Something I am thinking about is how to get students to think and reflect upon their racial position in the classroom. There are several reasons I think it is important for me to do this as a teacher on the BA Performance: Design & Practice course:
Firstly, the course is diverse in someways, and not in others. There are very few black students and teachers in the department and this can lead to racism (conscious and unconscious) going unchecked because of a lack of confidence and knowledge in non-black staff and students to address these issues. As the only black woman teaching in my department, and someone who cares deeply about racial justice I often approach these issues enthusiastically & passionately, but sometimes I don’t have the time and energy. It would be better if more people in the department were equipped to have these conversations. I hope to plan some lessons where I give people some of these tools and open up some of these conversations. I think it would be better to have moments in the curriculum where race is addressed head on, in a planned way, rather than only as and when issues crop up.
Secondly, performance is a field in which there are a large variety of well-archived successful black and brown practitioners. In British popular culture black performers are at the forefront: look at Rihanna, FKA Twigs e.t.c. However, I notice that many student ‘dissertations’ still focus mainly on white and western practitioners. Some students critique this in their dissertations, saying hat they feel they have to put their work in context with white canonical figures, but they don’t make the leap to leaving the canon behind and de-centring these tired references altogether. The discourse feels a bit stuck in the past. I want to empower the students to act on their critique.
There are many other reasons…. I could go on.
Ways of teaching about race and racism in the classroom:
I’ve started to show students my own work. I’ve brought two groups on a tour of my show at the Stuart Hall Library. My work is directly inspired by black feminist practice and writing and is about unpacking construction of blackness in popular culture. This was good as I felt able to talk about blackness from a point I felt very comfortable with. This is important as even though I am the teacher, I can sometimes feel vulnerable in these conversations as I am the racial minority amongst the students. There wasn’t lots of time for questions / there weren’t many immediate questions from the students about the subject matter itself, however I hope that I’ve shown them that I’m open to having conversations around these issues.
I came across a practical example in bell hooks’ ‘Teaching to Transgress’:
‘When I teach Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in introductory courses on black women writers, I assign students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory. Each person reads the paragraph aloud to the class. Our collective listening to one another affirms the value and uniqueness of each voice. This exercise highlights experience without privileging the voices of students from any particular group. It helps create communal awareness of the diversity of our experiences that may inform how we think and what we say. Since this exercise makes the classroom a space where experience is values, not negated or deemed meaningless, students seem less inclined to make the telling of experience that site where they compete for voice, if indeed such a competition is taking place. In our classroom, students do not usually feel the need to compete because the concept of a privileged voice of authourity is deconstructed by our collective critical practice.’ (p84)
I’ve been discussing with my colleague Thandi who teaches Architecture at RCA, activities for discussing race in the classroom.