

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60 per cent of German citizens are unhappy with the government’s response to right-wing extremism (Rinke and Sims 2019). Following the announcement that the murderer of Walter Lübcke had been under surveillance since the 1980s, there have been grave concerns about the ability of Germany’s Interior Ministry to keep extremism in check, but also about the efficacy of social discourse and public education to engage with the questions that conservative populism has raised about German democracy as a whole. Addressing populism in this unprecedented political moment, then, becomes a political matter of social justice pedagogy, which first requires a willingness to make time in our overloaded curriculum for discussions about the distressing strategies of the far right. While the subject matter itself can feel intimidating, by intentional design of the far right, this feeling can perhaps be drawn upon as an entrance point into the debate. Take, for instance, one of the popular tactics espoused by the right wing: intimidation campaigns against politicians like Walter Lübcke and other public workers with pro-refugee or tolerancebased standpoints. From the underground right-radical cell Nordkreuz to the Reichsbürger, fringe organizations have turned to public “death lists,” “national criminal registers,” and “wanted posters” that give out the names and contact information of pro-immigration politicians or left-wing targets (Oltermann 2019). Cataloguing and publishing this information is intended to scare citizens and dissuade them from taking civic action. Or in another example, the creation of underground networks that extend across the country on social media have recently come into the public spotlight. In December 2018, an investigation into Frankfurt’s police force uncovered an extremist network of neo-Nazi police officers, which targeted a lawyer’s daughter with a public hate message that included the family’s contact information. Yet what was especially disturbing was the message’s inference to a resurrection of the infamous National Socialist Underground (NSU) cell of neo-Nazi murderers from the 2000s. As the Handelsblatt reported, the message stated that “‘in retaliation … we will slaughter your daughter,’ […] mentioning the daughter’s name and Basay-Yildiz’ home address, which were not publicly known” (Crossland 2018). Signing the letter with “NSU 2.0.,” neo-Nazis in the Frankfurt police force commemorated the NSU and thereby brought back to life the many open questions about a government cover-up and other forms of complicity that continue to remain unresolved from the trial, which journalist Ben Knight calls “one of the most important in [the] country’s history” (2018); however, the letter also made an explicit threat to the lawyer, Seda Basay-Yildiz, who worked on the NSU case itself. By no means the norm

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in Germany’s police forces, this case nonetheless leaves a sinister implication for Germany’s current state of law and order. Just as important, it implicates the need for curricular engagement with contemporary strategies like intimidation campaigns or other attacks on democratic institutions such as the media. By asking how intimidation can happen on a day-to-day level in school, on social media, in our community, or in national discourses, we model the value of discussing and defending personal boundaries, human dignity, or rights to privacy, and we reject intimidation from the far right in German communities today. On a more concrete pedagogical level, requiring students to identify subtleties in messaging and connect them up to larger frameworks of ideology empowers them to parse out the details of any given point and demonstrate their ability to explain why such an activity is meaningful. Intimidation is, after all, something that scales up or down in many contexts. Drawing student attention to this social practice takes on new weight once it becomes clear that such a strategy has a longer and more recent history with far-right violence. But with troublesome, challenging questions about identity or borders, how can instructors address far-right populism meaningfully in a course? As humanists, we are well positioned to contextualize and scrutinize debates at the heart of the populist movement in Germany, whether that means historicizing hate speech and free speech, comparing refugee movements in 1945 and 2015 and now 2022, or tracing expressions of remembrance, pride, and protest in recent years. And yet, the face of Germany is shifting at such a rate that it is not only hard to keep up with the news headlines; it is hard to know the most effective method for beginning an analysis or discussion. Drawing on the discipline of political science, which deals in up-to-date attitudes, polls, and rhetoric, one conceptual tool that can help frame a topic is the “Overton window,” which helps identify turning points in what is deemed socially acceptable and inacceptable. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy (n.d.) defines it thus: “The Overton Window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics,” delineating which policies garner enough voter support and are therefore inside the window versus those ideas which do not and are outside of the window. Taking a recent statement from Alexander Gauland, leader of the AfD party, as an example, we can trace how language shifted the Overton window in German culture and politics. On 2 June 2018, Gaulend made the public statement that “Hitler and the National Socialists were just a small bird shit in the 1,000 years of successful German history” (“AfD’s Gaulend” 2018). Gauland’s attempt to trivialize the past was part of a broader effort to reframe Germany’s

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history by deflecting attention away from Nazi atrocities and glorifying the nation’s fallen soldiers. While the comment was widely rebuked for its insensitivity towards Germany’s Nazi past, the mere utterance and suggestion that the Nazi past was nothing other than passing “bird shit” by an elected leader at an official event provoked public opinion about what kind of language was acceptable, what ideas were conceivable, and what campaign slogans might be electable in wide swaths of the country. By using the Overton window as a mechanism for assessing language and public opinion surrounding instances like this, it becomes possible to associate and empiricize the ways language has been actively destabilizing Germany’s Overton window, from attempts to rehabilitate Nazi concepts like “völkisch” (Chase 2017) to calls for a “180 reversal on the politics of remembrance,” “memorial of shame,” or calling someone a Nazi. When we tie broader questions of AfD language to statistical popularity, we begin to see shifting opinions around what lies inside and what might no longer lie outside of the Overton window, which raises cause for concern. Following their second-place finish in German polls in September 2018, Simon Schütz noted how AfD spokesman Jörg Meuthen considered his party to be “in touch with German society.” As Meuthen stated, “[on] the crucial issues of our time, the views of the majority of the population coincide with ours. That drives these people to us” (Schütz 2018). To counter this argument, alternative first-person accounts about the directionality of trauma and violence play a meaningful role. In two recent courses at Montana State University, for instance (German 391, Weimar Publics and Counterpublics and German 450, Contemporary Populisms), Ervin Malakaj’s reflection, “Historical Injury and Multidirectional Solidarity in Times of Crisis,” offered MSU students a chance to understand how contemporary events of today (Ukrainian refugees and the war in Ukraine) indelibly connected to other refugee and war events of the past. As Malakaj described: If you’ve experienced forced migration, it might be very difficult to witness history repeat itself over again. Your personal plight, as well as that of your people, feels like a lesson unheeded by political leaders. Perhaps they never paid attention to your struggles in order to learn much from them. Perhaps they did but felt underwhelmed by your pain. Either way, the horror of it all just becomes too much to bear. And so, your solidarity with Ukraine might – as it did in my case – grow out of deep historical injury activated over and again with each tweet you read, each statement you signed, each time you shared resources with your comrades near and far. (Malakaj 2022)

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This notion puts the directionality of history and trauma into a new perspective for students who might or might not only be following news media, social media, or other forms of media about headline events. Our job as humanistic educators is to bring the human aspect of such events, and headlines, and media environments to the forefront – through first-person testimony, scholarship that touches on such aspects, and other artistic forms alike. In the case of Malakaj’s (2022) essay, MSU students responded overwhelmingly that it made them think differently about past and present because the course focus was framed around a regional/national narrative as opposed to a humanistic experiential narrative. Malakaj’s reflection reminds us all to centre the human experience in our work. Case Study: Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) By honing in on populist moments, rhetoric, and events, educators can use populist parties like the AfD as an example. After all, the AfD reached second place in Germany’s polls in September 2018, just one year after their first major election. What this proves is how quickly political and rhetorical norms can shift and, more importantly, why such shifts make for an intriguing focus on cultural hot topics, which have increasingly been weaponized to raise alarm and stoke fear, across the political spectrum. As Beverley Weber outlines, the racist language of the radical right is not confined to the right but has become increasingly normalized in a range of political positionings. For example, SPD party member Thilo Sarrazin bears a certain responsibility for allowing ideas, which were long taboo as racist, to again become “speakable” in the German public, although his ideas nearly cost him expulsion from his party. In particular, his association of poverty with cultural heritage, and cultural heritage with biological heritage, expresses forms of racism that had become fringe views after the Holocaust but now are re-emerging. (Weber 2016, 76)

Reinstituting harmful rhetoric in the public sphere, whether minimalizing the significance of the Holocaust or ostracizing religions such as Islam in Europe, is part and parcel of the groundswell of support for parties searching for electoral support, but especially notable of the AfD, which arguably comes on the back of its anti-refugee platform and claims of “taking Germany back, piece by piece” (“Höcke-Rede” 2017). Following Merkel’s decision to welcome over one million refugees in 2015, the AfD engineered a backlash of conservative populist

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resentment towards refugees based on xenophobic counter-slogans like “Refugees Not Welcome” and racist campaign posters like the recent “Slave Market” that stoked fears about dark-skinned foreigners turning white German women into slaves (Grieshaber 2019). Despite the Nazi history of scapegoating religious populations, this xenophobic, racist platform aims to outwardly address what some of the AfD’s politicians mock as the “political helplessness” of Germany’s government, at that time the ruling coalition between the CDU and Social Democratic Party (SPD) (Schütz 2018). For Weber, the nuances of the term “Willkommenskultur” encompass numerous meanings, including the “naïve opening of Germany to refugees (and thus potential threat to German or European culture), as emblematic of Germany’s fulfilment of the history of the Enlightenment tradition of human rights, or as demonstrative of Germany’s post WWII or post-Cold War re-integration into a democratic Europe and subsequent openness to the world” (Weber 2020, 45). As evidenced here, administering sentiments of “welcome” can be used to numerous political ends. As teachers, pinpointing rhetorical strategies around concepts like “Willkommen,” visual aspects of campaign posters, polemical traits in political speeches, or policy strategies in parliament allows our humanities students to culturally grasp or wrestle with the crux of what makes a party like the AfD so popular in the first place. Another way of understanding the populist appeal of the AfD is podcasts like the New York Times’s The Daily, which in 2020 featured a five-part miniseries from Berlin correspondent Katrin Bennhold about how populist movements are impacting the future of the EU and liberal democracy in Europe and has since then covered other related themes such as the “Day X” series. Back in 2020, Bennhold’s populism series put Germany’s populist trends into broader perspective. Travelling to France, Italy, Poland, and Germany ahead of the European Union Parliamentary elections – the second largest democratic elections in the world – Bennhold talked with populist protesters and politicians alike in order to get a better sense about why populism was doing so well right now. Born and raised in West Germany, Bennhold and others she interviewed had begun to question the vitality of Europe’s future as a whole. For Bennhold, recent events like Brexit and Chemnitz in 2018 raised a lot of doubts and concerns about Germany, the European Union, and liberal democracy. Describing Germany, she observed how now [you] have a situation where the AfD […] is the third largest party in the national parliament and it’s the main opposition party, which means that it gets to respond to Angela Merkel whenever she speaks in

206  Peter Schweppe and Adrian Richard Wagner parliament first. This has started to normalize far-right language, far-right slogans, certain angry sentiments about immigration. So you now see stuff that’s being said that’s become mainstream when only a few years ago, you would not have been able to say it. […] This is when I began to question the future of Europe. I was thinking, if this can happen in Germany, I mean, can the European Union survive this? (Bennhold 2019a)

Such questions indeed press the importance of this historical moment and allow students and instructors to identify themes or concerns they relate to such as the narrator’s perspective versus other perspectives featured in the podcast. It also allows for a connection with other more global contemporary debates that might include the use of the word “genocide” in Canada and “concentration camp” in the US, or proclamations like that of Russian leader Vladimir Putin (liberal democracy is “obsolete,” not to mention any number of his more contemporary remarks or threats about Western interventions into his Ukrainian war efforts) and AfD leader Jörg Meuthen (AfD demands EU reform “within a reasonable time,” or else hints at a possible “Dexit” – DeutschlandExit). In addition to these conceptual-level activities, listening to podcasts series like The Daily’s gives students the chance to engage with the medium itself through listening tasks that break down some of the formal elements of the podcast from editing to sound and content. And lastly, the podcast medium is indicative of the ever-changing landscape of how people consume news and entertainment, so this provides its own alternative to more familiar materials like textbooks or films. Podcast Pedagogy So, what is happening to the state of democracy in Germany today and what can ocial justice pedagogy do about it? For one, making time to explore and challenge concepts of populism allows students to engage in difficult dialogue about shifting opinions, demographics, and politics in places like Germany. This task showcases their ability to research, organize, and produce a story about a contemporary event, which requires an attention to sound elements that include interviews, background music, foreground music, or other aesthetic touches such as fades, transitions, outros, and more. What makes the podcast venue so interesting is that like far-right populism in Germany and elsewhere, a podcast may continue to evolve, or inspire further iterations that continue to follow or respond to events. Taking the example of one arch-conservative group, Generation Identity, we see constant attempts to rebrand or reclassify aesthetically, rhetorically, and politically,

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which makes it harder to identify outright as right wing. In December of 2018, for instance, the Identitarians presented themselves to Halle University students as a conscientious, enlightened community of citizens who were simply concerned about their country. This approach seeks to lure in moderate Germans with trendy offerings ranging from organic beer to yoga. As Katrin Bennhold (2018) reported, “part hippie, part hipster, the activists of Generation Identity are one result of a broad image makeover the far right has tried to give itself in recent years.” Thus, being able to pinpoint and discuss aesthetic makeovers marks the foundation of a critical response to populism that can begin in higher education and extend beyond it. As the Identitarians have realized, not every supporter is as fervent as the next. Political scientist Werner Weidenfeld also notes that “the AfD supporters are not all right-wing radicals” but instead a plethora of citizens from the “disappointed middle-class” who have joined up with right-wing extremists (Schütz 2018). While this chapter in no way intends to suggest that students engage in conversations with extremists, we do see Weidenfeld’s observation as being something that should incentivize dialogue with those segments of society who see things differently but are still willing to talk about these differences, left, right, or centre. In an interview with political scientist Franke Wilmer, she too described the importance of student dialogue in her courses (MSU Podagogies). For Willmer, some of her most memorable courses included those in which students on the opposite side of the political spectrum were able to converse about difficult topics and viewpoints they might not have otherwise had the opportunity to previously encounter. This kind of dialogue represents what social justice pedagogy has to contribute to this populist moment in time. Different than a static term paper with its tangible and usually ephemeral boundaries, the mobility of the podcast medium beckons further engagement and a broader audience, which in turn extends conversation, research, and arguable social justice pedagogy. To augment these dialogues, we propose podcasting for our curriculum because we think it offers several pedagogical gains that are otherwise difficult to achieve in a meaningful way. First, podcasting allows students to use their voices in a shared space as a collaborative and interactive form of action. The practice of participating in difficult dialogues together around topics like free speech or hate speech in the German context enhances and authenticates awareness about how these themes factor into contexts elsewhere in the world. Second, the relevance of the podcast as a medium is long overdue in higher education and can inform social justice pedagogy for the twenty-first century. By highlighting nuances such as intonation, communication, and

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a listening style, podcasting helps students develop cognizance around the ways they think, speak, and hear other stories or arguments. As stated above, the popularity of podcasting provides an opportunity to address tapestries like contemporary German society that have been threaded and instrumentalized by populists (Stanley 2018). Collaborating with other students to chart a plan, implement it, and edit final versions for such topics lends itself to critical listening, speaking, and media skills that come with podcasting as an activity. To that end, our chapter proposes one way to address populism via podcasting. As an addendum to this chapter, we have included one syllabus proposal for a twelve-week university course. While the course is designed for an English audience and addresses the theme of contemporary German populism, it could easily be modified for a different language and theme. In fact, we have recently modified this iteration for a cross-listed American studies and German studies transatlantic seminar on the theme of global populisms. But for the purposes of this article, which is to inspire offshoots and responses to the concept of podcasting and populism as social/vocal justice, our course proposal has four main sections. In the first, four-week section, students will read background texts on the history of the podcast medium and listen to several podcast components such as sound effects, music, plots. Then, they will focus on genres such as storytelling, interviews, culture, and remediations. The podcasts for this first section will include The Daily, Invisibilia, This American Life, Hear to Slay, Stuff You Should Know, Stammtisch, and something local that has been remediated. In our case, we are proposing a show from our local KGVM radio station, which reposts all shows on its site. In the second, two-week section, students will break up into small groups and get started on framing, researching, planning, and outlining their podcast project, which will include contacting community members and scheduling interviews. This section will also include discussion about accessibility and strategies for incorporating captions and other forms of accessible media. In the third, four-week section, students will implement their projects, drafting, recording, editing, and revising their contents. This section will also include team-listening activities so that students can try out contents in small groups before finalizing their podcast. The fourth and final, two-week section will include a listening party, if need be, in two separate listening conferences. Then, student groups will design and build a website for their podcast, after which they can decide whether or not they wish for their podcast to go public. For teachers, we refer to three valuable resources: NPR’s “Curriculum Guide” (Teaching Podcasting 2018), New York Times’s “Project Audio” (Hicks, Winnick, and

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Gonchar 2019), and the crowd-sourced New Fascism Syllabus (Evans and Heinemann 2017), which serve as particularly key primary starting guides among many more. All in all, our course proposal intends to get students talking, recording, and thinking about podcasting and populism, which, as we see it, models the social justice pedagogy we seek to further. To practise this pedagogy, we also created a podcast under the title of MSU Podagogies, which will walk instructors through some of our thought processes as we ourselves started to engage with the concept in 2019 and hopefully spark the kind of dialogue that podcasts so often do. Conclusion Rethinking social justice as vocal justice means countering dangerous, rehabilitative speech coming from Germany’s far right and increasing the significance of dialoguing about topics such as populism in our classrooms, drawing connections to daily overlaps and directional histories of injustice, pain, and trauma. Through an analysis of how German populism has impacted the current political landscape and a proposal of one mode of response, this chapter has revalued the importance of podcasting for social justice pedagogy – for actively getting student voices into critical debates and forging new dialogues about challenging subjects. Producing and listening to podcasts can showcase how higher education does not have to be limited to the classroom alone but can foster social justice awareness through community involvement. The facilitation of critical dialogue and listening skills are not simply learning objectives to be packaged into a semester block; rather, they are fundamental building blocks of democratic and civic society. In developing MSU Podagogies as a course framework and podcast, we attempt to introduce podcasting to students as a critical skill and thereby change learning outcomes and student experience. We also dialogue with our community regarding teaching and learning and thereby model public engagement. Rather than explaining how or why podcasting works, our podcast and course focus on walking through some of the challenges of getting started together as a class and community in order to broaden the conversation and authenticate the experience. Neither podcast nor course are perfect or complete; but we hope their imperfection and incompletion allow us and our potential audience and students alike the chance to reflect on the process of having real conversations, while recognizing and practising the right to use all of our voices in vital social discourses. Our central meeting point for our own podcast but just as important

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our course can be found at MSU Podagogies. The course is designed around a series of activities that train broader media skills like editing and workshopping. After first reviewing the history of the podcast medium, our students will focus on skills that include identifying genres, production styles, and narrative strategies in recent podcasts. Then, we will begin the planning phase, in which students start designing, outlining, and preparing their own podcasts on teams of two or three. The final phases of the course will be the implementation of the plan, production, editing, and a final listening conference. We began our first attempt at this course in the spring of 2022 at Montana State University, cross-listed and co-convened with an American studies graduate seminar, and we welcome partner educators in and beyond German studies or MSU, who would certainly add perspective, voice, and diversity to the project of better understanding populism and podcasting. With each attempt to rewrite, normalize, or distract from history – a common strategy for populist movements around the globe – the AfD party and Germany’s New Right in general have sparked contested debates about what it means to be German today and why hate speech flames hateful actions such as the recent shootings in Hanau (“Germany” 2020) or symbolic storming of the Reichstag by agitators holding the pre-Weimar-era “Reich flag,” a revitalized symbol of the far right. In a rare public condemnation, current president Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned citizens that “Reich flags and right-wing extremist rabble in front of the German Bundestag [parliament] are an unbearable attack on the heart of our democracy” (“President” 2020). While blatantly violent attacks have alarmed many in Germany for their unmistakable likeness to late Weimar-era Nazi agitation, similar political rhetoric in the US, Brazil, and other nations reveals a much larger phenomenon of violent language paving the way for violent action. For Daniel Koehler, Director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies, “a significant link between AfD hate speech directed against refugees and the level of far-right, xenophobic crimes in certain areas” (Amos 2019) relate how the AfD has made it possible for the far-right extremists to take the increasingly drastic positions they are taking in Germany and, by extension, elsewhere in the world. Hence, both the decision to spend time engaging with populism in an already constrained curriculum and to do so through the medium of podcasting embodies a mandate of the humanities – a process of examining what it means to be human by asking questions that lead to more questions as humans evolve amid cultural and political shifts and perspectives adapt. In addition to historic global pandemic and anti-racist protests, recent events in Germany have shown that there is no time

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like the present to mobilize and explore how vocal justice leads to or pre-empts social justice. Questions for Reflection: 1 To what extent can the Humanities effectively address contemporary political or cultural movements like populism? 2 Does podcasting offer a viable way for student voices and ideas to engage with audiences beyond the classroom? If yes, what concerns must instructors and students first focus on to ensure a safe and educational experience? 3 Where and how do we draw limits in difficult conversations? 4 Based on observations like that from playwright Sam Shepard, a “voice is almost without words,” how can various notions of “voice” be explored and galvanized in a social justice pedagogy? NOTES 1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations are from the authors. 2 In one example of how the neo-Nazi NPD party spreads anti-Muslim populist rhetoric, the Counter Extremism Project has noted widespread instances of the derogatory word “crimigrants” (Krimigranten), intended to associate criminals with immigrants and get right-wing protesters onto the streets to establish “safe zones” for the protection of German citizens. BIBLIOGRAPHY “AfD erstmals zweitstärkste Partei.” 2018. Tagesschau, 21 September. https:// www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend-1381.html. “Afd’s Gauland Plays Down Nazi Era as a ’Bird Shit’ in German History.” 2018. Deutsche Welle, 2 June8. https://www.dw.com/en/afds-gauland -plays-down-nazi-era-as-a-bird-shit-in-german-history/a-44055213. “Als sie ‘Deutschland über alles’ singen, zögert Höcke.’” 2019. Die Welt, 5 May 2019. https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article192967491/ErsteStrophe-des-Deutschlandlieds-bei-AfD-Treffen-mit-Bjoern-Hoecke.html. Amos, Deborah. 2019. “A German Politician’s Assassination Prompts New Fears About Far-Right Violence.” NPR, 1 July. https://www.npr .org/2019/07/01/737561640/a-german-politicians-assassination-prompts -new-fears-about-far-right-violence. Astor, Maggie. 2019. “How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Mainstream.” New York Times, 26 February. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/02/26/us/politics/overton-window-democrats.html.

