This is author Kevin Gannon’s response to our roundtable on his book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. Read the rest of the roundtable here.
Arthur Radebaugh (1958), via Paleofuture.
When I wrote the original blog post version of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, I did so simply to process and reflect on my own experiences looking back at one semester and ahead to the next. I didn’t think it would spread very far, and I certainly didn’t think anyone would ask me if I had thought about turning it into a book. But it did, they did, and so I wrote (for far longer than I had anticipated; I signed the contract in 2016). Once the book was out, I wasn’t sure how things would go. The soft release date was mid-March, and the “official” release was April 1; it was a surreal experience releasing a book grounded in hope as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, and the US stumbled into an even darker chapter, one from which we have yet to emerge. It’s been nothing short of surreal talking about any sense of hope, much less a radical hope, in this moment—especially when much of that talking is occurring via Zoom. Yet here we are.
I don’t think there’s a greater reward for a writer than to hear that their words have resonated with others engaged in similar pursuits and struggles. And I’m grateful beyond expression that Radical Hope has found a place on the reading lists of so many educators and fellow travelers, and that the book has provided at least some modicum of sustenance in these fucked-up times we’re in. So when Erin Bartram told me Contingent was doing a roundtable on the book, and asked if I’d be interested in writing a response, I was thrilled to get on board, not least because Contingent is—I think—one of the most important scholarly platforms we have right now, and it’s an honor to share (virtual) pages with its writers and staff. So before I proceed, I want to offer my deepest thanks to Erin and her colleagues, and particularly to Beth Lovern, Mary Klann, and Rhonda Jackson Garcia for their generous and thoughtful reflections in this roundtable.
I was gratified to hear Mary Klann’s description of the ways in which Radical Hope energized her teaching and provided a locus of agency for her as an adjunct faculty member. One of my regrets about the book is that I didn’t spend more time centering precarity and adjunctification as key examples of the neoliberalization of higher education in order to advance some ideas about resisting these phenomena. As a former freeway flier myself, I am well aware empty bromides are not only meaningless, but insulting. And while some of my chapters used a wider, institutional lens, my larger focus on individual praxis may have come at the expense of a deeper dive into adjunctification and the ways in which we can collectively fight the increasing trends of precarity.
I do think our practices with and among students are still a powerful expression of both identity and agency, and Klann’s assertion that “we [adjuncts] hold positions of power in the classroom” points out an opportunity in this regard. Students are our allies; they (and those around them who also care about their education) do care about who their teachers are, and at least implicitly about the conditions in which their teachers have to operate. That is potential leverage; how might we get students and their people to connect their learning conditions with the conditions their instructors face? And what reactions might those connections bring? Might that be a way for a commitment to teaching and students to become more than just “unattended sorrow?” Klann’s essay struck me as defiance tinged with melancholy in this regard. How much pedagogical greatness has been squandered in the lottery masquerading as the academic job market? The losses incurred within this system are overwhelming to contemplate. Klann’s determined stance here is a lesson for those of us with any modicum of institutional security and platforms on what we need to be doing with those resources. Contingency cannot be complacency, Klann tells us. I agree. But security cannot be complacency, either; the nature of the academic enterprise is shaped most profoundly by the ways its most precarious participants are treated. A reshaping is needed.
Beth Lovern’s exploration of the ways in which the liberal arts paradigm strengthens both student agency and a Freirean “life-affirming” pedagogy does us a great service in its centering of William Cronon’s 1998 “Only Connect…” article, which I think is one of the best encapsulations of what the liberal arts (indeed, higher education as a whole) should aspire to. Quoting Cronon’s assertion that a liberal arts education should put “human talent in the service of human freedom,” Lovern goes on to connect this imperative with the larger mission of helping students see the fundamental interconnectedness of themselves, their learning, and the human community—in all its glorious and kaleidoscopic dimensions—of which they are a part. I was delighted to see my work placed alongside Cronon’s in her meditations (and by “delighted,” I mean “giddily fanboying”), but even more so by Lovern’s emphasis on student agency as the core component in making this educational vision a daily reality. All too often we (and especially those of us in liberal arts colleges, who regularly traffick in this sort of language) talk a great game about how education “transforms” students, but in ways that make them seem like passive observers in the whole process. Just step onto this higher-education conveyor belt here, and once you step off in four years, you’ll have been transformed! But transformative, emancipatory learning is a process that absolutely depends on agency. The outcomes of this process are evident not simply in measurable skills and content expertise, but rather ways of seeing and being in the world which can only be actively cultivated, not passively absorbed.
One of the most important ways in which that dichotomy of active cultivation versus passive absorption plays out pedagogically is in the realm of writing and writing pedagogy. Rhonda Jackson Garcia’s essay is a powerful reminder that words and language, writing to express one’s ideas and thoughts, are at the very core of students’ agency, their sense of self-as-learner. In Radical Hope, I call for educators to reject a version of “rigor” that is nothing more than hazing disguised as instruction. All too often, we conflate challenging our students with their not succeeding; in other words, the harder a learning task is (and we define difficulty as a low pass rate), the better we are as teachers. Learning isn’t supposed to be easy, right? But in such a profoundly important area as writing—the foundational method by which students create, express, and explore their identities as learners—pedagogy that’s been weaponized like this does profound damage. Jackson Garcia’s essay deploys Laura Rendón’s theory of validation, which argues that validity—the radical welcoming of students and acceptance of their agency—is at the foundation of meaningful learning. I agree.
Moreover, there are specific elements we can adopt into our practices right now, as Jackson Garcia shows us. In particular, her discussion of the ways in which Dominant Academic English is but one strand of discourse—a specific dialect—helps free us and our students from suffocating pedantry and allows us to explore actual content and ideas. As she demonstrates, this is not dumbing-down anything, but rather a purposeful rethinking of our pedagogical priorities. Where do we want our students to be, and how might we best allocate our finite resources of time and energy to help them get there? This is an important question, especially for our minoritized students, and students who come to us from places where Dominant Academic English was not the coin of the realm. There’s a deep resonance here with Asao Inouye’s work, particular his (essential, I think) book Anti-Racist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future.1 Jackson Garcia’s discussion of her ability to move between dialects and linguistic framings, and the importance of modeling that to her students, is an excellent example of how practices grounded in an ethic of “radical hope” can pay immediate and significant dividends for students who have not always had the opportunity to reap those types of benefits. The effects of this—at scale—would be transformative. And I would submit that’s exactly what we need.
I’m honored to have been able to join this roundtable conversation, and am deeply appreciative of the reflections and conversations Radical Hope has sparked. Manifestoes are, after all, a call to action. And the most energizing thing for me about these three contributions is that they do exactly that. Whether it’s continuing and intensifying the fight for faculty equity and meaningful employment, recentering our practices of liberal arts-inspired education so that it is truly accessible to all, or releasing ourselves from the tyranny of culturally-specific and oppressive ideas about “rigor,” each of these authors has given us sustenance for the journey. As Yung Bleu said, “we all we got.” And to have colleagues as generous and fiercely committed as the members of this roundtable is to have much indeed.
- Asao B. Inouye, Anti-Racist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse and Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015).
