TEACHER, BUT NOT QUITE: TEACHING POST-COLONIAL TEXTS AS A MINORITY

 
 
 
 

TEACHER, BUT NOT QUITE: TEACHING POST-COLONIAL TEXTS AS A MINORITY

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Title: TEACHER, BUT NOT QUITE: TEACHING POST-COLONIAL TEXTS AS A MINORITY
Author: CHATTERJEE, ANURADHA
Description: My dissertation examines the close connection between classroom interaction and the colonial encounter. My field work re-affirms my belief in persisting with a pedagogy that self-consciously engages with issues of difference. My experience underscores the need to continue to engage with issues of diversity, but such an effort must persistently engage questions such as, who has the power to define whom, and when, and how? My students’ responses provided numerous learning opportunities for me and highlighted the need to continually question the validity of some of the pedagogic decisions that we make as practitioners of critical pedagogy. As a post-colonialist and a compositionist, I view the quest for subjectivity as one of the central predicaments for a teacher of color. My personal classroom encounters echo Jacqueline Jones Royster’s claim that, “‘subject’ position really is everything” (29). At the same time I recognize that even though identity politics is an inevitable character of a contemporary politics of difference, it can also become a form of cultural narcissism which distracts from the real struggles over class and power. My pedagogical experience recorded in my dissertation demonstrates the uneasy position of the minority pedagogue in Western academia. It highlights the slippages between subverting the traditional colonizing role of a teacher and ensuring the goals of critical pedagogy which aims to create collaborative learning environments. The minority teacher of literature has to balance the additional burden of resisting the mantle of the native informant, especially if the literature being taught identifies with her ethnicity. There is a vital need to construct a critical, self-reflexive, multicultural pedagogy that makes space for emotional/personal aspects of living as a minority, and at the same time does not regard personal experience as the exclusive site of knowledge.
Permanent Link: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1179929222
http://hdl.handle.net/2374.OX/12751
Date: 2007

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