212  Peter Schweppe and Adrian Richard Wagner Barrera, Jorge. 2019. “Canada Aimed to ‘Destroy Indigenous People’: The MMIWG Inquiry’s Case for Genocide.” CBC News, 3 June. https://www .cbc.ca/news/indigenous/genocide-case-inquiry-1.5160941. Bennhold, Katrin. 2018. “Germany’s Far Right Rebrands: Friendlier Face, Same Doctrine.” New York Times, 27 December. https://www.nytimes.com /2018/12/27/world/europe/germany-far-right-generation-identity.html. –  2019a. “Part 1: The Battle for Europe.” Podcast. The Daily, 10 June. https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/podcasts/the-daily/europe-nationalism. html. –  2019b. “Part 5: The Battle for Europe.” Podcast. The Daily, 14 June. https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/podcasts/the-daily/europe-liberal -democracy-germany.html?module=inline. –  2019c. “What Is Europe? Freedom, Slavery, Austerity or Nothing at All.” New York Times, 22 May. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world /europe/europe-election-parliament.html. –  2021. “Day X.” New York Times, 19 May.https://www.nytimes. com/2021/05/19/podcasts/far-right-german-extremism.html. Breunig, Mary. 2009. “Teaching for and about Critical Pedagogy in the PostSecondary Classroom.” Studies in Social Justice 3 (2): 2–6. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. 2019. “2018 Annual Report on the Protection of the Constitution.” June. https://www.verfassungsschutz.de /en/index-en.html. Center for Political Beauty. 2009. https://politicalbeauty.com/about.html. Chase, Jefferson. 2016. “Afd Co-Chair Petry wants to Rehabilitate Controversial Term.” Deutsche Welle, 11 September. https://www.dw.com/en /afd-co-chair-petry-wants-to-rehabilitate-controversial-term/a-19543222. –  2017. “AfD: What You Need to Know about Germany’s Far-Right Party.” Deutsche Welle, 24 September. https://www.dw.com/en/afd-what -you-need-to-know-about-germanys-far-right-party/a-37208199. Claiborne, Lily, John Morrell, Joe Bandy, and Derek Bruff. 2020. “Teaching Outside the Classroom.” Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching Guides. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/teaching-outside -the-classroom/. Crossland, David. 2018. “Frankfurt Police Accused of Neo-Nazi Cabal.” Handelsblatt, 18 December. https://www.handelsblatt.com/today /politics/nsu-2-0-frankfurt-police-accused-of-neo-nazi-cabal/23773658 .html?ticket=ST-3053528-2V9VTHdS1i5sKYUtQg4i-ap6. The Database: The Business of Podcasting. 2019. Nielsen. 1 April. https:// www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/podcast/2019/the-database -the-business-of-podcasting/. “Despite Holocaust Remarks, AfD Lawmaker Björn Höcke Allowed to Remain in Party.” 2018. Deutsche Welle, 9 May. https://www.dw.com/en

Podcast Pedagogy  213 /despite-holocaust-remarks-afd-lawmaker-bj%C3%B6rn-h%C3%B6cke -allowed-to-remain-in-party/a-43715394. Diversity, Decolonization and the German Curriculum. 2017. https:// diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/. Evans, Jennifer, and Elizabeth Heinemann. 2017. “New Fascism Syllabus.” https://www.thehistoryinquestion.com/. Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. “Germany: Eleven Dead in Suspected Far-Right Attack.” 2020. Deutsche Welle, 20 February. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-eleven-dead-in -suspected-far-right-attack/a-52438047. Grieshaber, Kirsten. 2019. “US Museum Condemns Use of its Art by German Far-Right Party.” AP News, 30 April. https://www.apnews.com /e4a3dca3c7464ca3925e4fe67afda5a6. Hammersley, Ben. 2004. “Audible Revolution.” The Guardian, 11 February. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/feb/12/broadcasting .digitalmedia. Harris, Sam. 2019. “Episode 160: Revenge of History.” Making Sense with Sam Harris, 17 June. https://samharris.org/podcasts/the-revenge-of-history/. Hicks, Justin, Laura Winnick, and Michael Gonchar. 2019. “Project Audio: Teaching Students How to Produce Their Own Podcasts.” New York Times, 19 April. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/learning/lesson-plans /project-audio-teaching-students-how-to-produce-their-own-podcasts .html. “Höcke-Rede im Wortlaut: Gemütszustand eines total besiegten Volkes.” 2017. Der Tagesspiegel. 19 January. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/hoecke -rede-im-wortlaut-diese-regierung-ist-zu-einem-regime-mutiert /19273518-2.html. hooks, bell. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. “International Podcast Day.” 2015. International Podcast Day. https:// internationalpodcastday.com/what-is-podcast/. Knight, Ben. 2018. “Neo-Nazi NSU Member Beate Zschäpe Found Guilty of Murder, Sentenced to Life in Prison.” Deutsche Welle, 7 November. https:// www.dw.com/en/neo-nazi-nsu-member-beate-zsch%C3%A4pe-foundguilty-of-murder-sentenced-to-life-in-prison/a-44626859. Kumashiro, Kevin K. 2004. Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning toward Social Justice. London: Routledge Falmer. Lather, Patricia. 2007. Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts toward a Double(d) Science. Albany: State University of New York Press. “Leading German Politician Calls AfD’s Höcke a ‘Nazi.’” 2017. Deutsche Welle, 25 February. https://www.dw.com/en/leading-german-politician -calls-afds-h%C3%B6cke-a-nazi/a-37714558.

214  Peter Schweppe and Adrian Richard Wagner Mackinac Center for Public Policy. n.d. “Overton Window.” https://www .mackinac.org/OvertonWindow. Malakaj, Ervin. 2019. “Merkel’s Shaking: Chancellor Says She’s ’Fine’ After Attacks.” BBC News, 29 June. https://www.bbc.com/news/world -europe-48812127. – 2022. The New Fascism Syllabus. 6 March. http://newfascismsyllabus.com /contributions/historical-injury-and-multidirectional-solidarity-in-times -of-crisis/. Mounk, Yascha. 2018. The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press MSU Podagogies. 2019. A Podcast about Pedagogy and Podcasting in Higher Education. https://msupodagogies.weebly.com/. Nash, Robert J., DeMethra LaSha Bradley, and Arthur Chickering. 2008. How to Talk about Hot Topics on Campus: From Polarization to Moral Conversation. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Oltermann, Philip. 2019. “German Far-Right Group ‘Used Police Data to Compile Death List.’” The Guardian, 28 June. https://www.theguardian .com/world/2019/jun/28/german-far-right-group-used-police-data-to -compile-death-list. “President: Reichstag Storming an Attack in Heart of German Democracy.” 2020. dpa 30 August. https://www.dpa-international.com/topic/president -reichstag-storming-an-attack-heart-german-urn%3Anewsml%3Adpa.com %3A20090101%3A200830-99-362827. “Putin: Russian President Says Liberalism ‘Obsolete.’” 2019. BBC News, 28 June. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48795764. Rinke, Andreas, and Tom Sims. 2019. “Germany Must Combat Right-Wing Extremism, Merkel says after Politician’s Murder.” 2019. Reuters. 22 June. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-crime/germany-must -combat-right-wing-extremism-merkel-says-after-politicians-murder -idUSKCN1TN0C9. Schulz, Florence. 2019. “AfD Party Congress: Back to a ‘Europe of Nations.’” Euractiv. Translated by Rob Kirby. 14 January. https://www.euractiv .com/section/eu-elections-2019/news/afd-party-congress-back -to-a-europe-of-nations/. Schumacher, Elizabeth. 2018. “Report: Far-right Reichsbürger Movement is Growing, Building Army.” Deutsche Welle, 1 December. https://www .dw.com/en/report-far-right-reichsb%C3%BCrger-movement-is-growing -building-army/a-42123450. Schütz, Simon. 2018. “Germany’s Far-Right AfD Party Now Polls Second.” NPR, 30 September. https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652284976 /germanys-far-right-afd-party-now-polls-second.

Podcast Pedagogy  215 Sensoy, Özlem, and Robin DiAngelo. 2009. “Developing Social Justice Literacy: An Open Letter to Our Faculty Colleagues.” Phi Delta Kappan, 90 (5): 345–52. Serwer, Adam. 2019. “A Crime by Any Name.” The Atlantic, 3 July. https:// www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/. Simpson, Patricia Anne. 2016. “Mobilizing Meanings: Translocal Identities of the Far Right Web.” German Politics and Society 34 (4): 34–53. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Cultural Studies.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 169–88. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Stanley, Jason. 2018. “Germany’s Nazi Past Is Still Present.” New York Times, 10 September. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/germanys -nazi-past-is-still-present.html. Stelzenmüller, Constanze. 2019. “German Radical Right Threatens the Survival of Democracy.” Brookings, 27 June 27. https://www.brookings.edu /blog/order-from-chaos/2019/06/27/german-radical-right-threatens -the-survival-of-democracy/. Taube, Friedrich. 2017. “‘Höcke’s Apology Is Part of a Strategy,’ Expert Says.” Deutsche Welle, 19 February. https://www.dw.com/en/h%C3% B6ckes-apology-is-part-of-a-strategy-expert-says/a-37624221. “Teaching Podcasting: A Curriculum Guide for Educators.” 2018. NPR, 15 November. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/15/662116901 /teaching-podcasting-a-curriculum-guide-for-educators. Weber, Beverly. 2016. “‘We Must Talk about Cologne’: Race, Gender, and Reconfigurations of ’Europe.’” German Politics and Society 34 (4): 68–86. –  2020. “Islamophobia East-West and the Politics of Hospitality in Contemporary Germany.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 28 (1): 44–56.

15 The Integration of Social Justice Pedagogy through Virtual Exchange diane ceo - difrancesco

Introduction Social justice pedagogy in higher education encourages students to engage in courageous conversations and invites transformative learning. Professors carefully select texts and facilitate in-class dialogues that challenge students to examine issues of injustice and move towards greater awareness of social justice issues and solidarity with marginalized populations. Currently, face-to-face experiential learning opportunities beyond the classroom are offered to further deepen student learning through programs such as service learning, communityengaged learning, immersive learning, and study abroad, all of which can be engaging and impactful for students. Yet, due to barriers such as resources, scheduling limitations, and funding, not all students have access to such learning opportunities. As these barriers are increasingly exposed due to global health crises and worldwide protests against anti-Black racism, they also challenge educators to develop new ways to integrate social justice pedagogies. As an educator, I am committed to providing a learning atmosphere that respects diversity in all its forms and to fostering an inclusive community of learners. Yet as a white, female, first-generation college graduate and Spanish-language educator, this commitment must move beyond simple exposure to social justice issues through texts and discussions. The implementation of virtual exchange as a pedagogical strategy provides learners with opportunities to examine local and global issues and realities, to go inward to reflect on their own experiences (Chávez and Longerbeam 2016, 175), and to engage with peers across borders through interactive and mindful dialogue and reflection. This chapter outlines the enhancement of curriculum through both social justice pedagogy and virtual exchange, providing a strategy which

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promotes the deep self-examination and cultural awareness that can lead to transformative learning. Both scholars and educators have proposed various definitions of social justice and social justice pedagogy. Nieto characterizes social justice as “a philosophy, an approach, and actions that embody treating all people with fairness, respect, dignity and generosity” (Nieto 2010, 46). Similarly, Bell (2007) describes social justice as “both a goal and a process” (1). The goal of social justice is equitable distribution of resources and opportunities, and the process involves “working collaboratively with others to create change” while respecting differences and diversity (1). According to Bell, social justice pedagogy aims to promote awareness and analysis of structural inequities while encouraging advocacy and action on behalf of others (4). Nieto invokes social justice pedagogy as a means of calling into question stereotypes and misconceptions that can lead to systemic inequalities, and as a vehicle for providing equitable educational opportunities that promote critical thinking and action towards change (2010, 31). Salinas and Guerrero (2018) propose a model of “multicontext thinking” to effectively integrate social justice pedagogy in the higher education classroom by encouraging students to consider different perspectives and lenses through which to understand the world around them. The first step is an examination and reflection of students’ own personal context and identity, followed by dialogue with others in order to actively listen and learn from multiple realities, particularly those different from one’s own. The next step involves investigation of historical contexts. The final phase of the model includes discussions during which students may experience both positive and negative emotions (Salinas and Guerrero 2018, 169–71). Social justice pedagogy provides a framework for virtual exchange that inspires learning beyond a superficial level and encourages a reciprocal relationship among its participants. This framework serves as a means by which students call into question traditional ways of thinking and knowing (hooks 1994, 57) as they develop conscientizaçᾱo, a term coined by Freire (2018, 19) and translated by hooks as “critical awareness and engagement” (1994, 14). hooks further explicates that the classroom is “the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (1994, 12), drawing attention to critical pedagogy as a means of both enhancing overall student growth and development and transforming the way in which we teach and learn (20–1). The dialogical encounters described by Freire involve students as “critical co-investigators” (hooks 1994, 61–2). These encounters can empower students to engage in intercultural communication, to analyse their interactions, and to reflect critically upon the impact of the reciprocal relationship that can develop through virtual exchange.

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Virtual Exchange The online setting offers numerous benefits to providing a platform for interaction with others across boundaries and borders. According to Kern and Warschauer (2000), educators can “use the internet not so much to teach the same thing in a different way, but rather to help students enter into the realm of collaborative inquiry and construction of knowledge, viewing their expanding repertoire of identities and communication strategies as resources in the process” (224). Given the wide use of online resources in educational settings, its strategic implementation proves to be inexpensive, inclusive, and cognitively engaging, and can break down the traditional walls of the classroom by creating an authentic context involving real communication for optimal educational outcomes. Virtual exchange is a means of cross-cultural interaction that transcends the classroom space, implemented by using simple technology with internet access. O’Dowd (2018) introduced the overarching term “virtual exchange” (4) to encompass numerous similar formats, such as e-tandem, tele-tandem, telecollaboration, and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) (2). The term refers to an online pedagogical strategy utilized for students to engage with peers from educational settings across the globe in order to complete collaborative tasks while also exchanging ideas and perspectives (Belz 2002, 61). The COIL model in particular has expanded the pedagogy of virtual exchange to cross-disciplinary global interactions between students or groups of students at two or more institutions of higher education with the goal to increase global awareness, while addressing discipline-specific outcomes. Student interactions consist of synchronous and/or asynchronous sessions conducted during instructional time or as outside of class assignments, depending on the time zones involved. They can utilize one or more languages as students from distinct parts of the world complete curricular requirements for their courses (Rubin and Guth 2015, 18). Formats for virtual exchange have included asynchronous written collaborations, such as email or discussion boards, and synchronous interactions, such as-one to-one video conferencing with the use of Zoom or other platforms (Schenker 2013). The languages used for the communication can be one that the students have in common, or, in the cases in which language proficiency is a curricular outcome, students can split the session time equally between two languages. A number of private service providers have recognized the growth in popularity of virtual exchange, particularly for language practice and its integration into language-based curriculum (Ceo-DiFrancesco 2015, 43). Their feebased services offer formats such as individual or small group sessions

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with native-speaker language coaches who facilitate conversation to increase language proficiency. This model serves students in privileged contexts. Higher education world-language programs typically are attracted to such models due to the fact that they alleviate instructor’s time pertaining to the planning, implementation, and facilitation of virtual exchange for their students. Transformative Learning Transformative learning theory posits that adult students learn by comparing new experiences with preconceived notions that they have developed through prior learning experiences (Mezirow 2003, 58–9). Discourse is essential to transformative learning, since it is through dialogue with others that students are stimulated to examine themselves through a new lens and to reflect upon their current beliefs, values, and perspectives (59). However, engagement with others can result in emotional reactions due to conflicting feelings (Adams 2007, 44–5) and discomfort as students challenge knowledge and beliefs that they previously held to be valid (Cranton 2016, 49). “Productive discomfort” (Lee 2017, 101) is a key component of transformative learning. However, as students face cognitive dissonance, they require an environment that facilitates their learning through dissonance (Gorski 2009, 54). Scaffolding and supporting student learning through the discomfort by facilitating critical reflection and open discussion plays a key role in avoiding the reinforcement of stereotypes and rejection of learning, that leads to complete disengagement on the part of the students. As it relates to social justice, transformative learning involves questioning social norms, traditions, and values, particularly as they pertain to issues of oppression (Cranton 2016, 42). However, without the opportunity to truly interact with one another, individuals with differing beliefs cannot jointly participate in the social justice process described by Adams (2007, 29). Promoting learning experiences that allow students “to get to know actual people and experience situations directly” (Goodman 2011, 145) can be leveraged through virtual exchange and social justice issues to facilitate mindful interaction, the application of active listening skills, and collaboration across difference. Course Description First-year seminars are thematically based courses offered at numerous universities in the United States to ease the transition to higher education for incoming students. In the case of the first-year seminar program at one US Midwestern Jesuit university, objectives include

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preparing new students for the rigours of academic learning and subsequent core curriculum courses, critically assessing an ethical issue through challenging readings and research, and exploring vocational discernment. Enrolment size is limited to fifteen students in order to provide them with the opportunity to build a mentoring relationship with a faculty member and to establish ties with peers by participating in a small learning community. A new first-year seminar course entitled Latino Community as Story: An Immersion Experience addressed the first-year seminar program’s student learning outcomes while integrating social justice pedagogy through virtual exchange. In addition to incorporating a variety of challenging texts on immigration and Latinx cultures, the students explored the local Latinx population in the community surrounding the university, through testimonials and encounters on and off campus, in order to offer a more humanistic perspective of social issues (Olivos 2013, 177). Over the course of the semester, students participated in four intercultural dialogues with peers at Jesuit universities in Mexico (Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, Guadalajara), Guatemala (Universidad Rafael Landivar, Guatemala City), Colombia (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Cali), and Nicaragua (Universidad Centroamericana, Managua). Course instructors connected to arrange the sessions through the Virtual Dual Immersion Program, established by language instructors at Jesuit universities in Latin America and the United States. The synchronous one-to-one videoconferencing exchange sessions occurred during class time utilizing free internet software. For the sessions, the instructor designed pre-session tasks, facilitated the student connections, provided technical and cross-cultural support, observed student interactions, and conducted follow-up discussions. Since the first-year seminar was not a world-language course, and student peers in Latin America were enrolled in English courses, the principal form of verbal communication for these virtual exchanges in particular was English. However, students studying Spanish or who had studied Spanish in the past were encouraged to conduct a portion of the virtual exchange in Spanish as well as to support their partner during the portion of the session conducted in English. The instructor provided general preparation in active listening skills and strategies to support English-language learners for the first-year seminar students prior to the first virtual interaction session. The topics for the virtual exchange sessions included the following titles: • The Cultural Iceberg • Sharing Cultural Photos

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• The Presence of English and Spanish • Comparing Perspectives The intentionally designed and structured tasks for each virtual exchange session highlighted the power of authentic dialogue to encourage a re-examination of students’ fundamental understanding of their world, and to create a shift in the way they perceived their own context. Each session involved a preparation phase in which students organized visual representations and reflected upon their own identities and realities prior to interacting with their partner. Following the preparation phase, the interaction phase occurred during sixty minutes of a class session with further instructions to guide the dialogue. The final phase involved reflection, designed as an assignment on a discussion board requiring asynchronous interaction. During the next first-year seminar class session, students participated in a follow-up discussion with class peers. Tasks for the virtual exchange sessions included instructions for each phase of the virtual exchange. Sample guidelines provided to student participants can be viewed in the instructions below for session #2: Telecollaboration #2 Theme: Sharing Photos Pre-Session Task – Look for or take two photos that represent your perception of your home culture. Be sure that one is a positive portrayal, and one represents a social justice issue. Reflect on why you selected each photo and its significance in your home culture. Session Task – Share your photos with your virtual exchange partner. Explain the concepts and issues that you associate with each photo and why you chose each one. Elaborate on your culture based on the photos you chose. Your partner will do the same. Be sure to ask questions, and share perspectives and experiences. Focus on being curious to gain cultural awareness, sensitivity, and respect. Post-Session Reflection – Reflect on your virtual exchange interaction, including the circumstances and ideas of your partner. On the discussion board, write a three-hundred-word (or more) reflection considering the following: 1 What caught your attention the most about the photos and perspectives of your partner? 2 In what way have the perspectives of your partner changed your perception of your own culture?

222  Diane Ceo-DiFrancesco 3 What have you come to discover about your individual worldview and cultural self-awareness? 4 What have you noticed about how culture affects the way we communicate with others? Be sure to check back to read and comment on a minimum of two of your classmates’ posts.

