sharon d. engbrecht
“How to address the urgency is the question that must burn for staying with the trouble.”
—Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
I love literature and writing. The biggest goal I have each year is to share this passion. Second to this, I seek to encourage students to be curious about texts and how they gather knowledge. I work to ensure students come away from my courses with critical thinking skills, having thought about how learning through imagination and creative problem solving is an incredibly valuable pursuit.
This means that a willingness to experiment coupled with a capacity to facilitate collaborative learning environments defines my teaching philosophy. Like much of my research, my methods for teaching focus on what it means to access and understand power as it interfaces with knowledge production and diverse ways of knowing. My experience as a first-generation, queer, disabled educator intersects with my privilege as a white settler, born in Canada, for whom English is a first language. This nexus of positionalities reflects my commitments to creating environments that meet and exceed the needs of students in post-secondary classrooms—from Universal Design in how I set up courses in learning management systems and create presence in the classroom, or consider accessibility in slide presentations and course materials, to my alignment of assessments with learning outcomes and finding a balance between course requirements and adapting to students’ learning gaps.
I first began teaching as an instructor in South Korea, with students unwillingly participating in mandatory classes. I had to improvise ways of creatively engaging students, from games to word challenges to concept scavenger hunts, while thinking about their barriers to learning English as a foreign language. My pedagogical goals have developed since then to include creating inclusive environments that adapt to real-time student learning needs, taking into consideration geo-cultural context and the way worldviews impact how and what we learn. This has included preparing alternative lecture formats and content (making recordings accessible online or doing literary Bingo or review Jeopardy), allowing students to “choose their own learning adventure,” or pivoting during in-class exercises to accommodate students’ affective responses and energy levels when materials are difficult or when students indicate that certain learning tasks seem unmanageable.
Jose Alcaraz and Marianna Fotaki suggest learning occurs as the result of “provoking and unsettling viewpoints through the critical re-appraisal of established concepts.” This experience in the classroom room enables students to adapt to “diverse learning situations in which their current assumptions may ‘not work.’”[1] They frame this learning through a kind of so-called failure that becomes part of an experiential learner’s cycle of conceptualization, reflection, and active experimentation. In many ways, I find guiding students through the queering process of what Jack Halberstam describes as “failure”—unknowing or undoing the way we have been taught to assume learning happens in a certain way—as a route to deep experiential learning and educational success. At the end of each course, my goal is to have students demonstrate how, in learning about the way some systems of thought have produced certain kinds of failure that may lead to other kinds of success, they come away with tools for more critical engagement—their ability to stay with the trouble—in and with the world.
[1] “Teaching Sustainability and Management Critically: ‘Expectation Failures’ as a Powerful Pedagogical Tool.” Disciplining the Undisciplined? Springer, 2018, p. 227.
S. D. Engbrecht 