Teaching Journal (2): Politics of humour

Week 4: The topic of this week was Classifying Difference, specifically race and sex/gender. I hadn't established ground rules or a learning contract with the students yet so I decided that this week would be a good time to do this, partially as a way to mitigate potentially problematic comments. I explained the usual points, such as respect (as pointed out by one of the students) and "I" statements. But I knew I wanted to really qualify the meaning of "respect."

One of the things I emphasized was that we need to pay careful attention to humour, that what we find funny is highly political. I asked the students, "What do we find funny?" After a brief moment of silence, one student answered, "A dog on a skateboard." Giggles from class. I asked, "Why is that funny?" Quiet. The same student mumbled something about a dog doesn't go on a skateboard normally. More giggles.

I took it up at this point and pointed out how a lot of humour is based on transgressing or pushing against boundaries of normality. So the image of a dog on a skateboard is funny because it blurs the boundary between human and dog. Dogs are supposed to be a certain way and not a certain way, i.e. human-like. Similarly, there are many different types of boundaries that can be crossed that could culturally register as humorous.

I decided on addressing politics of humour on a whim but I realized it's a great way to bridge discrimination at a conceptual level and at a practical level by engaging in how it manifests itself in everyday life.

Sometimes students are quite brilliant at coming up with the right examples, often without realizing it. It was a close one because I sure didn't have an example of something humorous! Dog on skateboard. I'm tucking that one away for future use.

Teaching Journal

I am teaching my second course this semester: a third-year seminar entitled "New Information Technology & Society", which I'm teaching as a science & technology studies (STS) course. My supervisor has advised me to keep a journal during teaching, as a way to reflect on my pedagogy and as a document to refer to when I put together a job application. I decided that this blog will serve as part of my journal-keeping.

Round two of teaching is infinitely easier. I think it's a combination of having some experience now and the class being mostly fourth- and fifth-years. I don't have to return to as many fundamental concepts, which makes such a topical seminar actually workable. I can say, "Hey, remember the concepts of racialization and borders? See how they play out in the context of the permanent resident card." The discussions are livelier, full of real-life examples as well as theoretical conversations.

I still have immense nausea before every class. I have trouble sleeping the night before, going over the possible class discussions in my head over and over. It also doesn't help that it's yet another new class that I'm teaching. I long for the day when I get to teach a course for the second or third time so that I can relax a bit and tweak things here and there. Assignments are also a cause for confusion as this course is turning out to be a workshop for these assignments. I'm hoping they will work but who knows for sure?

One thing I'm trying for this course is to use use more concrete examples, partly because the course material lends itself to real-life examples, partly because they facilitate learning, partly because it makes my life easier as an instructor.

Week 1: I divided the students into four groups of five and gave them a piece of technology to analyze for social, political, cultural, economic and historical contexts: washing machine, gun, phone and bicycle. I had somewhat randomly come up with those examples, but luckily they covered a lot of areas: feminism, criminalization of poverty, individualization and privacy, and urbanization and the politics of space.

Week 3: This is an activity idea I had gotten while helping my supervisor's plan for her community survey course. In the previous class, I asked the students to bring a newspaper to the next class. I had assigned Ian Hacking's "Making Up People" in the course readings for the week. After watching Chimamanda Adichie's talk, "The Danger of the Single Story", that is a brilliant discussion about the danger of stereotypes, the students worked in pairs to find an article in their newspapers that "makes up people." I provided them a set of guiding questions, such as who is being "made up"? which "expert" knowledges are invoked to give legitimacy to the claims about the people? what is the story being told? are there any missing stories? The students talked a lot about the newspaper coverage of the earthquake in Haiti. One student pointed out how the newsmedia seems to neglect the fact that there is a significant social division based on class, showing only the destroyed buildings (i.e. of the very poor) while the homes of the wealthy, which are still standing, go unnoticed. The single story being told is that Haitians are poor, have no infrastructure and chaotic. I was very impressed by their analysis.