Student Reflections Through virtual exchange, students came to view situations and structures that are both similar and different from their own (Nagda and Maxwell 2011, 5). They examined power and privilege through a different lens and were challenged through personal engagement in a way that could not necessarily have been accomplished solely by discussing assigned texts. Participating in self-reflection and discussion are essential components of a carefully designed virtual exchange program in order for students to make sense of their experience and to avoid reinforcing stereotypes (Goodman 2011, 145). The third phase of each of the four virtual exchange sessions in the first-year seminar course was an initial reflection submitted to the discussion board within the learning management system prior to reading peer submissions, along with at least two additional short responses, questions, or interactions with peers within the discussion board. The fifteen enrolled students wrote 179 posts over the period of the four virtual exchange sessions. The text was compiled and read in its entirety three times, analysed, and organized into the following five themes that emerged from the analysis: • Communicating across cultures • Identifying privilege • Reflecting on injustices and inequities • Experiencing emotions • Gaining new perspectives Students described communication difficulties and successes. At times frustrating, they employed strategies such as restatements, use of simple and common terminology, slower speech, and repetition, which resulted in successful interactions and personal growth. One student shared her experience in this way: Surprisingly I also gained many English-speaking skills! It is easy to speak to friends and family, and often get away with poor grammar and slang

Integration of Social Justice Pedagogy  223 terminology; however, you can’t take shortcuts when conversing with an ESL student. My virtual exchange partners, though they all had an excellent grasp of the English language, needed direct statements and questions, in order to respond. They forced me to improve upon my, typically mediocre, conversational English. I spoke as if I were speaking with a friend from school, and often trailed off before finishing a sentence. When my partners struggled to respond to the half-formed statements, I immediately acknowledge my error, and began speaking with conclusiveness and dedication. (Student 5)

A student also shared the support that her partner provided while she communicated in Spanish: What struck me from our conversation was my partner’s willingness to help me while I tried to converse in Spanish. When I didn’t know how to pronounce a word she slowed down and enunciated, and when I couldn’t grasp the word at all she even wrote it down on a piece of paper and held it to the screen. This gave me a little taste of what it must feel like to come to the US as an immigrant and have to deal with the language barrier. (Student 3)

Students also recognized the inextricable interconnectedness of language and culture. As one student stated, “One thing I have noticed about my personal worldview is that the ways my parents raised me, where I grew up and how I experience things greatly affects how I form/ask questions to people from other cultures” (Student 6). The second theme, identifying privilege, was common throughout the four discussion board posts. Students came to recognize that their partners were well versed in US culture and politics, yet they knew nothing about the country and cultures of their peers. As one student stated, “I never knew the broad influence of my country and culture. Our decisions affect many” (Student 14). Students also came to recognize the dominant role of their native language in the world, as one student posted the question, “Why do they need to know two languages to be successful and I only need to know one?” (Student 2). Student reflections contained numerous instances in which they reflected on injustices and inequities. As one student stated, “Our discussion made me realize that the more we know about a culture, the less judgmental we become. In our world today, racism and prejudice still exist pretty predominantly. If we were more educated, our world could take a big step in ending racism and prejudice” (Student 12). Another student recounted her discussion of stereotypes with her virtual partner:

224  Diane Ceo-DiFrancesco he began to discuss his experience in North Carolina. When he visited the U.S., he did not have a car, so he walked around the town. His first day in the States a group of teenagers yelled loudly at him from their truck as they drove by, which scared him. Many people passed on the street gave him “look-downs” with judgement in their eyes. His family and friends are often referred to as “Mexicans,” despite their Nicaraguan nationality. I related back to his earlier point on generalizing blonde, blue-eyed individuals in the United States. We both agreed that these stereotypes are difficult to break, especially when we don’t realize that we’re misidentifying both individuals and cultural groups. (Student 7)

Students described the many emotions that they felt during the virtual exchange sessions. These emotional reactions included positive feelings of contentment and happiness due to the warmness of their partners as well as guilt, sadness, and embarrassment. The negative emotions also caused discomfort at times. One student stated, “I found myself struggling to keep up an educated conversation because I knew nothing about the culture” (Student 11). Another student reflected on family separation in this way: During opening introductions, I asked about his family. His facial expression dropped, and his eyes began to water. He tried to explain that he didn’t have a dad and that his mom left when he was 10 to live in Panama. Today, he lives with his older brother. From what I picked up on, this was a tough topic for him. It really put the course readings into perspective. It’s hard enough to read about the hardships of Latinos living without full families, but to hear the sorrow in his voice as he tried to say as little as possible about his family really hit me hard. (Student 4)

Speaking about the cost of education in the United States resulted in emotional discomfort for another student: He concluded our conversation by asking about the price of college. I told him how much it was to attend Xavier University and he was astounded. In his country, the price of education is the smallest of fractions compared to ours. What really hit me emotionally was when he said, “wow, in my country we could build a school with that much money, or probably even more.” I honestly felt bad, and I had grief. (Student 9)

The final theme, gaining new perspectives, resulted from students seeing life through a different lens. Students described instances of gaining new perspectives on living life in general, learning to embrace their

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own culture, and becoming more aware of their limited level of global awareness. As one student shared, “I’ve come to realize that, before these sessions, my individual worldviews were very limited, and my cultural awareness was non-existent” (Student 1). Another student stated, “But the main thing I have come to discover about myself is I was close minded before and this experience has opened my eyes up to a new world” (Student 15). A third student described her perspective change thus: This gives me a different way of looking at things. Being in other cultures gives you the opportunity to step back from your social norms and see new ideas and ways of thinking. That’s the best part about meeting people different from you, it gives you this glimpse into someone else life, their story and culture. (Student 8)

New perspectives encourage changes in actions. Many students expressed ways in which they hoped to shift attitudes and behaviours. In one case, a student stated: These interactions have really helped me to grow and develop skills of communicating with people of different cultures by acknowledging that every person (including myself) has a worldview from which they are going to assess situations and act by, by setting aside any prejudices I have gained from my experiences, and coming into a culture with a learning mindset instead of seeing things as how they pertain to the U.S. or compare with the culture I am familiar with. It’s good to remember the U.S. doesn’t have all the best solutions/mindsets out there! (Student 10)

Virtual exchange transformed class discussions and follow-up reflections, showing potential as a powerful strategy for incorporating social justice pedagogy into the higher education classroom. It provided a context for new relationships, experiences, and perspectives. Through the analysis of students’ written reflections, this chapter suggests that the strategic use of virtual exchange can promote a deeper sense of self in a global context and offers an eye-opening examination of how student willingness to engage beyond their comfort zone can have an impact far beyond what the student and instructor originally imagined. Questions for Reflection: 1 How can reflection prompt transformative learning? 2 What are ways that you can engage students in critical dialogue beyond the typical classroom discussion format?

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3 What aspects of virtual exchange could enhance the student learning experience in your program, curriculum, and/or courses? BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Maurianne. 2007. “Pedagogical Foundations for Social Justice Education.” In Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, edited by Maurianne Adams and Lee Anne Bell, 27–53. London: Routledge. Bell, Lee Anne. 2007. “Theoretical Foundations for Social Justice Education.” In Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, edited by Maurianne Adams and Lee Anne Bell, 1–26. London: Routledge. Belz, Julie A. 2002. “The Social Dimension of Telecollaborative Foreign Language Study.” Language, Learning and Technology 6 (1): 60–81. Ceo-DiFrancesco, Diane. 2015. “Engaging Learners in Culturally Authentic Virtual Interactions.” CSCTFL Report, 39–57. https://csctfl.wildapricot.org /resources/Documents/2015Report/CSCTFL%20Report_2015.pdf. Chávez, Alicia F., and Susan D. Longerbeam. 2016. Teaching Across Cultural Strengths: A Guide to Balancing Integrated and Individuated Cultural Frameworks in College Teaching. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Cranton, Patricia. 2016. Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide to Theory and Practice. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Freire, Paulo. 2018. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Bloomsbury. Goodman, Diane. 2011. Promoting Diversity and Social Justice: Educating People from Privileged Groups. London: Routledge. Gorski, Paul. 2009. “Cognitive Dissonance as a Strategy in Social Justice Teaching.” Multicultural Education 1 (1): 54–7. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom. London; Routledge. Kern, Rick, and Mark Warschauer. 2000. “Theory and Practice of NetworkedBased Language Teaching.” In Network-Based Language Teaching: Concepts and Practice, edited by Rick Kern and Mark Warschauer, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Amy. 2017. Teaching Interculturally: A Framework for Integrating Disciplinary Knowledge and Intercultural Development. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Mezirow, John. 2003. “Transformative Learning as Discourse.” Journal of Transformative Education 1 (1). 58–63. Nagda, Biren R., and Kelly E. Maxwell. 2011. “Deepening the Layers of Understanding and Connection. A Critical Dialogic Approach to Facilitating Intergroup Dialogues.” In Facilitating Intergroup Dialogues: Bridging Differences, Catalyzing Change, edited by Kelly E. Maxwell and Biren A. Nagda, 1–22. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Integration of Social Justice Pedagogy  227 Nieto, Sonia. 2010. Language, Culture and Teaching: Critical Perspectives. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. O’Dowd, Robert. 2018. “From Telecollaboration to Virtual Exchange: State -of-the-Art and the Role of UNICollaboration in Moving Forward.” Journal of Virtual Exchange 1 (1): 1–23. Olivos, E.M. 2013. “Teaching and Learning about Immigration as a Humanitarian Issue: The Sociopolitical Context Bottleneck.” In Cultivating Social Justice Teachers: How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concept, edited by Paul C. Gorski, Kristien Zenkov, Nana Osei-Kofi, and Jeff Sapp, 166–83. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Rubin, John, and Sarah Guth. 2015. “Collaborative Online International Learning: An Emerging Format for Internationalizing Curricula.” In Globally Networked Teaching in the Humanities, edited by Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Sunka Simon, 15–27. London: Routledge. Salinas, Cristobal, and Valerie A. Guerrero. 2018. “Tokenizing Social Justice in Higher Education.” In Colleges at the Crossroads: Taking Sides on Contested Issues, edited by Joseph L. DeVitis and Pietro A. Sasso, 161–79. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Schenker, Theresa. 2013. “Virtual Exchanges in the Foreign Language Classroom.” The FLTMAG, July, https://fltmag.com/virtual-exchanges-in -the-foreign-language-classroom/.

16 Intercultural Telecollaboration as Social Pedagogy jennifer ruth hosek

Introduction In graduate school in comparative literature, I was a teacher of culture through works in English translation. When I became a professor of German studies, I became a teacher of language. I quickly came to recognize that while there is a difference between culture and language, one really cannot be considered without the other. I am a white, cisgender, first-language English woman with German grandparents and Bohemian great-grandparents who grew up in Europe on US military bases, where my parents were teaching elementary schoolchildren of the armed forces. (White) Germans in our Bavarian town both accepted and exotified me as an American, but in ways that, at this time in the 1980s, were rather benign. When I moved to University of California, Berkeley for graduate training, I began to recognize both that I had grown up in a position of cultural privilege in that I had lived the kind of European experiences that generally only Americans of class privilege live and also that I had grown up in a lot less privileged position in terms of family income and formal education than my UC Berkeley cohort, who had all attended private schools their entire lives. I think that this realization of relative privilege in my own experience helped me to increasingly recognize how much privilege is often involved in gaining competency in cultures that are not one’s own and that even more privilege is frequently involved in gaining competency in languages that are not one’s own. To be sure, as Diane Ceo-DiFrancesco’s excellent piece in this volume makes clear, multilingualism does not always mark privileged positioning. Ceo-DiFrancesco attends to an anglophone student who, thanks to discussions with their virtual exchange partner, wonders, “Why do they need to know two languages to be successful and I only

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need to know one?” And yet, it is typical in the anglophone context that privilege shapes the access that students have or do not have with the target culture/target language. Can they afford to study abroad? Have they travelled alone or with their families? Have they lived abroad, for instance, due to the career of their parent? I believe that these are my experiences and recognitions that made the potentially equalizing force of the internet so salient to me when I began to teach German language and culture. Telecommunication makes it possible to connect students who live far away from each other and can teach each other because they are experts in their own cultures and languages. I started a collaboration with my students and then created a free, non-commercial web platform, LinguaeLive (LiLi), that helps other instructors collaborate more easily as well. As you might glean from my tone, I am indeed pleased at having created this resource. Rather than seeming selfaggrandizing, I hope it expresses M.V. Lee Badgett’s exhortation to enjoy the “intrinsic rewards” of working towards social justice, as Kat Sark’s stirring introduction puts it. Such e-tandem collaborations help to level the playing field so that less privileged students can more easily become competent in cultures and languages that are not their own. These person-to-person connections positively impact human relationships on a global scale by decreasing othering based on perceived difference. In this chapter, I am going to focus on the experience that we had with LinguaeLive to try to convince you that telecollaboration for language and culture learning is a critical tool for social justice pedagogy in today’s networked world. By you, I mean L2 instructors who want to teach-learn more effectively both in terms of language-culture and social equity learning-acquisition; I mean language and culture students; I mean experts in teaching and learning centres; I mean administrators, trustees, and government leaders who hold the purse strings; and I mean everyone who is interested in extrapolating on the ideas found here to build social justice-oriented pedagogy in all fields and further social justice-oriented communication globally (Ceo-DiFrancesco, this volume). I will explain why telecollaboration works so particularly effectively for learning and acquisition according to experts in the field of language learning and Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). I will tell you about the journey that we participants in this project undertook. And I will share some best practices for telecollaborations that I hope will inspire you to incorporate telecollaborations into your life practices. My study of social justice pedagogies literature in preparing this article on our telecollaborative experiences revealed that several of the characteristics of the telecollaborations that my colleagues and I have been undertaking are fundamentals in communicative practices

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that seek to break down prejudices and improve intercultural competency. This is certainly felicitous. It may be unsurprising. We designed our telecollaborations according to our expert opinions of what would be effective. In a time when expertise is increasingly being called into question (Nichols 2017), it is nevertheless particularly reassuring that our hunches were accurate, which speaks to the continued importance of expert instruction in our “Google it” world. As I will detail below, our telecollaborations emphasize reciprocity, equal standing, and mutual tasks, all of which characterize social justice pedagogy brought to bear on telecollaborative language learning. Robert Sigmon’s service-learning principles emphasize the need for reciprocity such as “all parties are learners and all influence what is learned” (1990 cited in Tavakoli, Hatami, and Thorngate 2010, 60). The alternation of teacher and learner roles in our telecollaborations greatly facilitates this reciprocity. Psychologist Gordon Allport’s (1954) classic contact theory states that the necessary conditions under which contact inhibits or reduces prejudice are pursuit of common goals; equal status contact; contact that contradicts stereotypes; long-term contact; and social norms that favour contact (cited in Tavakoli, Hatami, and Thorngate 2010, 63). It is well understood that the latter three conditions are hard to attain; correlatively, it is easy to continue prejudices (63). I find that Mahin Tavakoli’s own work and that of Yumi Takamiya and Mariya Aida Niendorf (2019) suggest that task-based learning, which is interesting to the participants, may diminish the necessity for these last three conditions. For instance, Tavakoli’s work on Iranians’ and Canadians’ attitudes towards each other shows that positive change in attitudes occur when participants are involved in cooperation and in interesting joint activities, even when participants never find mutual similarities. Takamiya also points to the importance of participant reflection to further intercultural competency, an activity that trained pedagogues frequently deploy (2019). This chapter makes the case for telecollaborations in language-culture teaching-learning, particularly such that seeks to further social justice. (I use hyphens to emphasize the imbrication of culture and language and of teaching and learning.) Communicative approaches that forefront authentic and immersive environments facilitate learning and acquisition. Communication means sharing of information between interlocutors. Learning is a process by which someone actively tries to acquire knowledge. Acquisition is a process by which knowledge is assimilated without someone actively working to learn it. Telecollaborations are among the best communicative practices, especially when material constraints disallow learners from sustained access to native speakers or near-native speakers (NS),

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for instance through living abroad. By helping to level the playing field, telecollaborations function as social justice pedagogies. Furthermore, conditions that facilitate peer-to-peer learning independently of levels of language-culture competency seem to map with conditions under which peer interaction reduces stereotypes and/or negative attitudes towards a respective outgroup. Appropriately structured and scaffolded telecollaborations not only improve language-culture competency even when peers have asymmetric language proficiency but also tend to decrease chauvinism even when peers have limited intercultural competence and experience. Thus, telecollaborations lend themselves multiply as tools of social justice. Telecollaboration as Social Justice Pedagogy There are numerous ways to teach-learn language-culture. Today, many educators and students alike are convinced of the effectiveness of communicative approaches and immersive environments that put non-native-speaking (NNS) learners in contact with native and nearnative speakers (NS). Such experiences leverage our human capacity to semi-passively and efficiently acquire language-culture by hearing it in relevant contexts, as well as by consciously learning it. While the benefits of these circumstances are increasingly recognized, the material conditions and attendant privileges that they often necessitate are frequently underplayed and otherwise not addressed or mitigated. I hope to show here that telecollaboration can variously engage this real-existing tension involving equity. I articulate benefits of communicative and immersive teach-learn practices for language-culture pedagogy from the literature and by exploring a case study: my and some of my colleagues’ experiences with LinguaeLive, an educational web platform that I have designed and run and that teachers and learners are deploying for e-collaboration. Here, I will call these learners who are learning a language that is unknown to them second-language learners, or L2 Learners, which is the term generally used in the field of language pedagogy. My investigation underscores how such virtual peer-to-peer tandems offer opportunities to students and instructors who do not have access to a plethora of (near)native speakers, to target language materials, and/or sustained opportunities to immerse themselves in the target language-culture. Furthermore, it sketches best practices for such intercultural telecollaborations. Telecollaborations that are anchored in and expand beyond the classroom function as student-led, task-based field schools that increase active learning. They are well positioned to move towards “decolonizing” and “deprovincializing” language-culture

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learning-acquisition because peer partners are meeting as equals and working on mutual tasks that will lead to more knowledge and mutual understanding, whether or not they have the budget to live near each other. Although global hierarchies inhere in most learning situations, telecollaborations organized on social justice principles that seek to further fair and just relations and opportunities for all members of our world can work towards levelling the learning field and improving understanding across perceived difference. Avenues for further research and praxis abound. Teaching Text in Context: Why Communicative Approaches in Immersive Environments Using Task-Based Learning Are Particularly Effective in Increasing L2 Competency Over the last decades, L2 pedagogy has increasingly emphasized cultural-linguistic competency and using communicative approaches to improve it. These approaches seek to create “authentic” situations and to use “authentic” materials in the classroom, while at the same time, the situations and materials are often modified in order to have students engage with the second language at just a bit above their level of competency (Krashen 2003; Vygotsky 1978). It is well understood that creating engaging authentic experiences using authentic situations and materials is challenging. In the early stages of language learningacquisition, communicative approaches often employ the individual “I” as a facilitative starting point. While this approach does further their ability to comprehend and speak in relation to the self (for example, I brush my teeth, I like sports), students soon tend to experience such foci as impoverished because they have little to do with the target regions or languages (Nikolaus Euba, pers. comm.). At the same time, even learners with more L2 competency can experience broader cultural-­ linguistic topics as alienating, seemingly because they have difficulties perceiving connections between themselves and what they understand as a foreign world. This alienation effect has been dubbed the “literacy gap” when the challenge is helping scaffold students’ engagement with literature written in the L2 that they are learning (Bernhardt 1991; Swaffar, Arens, and Brynes 1991; Schulz 1982). Calls for language-culture teaching from the earliest stages to allay these challenges (classically, Kramsch 1985) have slowly been making inroads. Pedagogies that deploy instructor-scaffolded telecollaboration can bridge this divide by enabling communication between complementary learners even a world away. (Other terms for telecollaboration that readers may know include online intercultural exchange [OIE] and

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peer-to-peer [P2P] Computer Assisted Language Learning [CALL]). Through such shared communications, L2 learners can place “texts in[to] context” (Kramsch 1993) through interactions that are uniquely engaging for and tailored to them, which facilitates acquisition and learning. Telecollaborative communication promotes active learning, language-culture access beyond the walls of the classroom, and the chance for interlocutors to negotiate meaning in rich ways (Suaro 2009). Praxis and research are increasingly engaging voice-and-video-overinternet protocol technology (VoIP) for peer-to-peer (P2P) learning (e.g., Mullen, Appel, and Shanklin 2009). Studies focusing on synchronous chat, email, and VoIP exchange predict robust benefits, for instance, in that they increase student motivation and agency, which are known variables in learning (Kohn and Hoffstaedter 2017; Appel and Gilabert 2002). Student participants in telecollaboration using the web platform LinguaeLive (LiLi) consistently self-report in anonymous surveys that the exchange facilitates their learning in a variety of pedagogically significant ways, over and above what they gain in the classroom. They cite the following in particular: noticeable to rapid improvements in fluency, comprehension, and grammatical accuracy; expansion of vocabulary; and improved understanding of the way that both languages work. Participants find that they have increases in linguistic skills in the four modalities, increased motivation, reduced anxiety level in L2 communication, and increased cultural learning (Takasaki and Hirata 2014). Furthermore, they report more interest in the target language-culture, which leads to spending more “time on task,” another commonly accepted criterion of effective instruction and competency development (Chickering and Gamson 1987). As is the case with many investigations involving teaching-learning, ours cannot assess gains in language-culture acquisition with scientific accuracy according to internationally established norms; nevertheless, the results point to probable best practices. The Influence of Asymmetric vs. Symmetric Language-Culture Proficiency in Telecollaboration: An Aporia in the Literature Resolved by Expertly Scaffolded Task-Based Learning A preponderance of studies shows that telecollaborations are beneficial; but what are some best practices? Over the last decade many instructors have asked me and my colleagues who use telecollaboration (such as Mayu Takasaki, Eri Hirata, Keiko Aoki, Monika Holzschuh-Sator, Xuelin Bai, Marjorie Willey, and Amber Smith) whether student peers need to have similar L2 competencies to optimize telecollaboration.

