Strategies from and for the Classroom
A serious goal of this Profession special issue is to provide even more opportunities for members to share how they are pushing back against the current climate of hostility. . . .
Winter 2024–25
Navigating Complexity
In This Issue
Embracing Complexity: A Three-Realm Approach to Engage Contemporary Political Landscapes
The challenges of the moment call for us to resist binary thinking and embrace complexity—the shifting, interactive, and dynamic nature of human interactions with and in social and political systems.
Deweaponizing Discourse: Language Education and Critical Thinking Skills
[A]s educators of language and culture, we hold a distinct opportunity to equip our students with the critical tools necessary to engage with the nuances of divisive sociopolitical issues and dehumanizing discourses. By equipping our students with these tools, we foster a shared responsibility in the learning process, where both teachers and students are active participants, working together to understand how language shapes these narratives.
A Florida Woman on Teaching the Humanities in a Divided America
New laws in Florida purport to uphold academic freedom, but in practice these measures curtail faculty members’ role in decisions about what and how to teach. By sharing personal reflections on the chilling effects of this climate of censorship on my teaching, I aim, here, to reflect on how the “culture wars” (to use James Davison Hunter’s expression) are reshaping humanistic teaching and curricula in Florida. . . .
Antihostility Pedagogies: Humility, Empathy, Reciprocity
Our students have never been without hostility. But we can show them that hostility is not the only way. As experts in the art of reading, we can demonstrate how, as Kevin M. Gannon notes, hostility is sustained by bad reading: a deliberate engineering of “backlash” predicated on intentionally selective misreading, so that the injustices that a more genuine act of reading reveals are obscured through “a bogeyman that exists mostly in their own fevered imaginations” (112).
Forget Freedom; or, Thinking about Harm and Harm-less-ness with the Buddha
Rather than the notion of freedom, I propose we reorient our thinking about academic conduct and speech—indeed, education itself—around ahimsa, or harm-less-ness.