IN-PERSON New Schools of Thought

Abstract

What are the overwhelming preoccupations, hopes, fears, desires, and blind spots of professors in classrooms at this moment of historical crisis and precarity? What cultural practices and values do we seek to generate in classroom spaces, and how do we go about these attempts? How do we think about our role in creating democratic spaces for teaching and learning? This paper will explore the reflective writing and online dialogues among faculty members at a liberal arts art and design college who were engaged in an asynchronous course called “Creating Spaces and Practices for Critical Conversations.” Analysis of both anonymous and attributed online writing uncovers how professors grapple with competing desires and demands within the contexts in which their classrooms are embedded. Drawing on ethnographic data, this research helps us understand how tacit and explicit values operate in college classrooms, and how these values might contribute to or further degrade democratic and equitable learning practices. Professors’ narratives and discourses reveal how the issues of power, safety, and hegemony come to be actively contested or reproduced through emotionally and politically charged moments of teaching and learning.