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This seems an open question in the literature. Some experiments conclude that asymmetric linguistic proficiency in tandem peer dyads inhibits learning (Lee 2004; Belz 2002). That is, according to Lina Lee’s and Julie Belz’s work, when one student in a pair of peer interlocutors is much more competent in their L2 than the other student is in their respective L2, the students do not learn as well. Belz cites Brown and Levinson (1987) to conjecture that suppositions of asymmetrical competency alone impacted the ability of US students in their study to engage emotionally with their partners because of “threats to positive face.” Yet this position does not seem to account for work showing that positive personal rapport significantly facilitates the success of tandem communications (Appel 1999; Wegerif 1998; Byram 1997; cited in Betz). Other contrasting results show that when collaborators have equivalent status and are engaged in tasks together, learning occurs and chauvinisms erode (Takamiya and Niendorf 2019; Tavakoli, Hatami, and Thorngate 2010). From social justice and logistical perspectives, it seems beneficial to have asymmetrically proficient learners be able to tandem together effectively. In this way, more collaborations should be possible but more than this, because language proficiency relates to individual positioning and privilege, asymmetrically proficient students stand to learn a lot from each other about privilege and power as well as about language-culture. For instance, and as I discuss further on in more detail, collaboration between my less L2 competent students and their peers in Germany fostered discussions about the positionings of different languages in the world, effects of mono- and multilingualism, and the power dynamics and privileges that are at play in communication across national borders. Our1 long-term telecollaborative case study using LiLi engages this debate around peer competencies. It may seem almost too much of a happy story that most of our telecollaborations have featured asymmetric proficiency and yet that these learners tend not to perceive such asymmetry as an impediment. Here, I will report most directly upon my side of the tandems that I have co-scaffolded; none of the results of the other tandems countermand my positions. The question is, why do peer dyads in Germany and Canada seldom report their differing skill levels as detrimental to learning? When does asymmetry not matter? On the basis of my experiences with telecollaboration using LiLi and further exploration of the literature inspired by this question, I argue that task-based learning (TBL) facilitated by experts is a key feature that helps resolve the seeming aporia that I metonymize here in Takamiya and Niendorf (2019), Tavakoli, Hatami, and Thorngate (2019), and Sauro (2009) vs. Lee (2004) and Belz (2002). Expert-supported TBL seems

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to shift the focus of the peer collaborators from the (dissimilarities of) their L2 identities to the task of overcoming knowledge gaps through communication in their target languages. Fortuitously, as I will discuss later on, TBL is one of several characteristics of human exchange that can diminish chauvinisms. Sometimes called problem-based learning (PBL), TBL was developed in Canadian medical education in the 1970s and has since moved into many areas of teaching. TBL contends that hands-on work and problem-solving promote student mental activity and learning. While TBL has many definitions, the multi-feature hypothesis is well accepted and useful here. The multi-feature hypothesis “predicts that retention and ease of activation of new linguistic items are improved by mental actions that involve a wide variety of different features, simultaneously and frequently” in lifelike combinations (Moonen, DeGraaff, and Westhoff 2006, 35). TBL is related to activity-driven perspectives, according to which students acquire linguistic knowledge through mental actions (Arievitch and Haenen 2005; Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000). A TBL model in L2 learning hypothesizes that tasks engender intense student involvement, with the consequence of improved language learning and acquisition in comparison to more traditional teaching methods (Bygate, Skehan, and Swain 2001; Mackey 2003). What comprises a task in L2 TBL is somewhat contested. Peter Bygate (2016) calls them “pedagogic activities in which language is used to achieve non-linguistic outcomes but with the overall purpose of improving learners’ language proficiency” (2016). William Littlewood (2004) emphasizes the importance of the degree of focus on elements of the task. The above explication of TBL is highly relevant to telecollaboration. It indicates that telecollaboration that features TBL is effective. It also strongly suggests the efficacy of TBL telecollaborations in which peers alternate roles of NS and NNS. Such collaborations necessitate a wide variety of engagements with language-cultural items, which facilitates L2 retention and activation. Further, this research supports my contention that TBL in telecollaboration furthers success whether or not participants have symmetrical L2 competencies because participants tend towards focus on task rather than on self. My working definition of TBL here is based on Bygate’s (2016) and Littlewood’s (2004). Following Bygate, our telecollaborations with LiLi focus on the activity of communicating ideas and feelings (the non-linguistic outcomes) through active learner involvement with the overall purpose of improving learners’ linguistic and cultural competency. Other elements of our telecollaboration resonate with Littlewood’s point about TBL. The telecollaborations further my students’ focus on engaging with those

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whom they characterize as real Germans and that which they deem real Germany in ways that interest them. As a facilitator, I help student participants develop and employ a palette of strategies to better achieve their TBL aims. I hope that this argument based in L2 scholarship has convinced particularly instructors who teach L2 of the efficacy of telecollaboration. Telecollaboration does an exceptional job of fostering language-culture competency when it is undertaken using best practices. Furthermore, when undertaken in this manner, it fosters aims of social justice not only simply by levelling the field of opportunity for learning, but also by fostering intercultural competencies and thereby furthering equity. Not all use of technology in learning is equal in regard to promoting these aims. It is up to all of us, particularly instructors and students, to engage thoughtfully in practices that do facilitate betterment, and I believe that our case study stands as an example that I hope others will consider as a model for their own telecollaborations. The Structure of Our Ongoing Case Study: General Unlike many Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) projects, our telecollaborations deploy technology as a tool to leverage person-to-person communication. Many CALL projects attempt to replace tandem communication with service communication or persons with machines. Commercial and freeware sites include pay-per-conversation with NS interlocutors, grammar and vocabulary building solitaire games, and options reminiscent of online dating. This range speaks to varying desires and financial situations of users, high user attrition rate, and the relative newness of the market. Whether commercial sites deploy NSs or technology as the magic cornerstones that will deliver fluency, they promise human users minimal effort, engagement, and uncertainty. In contrast, our best practice uses of telecollaboration with LiLi leverage the reciprocal expertise of peer NSs within a multifaceted course facilitated by expert instructors. This structure responds to work such as Christine Appel and Robert Gilabert’s (2002) that reveals the fragility of working exchanges. They point to recommendations that tandems be employed within pedagogical frameworks for best results (Ushioda 2000). We use tasks that on the dyad level are mutual although on the individual level they may well be distinct. The joint aim of each dyad is to communicate in each of the target/expert languages for the requisite units of time, with hoped-for results of increased linguistic and cultural competence. The individual task is to communicate in the target language with a self-defined aim, as well as practise reciprocity by communicating in one’s expert language to further an aim defined

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by one’s interlocutor. Thus, peers of each team are involved in at least one mutual task. Each paired partner takes turns as NS and NNS; responses from our student surveys over the last decade strongly suggest that (alternately) sharing the role of expert minimized concerns of losing “face,” independent of competency in the L2. Instead, peer focus tended to stay on the tasks of overcoming the series of knowledge gaps. The Structure of Our Ongoing Case Study: Specific Instructors at many universities and several instructors at Queen’s use LiLi-based telecollaboration on a regular basis. Here, I will restrict myself to outlining the decade-long tandem that I and my Queen’s University colleague Monika Holzschuh-Sator regularly undertake with our anglophone students who are learning German. An existing academic partnership between Queen’s University’s German and Martin-Luther Universität’s Germanistik departments facilitated the tandem between Queen’s German and Martin-Luther’s English departments. Queen’s University is in Kingston, Canada, and Martin-Luther Universität is in Halle, Germany. The success of our tandem, in turn, inspired me to design and launch LinguaeLive.ca with funding from Queen’s and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in order to facilitate such exchanges worldwide by automatizing the logistics of the exchanges. Subsequent iterations using LiLi are labour saving because a system is in place. Nevertheless, as I will return to later, technology is never a free lunch. Our telecollaborations consisting of student pairs that are NS Germanophones learning English in Halle, Germany, and NS anglophones learning German in Kingston, Canada, are severally dissimilar. My Queen’s students must complete a certain number of time units per semester (typically 180 minutes in German and 180 minutes in English) for full credit in my course (typically 10 per cent of the overall course mark). In contrast, Martin-Luther’s students are volunteering. Their courses are governed by strict university guidelines, which in turn conform to the new bachelor’s degree structure that accords with the Bologna process. Therefore, very unfortunately, my peer instructors Marjorie Willey and Amber Smith do not have substantive academic freedom in their course design. (For an examination of common institutional and other challenges to the use of telecollaboration, see O’Dowd [2013].) In regard to our project, Martin-Luther’s instructors may not make these telecollaborations mandatory for their students. Our telecollaborations have dissimilar knowledge gap tasks. We instructors seldom synchronize the topic or content of our courses. Independent contents best meet the learning aims and interests of our

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students, which tend to be very different. My anglophone students tend to be learning German for general enrichment and have rudimentary skills. In contrast, the native Germanophone students are perfecting their English, often in a high-level translation course. They plan to become high school teachers and face rigorous examinations. In order to best tailor the collaboration to such diverse needs and competencies, each student determines their particular learning task. Concretely this means that during the part of their exchange that takes place in German, each of my students sets the content of the communication and the L2 level. During the English-language portion, the NS Germanophone students do the same. Student learners actively decide how to shape the communication to best serve their needs. This reciprocal structure also de-emphasizes the significance of L2 competency because the basic unit of exchange is time on task, the role of expert speaker is shared, and the most overt task is knowledge-gap bridging. Results The primary results reported by the students were increased confidence, fluency, and communicative and cultural competency. The majority of the respondents deemed these aspects very important and the responses to the project were very enthusiastic precisely in regard to these aspects. The Germanophone students in particular reported having learned communicative soft skills and contemporary English vernacular. Unlike the students of Lee’s (2004) and Belz’s (2002) studies, neither the Queen’s nor the Martin-Luther undergraduates are much concerned about asymmetrical language competencies. Indeed, some Queen’s students see it as beneficial to their German language and culture learning that their partner is fluent in English. To the minds of these respondents, this situation enables better communication on all topics, including questions of German language. The Queen’s students who are initially discomfited about their comparatively poor language abilities tend to comment that once they get to know their partner, this fear dissipates. Importantly, even these uncomfortable participants quickly feel confident when they believe that they are offering their partners reciprocal exchange – whether it be language, culture, and/or language-culture. These results accord with work such as that of Littlewood (2004) and of Tavakoli, Hatami, and Thorngate (2010), who postulate two necessary conditions for effective tandem language learning: learner autonomy and reciprocity (cited in Mullen, Appel, and Shanklin 2009). As expert facilitators, we do well to highlight the benefits of reciprocity to our student telecollaborators.

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Conclusions and Further Steps This variant of CALL that keeps language-culture pedagogy student centred, expertly scaffolded, and technology supported is extremely effective. Most participants experienced telecollaboration as an authentic, relevant, and extremely engaging learning environment. In the tandems, which were designed for maximum learner autonomy (see Ushioda 2009), students drove their active TBL by means of which they sought to bridge various knowledge gaps. These gaps in turn were often inspired by the aims of the classroom in which students were also involved. For instance, students asked their peers about racist attacks in Germany and Europe and compared them to events in Canada, discussed the meanings of famously “untranslatable” words such as “eh” and “Gemütlichkeit,” and compared the US-Mexico and Schengen border walls, all the while improving their grasp of their L2. In the classroom, instructors elicited information and discussion about telecollaboration experiences and sought to incorporate these into the themes of the course. Our practice of telecollaboration expresses and puts into practice a communicative approach to language acquisition that allows NS and NNS students to engage interpersonally from across national borders. The intensive work with peer partners abroad means students engage in real time with a sense of authenticity even when they do not have the means for sustained immersion. It helps them understand themselves and their peers in transnational perspective even as it increases their interest in L2 language-cultures. Partly for these reasons, telecollaborations will also encourage continued study of language-cultures and engagement in the L2 through work and travel abroad. Such telecollaboration optimizes technology as a tool. It is cost effective because it utilizes contemporary technological means available to most university students. At the same time, good education comes at a cost, although corporatized institutions of higher learning may wish us to believe otherwise. Engaged and reciprocity based, LiLi competes against well-funded, profit-focused, service-based options. Technologies are never magic bullets that protect universities from financial woes. Technologies are tools that can help instructors facilitate better and students learn better. Nothing can replace the one-on-some of the instructor in the classroom with their students. This peer-to-peer project is most effective as a supplement to a most effective university teaching and learning experience: the seminar. Our case study offers a framework that facilitates the employment of telecollaboration in ways that we deem useful for obtaining our specific pedagogical aims. Other instructors will use it in other expert

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ways to meet their expert aims. Telecollaboration has the potential to serve the varied needs of many learners. For instance, students and professionals could collaborate with experts in their particular field to teach-learn specific competencies and build professional networks. No more would only students who have the means to travel, study, and work abroad be the only learners able to benefit from knowledges of experts a world away. As for the effects of asymmetrical competency in learner dyads, our telecollaborations suggest that tandems are effective independent of symmetry when they de-emphasize individual competency identity through focus on broader task-based aims and through sharing of the role of expert, especially in the presence of positive personal rapport. This recognition means that instructors are not limited by whether they can find a partner class whose students have similar L2 competencies. Independent of competency levels, their students can undertake telecollaborations that are designed on best practices for telecollaborations, practices that are also best for improving relationships between learners who understand their peer collaborators as different from themselves. As I hope that this contribution has shown, expertly scaffolded telecollaborations based on mutual engagement have great impacts on the learning and acquisition of knowledge (=power) and of intercultural competencies that foster deeper acceptance and concern for others, even those who live far away. Such telecollaboration fosters and is an expression of social justice pedagogy. Author note: LiLi is out of funding! All collaboration is welcome. [email protected]. Questions for Reflection: 1 How do you imagine incorporating telecollaboration in your classes? 2 How do you imagine incorporating telecollaboration in your non-language classes? 3 Think about scenarios in which telecollaborations might enable “teachable moments” around issues of difference and privilege. How do you see such moments unfolding productively with your expert scaffolding? NOTE 1 “Our” means my telecollaborations with Marjorie Willey and Amber Smith as well as those between Mayu Takasaki and Eri Hirata. With the participation of Queen’s colleagues Keiko Aoki and Monika Holzschuh-Sator

Intercultural Telecollaboration as Social Pedagogy  241 and the assistance of Aurora Castillo (Georgia College) and Constanza Rojas-Primus (Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey), Mayu and I spearheaded a series of student surveys from which I distil my opinions. Takasaki and Hirata have also variously analysed the surveys. My gratitude for the work of these splendid colleagues, several excellent student assistants, and our enthusiastic student learner-participants cannot be overstated. Thank you also to Keiko Aoki and Mayu Takasaki for apprising me of some of the scholarship cited here. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allport, Gordon. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1954. Appel, Christine, and Roger Gilabert. 2002. “Motivation and Task Performance in a Task-Based Web-Based Tandem Project.” ReCALL: Journal of EUROCALL 14 (1): 16–31. Appel, Christine, Tony Mullen. 2002. “A New Tool for Teachers and Researchers Involved in E-mail Tandem Language Learning.” ReCALL: Journal of EUROCALL 14 (2): 195–208. Arievitch, Igor, and Jacques Haenen. 2005. “Connecting Sociocultural Theory and Educational Practice: Galperin’s Approach.” Educational Psychologist 40 (3): 155–65. Belz, Julie. 2002. “Social Dimensions of Telecollaborative Foreign Language Study (1).” Language, Learning & Technology 6 (1): 60. Bernhardt, Elizabeth. 1991. Reading Development in a Second Language: Theoretical, Empirical and Classroom Perspective. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bransford, John, Ann Brown, and Rodney Cocking, eds. 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School. Washington, DC: National Academic Press. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bygate, Martin. 2016. “Task Based Learning.” Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. The Higher Education Academy. https://web -archive.southampton.ac.uk/www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/412.html. Bygate, Matrin, Peter Skehan, and Merrill Swain. 2001. Researching Pedagogic Tasks: Second Language Learning, Teaching and Testing. Harlow, UK: Longman. Chickering, Arthur, and Zelda Gamson. 1987. “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.” The Wingspread Journal 9, no. 2 (June): 140–1. Erickson, Joseph, and Susan O’Connor. 2019. “Service Learning: Does It Promote or Reduce Prejudice?” In Technology-Supported Learning in and out of the Japanese Language Classroom, edited by E. Zimmerman and A. McMeekin, 59–70. New York: Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications.

242  Jennifer Ruth Hosek Kohn, Kurt, and Petra Hoffstaedter. 2017. “Learner Agency and Non-Native Speaker Identity in Pedagogical Lingua Franca Conversations: Insights from Intercultural Telecollaboration in Foreign Language Education.” Computer Assisted Language Learning 30 (5): 351–67. Kramsch, Claire. 1985. “Literary Texts in the Classroom: A Discourse.” Modern Language Journal 69: 356–66. – 1993. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krashen, Stephen. 2003. Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use: The Taipei Lectures. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Lee, Lena. 2004. “Learners’ Perspectives on Networked Collaborative Interaction with Native Speakers of Spanish in the US.” Language, Learning & Technology 8 (1): 83–100. http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num1/lee/. Littlewood, William. 2004. “The Task-Based Approach: Some Questions and Suggestions.” ELT Journal 58 (4): 319–26. Mackey, Alison. 2003. Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moonen, Machteld, Rick DeGraaff, and Gerard Westhoff. 2006. “Focused Tasks, Mental Actions and Second Language Teaching: Cognitive and Connectionist Accounts of Task Effectiveness.” ITL – International Journal of Applied Linguistics 152 (January): 35–55. Mullen, Tony, Christine Appel, and Trevor Shanklin. 2009. “Skype-Based Tandem Language Learning and Web 2.0.” In Handbook of Research on Web 2.0 and Second Language Learning, edited by M. Thomas, 101–18. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. Nichols, Tom. 2017. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Dowd, Robert. 2013. “Telecollaborative Networks in University Higher Education: Overcoming Barriers to Integration.” Internet and Higher Education 18: 47–53. Sauro, Shannon. 2009. “Strategic Use of Modality during Synchronous CMC.” CALICO Journal 27 (1): 101–17. Schulz, Renate. 1982. “Literature and Readability: Bridging the Gap in Foreign Language Reading.” Modern Language Journa. 65: 43–53. Swaffar, Janet, Katherine Arens, and Heidi Brynes. 1991. Reading for Meaning: An Integrated Approach to Language Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Takamiya, Yumi, and Aida Niendorf. 2019. “Identity (Re)Construction and Improvement in Intercultural Competence through Synchronous and Asynchronous Telecollaboration: Connecting Learners of Japanese in the USA and Sweden.” In Technology-Supported Learning in and out of the Japanese

Intercultural Telecollaboration as Social Pedagogy  243 Language Classroom, edited by E. Zimmerman and A. McMeekin, 111–45. New York: Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications. Takasaki, Mayu, and Eri Hirata. 2014. “Report on a Japan-Canada Etandem Project and Recent Development in the Field of Tele-Collaboration and a Virtual Exchange Provider Linguaelive.Ca.” Canadian Association for Japanese Language Education Annual Conference. Montreal. Tavakoli, Mahin, Javad Hatami, and Warren Thorngate. 2010. “Changing Stereotypes in Iran and Canada Using Computer Mediated Communication.” Journal of Intercultural Communication (23 June): 1404–634. http://www.immi.se/intercultural/. Ushioda, Ema. 2000. “Tandem Language Learning Via E-mail: From Motivation to Autonomy.” ReCALL: Journal of EUROCALL 12 (2): 121–8. –  2009. “A Person-in-Context Relational View of Emergent Motivation, Self and Identity.” In Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self, edited by Z. Dörnyei and E. Ushioda, 215–28. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Vygotsky, Lev. 1978. Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Westhoff, Gerard. 2004. “The Art of Playing a Pinball Machine. Characteristics of Effective SLA-Tasks.” Babylonia 3: 58–62. White, Cynthia. 2006. “Distance Learning of Foreign Languages.” Language Teaching 39 (4): 247–64.

