Nina K. Müller-Schwarze and Robert Perry share reflections on their time and experience as faculty at Southern University in New Orleans.
teaching
9 posts
As we rushed into the new reality of Zoom meetings and video lectures, the course became a roadmap for examining the coronavirus crisis in light of the current neoliberal economic condition.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in access to education, posing particular challenges for maestra-mothers and their students in Oaxaca.
Higher education is at a crossroads. Can we adapt to the ongoing challenges and create transformative educational courses for an uncertain future?
Even after 15 years of teaching literature on the Arabian Peninsula, I still worry about finding the right texts for my students. They are majoring in English language, not literature, so I don’t have to cover any kind of canon. I just need good stories, plays, and poems that will help improve their English by giving them a chance to read, write, talk, and think.
At my current institution, a group of interdisciplinary faculty gathers every so often to talk about ways to “decolonize” our syllabi. In our meetings, we discuss how the use of “decolonize” remains fraught and even nonviable given our location on stolen land, and I share with them anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla’s use of “unsettling colonial logics and institutions” (2015) as a modus operandi for thinking about and engaging in such efforts.
When I first began working at Eastern Kentucky University in the fall of 2018, I taught a module on food insecurity in order to encourage students to pursue applied projects in our local food system. As I presented the syllabus on the first day of class, I saw a number of raised eyebrows and cocked heads. One student slowed me down: “Dr. Green, what do you mean by ‘food insecurity’?”