Author: Bob Squillace
Recent years have seen an alarming global rise in nativism as a political force. Nativism is, in essence, the politics of normalization – it seeks to privilege as rulers of a polity (a city, a country, a state) a particular constituency within that polity that regards itself as normal and constructs all other identities as deviations from that norm (to be tolerated only to the extent the nativist constituency determines). Ironically, nativism in this sense has no relationship to actual histories of habitation – having been born and lived within a polity’s borders or even having been tied to a location for generations does not provide membership in the privileged identity group that styles itself as “native.” Nativism is virulently anti-historical, typically denying the rich demographic variety and great migratory movements that have produced current population patterns in favor of a fantasy monocultural past. Indeed, nativism is not in truth nativist at all; it uses the rhetoric of nationalist attachment to place as a blind for normalizing a dominant (and frequently racialized) population group against a set of excluded “others,” regardless of their equal or superior claims to political power and representation. For nativists, the plurality rules; groups who do not enjoy demographic prevalence of some sort may at times spawn separatist movements, but are never soil for the sort of nativism I have described.
To counter-balance the rhetoric of nativism requires a radical de-normalization of all the various identity-positions that have laid claim to normality in both the geographical context and intellectual climate of one’s teaching. The list of historically-normalized identities is daunting, and de-normalization is complex; while, for instance, many humanities departments at American colleges and universities have done a great deal to challenge the normalization of male experience, the de-normalization of the idea of binary gender itself has not proceeded as far. Nor, in the globalized centers of higher education where many of us teach, will all students carry the same set of cultural normalizations. The pre-marital celibacy that one cultural group normalizes may clash with the pre-marital sexual activity that another regards as normal. The goal is not so much to denormalize each normalized identity position in turn as to challenge the practice of normalization itself. Often, this can be done most effectively when it is least expected by students, who otherwise may dial in pat responses to demonstrate that they are not racist or sexist – engaging the normalization of whiteness in the context of a white author’s construction of racial identities in a novel with no non-white characters, for instance.
To challenge the normalization of identity positions effectively, it is necessary to challenge the normalization of hierarchy itself, for the idea that absolute hierarchies are the natural way of things is foundational to nativist thinking. But hierarchies are written into the arrangements of all kinds of spaces, the space of the classroom being no exception. While classes take place in a wide variety of rooms, students have largely internalized a particular set of physical arrangements of space as typifying a classroom:
- A large area containing chairs at which students are expected to sit.
- A hard, flat surface in front of each student, which invites such practices as writing, note-taking, or holding open a book.
- A blackboard, whiteboard, projection screen, teacher’s desk or other object that creates a focal point toward which the attention of the rest of the room is focused, giving the space a clear front and back. The instructor’s space is implicitly at the front of the room; the students’ space at the back. The instructor is empowered to move; students, to sit.
- An orderly, symmetrical arrangement of furniture – chairs in rows, a seminar table at the center of the room, etc. This arrangement is sometimes inalterable, chairs being bolted to the floor or arranged around an immobile seminar table.
Faculty have also and perhaps even more profoundly internalized the association of classroom spaces with hierarchies. I recently helped moderate a faculty development event that was held in a room with a seminar table. When we began discussing hierarchy and the classroom space, one of us raised the point that even a space that didn’t encode hierarchies could easily have them imposed on it. Then we all looked around the table. And laughed. Unconsciously, the three moderators had clustered at the head (or what became the head because they had clustered there). The other participants had scattered themselves at safe distances around the table, always leaving at least one empty seat between them and the moderators. We had reified the practice we mock in our students, who dare not enter the invisible death zone that emanates from their instructor, making the nearest seat or row of seats unfit for human habitation.
In spatial terms, then, a classroom (or, at least, the classroom as type) is most similar to a theater – a performance space that implicitly differentiates the roles of (static, quiet) audience and (mobile, vocal) performer. It encodes the purpose of the space as being the transfer of knowledge, an active, freely mobile presence at the front performing to a passive, stationary group at what becomes, mentally, an “opposite end” of the room. Such a configuration of space does not in itself constitute an act of normalization as I have described it above, as it does not encode a specific hierarchy; however, it encodes the morphology of hierarchy itself.
One can, to a limited extent, challenge the hierarchical bias of the classroom space by re-configuring the arrangement of furniture – we are all familiar with the act of dragging chairs into a circle at the beginning of class, and the effect it can have on the class atmosphere. But hierarchy is an inescapable fact of any class in which grades are assigned, as students are perfectly aware. Nor is hierarchy inherently bad – it is the normalization of hierarchy as the natural order of all relations that is repugnant and that supports a politics of nativism.
The strategy I suggest, then, is not to make a pretense of an equal power relation where no such equality exists, but to re-position the hierarchies of the classroom to make clear that they are contingent, provisional, based in the specific needs of teaching and learning. Some of this involves directly challenging the message of the classroom space – there are a number of ways one can work against the classroom’s morphology of hierarchy:
- Re-claim student motion. Action implies agency; finding ways for students to occupy a different position than that of audience can clarify that the moments when they do serve as an audience are contextual.
- Learn names and teach names. Nothing more precisely characterizes the nature of an audience than the anonymity of its membership. It is not enough for instructor to know students’ names to challenge their role as an audience; students must know and use each other’s names.
- Write in the margins. There are normally a few minutes before a class formally starts and after it ends when a different sort of relation with students can exist, which can demonstrate the contingency of whatever hierarchies exist during the class period. Of course, an instructor should not use their position of power to intrude on aspects of student life where they are not welcome.
The fundamental question, however, is on what basis a teacher has the authority to teach – how does one position or construct the guiding hierarchy that allows instruction in a way that clearly manifests its contingency? The traditional answer (that is, “traditional” at least since the sheer authority of the institution was undermined as a basis for the teacher’s power) has justified hierarchy on the basis of subject knowledge – mastery over a particular body of facts or texts. An instructor should of course generally know more than their students about the subjects they teach, but basing a hierarchy on subject knowledge alone seems dangerous to me, as knowledge does not guarantee insight and, in the era of broadband internet access to knowledge of all sorts, is not the most valuable influence an in-person instructor can have, particularly in the struggle against pernicious normalizations.
I suggest instead that instructors foreground the hierarchy of experience – that they present as the basis of their right to teach not who they are or what they know, but what they have lived through and done. We have been both students and instructors and have experience in teaching and learning our students lack; we have lived consciously through periods that to our students are mere images and words; we have experienced the passage of time and the processes of change that alter the identity of places, that turn the contemporary into the historical. There is no better ally in the struggle against false normalizations than an understanding of time and change; a politically-engaged pedagogy should base its claim to authority in the classroom on that understanding, which recognizes that no land belongs in perpetuity to any self-proclaimed inheritors. To address our subject at least in part from the well of our own experience both humanizes us and re-positions the hierarchy the classroom space inscribes so that it more clearly arises from a contingent circumstance and not from the nature of human relationships.