17 Fashion and Social Justice: Teaching and Questioning otto von busch

The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice. (Andrea Dworkin 1981, 149)

Introduction Even if central to many other subjects, topics such as power or justice are seldom discussed in fashion magazines and education, even though these issues seep into our lives from every seam, purchase, and garment. The L’Oréal advertisement famously acclaims “Because I’m worth it!” But the question remains open: What is it that I am worth? And why is someone else not worth it? Does L’Oréal really want us to ponder if we get what we deserve, do they make a claim to just distribution of cosmetics and beauty, or is there something else going on? Teaching fashion students about social justice faces some challenges. The urgency seems distant as the general narrative is that fashion has become “democratized” through cheap and accessible garments. Yes, there may be global injustices, but rarely have the students who attend fashion school been the subjects of fashion’s injustices: if they have been “victims” of fashion, that is usually not affecting their self-image in a damaging way. In general, the world of appearance and fashion may not be on the top list of people’s lists of urgent injustices. It is an everyday phenomenon that touches deep places in our psyche, not least self-esteem, identity, and claims to selfhood. In most cases, being considered unattractive is a subjective or individual experience, and may be accepted as part of anyone’s life. But under a structural regime of domination,

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increasingly judged through visual and social media, being unattractive can be an essential part of a subjugation process where someone is “othered” or considered a “loser.” In these cases, ideals of beauty and hierarchies of values are not abstract processes far removed from individual experience but become tools of repression where exclusive ideals reinforce submission. If critically examined, the world of appearances, often brushed off as shallow and unimportant, is a surface on which injustices are projected. Thus, unpacking the world of everyday fashion offers multiple leads to deeper structures, dominant values, and the ordering of society, and often in ways that creep under the skin of the observer. Justice and beauty are an intimate couple. To art theorist Elaine Scarry (1999), beauty and justice are tightly connected through our human perception of symmetry. As humans, we seem drawn to symmetry. It is an intimate part of most traditions of aesthetics, just as balance and proportions. In her book On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry accounts for a discussion she had with economist Amartya Sen, who evokes Aristotle’s idea of justice as a perfect cube: equal and proportionate in all directions (Scarry 1999, 64). It is easy to connote balance and symmetry to a harmonious and peaceful condition, but we can also think of aesthetic expressions that are based on, and even thrive, because of imbalance and disproportions, specifically social ones. Fashion might be one of them. It is not foreign to fashion to be based on exclusivity and thus exclusion. As fashion journalist Mari Grinde Arntzen claims, in fashion, “quite literally, some are counted in and others out […]. By its nature, fashion is only designed for some” (Arntzen 2015, 58). Fashion is fashionable just because not everyone has access to it. It is in vogue because it is not fairly distributed amongst a population, but something exclusive. As Karl Lagerfeld (2007) put it, fashion is “ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.” Fashion is popular because it is connected to people we admire and look up to. Under such conditions, the disadvantaged, poor, minoritized, helpless, or ugly offer little prestige. This unfairness ties fashion to issues of justice and equity. As noted by philosopher John Rawls (1999), “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought” (3). Justice is also intimately connected to the political, as politics concerns the distribution of social relationships, authority, and power as well as commodities and leisure. Thus, equality is at the core of every political theory, as noted by legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin (1977, 179ff). The conflict of what is just could be raised every day, yet it often remains obscured by ideology, social institutions, and habit. It is as if there is a tacit consensus that, like beauty, we have to

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accept that fashion cannot be truly democratic or fair, just as Lagerfeld once noted. Even if fast fashion has made more people gain access to cheap clothes, the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are still pervasive: fashion is, and possibly must be, unevenly distributed amongst people. So, what is the connection between fashion and justice? Can fashion somehow address the world’s injustices – or can it only feed, and even celebrate, the imbalances of the world? These are topics we have explored and discussed in Critical Fashion and Social Justice, a course I have been teaching at Parsons School of Design in New York since 2012, to a mix of humanities and fashion students, grads and undergrads. In this chapter, I will unpack some of the theoretical background of the course, connecting each section with a short discussion on how this perspective has been presented and discussed in class. What Are the Values in Fashion? On a first note, when asked about the possibility of violence stemming from fashion, students bring up poor working conditions in arid cotton fields and factories, or environmental disasters in developing countries. But when taking a step back, when pulling the discussion towards the everyday, other perspectives may become clear. As fashion scholar Susan Kaiser observes, the basic premise of dress is that everyone is “forced to appear” (Kaiser 2012, 30), whether we want to or not. Even if we habitually speak of fashion as an individual style, it is a mind trick that reinforces the idea of the fashion subject who can forge their own luck. Yet, fashion can never be private but is always caught in social relations and comparisons. This atomization is not only present in fashion. The cult of the individual is part of the narrative of our time, and social atomization is celebrated as a proof of our freedom and independence, bringing along competition and individualism. In order to keep up with the rest, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2010) notes, we are drawn into a cycle of hedonistic hunting for the new look, the new distinction. We use commodities to turn ourselves into a commodity on the social market. Yet we never remain satisfied with what we acquire, as it is already on its way to lose its significance; “once started, tasted, and savoured, the hunt (like any other drug) becomes an addiction, compulsion, and obsession” (Bauman 2010, 61). As Bauman would have it, hunter and hunted merge into one fearful and perpetually chasing endeavour for the next thing, a drive propelled by continuous anxiety, a fear of being excluded, ignored, forgotten – of becoming a “loser.” What counts is to be popular, to be adored, to win. Any social fallout, loneliness, or wrecked self-esteem is simply collateral damage.

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As clothing is such a powerful interface for interpreting, judging, and assessing our peers, it may not be surprising that many of us have been culturally schooled not to judge others by their looks, in a traditional civic effort to limit the existential damage the social conditioning of appearance may cause. However, this cultural tradition of damage control has been steadily dissolving with the entrenching of consumerism across affluent societies. Cultural theorist Gilles Lipovetsky (1994) notices how fashion has been the arena where the vice of conspicuous consumption has most efficiently been washed away and turned into a virtue. Under contemporary consumerism, a regime of “total fashion” seeps into all our relationships (Lipovetsky 1994, 241). In fashion, you get few points for the old civic virtues of frugality or loyalty. In class, we discuss the everyday presence of fashion and clothing, and how we judge others by what they wear, even if we are often taught not to “judge a book by its cover.” By highlighting the tension between identity production and everyday bias in social cognition and tying this to Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion on taste and distinction (1984), students use the BIAS-map (Cuddy, Fiske, and Glick 2007) to map out subcultural looks, brands, and influencers in a hierarchy of “warmth” versus “competence.” How is appearance used to signal social hierarchy as well as more deep emotional values? What values are in high esteem and by whom? Imagined Equality and Imagined Community On a historical scale, fashion offers a fluidity in social organization that breaks with tradition and convention. With the opportunity to dress up in a new look, as a masquerade of sorts, people can appear as someone they are not: a poor farmer can dress up like a rich merchant or lord, a king can become a commoner. Histories, classes, ethnicities, and genders can be blended, bent, and queered. In its full potential, fashion is a great equalizer: we can all become someone else, and behind the mask of fashion we can live out unknown pleasures and desires. Yet this perceived equality is also one of the key paradoxes of fashion, especially with the emergence of fast, accessible, or what is often called “democratic fashion.” In cheap clothes, we can all dress fashionably – if we have the money, that is. That is why the social impact of fast and cheap fashion over the last decade has been so powerful, and it’s also such a great varnish over a deteriorating social and environmental landscape around us. Simultaneously, consumer democracy in the form of cheap goods is the politics of the day and this arena is red in tooth and claw, where popularity and online likes easily translate into career

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and job opportunities. Zygmunt Bauman (2007) poignantly argued that as we “consume life,” even social relationships are now something we judge and value as goods, rather than commit to or build strong and lasting commitments through. As our sociality becomes expressed also digitally through “friends,” “followers,” and “fans,” the ephemeral image culture of fashion seems to just fit perfectly for our time’s social relations where every emotional connection simultaneously becomes a form of competition (Han 2015). Fashion plays an essential role in the shaping of this form of sociality. It opens for ways of belonging that have the possibility to entrench, but also to bypass and play with, many social distinctions, not least education, class, and other hierarchical markers (Bourdieu 1984). The community, culture, or subculture we dress distinctly to belong to is shaped in a similar way as Benedict Anderson’s (1983) idea of nations being “imagined communities.” As Anderson suggests, the sociality of nations is created, not primarily by everyday relations or inheritance, but by the cultural myths and narratives that give shape to a mental image of shared affinity. This image is projected through media and enacted in events and rituals in order to build a social fabric and national loyalty beyond the social, “conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 1983, 224). Followers of the lasts drop of NYC streetwear or obscure Japanese avant-garde labels seem to shape some intangible attitude of belonging, and giving a nod of approval between peers is an acknowledgment of streetwise connoisseurship, like a secret family connection. In class, students are introduced to the classic board game Monopoly, recollecting its basic rules of moving around the board to earn money and buy and develop properties that are hierarchically organized according to their prestige. In the game, every player starts out with equal opportunities, represented in the same amount of currency with only the dice deciding the shift of luck in the game. The students are then introduced to “Stratified Monopoly” (Coghlan and Huggins 2004; Fisher 2008), that is, playing the game in a way where the rules and players come to represent the unequal distribution of money, power, and agency in society. In this version of the game, players do not have the same opportunities but reflect the distribution of wealth in society. The player taking the role of the rich already owns some property and can easily get out of jail, whereas the players being the poor are faced with the rules tilted against them. After this, the students are given a blank piece of paper and are encouraged in groups to create a “game of fashion” modelled on Monopoly to expose the values and hierarchies of fashion. As the class wraps up, students present their ideas followed by a discussion of is who is included and excluded in their games: where

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are the poor, the oversized, the disabled? Where are the interns, sweatshops, and cotton fields? Where is the waste going? How does the game play out between the haves and have-nots? A Democracy of Imagination? Today’s current, fast, relatively accessible, and mass-produced fashion is said to be for all. The brand Uniqlo even has the slogan “Made for all” in their ads. But their stores are not situated where the poor live. Even if many brands today offer more generous sizing than a decade ago, most stores remain segregated, with clear hierarchization of looks and desirability, dividing collections according to gender, sizing, and price ranges. Even if there are attempts to make fashion more inclusive, it remains being broadcast from designers, editors, and influencers to their “fans” and “followers.” This means most people remain excluded, uncounted, and unseen. Agency is restricted and consumer are left with few options but to consume. As suggested by Rawls (1999), the centre of social justice is the concern to improve the conditions of the least advantaged members in society, rather than just the maximization of the general social welfare. That means that even if cheap fashion is produced for the masses, as long as it does not seriously improve the conditions of the sweatshop workers, the disabled, or the poor, this change improves little from a perspective of justice and equity. Instead, there seem to be other implications for the “democracy” in fashion: instead of justice, fast fashion pushes mass homogenization. This is a phenomenon Michele Lee (2003) calls “McFashion” – as unsatisfying, commonplace, and utterly forgettable as the fast-food equivalent. This type of mass dissemination of goods not only fails to satisfy the desire of people, but it also raises the level of competition and thus fuels even greater patterns of binge and purge on consumption. With the consumption of fashion, we buy not only leisure – we buy a sense of control. Consumers may feel they have the power to shape their identity and become part of fashion. Yet the mechanism of fashion commodities only conforms the power of the dominant mode of production; the consumer can “vote” with their money, and we may feel involved, but at the same time we cannot participate in any real decision making beyond picking something that is already offered. As philosopher Jean Baudrillard notes on consumerism, “to the illusion of change is added the illusion of democracy” (Baudrillard 1981, 78). The fashion system simultaneously liberates and imprisons, and, as fashion historian Anne Hollander notes, “the tyranny of fashion itself has in fact never been stronger than in this period of visual pluralism” (Hollander 1993, 345).

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An example of this thinking can be recognized in the opening scene of The September Issue (2009) a documentary movie on the inner workings of Vogue magazine. Here, Anna Wintour, the famous editor, advances her standpoint that “on the whole, people who say demeaning things about [fashion], I think it’s because they feel in some way excluded, or not part of the ‘cool group.’ So, as a result they just mock it.” Effectively blaming the victims of exclusion for not being part of the cool group, Wintour not only elevates the cool, but also explicitly reinforces the dichotomy between the “in” and “out.” Simultaneously, as the movie exposes, she dictates the symbolic currencies of that which is “in” on very vague premises, resulting in a workplace culture conditioned by anxiety and fear. The elitism and processes of exclusion are never questioned. Instead, everyone strives to be part of the ingroup. Yet, this yearning to be recognized and accepted is essential to our social life. Fashion taps into our deepest yearnings. Every living organism seeks energy, and for a social species like humans, there is a deep hunger to be seen, affirmed, acknowledged, and included. Through the medium of fashion, this drive is funnelled into a process dependent on the exclusion of others. Here, clothes act as the perfect screen onto which to project stereotyping. Clothes, by being “shallow” by popular definition, allow them to be the excuse for various forms of micro-regulation of relationships and access. When the bouncer stops a person of colour to enter a nightclub because of some vague rule of “no sneakers tonight,” while simultaneously letting the rich kids in with similar shoes, dress has become an absolvent for segregation. Likewise, when the cool kids in school ironize about a bully victim’s clothes, these garments not only become an interface for violence, but they also mask it as a comment “only” about the surface of things, while the venomous comments poison the victim’s soul. The same interface that may be an armour on one occasion is also a window of vulnerability on another. In class, we discuss the social phenomenon we may jokingly call the “fashion police.” Even if designers and editors have power over looks and consumer goods, they are not the ones enforcing social distinction. The enforcement of fashion is done through peer pressure and subtle policing, in everything from bouncers at nightclubs refusing entrance to people not dressing up to the norm, or peers’ sudden silence after a bad haircut. A comment on one’s clothes may appear harmless, but it often leaves an existential wound and low self-esteem. But how do we know an outfit “works” or not? Whose judgment do we seek and whose signals do we listen to? Students discuss cases where they feel they have been judged and through which signals or interactions (subtle or not)

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they know the result of their appearance. What experiences are they ready to share in class? What patterns can they see? Unpacking Fashion Supremacy What Wintour suggests above is that the “cool group” has another social standing than the people outside, one of aesthetic merit, if not also of moral superiority. As Mari Grinde Arntzen (2015) highlights, fashion is always “right,” and this often translates into the fashionable person taking on a social standing that amounts to being just a little better than others. Fashion offers an arena whereby a group of people, often with other means of power and recognition, can position themselves as superior by criteria they already possess. It can be wealth, skin colour, body figure, taste. Not only are those who possess these attributes better and worth more than others, but the value system also masks indifference and willing blindness to its injustice. This elitist regime is an aesthetic, political and ontological category, and it is an intrinsic part of today’s social life. I call this fashion supremacy (von Busch 2014). Fashion supremacy is enacted through various levels of coercion, exclusion, and threat or explicit use of violence (for example, in bullying). It is a value system that legitimizes judgment of others by their looks and results in aesthetic segregation, and it celebrates an imaginary meritocracy within the realm of dress that those with better means are simply worth a higher status, effectively hiding an unjust distribution of assets behind the perfect facade. As a parallel to Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel’s (2000) argument of an economic apartheid, which feeds into the inequality and insecurity of the poor through social and institutional discrimination, I would suggest fashion supports an aesthetic apartheid of a similar structure, using peer judgments and policing to uphold its social stratification. The fashion system effectively veils how the industry is structurally discriminatory and exploitative, totally based on the outsourcing of labour, oppressive sweatshops, unpaid interns, unattainable body ideals, and outright ableism, ageism, classism, and racism. What makes the institutional apartheid of fashion so devious is how it is covered under a soft regime of “democratic” fast fashion and perceived equality of opportunities (“you can be part of our group, if you just put in some effort!”). The “democratization” of consumerism coincides with a consumer perspective on justice – one in which the seemingly equal distribution of goods can be seen as an everyday application of justice. But as put forward by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson (1999), producing accessible aesthetic goods to those excluded from the values of beauty does

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not address the hierarchy and uneven distribution of power. In order to make her point clearer, Anderson projects a fictional State Equality Board that sends out compensation cheques to people repressed by the state-sanctioned system. The cheque is accompanied by a letter of consolation to the poor excluded recipient: How sad that you are so repulsive to people around you that no one wants to be your friend or lifetime companion. We won’t make it up to you by being your friend or your marriage partner – we have our own freedom of association to exercise – but you can console yourself in your miserable loneliness by consuming these material goods which we, the beautiful and charming ones, will provide. And who knows? Maybe you won’t be such a loser once potential dates see how rich you are. (Anderson 1999, 305)

In this fictional letter, Anderson points towards the absurdity of thinking that cheap consumerism can somehow compensate for the current meritocratic and consumerist regime that feeds into the unjust value systems embodying fashion superiority. Cheap goods, however beautiful and nice, cannot make up for the unequal values attributed to people, especially if they offer no avenue for people to address and change these values. Instead, to make things worse, cheap and accessible fashion covers an existential as much as an institutional wound that cannot heal. Instead, the industry makes sure the wound is never cured, so that the bandage needs to continuously be changed. As a form of arms industry for aesthetic struggle, the fashion industry thrives on conflict and perpetual civil war (von Busch 2020). In class, we often start discussing the popular film The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and students pick out key scenes they think represent the hierarchization of values in fashion, and also how these are legitimized. Many students at Parsons have internships at various brands and institutions in New York City, so we then move the discussion over to unpack instances of how they themselves have come across stratification, divisions of labour, and aesthetic micro-regulations in the industry. We also discuss how this influences education, in perpetual competitions, iteration of historical hierarchies, and how dominant Western concepts about success, sexuality, and desire keep reproducing themselves – in mood boards, history courses, sizing and proportions of mannequins, pattern-making techniques, etc. What ways could be imagined and practised that break away from this cycle of exclusion, and can they become part of an overall struggle for justice?

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Conclusion It is easy to connote democracy with an idea of rule of law and equate mass distribution of goods as a basic form of justice, and this is a narrative that permeates the media discussion on fashion. If fashion is to have the attribute of democracy, it needs more than cheap mass production (and who is counted to have a voice in this democracy? Consumers? Producers?). Moving forward, fashion designers need to listen more, proclaim less, and be humble and helpful, rather than thrive on undermining self-esteem through the promotion of continuous conflict, consciously or unconsciously. A perspective on design justice is just emerging and should be coupled with decolonization of the syllabus, challenging Western norms on bodies, patterns and aesthetics, and historical narratives putting Paris as centre of fashion while excluding other voices (Ahmed 2018; Constanza-Chock 2018). This means both studying popular dress practices in other cultures, unpacking the power relationships in how styles move across the world, what is appropriated without acknowledgment, and how patterns, silhouettes, and fits are made for certain ideals while excluding others. Moving forward, could fashion be an arena through which designers engage users to participate in more inclusive “arts of democracy,” and offer liberation as well as social mobility to those most in need? As Anderson (1999, 2010) points out, this must include a more generous notion of a relational, or more democratic, form of equality, rather than a narrow focus on distribution through mass production, even if this could one day be done without human or environmental costs. If tuning a fashion syllabus towards addressing social justice, go through the syllabus of your class and think of what elements of the course prepares students for the industry versus what parts can help students question, rethink, and reimagine the industry and its relationship to its users – not necessarily narrowing users down to being merely “consumers.” How is fashion arranged to exclude, in its cultural norms, sizing, distribution, pricing, and expression? Can you encourage more inclusive and visionary components that gets the students to think of hierarchies, power, and social justice in the class? How can the outcomes of the class also be open to projects that question some of the basic assumptions of what we think of as fashion, opening it up to experiences that are more equitably shared, and less limited to a narrow distribution of excusive goods, already designed and designated by a visionary and all-knowing designer, editor, or influencer?

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In the end, fashion is a phenomenon happening between us, it can exist as a relational power, and as such it could be used to promote civic goods, not least togetherness and tolerance, by listening to others, allowing them room for self-expression, and promote a sense (and skills) of care. At best, fashion can be a form of beauty and aliveness distributed throughout the social, a feeling of excitement that best appears to us in togetherness, in sharing looks and mutual attention, affirmation and flirting – social pleasures that do not diminish but are amplified when shared (von Busch 2018). As the course on critical fashion and social justice highlights, even a seemingly shallow phenomenon such as fashion carries deep implications for everyday justice. Whereas many students have seen media reports about exploitation in production, or encountered controversies around aesthetic appropriation, their examination of everyday life with clothes reveals deeper injustices in the distribution of goods, desires, and aesthetics across consumer society. They come to see how fashion is not only about the unfair distribution of goods, but also of judgment, desire, and affirmation. The challenge for educators is firstly to take fashion seriously not only as an aesthetic or business, but as a sociopolitical conflict zone and see how they often unwillingly contribute to a perpetuation of injustices. Critically examining the stratifications and relationships of fashion is a first step to question and redesign them. Elaine Scarry (1999, 63) draws our attention to Rawls’s idea of justice as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other,” and how the symmetry and equality of these relations are part of beauty itself. And she notes how “beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of ‘a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other’” (65). One task of social justice pedagogies is to see how fashion can help more people get their fair share of such a sense of loveliness, a reciprocity whose value does not decrease when shared, but increases as we do it together. Questions for Reflection: 1 The chapter discusses some pros and cons of fashion, both individually and on a societal level. What were the ones that stood out to you? 2 Fashion is not for everyone. Think of ways through which various brands restrict the reach of their goods and how that affects different social groups.

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3 What are the injustices that happen in the production of fashion? What are the injustices that happen in the consumption and use of fashion? How about in the processes and flows of waste? Do they overlap? BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmed, Tanveer. 2018. “‘All About Love’: How Would bell hooks Teach Fashion Design?” Paper presented at DRS2018, Limerick, 25–8 June. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Elizabeth. 1999. “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (2): 287–337. –  2010. “Justifying the Capabilities Approach to Justice.” In Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, edited by H. Brighouse and I. Robeyns, 81–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arntzen, Mari Grinde. 2015. Dress Code: The Naked Truth About Fashion. London: Reaktion Books. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis: Telos Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity. –  2010. “Perpetuum Mobile.” Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 1 (1): 55–63. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. Coghlan, Catherine, and Denise Huggins. 2004. “That’s Not Fair! A Simulation Exercise in Social Stratification and Structural Inequality.” Teaching Sociology 32 (2): 177–87. Collins, Chuck, and Felice Yeskel. 2000. Economic Apartheid in America. New York: New Press. Constanza-Chock, Sasha. 2018. “Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice.” Paper presented at DRS2018, Limerick, 25–8 June. Cuddy, Amy, Susan Fiske, and Peter Glick. 2007. “The BIAS Map: Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (4): 631. Dworkin, Andrea. 1981, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Perigee. Dworkin, Ronald. 1977. Taking Rights Seriously. London: Duckworth. Fisher, Edith. 2008. “USA Stratified Monopoly: A Simulation Game about Social Class Stratification.” Teaching Sociology 36 (3): 272–82. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. 2015. Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs.

256  Otto von Busch Hollander, Anne. 1993. Seeing Through Clothes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaiser, Susan. 2012. Fashion and Cultural Studies. London: Bloomsbury. Lagerfeld, Karl. 2007. Lagerfeld Confidential. Film directed by Rodolphe Marconi. Lee, Michele. 2003. Fashion Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of Style. New York: Broadway Books. Lipovetsky, Gilles. 1994. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The September Issue. 2009. Documentary film directed by R.J. Cutler. von Busch, Otto. 2014. “‘A Suit, of His Own Earning’: Fashion Supremacy and Sustainable Fashion Activism.” In The Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion, edited by Ken Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, 275–82. London: Routledge. – 2018. Vital Vogue: A Biosocial Perspective on Fashion. New York: Self Passage. – 2020. The Psychopolitics of Fashion: Conflict and Courage under the Current State of Fashion. London: Bloomsbury.

