Is Pedagogy About Us?
Harvard Magazine | Isabella Cho
Cho questions whether students should always bring one’s identity into the classroom, and how doing so can compromise learning and intellectual growth.
“We inhabit a zeitgeist that, often with good reason, celebrates identity. Anyone arguing that identity is less than integral to each person and the way that person experiences the world would likely be judged as myopic or bigoted or just wrong. But is it always helpful to bring identity into a classroom? Is such an act intellectually rigorous?… I want to understand why sometimes identity may not be a productive feature of classroom discussion—and what professors have done to strike a balance.”
Cho speaks of literature, and whether she needs to be “seen” in a text to consider it powerful. No, she determines: “It is by suspending the “I” in order to submit wholly, if only for a moment, to the world as seen by another that we can commence that bizarre and astonishing process of change that earns the title of education. Not everything we learn turns wholly back to us.”
Related: Courses on Identity Shouldn’t Be So Rare (Crimson 12/7/23)