18 Getting Beyond Alterity: Building a Just Post-Fashion Curriculum sandra niessen

Introduction I remember my delight, as a vegetarian, when I discovered quinoa, a delicious seed grain that contains the full set of amino acids! And then the disappointment and regret when I later learned about the effect that the sheer size of the quinoa fad, myself implicated, had on Bolivian farmers. They consequently could no longer afford to eat the crop they had been growing since ancient times (Blythman 2013). Many readers will recognize the same excitement-followed-by-crash upon discovering the impacts on the world of the expanded consumption of avocados. A comparable disappointment accompanies the consumption of industrially produced clothing. I am a retired anthropologist who has followed the decline of the clothing and textile traditions of the Batak people of North Sumatra, Indonesia, for some forty years. This experience has engendered insight into the impacts of the industrial and fashion systems of the West on Indigenous cultures. I welcome this opportunity to share some of these insights with instructors and students of fashion who may not have had the opportunity to conduct longitudinal fieldwork. This pedagogically oriented chapter is the counterpart of a theoretical study that I published in Fashion Theory commenting on the need to examine fashion alterity, especially in the wake of awareness driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations (Niessen 2020). Researchers, activists, and the media have stepped up to show the highly deleterious environmental consequences of untrammelled clothing consumption encouraged by an economic system for which growth is the life force. The generated awareness has sparked considerable response. Cognizant of the fact that their generation has to solve this global problem, students of fashion have been tackling the

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environmental footprint of clothing with verve: inventing and exploring new fibres and fabrics, developing better recycling strategies, reducing consumption and waste, making production more efficient, reducing transportation distances; in short, bringing greater responsibility to the way consumers can dress. Together with designers, activists, and industrial labs, they are making progress. Nevertheless, the focus on the materiality of fashion is not enough. In this chapter, I argue that this focus on materiality is also symptomatic of a conceptual disconnect, and that addressing some central injustices resulting from the current global fashion system will require redressing colonial vestiges in fashion theory. We live in a world in which an enormous number of conceptual disconnects facilitate the status quo. An obligation of the fashion/clothing instructor is to make such obscured interconnections transparent, and then for students to carry the implications forward. In her essay on the violence of othering, Naomi Klein (2019) cites Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to define othering as “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region” (Said 1978 in Klein 2019, 155). She points out that anti-imperialist knowledge is necessary “because without that knowledge, there is no way to understand how we ended up in this dangerous place [of environmental crisis], or to grasp the transformations required to get us somewhere safer” (153). Othering is a pernicious proclivity of fashion. For more than a century, fashion theorists have correctly pointed out that the Western fashion phenomenon depicts the passage of time and modernity. In more recent decades, decolonial theorists have shown that fashion is also bound up in an implicit politics of demonstrating the superiority of its wearers. This is evident from early theory stating that fashion is a European phenomenon and that cultures expressing slower change and simpler technologies could not possibly have fashion, thus creating a cultural schism between those with and those without fashion. However, fashion is deeply invested in its self-perception as apolitical and free of cultural baggage and has had difficulty responding to the criticism that it is a tool of colonial hierarchy. As Klein (2019) pointed out, “once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression. [...] Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction” (155). Klein was referring specifically to how mining for oil and gas continues unabated, regardless of the consequences not just for nature, but also civil liberties and Indigenous cultures (Klein 2014). Nevertheless, she placed this in the context of pervasive, institutional racism made possible by othering. In these reflections, I am making the point that exposing how

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othering occurs in fashion can be radically transformative, and it therefore behooves fashion educators to expose its root and build a fashion curriculum that is inclusive of those who have been placed in the cate­ gory of other by conventional, industrial Western fashion and Western fashion theory. Fashion marks the boundary between the other and those making the distinction – a good explanation for why fashion is fixated on style, material, and modernity. This focus deflects attention away from fashion’s behind-the-scenes intentions. Decolonial scholars have noted the role of alterity in fashion, but the implications of fashion’s pernicious behind-the-scenes raison d’être have not yet been sufficiently mapped. This is a task that can be taken up in the classroom, where we must assume the obligation to transform the fashion system into something more inclusive and more just. Alterity means the state of being other or different. The title of this piece refers to a post-fashion period – a visionary future in which diversity in dress systems is recognized and respected throughout the world without any particular system having primacy over any other system, such as the one with the most powerful underlying economic system and an accompanying hubris that thrives on othering. Theoretical Frameworks The body of literature mentioned above that has examined alterity in fashion (Baizerman, Eicher, and Cerny 1993; Craik 1994; Niessen 2003, 2010; Jansen and Craik 2016; Welters and Lillethun 2011) has made inroads in fashion theory. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (2010) were among the first to respond to the charge of Eurocentrism in fashion by attempting to construct a non-Eurocentric fashion history in The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives. They did so by examining fashion themes cross-culturally, all the while acknowledging that imbalances would be inevitable because the Western fashion variant is so much more richly documented than its counterparts elsewhere in the world. Thorough documentation (in English) of fashion histories outside Europe/North America such as Toby Slade’s (2009) Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History are still rare, although anthropologists have been quicker to point out dynamics in bodily adornment at play outside the West. In 2004, anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen pointed out that “traditional” dress was never a cultural “heritage issue” in anthropology but was “always a changing practice, remaking itself in interaction with other dress styles” and that “fashion’s Western hegemony” was breaking down (Tranberg Hansen 2004, 372–3). Richard Kunz and Willemijn de Jong (2016) explicitly used the concept of fashion to describe

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changes in Indonesian weaving arts. More recently, in their encyclopaedic Fashion History: A Global View, Welters and Lillethun (2018) have straddled the fields of anthropology and archaeology and fashion in their attempt to “inspire new inclusive fashion histories” by recrafting the dominant narrative that privileges Western Europe in the history of dress (4). They, too, present cross-cultural information to demonstrate that style change through time, earlier held as a defining characteristic of Western fashion, is in fact not exclusive at all, but a feature found in most dress systems around the world. This matter of inclusivity and exclusivity in fashion, fashion theory, and the classroom is at the core of much injustice in fashion. To put Welters and Lillethun’s contribution in perspective, it is necessary to recall the claims made by fashion theorists who preceded them by a century and more that Western fashion was distinctive in the world and served, therefore, as both an emblem and proof of the cultural superiority of the West. These early writers pointed out that Western fashion was distinctive for its rapid change (Flügel 1930), and the possibility of reversible change (Sapir 1937, 141) and therefore not to be found in “tribal, classless, peasant and caste societies” (Simmel 1957, 541; Blumer 1968, 342). These mistaken assumptions became accepted wisdom, passed from generation to generation through fashion curricula, neither doubted nor submitted to serious empirical testing. In recent decades these a posteriori claims about the superiority of Western fashion have been debunked one after the other, until only the very barest bones of the original claim of fashion uniqueness, “style change through time,” remained cited in definitions of fashion (Welters and Lillethun 2011, xxv; Rouse 1989, chapter 4). The extensive ethnographic detail of Fashion History: A Global View has definitively revealed that even this last, commonly accepted “diagnostic feature” of fashion is false, leaving no doubt that the professed superiority of Western fashion was established a priori. The logic ran something like this: the Western “race” represents the zenith of evolutionary cultural development, ergo the dress system of the Western “race” is unique, and its features are, by definition, both unique and superior. The deduced delusionary superiority of the West had been enabled by technological advancements since the Enlightenment to the extent that the West reified its fashion system as a unique object of study (Niessen 2010). I perceive two immediate consequences of the Welters and Lillethun study for the ethnically diverse classroom. First, the cultural playing field has gone from hierarchical to level. In the classroom, this means inclusiveness. In principle, students from every culture, background, and dress tradition can now be equal in the study of dress. There are no students who have come from a background “without fashion,” only

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students who hail from more or less thoroughly studied clothing systems. The second issue, however, is that by having conducted a search among “other cultures” for a feature of Western fashion, namely, “style change through time,” the Welters and Lillethun study continues to give primacy to the Western variant. If, in the previous century, fashion had been used to demonstrate that “we” are superior to “them” as evident from the fact that we have fashion and they don’t, the new stance, “We can show that they are like us after all,” is an inversion of the old one and potentially conceptually blocks from view the unique dynamics of other dress systems. The “globalization of fashion,” when understood as sui generis rather than a result of interaction with external cultural forces, appears to support this stance. In the classroom, this stance reinstalls strata in the playing field because the default starting point is still the West and students coming from a Western fashion tradition retain a position of privilege. A comparable ambivalence plays at the gate to the fashion world. The boundary between the fashions of the West and East wobbled a little at the end of the twentieth century with the breakthrough of designers Kenzo, Issey Miyake, and Rei Kawakubo. Initially this emergence created conceptual confusion. The West had to get its head around the entrance of the East (“East meets West” was the title of the section in Bloomingdale’s section where Miyake’s innovative clothing was sold). Othering quickly kicked in, however: these were not just brilliant designers, these were “Japanese designers” bringing something quintessentially Japanese to the Western fashion scene. Did West truly meet East? Or did the East come to the West framed and packaged so that the West could accommodate it? During the ensuing rampant globalization of fashion, designers from “other cultures” continued to complain about being situated in an ethnic idiom (Skov 2003), framed as being rooted in ethnic tradition, ethnicity being precisely what distinguished “them” from “us” (Teunissen 2005), and their histories described as “alternative,” to also acknowledge the primacy of the Western industrial one. In other words, the placement of the boundary between centre and periphery continued to be contested; inevitable, given that the financial reins of fashion continued to be held in the West. Now it is time not for the placement of the boundary be contested, but rather the fact that there is a boundary at all. In Fashion History: A Global View, Welters and Lillethun have shown that Western fashion has something fundamental in common with clothing systems throughout the world, namely, style change through time. They could have drawn far more significant conclusions from their work because they have definitively debunked fashion’s final claim to superiority. They have shown that fashion joins

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the fold of dress practices all over the globe, each of which is unique in its own way and, I would add, meritorious of study in its own right, not just relative to the Western fashion system.1 The study of dress, decolonialized in this way, must focus on the universal phenomenon, or at least recognize both the universality and the specificity of each cultural system of dress. It seems embarrassingly anachronistic to submit this suggestion in a postcolonial era on the brink of post-globalization, when fashion expressions abound throughout the world and alternative fashion narratives are being constructed everywhere, and when Western fashion is no longer conceptually dependent on non-fashion systems, but rather even on their demise in order to acquire a labour pool, market, and dumping ground for castoffs. Logically, the comparative study by Welters and Lillethun should have been conducted a century ago. But it wasn’t. Very troublesomely, it remains relevant today, and othering in fashion persists. Why does the Western fashion system continue to be reified as a special case of dress and a special theme for comparison when every dress system in the world has unique and universal traits? Is it still the belief in Western superiority that so profoundly motivates this illogicality in dress theory? That must be part of it. A decolonial approach to fashion must expose the complicated historical relations between the imperialist Western fashion system and other systems that have been negated out of hand and erased as “non-fashion,” perceived as having neither validity nor meriting scrutiny (labelled “primitive” or “simple”) and destined to die out as a consequence of the march of unstoppable progress. Certainly, the lack of information about other systems of dress, as pointed out by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (2010), also interferes in the ability to see the two sides of the fashion coin. Fashion Pedagogies What is the role of the classroom in constructing a more inclusive fashion? In her presentation for Fashion Colloquium: Disrupting Fashion; From Yesterday’s Heritage to Tomorrow’s Future in Rome in September 2019, Angela Jansen (2019) noted how colonial perspectives figure in the study of fashion in Morocco: Graduate students from Morocco’s main fashion academy mostly reject Moroccan fashion as a source of inspiration because of its stigmatisation as traditional dress and therefore incompatible with modern (European) fashion. Students cannot imagine Moroccan fashion as having a history of dynamic influences, continuous innovations and global interconnections

Getting Beyond Alterity  263 and as such, as a rich source of potential solutions for some of the most urgent problems in dominant fashion. Run by a French director, with a majority of French teachers, students are only taught European fashion history and technologies. Not only does this illustrate how French involvement in Morocco is not over, but it also perpetuates the misconception that fashion is European. Local craftspeople, who master historical techniques, suffer from having the reputation of being traditional (e.g., not innovative), ignorant (of trends) and old-fashioned. (n.p.)

How did the biases of Western fashion become so deeply entrenched, not just among Moroccan students but amongst all of us? We are conceptually deeply invested in images of fashion presented to us by the industry through popular media such as television and magazines, catwalk performances, shopping, history, theory, and so on. It is necessary to make transparent the privileges and injustices that are built into that system. Who has the power of self- and style determination? Who is chained in subservience to these dominant interests? What are the consequences of this inequality? Where and how does fashion capital flow? When and why do fashion expressions emerge outside the West? What are the processes through which they are realized? What is the effect of “fashion” expressions on Indigenous systems of dress? These kinds of investigations will reveal relations between fashion and “other” systems of dress, and not just at a conceptual level. They will help students situate themselves in the sober world of fashion dynamics and history. The process can be deeply confrontational, perhaps most of all for the students who have been situated beyond the fashion pale by force of history and geography and have embraced the fashion system as their aspired-to future, because they must have undergone a form of selfand cultural erasure. G.T. Reyes (2019) has described this process of confrontation from his experience teaching Indigenous pupils in North America (albeit not in the area of fashion): Coloniality does not only operate systemically; it also functions at the personal level. Engagement in praxis must then also be intimate and mindful, starting with the self. It questions the construction of one’s entire being: Why am I how I am? Why do I think what I think? Why do I do what I do? At minimum, such questioning is uncomfortable, but discomfort can be temporary. What is of importance in this process of becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable is developing the tools to be radically mindful in the moment of experiencing discomfort. Radical mindfulness moves beyond traditional purposes of mindfulness that intend for individuals to become more aware of their inner experience and how they interact with

264  Sandra Niessen the world around them. Radical mindfulness particularly assists peoples impacted by coloniality to navigate the compounding and cumulative ways that systems of oppression impact mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health. Actively working through discomfort in critical and humanizing ways opens up transformative possibilities. Without doing so, people remain unaware or complicit in the colonial project and therefore reproduce it. Becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable requires visibilizing [sic] and critically examining of [sic] the underlying sociohistorical reasons that cause the discomfort in the first place. (5–6)

Ethnically diverse classrooms can serve as important crucibles for new fashion narratives to emerge, where students can share how they have experienced fashion process and politics – but the process can be delicate and sensitive. In a recent discussion on decolonial fashion education, Cheang and Suterwalla (2020) described their careful strategies in the classroom to even-handedly encourage students’ voices in the construction of a broader fashion history. The level playing field in the classroom as described above provides a safe facilitating framework. Fashion erasures are lived experience through all of fashion’s processes from design to production to the catwalk to advertising. When an open framework of enquiry is set up and transparency about fashion systems is encouraged, the classroom can encourage (self-) awareness on both sides of the fashion divide. In 2019 the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, in the Netherlands, sponsored a Climate Urgency event, one day of which was devoted to fashion. Erica de Greef, member of the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion, showed artistic fashion films from South Africa exploring the ­decolonizing power of fashion. The films and underlying motivations and disruptions were not immediately accessible to the mostly Dutch audience. One of the viewers stated, “when you sketch the context to these films, it allows me to see them in a new light. I don’t know anything about this South African context. When you provide background explanations, I am thrown back on myself, and I perceive that I must unlearn my ‘usual’ responses and learn anew according to the new information. This is humbling and it makes me careful. It is another culture and deserves respect. Decoloniality is about self-awareness.” This is the awareness of how ethnocentrism, familiar and inevitable in us all, can be mitigated. Fashion’s global challenges have not yet been met, but they are being worked on sincerely and thoughtfully. Fashion education is also changing. ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, Netherlands, for example, has devoted a master’s Program to seeing through the underpinning

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values of fashion and consumption to engender a more environmentally friendly fashion, asking on their website: “Shouldn’t we focus more on the emotional, ethical and social value of fashion? [...] Shouldn’t we look beyond simple financial maximization, and fundamentally rethink the concept of ‘value’ and how we as individuals and communities relate to our environment?” How can we get in touch with our most essential human relationship to clothing and body decoration unmediated by the norms, expectations, and pressures exerted by the trillion-dollar clothing industry steaming ahead on the dictates of financial growth? At the Centre for Fashion Diversity & Social Change (FDSC) at Ryerson University in Toronto the focus is on “bodies that have been marginalized in and by fashion” (Barry 2020). On the centre’s website they highlight that “our work centres fat, disabled, trans, gender nonconforming, Indigenous, Black, racialized and/or other bodies that have been marginalized in and by fashion. Our projects use participatory and decolonizing methodologies to centre the experiences and ideal futures of these wearers and makers and to redesign the field of fashion for and with them.” Both institutions are working on constructing a new, more just fashion starting from the individual, confronting the self. The departments appear to be praxis oriented, experimental, experiential, activist, and idealist. Conclusion I expect that fashion study will be revised collaboratively and iteratively, rebelliously, and thoughtfully, by activists, researchers, educators, makers, students, and fashion aficionados. Transformation will occur inside and outside the classroom. The process seems to be forging far ahead of the fashion theory discussed above that is still bogged down in early twentieth-century biases and fallacies. Nevertheless, working out the relationship between fashion and those whom it has erased from view has important transformative potential. There is much to redress that remains hidden from view. It could be that the boundary and process of othering is the hardest for fashion to address. The Western variant of fashion has been rendered narrow in its emphasis on style and look. How have the gaze, the catwalk, and notions of individual and design freedom blinded consumers and students of fashion to deeper dimensions of dress? How have Western conceptions of linear time and modernity functioned to expand the Western fashion system and at what cost to other systems of dress and bodily decoration? What are the consequences of fashion’s presentation of gender, relations between the genders, and the sexualized self in

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Indigenous cultures? How has the development of a universal jeansand-T-shirt attire affected Indigenous systems of dress? What is the relationship between the making of Indigenous dress and the continually expanding labour pool for industrial fashion, which has doubled during the past fifteen years alone? Why do fashion environmentalists limit their humanitarian focus to “labourers” and “the living wage” and not address the systemic reasons why these members of other (non-fashion) cultures have been reduced to “labourers”? Why can these “labourers” not be reabsorbed into their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic? All of these issues need to be addressed and the process can begin in classrooms when students are encouraged to explore and share their personal experiences with dress – the more diverse the classroom, the greater the latitude of discussion. The difficulties in accommodating fashion’s alterity are not confined to fashion theory, nor even to the entire field of fashion. As pointed out at the outset, they are endemic to an economic system in which fashion is cued for expansion, an expansion founded on alterity. It is important, therefore, not to underestimate the potentially profound ramifications of radical transformation of a fashion world that learns how to dispense with alterity. Awareness of alterity, starting in the classroom, can kickstart change on a larger scale. Questions for Reflection: 1 Feminists have taught us that the personal is political. Our personal experience of clothing cannot help but relate to the wider phenomenon of industrial fashion. Solutions to unfairness in the fashion system can therefore be rooted in personal experience and insight. Reflect on how your relationship to clothing has been informed by othering. How do you address this in your own wardrobe? 2 Othering is pervasive in the West. Name one or two ways that you perceive the fashion curriculum as having hidden the other from view. 3 Something to ponder: how can you allow the other to become visible through fashion? 4 What does the post-fashion world of dress look like to you? NOTE 1 The authors have cited my 2003 publication as a source of inspiration for their work. In that publication I claimed, indeed, that fashion is not exclusive to the West and can be found everywhere in the world. My claim has

Getting Beyond Alterity  267 been interpreted variously by different readers, depending on their definition of “fashion.” To be clear, I was not dwelling on whether the characteristics of Western fashion could be found elsewhere, but rather trying to point out that Western fashion was but one system of dress and that dressing is a human universal. In this, my position has not changed. In 2003, however, I used the word “fashion” to denote that human universal. In the present article, I try to avoid that confusion by allowing the term “fashion” to designate the Western system of dress. I use the term “dress system” to designate the overarching universal phenomenon. BIBLIOGRAPHY ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, Netherlands. https://www.artez.nl /en/course/fashion-strategy/vision. Baizerman, Suzanne, Joanne B. Eicher, and Catherine Cerny. 1993. “Eurocentrism in the Study of Ethnic Dress.” Dress 20 (1): 19–32. Barry, Ben. 2020. “Op-Ed: How Fashion Education Prevents Inclusivity.” Business of Fashion, 6 January. https://www.businessoffashion.com /articles/opinion/op-ed-how-fashion-education-prevents-inclusivity. Blumer, Herbert. 1968. “Fashion.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 5, edited by David Sills, 341–5. New York: Macmillan. Blythman, Joanna. 2013. “Can Vegans Stomach the Unpalatable Truth about Quinoa?” Guardian, 16 January. https://www.theguardian.com /commentisfree/2013/jan/16/vegans-stomach-unpalatable-truth-quinoa. Centre for Fashion Diversity & Social Change (FDSC), Ryerson University, Toronto. https://www.ryerson.ca/fashion/research-creative/the-centre -for-fashion-diversity-social-change/. Cheang, S., and S. Suterwalla. 2020. “Decolonizing the Curriculum: Rethinking the Teaching of Fashion History.” Fashion Theory 24 (6): 879–900. Craik, Jennifer. 1994. The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. London: Routledge. Flügel, J.C. 1930. The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogarth Press. Jansen, M. Angela. 2019. “Disrupting Today’s Fashion Heritage to Reconstruct Yesterday’s Future: Decolonizing Moroccan Fashion History and Education.” Paper prepared for Fashion Colloquium: Disrupting Fashion; From Yesterday’s Heritage to Tomorrow’s Future. Rome: September 10–11. Jansen, M. Angela, and Jennifer Craik, eds. 2016. Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion. London: Bloomsbury. Kunz, Richard, and Willemijn de Jong. 2016. “Introduction in Striking Patterns: Global Traces in Local Ikat Fashion.” Basel: Museum der Kulturen. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

268  Sandra Niessen –  2019. “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.” In On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, 149–68. London: Allen Lane /Penguin Books. Niessen, Sandra. 2003. “Afterword: Re-orienting Fashion Theory.” In ReOrienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress, edited by S. Niessen, A.M Leshkowich, and C. Jones, 243–66. Oxford: Berg Publishers. –  2010. “Interpreting ‘Civilization’ through Dress.” In West Europe, Part 1: Overview of Dress and Fashion in West Europe. Vol. 8 of Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Oxford: Berg Publishers. –  2020. “Fashion, Its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability.” Fashion Theory 2 (6): 859–77. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800984. Riello, Giorgio, and Peter McNeil, eds. 2010. The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Reyes, G.T. 2019. “Pedagogy of and Towards Decoloniality.” In Encyclopedia of Teacher Education, edited by M.A. Peters, 1–7. Singapore: Springer. Rouse, Elizabeth. 1989. Understanding Fashion. Oxford: BSP Professional Books. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sapir, Edward. 1937. “Fashion.” In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 139–44. New York: The Macmillan Co. Simmel, Georg. (1904) 1957. “Fashion.” The Journal of American Sociology lxii 6: 541–8. Skov, Lise. 2003. “Fashion – Nation: A Japanese Globalization Experience and a Hong Kong Dilemma.” In Re-orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress, edited by S. Niessen, A. Leshkowich, and C. Jones, 215–42. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Slade, Toby. 2009. Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History. Oxford: Berg. Strapagiel, Lauren. 2019. “MaxMara Allegedly Stole Designs from A Laotian Community for These Pricey Dresses.” Buzzfeed News, 10 April. Teunissen, José. 2005. “Global Fashion/Local Tradition. Over de globalisering van mode.” In Global Fashion Local Tradition: Over de globalisering van de mode, edited by Jan Brand and José Teunissen, 8–23. Warnsveld: Uiteverij Terra Lannoo BV. Tranberg Hansen, Karen. 2004. “The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 369–92. Vazquez, Rolando. 2009. “Modernity Coloniality and Visibility: The Politics of Time.” Sociological Research Online 14 (4): 109–15. –  2017. “Precedence, Earth and the Anthropocene: Decolonizing Design.” Design Philosophy Papers 15 (1): 77–91. DOI: 10.1080/14487136.2017.1303130. Verheij, Alain. 2020. “U wilt dit niet lezen, want dit gaat over uw slaven.” De Nieuwe Koers, January. https://www.denieuwekoers.nl/u-wilt-dit-niet -lezen-want-dit-gaat-over-uw-slaven. Welters, Linda, and Abby Lillethun. 2011. The Fashion Reader. 2nd ed. Oxford: Berg.

19 Social Justice, Intersectionality, and Decoloniality katrina sark

Whether you have ancestors that were colonizers or colonized, we are all ­colonized people, so the work of decolonization is really work that we all need to come together to do with one another, equally accepting our roles, our locations, our privileges, and ways in which we can start to move towards a future that looks like healing, that looks like justice, that looks like ­dismantling systems of oppression. (Nikki Sanchez 2018)

Introduction In this final chapter, I outline some ideas for using the combined methodologies of decoloniality, intersectionality, and social justice based on the theoretical framework that I outlined in the introduction and my own experiences teaching in eight different departments at the University of Victoria (UVic) and then in the Department of Design and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), as well as working with local communities as an organizer and working collaboratively with students, faculty, Indigenous leaders, the LGBTQIA+ community, refugee organizations, and the Victoria city council. As a white, cisgender, immigrant woman with hybrid backgrounds and multicultural identities, I ground my understanding of intersectionality, decoloniality, and social justice in a deep sense of respect for human rights and human dignity as well as solution-based approaches that require taking responsibility, to be part of the solutions, rather than merely pointing out the problems. As many of the authors whose work I commissioned and collected in this volume, I too sensed an urgency in the way we approach and facilitate education across disciplines in

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these troubled times. I wanted to respond to this urgency by not just questioning what skills we make available for our students to take away beyond the classroom, but by actively seeking out, developing, and collaborating on curricular changes, publications, networks, and community and activist projects. This book and this chapter are my attempts to process and translate this urgency and outline my approach and response, which can hopefully inspire others as well. When I moved to Denmark in the spring of 2019 (first on a two-year postdoc contract, and then a two-year extension of the contract, continuing the precarious employment track oversees) and started redeveloping the fashion studies stream of the Design Culture and Economics program at SDU, I identified the two most pressing issues in fashion studies to date: sustainability and ethics on the one hand and decoloniality on the other (especially regarding the ways in which fashion studies, including fashion history and fashion theory, are taught). It became apparent that without decolonizing old, exploitative, transactional, and unsustainable ways that people and the planet have been and are still treated in the global fashion industry in particular, and global market economies in general, there could not be any sustainable fashion systems, or a new generation of ethically minded and creative researchers, experts, and professionals who could address the climate crisis effectively, reform the broken exploitation systems, and rebuild the industry in a just and inclusive way. What the new generation of fashion students needed was a holistic understanding of history, environmental and social sustainability, critical media literacy, a knowledge of theoretical frameworks to make their analytical work more informed and grounded, a global perspective, and digital skills that transcended the classroom. The responsibility of educating and empowering young people who would be able to reform the industry, empower others in the global fashion industry, and produce actual social change was a tremendous goal to set. So, I had to develop a methodology and a pedagogy for making fashion studies more ethical, just, intersectional, and decolonial. In short, they and I needed the social justice pedagogy toolkit I began developing during my four years at UVic. In many ways, teaching as a sessional lecturer at UVic prepared me to take on new challenges and forged me into becoming the educator and leader I am today, but I still would not wish the kind of precarious workload, low pay, constant hustle, and burnout on anyone. Canadians who have been educated and professionalized in the years following the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) reports in 2015 (the year I graduated and started teaching at UVic) have benefited from a paradigm shift that swept across academic institutions in Canada during

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which decoloniality became part of our understanding of social justice, human rights, ethics, intersectional feminisms, climate justice, and sustainability, regardless of our (multi)disciplinary training or background. Following the TRC reports’s chapter entitled “Education for Reconciliation,” my UVic colleagues and I understood that education “involves not only schools and post-secondary institutions but also dialogue forums and public history institutions such as museums and archives,” and that education “must remedy the gaps in historical knowledge that perpetuate ignorance and racism” (TRC Report, Vol. 6, 2015, 117). So, we gradually translated that call to action into our teaching practices whenever and however possible. While decoloniality is still not part of mainstream education in many European countries with colonial histories, by the time I moved to Denmark, I was better equipped to address the theoretical and practical work necessary for restructuring the discipline of fashion studies. But understanding the theoretical, historical, and conceptual frameworks of decolonizing education is one thing; putting them into concrete practice, in and beyond the classroom, will be the next big step in this paradigm shift for all of us in the years to come. Decoloniality Decoloniality became a lens though which all other forms of exploitation and discrimination (economic, social, ethical, and environmental) became apparent, and once you see the connections, you cannot unsee them. I understand decoloniality not just from a theoretical perspective, but also as a way of seeing the deep interconnectedness of nature and culture, and how we use our creative capacities for either self-enrichment or community support. According to Kathleen Kesson (2019), “in the past, colonialism was justified by asserting the moral, technological, and cultural superiority of the Western empires, and colonialism proceeded hand in hand with missionary Christianity and commerce (which generally consisted of the plunder of raw materials, forced labour and the disruption of local economies)” (3). When we look at the current state of the global fashion industry, our global economic systems, and our current climate emergency, the common denominator is exploitation of people and the planet for profits that are not distributed fairly through taxation systems, investments into social welfare, or fair wages. This system has its roots in colonial violence and illegal appropriation of lands, resources, and labour of primarily people of colour, Indigenous people, women, and children. Furthermore, colonial practices in different countries and territories had additional cruel and violent by-products, such as “genocide that

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opened up territories for white settlement, a system of forced labour, or enslavement” (3), and especially in the Canadian context, residential schools that perpetuated the abuse and starvation of Indigenous children as well as cultural genocides by eradicating Indigenous languages, traditions, and cultures. The work of decoloniality includes “a process that recognizes the connections between what has occurred in the past and what is experienced and perceived in the present” (4) and works towards a future that attempts to heal the traumas of the past. While the work towards decolonial practices that Canada began to expand on (especially in education and the arts) after the publication of the TRC reports in 2015 only scratches the surface of the iceberg of the work that lies ahead, there is a lot of frustration and distrust in the political and economic work of reconciliation, especially in light of the oil pipeline that is being built between Alberta’s tar sands and British Columbia’s access to the Pacific Ocean, with the consent of federal and provincial governments, but against the consent and agreement of all the Indigenous peoples on whose unceded lands this environmental catastrophe is being constructed. The discovery of the hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children around former residential schools was another significant and traumatic setback in the reconciliation work. The continuous exploitation of people’s rights and the planet’s very finite resources is built into the exploitative and white-supremacist economies of scale as well as the histories, theories, and educational systems that have legitimized and upheld them for generations. When the TRC reports were published in December 2015, the Commission called for large-scale and in-depth re-evaluations of the ways in which we all engage with each other, our communities, and our environment, and made concrete recommendations to guide us on how to proceed – this was in the days when we still called the climate emergency “global warming” and before the global economic freeze in light of COVID-19 lockdowns. Back in 2015, the message that the TRC was sending to all of us (or those of us who read the reports or talked to our colleagues about it) was that of hope for a better future: “in the face of global warming, growing economic inequities, and conflicts over large-scale economic development projects, there is an emerging consensus that the land that sustains all of us must be protected for future generations” (TRC Report, Vol. 6, 2015, 203). Translating that into our education and community work was challenging enough, but putting that into economic, political, and cultural practice will take a few generations. As educators, our job is to shape and empower these next few generations.

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Social Justice I define social justice as an ethical guiding principle that makes us think beyond our own well-being. My work as a sessional (adjunct) instructor at UVic started in the fall of 2015. I initially taught German language courses that included some sections on film and literature, but then started developing cultural history courses for the History Department, taught Academic Reading and Writing in the English Department, and developed and taught media courses for the Departments of Technology and Society, Gender Studies, and European Studies. In 2016, with the rise of online media manipulation, fake news, racialized and religious hate crimes in Canada and around the world, and the rising need for more critical media literacy, I noticed that many humanities and social sciences students were increasingly searching for knowledge and empowerment in response to what they witnessed unfolding in the global media. Following the sexual assaults and attacks on German women on New Year’s Eve all across major German cities in 2015–16 as well as the US presidential race of 2016, I developed the courses Gender and Media (which won the DAAD and CAUTG Innovate German Award in 2017) and Transnational Media Analysis that looked at Russian, Ukrainian, German, Canadian, and US media practices, with an emphasis on media literacy, media manipulation, social media, and new media technologies as well as independent media practices based on investigative journalism and social justice. Since 2016, I have incorporated digital project design into all my course assignments. I also added a social justice component to all the courses I designed and compiled lists of local social justice and non-profit organizations for students to explore and to collaborate with. Other activities included collaborative online forum assignments, where students got to work together on compiling annotated bibliographies, new media glossaries, and other media resources for collaborative learning. For their final projects, they built websites, videos, and other web projects that had to include action-based and educational social justice components. These projects allowed them not only to develop transferable, experiential-learning, and practical skills, but also to learn to work collaboratively, to provide peer evaluations and peer feedback on the projects before they presented them in class, and in many cases to experience the impact their work had on their peers or the community at large. Parallel to incorporating social justice into my teaching, I began organizing many panel discussions, conference panels, and fundraising events at UVic and in the Greater Victoria community, raising money for the Canada Refugee Council and Women’s March. After being

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invited by the CEO of the Greater Victoria Public Library to design a panel series on social justice and feminism for the larger community, bridging academic and non-academic audiences, I had the idea of producing and publishing a digital, open-sourced, and widely available and accessible Anthology of Social Justice, Decolonization, and Intersectional Feminisms (2018). I put out several calls for submissions over the course of several months – I invited students, colleagues, artists, writers, poets, Indigenous activists, and the organizers of the Women’s Marches across Canada and abroad. The submissions I received were powerful. I wanted the voices to be as diverse and intersectional as possible, and the result is a rich collection of personal reflections, research essays, grassroots activism reports, and expressions of allyships as well as other forms of creative and personal reflections on what social justice, decoloniality, and intersectional feminisms meant to different people. Perhaps the most surprising part was that the best quality of work and writing came from the undergraduate students. Yet, they are often the ones who fall through the cracks when it comes to scholarly publications or public conversations and discussion panels on social justice. The Anthology proved that these young people were becoming highly attuned social critics, equipped with new media and technology as well as analytical and interpretive skills. Many of them were in their early twenties, eloquent, well informed, analytical, critical, creative, and inspiring, as their brains have been rewired by new media in ways that allowed them to grasp social change faster, act and respond faster, and generate their own solutions and actions, without waiting for someone else to fix things. This illustrated that students had to be at the centre of changes in education, just as they were in the climate justice protests and the anti-racism demonstrations. It is also important to observe that only a select few of my tenured colleagues contributed to what they considered a non-peer-reviewed collection that would not count towards their tenure files, and even fewer came to the community events I organized, especially after I made the decision to invert the panel format and encourage the young undergraduate students to lead the panel discussions, rather than highlight the work of tenured professors. Yet, thinking outside the corporate-academic structures and frameworks was part of the necessary paradigm shift, and it is not surprising that undergraduate and graduate students, and non-tenured colleagues, who were overworked, underpaid, and exploited by the universities, understood this and got involved. The TRC reports found that creative expression can provide “alternative voices, vehicles, and venues for expressing historical truths and present hopes” and it “supports everyday practices of resistance,

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healing, and commemoration at individual, community, regional, and national levels” because “the arts help to restore human dignity and identity in the face of injustice” (TRC Report, Vol. 6, 2015, 178). So, despite my lack of time, resources, or merit points for a tenure file, the Anthology became a new space for both academic and more creative ways of expressing reflections on social change, media, activism, decoloniality, Indigeneity, and solution-based cultural criticism at a time when social movements like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #NotOneMore after the many school shootings in the US, and the climate justice protests, which often started with social media campaigns but then transcended into consequential activism and gradually became global movements. Moreover, throughout the Anthology, students were the first to provide an informed analysis or critical response to these social, cultural, and political transformations. That was significant. As educators, we need to remain open to their collective and individual creativity and talents, and to foster more platforms and environments for students to practise their critical, practical, and creative skills. It was a truly collaborative project, because had it not been for the work of graduate and undergraduate students who wanted to collaborate, for the courses I developed and taught, the web projects that my students produced in each course, the fundraisers we put together, the panel discussions that I organized, my community work and outreach, and the support and inspiration I received from my colleagues (especially in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at UVic), the Anthology would not exist. Intersectionality For me, intersectional feminism means equity, justice, inclusivity, respect, human rights, and a practice of holding space, building trust, and collaborating not only despite but because of our differences. All these collaborative efforts have taught me how to be a better organizer, researcher, writer, editor, educator, and leader. In 2017, I co-organized the Victoria Women’s March with Cayla Naumann, a UVic MA graduate in Biology. We took all the criticism of the 2016 Rally in Support of the Women’s March on Washington very seriously and made sure that the march was truly inclusive and intersectional, again foregrounding fewer white women in privileged positions of power and more community leaders and organizers from Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and immigrant communities. Following the success of the 2017 Women’s March in Victoria, I founded the Victoria Chapter of Women’s March Canada. In July 2018, I organized the Women’s March Symposium with

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Figure 19.1.  Women in Business Guide and the Women in Politics Guide, as well as the Anthology of Social Justice, Decolonization, and Intersectional Feminisms created in collaboration with the Victoria Chapter of Women’s March and students at UVic, with permission by K. Sark.

discussion panels that focused on Indigenous women, immigrant and refugee women, women’s poverty, and women’s health and safety. That year, I collaborated with a few former students on compiling the data for the Women in Business Guide and the Women in Politics Guide (see fig. 19.1), which highlighted the important work of women in the Greater Victoria communities and made them available online for free. With the money we raised from our bake sales, I was able to pay a former student for the graphic design of the guides we published. Combining teaching with community work also allowed my students to witness grassroots activism in practice. Many of them came to the Women’s March in Victoria (for many it was their first time actively participating in a protest march). Many of them decided to get involved in community activism of their choice. Many got to contribute their writing or artworks to the Anthology and see it in print for the first time. This was highly empowering for so many of them, as they were still in the process of finding their voices and learning how to use them effectively to generate social change. They were passionate about climate justice, feminisms, LGBTQIA+ and Indigenous rights, but did not always have outlets to express their ideas or activism. While teaching in so many different departments at UVic and constantly designing new courses and course materials, which took up all my free time, I decided to approach each course as a social justice course with an intersectional feminist perspective (even when I taught languages or academic reading and writing courses). I often encountered

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students who may otherwise never have been exposed to social justice conversations in their programs or departments. They engaged with these ideas and concepts and built digital projects based on social justice values and principles. In the summer of 2017, I designed and taught a new course in the History Department at UVic, entitled History Through Autobiographies, Testimonies, and Eye-Witness Accounts. I have always been interested in life writing and autobiographical genres and documentaries, and I have always been drawn to anti-hegemonic narratives of freedom and social justice. I wanted to approach comparative world history through the voices of the people who transformed it. But the case studies I picked were often marginalized voices (of the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, AIDS crisis, Holocaust, and residential school survivors, post-apartheid and contemporary activists) that were traditionally excluded from mainstream historical narratives, or relegated to the niches of gender, race, or postcolonial studies. By foregrounding these narratives and experiences, I wanted to examine our relationship to historical writing and ideologies, to uncover patterns and common threads that run through history but are not usually studied or taught together in one course. I wanted to map out alternative narratives and alternative histories. We started this course with Indigenous narratives and residential school survivors’ memoirs because learning from this history was essential in terms of “repairing broken trust, strengthening a sense of civic responsibility,” and “understanding the ethical dimension of history” (TRC Report, Vol. 6, 2015, 125). I understood that “students must be able to make ethical judgments” about history, and “informed decisions” about the responsibility “to address historical injustices” through “ethical awareness,” which will ensure that they “know and care about the injustices of the past as they relate to their own futures” (TRC Report, Vol. 6, 2015, 125). This course provided opportunities for peer learning, building trust and solidarity, and as a result, many of the students who took this course with me joined the community events, panel discussions, fundraisers, and activist projects I organized, developed their project management and organizing skills, and got to apply their research, skills, and knowledge in meaningful community work. Their digital projects, built by using their own research, critical thinking, writing skills, outreach to local communities, and the creation of (trans)national networks of support and social justice, pushed the limits of what Humanities education can provide. I encouraged students to think beyond the classroom and to extend their work to collaborative networks, presentations, exhibitions, conferences, and (online) publications. Thus, by the time I was hired to teach fashion studies in Denmark in 2019, I had built a solid foundation

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of pedagogical, scholarly, and organizational experience based on social justice, intersectional feminism, and decolonial theories and practice. Decolonizing Fashion Studies at SDU and Beyond In “Pedagogy of and Towards Decoloniality,” G.T. Reyes (2019) links colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples, lands, and cultures to global capitalism, in which the Western elites are more concerned with the accumulation of wealth and goods than about consequences of their actions on people and the planet. He proposes a “pedagogy of and towards decoloniality” that “works to both examine and radically transform unequal relations of power” in order to interrogate the “structural ways that institutions are organized with colonial powers such as Europe and the United States at the center” (2). The old-­ fashioned history syllabi that I inherited from previous part-time lecturers at SDU revealed that the fashion history course was u ­ nteachable due to its old, outdated, colonial ways of perpetuating the historical narrative of white supremacy and capital appropriation positioned as white creativity or exceptionalism. My only options were to take on the mammoth workload of redeveloping that course and the whole fashion stream, or not take that job and continue drowning in precarious sessional work at UVic (which, after I left, cut most of the sessional employment). According to Reyes, as praxis, a pedagogy of decoloniality must be “operationalized daily through practices that build and deepen critical consciousness of systems of coloniality and how those systems have impacted the self and others” (3). It also presupposes a “decolonial self-reflection” that requires committing to an “ongoing exploration of one’s deep-seeded [sic] system of beliefs, the systemic origins of those beliefs, and the manner in which those beliefs manifest through unconscious or complicit behavior” (3). A pedagogy of and towards decoloniality is “generative and requires creativity” (4), and it invokes the “creative, transformative potential of teachers to act as agents of change rather than passive consumers of cultures of oppression” (4). Understanding my role as a responsible educator, I found myself once again in a role with more responsibility than expected, with no assistance because everyone I asked knew that the way fashion history had been taught was a problem; most educators acknowledged it and struggled with it, but no one – not one – had a ready solution on how to fix it. So, I had to start from scratch, by reading the canon of fashion history books and piecing together a more global and multidimensional perspective with complex case studies that revealed the underlying paradoxes of fashion’s

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colonial and destructive undertones. And in the process of building a new fashion history course, I began building a new network, so that other educators and researchers didn’t have to do this work from scratch and on their own. In the fall of 2019, while teaching a new Fashion Media course at SDU, I started researching ways of redesigning and decolonizing fashion history and fashion studies in preparation for a new course that would give my Danish students a solid foundation in global fashion (and cultural) history, from the onset of industrialization until the present, without perpetuating the old white-supremacist, Eurocentric, and colonial-capitalist exploitative-appropriating ways of the business of fashion. I started organizing a series of workshops entitled Decolonizing Fashion History and Fashion Studies in Denmark and Germany and inviting other colleagues working on decoloniality and sustainability in fashion studies in the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, and South Africa to join our meetings virtually. Following one of the workshops in Hamburg in December 2019, I compiled a “Decolonizing Fashion Studies Toolkit” that included the following suggestions based on our shared teaching experience and international collaborations: • Practice and facilitate transcultural (rather than multicultural or international) learning, inspired by our international students, who bring their own expertise and can teach us and their fellow students about cultural sensibilities and sensitivities, but also expertise and knowledge that is not otherwise accessible to us • Encourage lifelong learning and inter-teaching (learning from each other) • Build collaborations with international schools, organizations, networks, designers, etc. • Learn from Truth and Reconciliation practices in Canada and South Africa – humbly acknowledge our position as a guest and work towards reconciliation and collaboration rather than appropriation • Practice relational or collaborative forms of teaching, design, research, and organizational work, rather than hierarchical or exploitative forms • Create platforms (websites, online magazines, podcasts) that empower students to practise critical thinking and develop their voices and visions as cultural critics and creative contributors to culture Designing a decolonized fashion history course from scratch (that gives a solid cultural history foundation from a global perspective, includes a

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Figure 19.2.  The Critical Pulse magazine covers, 2020–2, with permission by K. Sark.

history of technology and economics, bridges fashion with design and art history, and allows students to develop their digital skills by building digital timelines that focus on intersectional, non-Western fashion histories) was also work that brought me to the brink of burnout, but was rewarding beyond the confines of my class. In 2020, I joined the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion (RCDF) and began collaborating with a global network of educators working with the methodologies of decoloniality, intersectionality, and social justice. Together with my fashion students, we launched The Critical Pulse online magazine in 2020, an important platform for fashion researchers to make their research and writing visible and to help fashion students professionalize. Building International Networks Simultaneously to developing a new ethical and decoloniality-based curriculum for the fashion stream at SDU, I also began building a larger fashion scholars network (based on the model I developed in Canada with the Canadian Fashion Scholars Network, which I founded and have been running since 2014), with fashion researchers, scholars, and professionals collaborating together on workshops, conferences, international events, and scholarly publications that help direct the discipline of fashion studies in a more ethical direction, and help educate current and future fashion scholars and professionals in the fields of ethics, sustainability, and decoloniality. The current challenge for many fashion

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scholars around the globe is that while many researchers and educators are aware of the current theoretical paradigm shift in fashion studies towards more global, inclusive, and ethical approaches and methods, very few actually know how bridge sustainability and decoloniality and apply the new theoretical knowledge into practice. Sustainability does not exist in a vacuum – it has a wider context and history that are mired in the fashion industry’s (mal)practices of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and exploitation. Sustainability has a social and cultural dimension, and our moral responsibility is to continuously educate ourselves and others, and to do better as a global community. My research and networking aim to produce collaborative projects and publications that will push ethical fashion studies, fashion education, and fashion practice further and have a lasting impact on society and industry. The theoretical foundation of this work are rooted in the paradigm shift to decolonize fashion history (Welters and Lillethun 2011, 2018, 2022; Niessen 2003, 2020a, 2020b), and make fashion studies and the fashion industry more ethical, inclusive, diverse, and just (Hoskins 2014; Fletcher 2012). The fashion industry is still mired in and operates according to colonial and exploitative practices, and the way that fashion history, fashion theory, and fashion studies have been taught for decades reinforces deep-rooted racism, inequality, and injustice as well as exploitation of people and the planet as the status quo. We need to expand on Abby Lillethun and Linda Welters’s (2018) paradigm shift of decolonizing fashion history, and map out the connections between decolonization, capitalist exploitation, cultural appropriation, sustainability, ethics, empowerment, and creativity. Convincing people to take responsibility and become active citizens and not just consumers is a big project that has to be done for each new generation. I believe that understanding the interconnectedness of these areas and shifting our thinking about what fashion is and can be is the crux of transforming fashion education, and consequently also the fashion industry practices. In the current global climate crisis, fashion researchers in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and South Africa have taken a lead on changing the theoretical and pedagogical paradigms of how fashion studies are taught, researched, and practised. Research-based networks can bring together scholars and experts to push this paradigm shift further and turn it into practice. A great example of this paradigm shift in practice was the New York Times Sustainability Summit in January 2020, where experts from various fields came together to discuss how decoloniality and sustainability need to be brought together in order to reform our current ways of thinking and practice when it comes to fashion.

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I interpret the current paradigm shift in fashion studies as precisely this interconnection between decoloniality (as an ethical engagement with people and the planet) and sustainability (as a practical response to how we treat the environment and its non-renewable resources). Once you map out the current paradigm-changing research, it becomes apparent that decolonial sustainability needs to be decoupled from capitalist economies, histories, and theories and reconceptualized as a holistic approach to ethical creativity. Fashion needs to be reconceptualized as a cultural heritage, and not merely an economic system of extraction of capital and resources, and fashion research and fashion education need to be reformed accordingly. By developing a collaborative vision and more collaborative projects that help us put this theoretical paradigm into concrete practice, we can actually effect change. I believe that fashion education has to be inclusive, ethical, inspiring, transformative, innovative, creative, and just. I also believe that we need more opportunities for cross-collaborations across different fields of expertise, knowledge, and innovations that go beyond academic networks and established organizations. My methodology is also grounded in cultural analysis and cultural studies, as I treat fashion as a cultural, material, economic, political, and social lens to examine issues of race, gender, class, social justice, and sustainability. The best think tanks and networks are open and inclusive, where every member can benefit from multidisciplinary and multigenerational expertise and exchange. Including students in this type of network building allows them to see this work in action and to conceptualize and develop their own networks. Conclusion My highly precarious and unsustainable work experience at UVic forced me to become resilient and resourceful. The many formative and transformative conversations and collaborations with colleagues across various disciplines about making education more just helped me develop an approach to education based on social change, intersectional feminism, and decoloniality. I believe that combining these critical components is the underlying baseline from which to approach research, pedagogy, scholarship, network building, community engagement, and leadership. I have put this approach into practice over the years, and at various universities and in multiple disciplines and networks, and I continue to see the results in collaborative projects with colleagues and students, and the ways in which this multigenerational empowerment through social justice pedagogy continues to produce ripple effects beyond the classroom and beyond borders. This book is

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just one attempt to bring the many different voices and perspectives into conversation and collaboration. My hope is that it will inspire and guide readers to use some of the tools, concepts, and reflections collected here to build their own collaborative networks and to facilitate positive change through social justice. Questions for Reflection: 1 What is social justice and how can it be practised in and beyond the classroom? 2 What is intersectionality and how does it help us be better allies? 3 What is decoloniality? What does it mean in a global context? 4 What does it mean to put decolonial sustainability into practice? BIBLIOGRAPHY Brydon, Anne, and Sandra Niessen, eds. 1998. Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body. New York: Berg. Canada’s Residential Schools: Reconciliation. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015 Vol. 6. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ditty, Sarah. 2015. Fashion Revolution: It’s Time for a Revolution. White Paper. December. https://www.fashionrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads /2015/11/FashRev_Whitepaper_Dec2015_screen.pdf. Fletcher, Kate. 2012. “Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use.” Fashion Practice 4 (2): 221–38. hooks, bell. 2010. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge. Hoskins, Tansy E. 2014. Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Jansen, Angela, and Jennifer Craik, eds. 2016. Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Traditions and Modernity Through Fashion. New York: Bloomsbury. Jenss, Heike, and Viola Hofmann, eds. 2020. Fashion and Materiality: Cultural Practices in Global Contexts. New York: Bloomsbury. Kesson, Kathleen Kesson. 2019. “Decolonizing Education: Implications for Systems Transformation in Vermont.” Unpublished paper, 1–10. https:// static1.squarespace.com/static/590cbe53ebbd1afaa38e2081/t/5e5955cf1ad1 1748b220b40c/1582912979187/Decolonizing+Education+%2820%29.pdf. Landgren, Trudy M., and Anupama Pasricha. 2011. “Transforming the Fashion and Apparel Curriculum to Incorporate Sustainability.” International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 4 (3): 187–96.

284  Katrina Sark Lehnert, Gertrud, and Gabriele Mentges, eds. 2013. Fusion Fashion: Culture Beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lan Academic Research. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s Education, Outreach and Public Programming. “Teaching Resources.” https://education.nctr.ca/. New York Times Sustainability Summit. 2020. January. https://studyhall. earth/study-hall/nyc-summit-2020#live. Niessen, Sandra. 2003. “Afterword: Re-orienting Fashion Theory.” In ReOrienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress, edited by S. Niessen, A.M. Leshkowich, and C. Jones, 243–66. Oxford: Berg Publishers. –  2020a. “Fashion, Its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability.” Fashion Theory 24 (6): 1–19. –  2020b. “Regenerative Fashion.” State of Fashion. Niessen, Sandra, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones, eds. 2003. ReOrienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress. New York: Berg. Reyes, G.T. 2019. “Pedagogy of and Towards Decoloniality.” In Encyclopedia of Teacher Education, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1179-6_220-1. Riello, Giorgio, and Peter McNeil, eds. 2010. The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Rocomora, Agnès, and Anneke Smelik, eds. 2016. Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. London: I.B. Tauris. Sanchez, Nikki. 2018. “Decolonization Is for Everyone.” TEDxSFU, Vancouver. https://www.ted.com/talks/nikki_sanchez_decolonization_is_for _everyone. Sark, Katrina, ed. 2018. Anthology of Social Justice, Decolonization, and Intersectional Feminisms. https://womensmarchvictoria.wixsite.com/home. –  2021. “The Fashion Paradox.” Ethical Fashion and Empowerment, Special Issue of Clothing Cultures 7 (1): 3–21. Sensoy, Özlem, and Robin DiAngelo. 2017. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education. 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press. Swilt, Alison, and Timo Rissanen, eds. 2011. Shaping Sustainable Fashion: Changing the Way We Make and Use Clothes. London: Earthscan. The Critical Pulse. Online magazine. https://thecriticalpulse.wixsite.com /fashion. Tseëlon, Efrat, ed. 2014. Fashion and Ethics: Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty. Vol. 2. Bristol: Intellect. Tortora, Phyllis G. 2015. Dress, Fashion and Technology: From Prehistory to the Present. London: Bloomsbury. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). 2015. http://www .trc.ca/.

Social Justice, Intersectionality, and Decoloniality  285 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action. http://nctr .ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. http://caid .ca/DTRC.html. Welters, Linda, and Abby Lillethun. 2011. The Fashion Reader. 2nd ed. Oxford: Berg. – 2018. Fashion History: A Global View. New York: Bloomsbury. –  eds. 2022. The Fashion Reader. 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury. Zinn, Tracy E., and Saville, Bryan K. 2007. “Interteaching: A New Approach to Peer-Based Instruction.” Psychology Teacher Network (Summer): 19–22.

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Contributors

Nina Belmonte is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, where she teaches courses in the history of philosophy, philosophy and literature, philosophy and film, and European studies. She is on the faculty of UVic’s interdisciplinary Cultural, Social and Political Thought program and serves as vice-president for the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture. Her primary interests are in the history of philosophy, critical theory, and philosophy and/as literature. She has published scholarly articles and reviews in Philosophy & Social Criticism, Praxis International, Phaenex, and The New Art Examiner. She has also translated various works from French to English, including Rationalities/Historicities by Dominique Janicaud, and has published short non-fiction in local newspapers and journals. She is currently at work on a project exploring the role of metaphor in philosophical literature and thought. Ashley S. Boyd is an associate professor of English education at Washington State University, where she teaches courses on young adult literature, methods of teaching, and critical theory. Her research investigates practising teachers’ social justice pedagogies and secondary students’ social action projects and development of critical literacies. Beth Buyserie is the director of composition at Utah State University, where she teaches courses on rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy. Her research focuses on the intersections of language, knowledge, and power through the lenses of queer theory, critical race theory, critical disability studies, and decolonial scholarship. Tobias Dietrich is a lecturer in film studies and film education at the Institute for Art History – Film Studies – Art Education / ZeMKI at the

288 Contributors

University of Bremen. Since 2015, he has been researching his dissertational project entitled “Aesthetic Dimension of Mental Illness,” which from 2016 to 2018 was funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. He is a jury member at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival in Glasgow. His recent publications include Filme für den Eimer: Das Experimentalkino von Klaus Telscher (2017) and Kopf/Kino: Psychische Erkrankung und Film (co-edited with Winfried Pauleit, 2022). Diane Ceo-DiFrancesco serves as faculty director of the Eigel Center for Community-Engaged Learning and is a professor of Spanish in the Department of Classics and Modern Languages at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Diane instructs courses in Spanish language, linguistics, and world language pedagogy. Dedicated to fostering students’ language proficiency and developing their intercultural competencies, Diane integrates community-engaged learning, virtual exchange, and collaborative online international learning (COIL) into the courses that she teaches. She serves on the coordination team of the AUSJAL Virtual Dual Immersion Program, reaching over forty thousand students since 2007. She has coordinated study abroad programs in Peru, Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Spain and directed a Fulbright-Hays Group Project in Colombia for Spanish teachers in June 2022. Diane delivers webinars and training workshops internationally on COIL and virtual exchange pedagogy and was awarded the Ohio Foreign Language Association Technology award in 2017. She has published articles in Hispania, The Language Educator, Internet Journal of Allied Health Sciences, Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education, and Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice. Diane and her co-authors have recently published two Spanish-language textbooks entitled Experiencias, incorporating social justice themes with an intentional learner-centred approach. Her research interests include secondlanguage acquisition, world language pedagogy, intercultural communicative competence, telecollaborative/virtual exchange pedagogy, COIL, and immersion. Jennifer Ruth Hosek is professor of transnational German studies, Queen’s University, Canada; Humanities Postgraduate Fellow, Stanford; PhD in comparative literature, UC Berkeley. She is interested in intersectionalities of power in culture and society. Larger projects include Sun, Sex and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary (2012), from which a spin-off article won a National Coalition of Women in German (WiG) Best Article Prize and was published in three languages; Rodando en La Habana: bicycle stories (with Dir. Jaime Santos, 2016), a documentary

Contributors 289

that has won several awards and screened at multiple festivals; and the anthologies Christa Wolf: A Companion (with Sonja Klocke, 2018) and Topographies of the New Berlin (with Karin Bauer, 2017). Funders include the Berlin Parliament, DAAD, WiG, the Humboldt and the Mellon Foundations, SSHRC, Berkeley, and Queen’s. Hosek’s current large project, Occupying Motion: Visual Culture and Community in Market Times, investigates non-automotive urban mobility cultures. Hosek also created, co-designed, and runs the free, open-access, educational telecollaboration platform LinguaeLive.ca. Sage Lacerte is a Carrier woman from the Lake Babine Nation. She graduated from the University of Victoria in the Department of Gender Studies with a focus on Indigenous feminism and cultural resurgence. Since 2017 Sage has stood as the National Youth Ambassador of the Moose Hide Campaign, contributing to the vision of ending violence towards women and children in Canada. In 2022 Sage launched “The Sage Initiative,” a collective for young Indigenous womxn working to create Indigenous economies by becoming investors. Sandra Niessen is an anthropologist who, since 1978, has researched the textiles of the Batak people of North Sumatra. Teaching at the Department of Clothing and Textiles, later Human Ecology, at the University of Alberta (1988–2004), she familiarized herself with fashion theory. In 2003 she published “Afterword: Re-Orienting Fashion Theory” to explore ethnocentrism in fashion theory and the false schism between “indigenous textiles” and “Western fashion.” In the wake of this publication, she has been involved in the Non-Western Fashion Conference (NWFC), now the Research Collective for Decolonising Fashion (RCDF), an initiative of M. Angela Jansen. She is grateful to fellow members of the RCDF, Angela Jansen, Erica de Greef, Sarah Cheang and Toby Slade, for insights during the writing of the current reflections. Franco Passalacqua is a researcher in didactics and teacher at the University of Milan – Bicocca. He obtained a PhD in education with a dissertation entitled “Embodied Simulation: From Didactic Transposition to Narrativization of Knowledge.” He has been working in the Department of Human Sciences for Education as a lecturer in didactics of literature and educational design and evaluation. He specializes in teachers’ professional development in higher education and primary and secondary school. He has a solid experience in social justice education, both in researching on early school leaving and in studying the democratic and emancipatory role of schools. His research interests are

290 Contributors

also directed to explore the role of narrative writing as a learning and teaching strategy. Elena Pnevmonidou is associate professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and director of the European Studies program at the University of Victoria. Her main areas of research revolve around aesthetic theory and discourses of gender and otherness in the age of Goethe; modern poetics; and Bertolt Brecht and drama pedagogy. Since 2011, she has been teaching a drama course that serves as the academic home of German student theatre at the university. Originally designed to function as a bridge between foreign language teaching, on the one hand, and literature and culture teaching, on the other, its blended educational setting and reliance on cooperative learning and peer teaching also serves as a model for teaching diversity experientially and thus fostering empathy among learners. Braden Russell is a PhD student in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. His current research interests centre around negotiations of queer German Jewish identity and belonging within present-day cultural products in Germany and Austria. Prior to his doctoral studies, he attended the University of Victoria (UVic), where he completed his MA in Germanic and Slavic Studies with a concentration in Holocaust studies. His master’s project focused on the memorialization of queer victims of National Socialism in Vienna. During his time at UVic, he was also able to intern for the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest. Before beginning his studies in Canada, he received a BA in Global Studies and an MA in Language and Culture from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Katrina Sark teaches Fashion studies at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Before that she taught as a sessional instructor at the University of Victoria (UVic). She specializes in cultural analysis, cultural history, media, and gender studies as well as fashion cultures. She is the founder of the Canadian Fashion Scholars Network, the co-founder of the Urban Chic book series, which includes her co-­ authored books, Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion (2011), Montréal Chic: A Locational History of Montréal Fashion (2016), and the forthcoming Copenhagen Chic: A Locational History of Copenhagen Fashion. Her dissertation, entitled Branding Berlin (2014), is a cultural analysis of the urban, economic, political, and cultural transformation in post-Wall Berlin and won the Best Dissertation Prize from the Canadian

Contributors 291

Association of University Teachers of German (CAUTG). She also hosts the Chic Podcast, dedicated to fashion, design, culture, sustainability, ethics, decoloniality, media, and technology. Charlotte Schallié is a professor of Germanic studies and chair of Germanic and Slavic studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research interests include representations of the Shoah in literature and film, oral history, visual storytelling, Jewish identity in contemporary cultural discourse, and teaching and learning about the Holocaust. Together with Agnes Hirschi, she published Under Swiss Protection: Jewish Eyewitness Accounts from Wartime Budapest (2017). Peter Schweppe is an assistant professor of German studies and history at Montana State University. He received his PhD in Languages, Literatures and Cultures from McGill University in 2017 and teaches courses on social movements, visual culture, media studies, and European history. At present, Peter is working on a book manuscript that explores the relationship between print and protest cultures in West Germany, 1968. Kathryn Sederberg is an assistant professor of German studies at Kalamazoo College. Her research includes twentieth-century German culture, with a focus on life writing and the legacies of National Socialism. She also writes on content-based language instruction, teaching with museums, and is currently working on the intersection between social justice pedagogy and multiliteracies approaches to language teaching. Maria Stehle is professor of German and co-chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her publications include a monograph entitled Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Cultures (2012), book chapters, and articles in the fields of German, media, film, critical pedagogy, and gender studies. Her co-authored book (with Carrie Smith) Awkward Politics: The Technologies of Popfeminist Activism, was published in May 2016. Her most recent book, in collaboration with Beverly Weber, Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary European Cinema, was published in August 2020 with Northwestern University Press. Magda Tarnawska Senel is a lecturer and director of the German Language Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research includes language pedagogy, teaching languages within

292 Contributors

the social justice framework, travel literature, and intersections of contemporary German literature, pop culture, politics, and migration. She has written on the politics of the female body, education and gender, travel literature, and language pedagogy. Helga Thorson is an associate professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. She is the co-director of the I-witness Field School, a four-week course on Holocaust memorialization in Europe, which she ran for the first time in 2011. She is the co-editor of a recently published book on place-based learning (Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus Study Programs), which highlights the intricacies of short-term off-campus study programs. Dr. Thorson has received numerous teaching awards including the Faculty of Humanities Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Victoria in 2012; the Excellence in Teaching for Experiential Learning Award at the University of Victoria in 2017; and most recently a 2019 3M National Teaching Award in Canada. Sarah Todd is a professor and director at the School of Social Work, Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She teaches a range of courses in social work theory, practice, and pedagogy. Her current areas of research include community work, professional education, and simulation as research and pedagogical method. She is a 3M fellow and is midway through a SSHRC Insight Grant funded project exploring how practitioners navigate uncertainty in clinical practice. She has published in a wide array of academic journals on social work pedagogy and scholarship. Didem Uca is assistant professor of German studies at Emory University. She received her PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 and her research focuses on intersectional approaches to migration, the cultural production of minorities in Germany, and the transnational Bildungsroman. Her work has appeared in Symposium: A Quarterly Journal of Modern Literatures, Gegenwartsliteratur, Monatshefte, and Türkisch-Deutsche Studien, of which she has been co-editor since 2019. Together with Kate Zambon, she published an article on the performative politics of minority hip-hop artists in Germany in the International Journal of Communication (2016). Otto von Busch is professor of integrated design at Parsons School of Design. In his research he explores how the powers of fashion can be

Contributors 293

bent to achieve a positive personal and social condition with which the everyperson is free to grow to their full potential. He has for over fifteen years examined fashion beyond consumerism, aesthetic decrees, and arbitrary authority, and worked towards establishing fashion practice as a shared capability, biosocial energy, a process of mutual flirting, a play of embodied attentions. Adrian Richard Wagner is a graduate student working towards a Master of Public Administration at Montana State University. In May 2019, he graduated from MSU with a baccalaureate degree in political science with a minor in German studies. Richard currently works with MSU’s Leadership Institute working to empower student leaders and make lasting and notable change happen on MSU’s campus and throughout the Bozeman community. Kate Zambon is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in global media studies focuses on the cultural politics of nationalism and migration in the media. Her current research analyses how the rejection of multiculturalism across Europe has paved the way for renewed nationalism and the rise of “integration” as a technology for regulating multi-ethnic populations. Her research has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Popular Communication, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and, together with Didem Uca, the International Journal of Communication.