Pedagogy in Public
Nora Almeida
Many discussions about the importance of “Open” (Educational Resources, Pedagogy, Scholarship) are also discussions about social justice, economic equity, and access to information. Embedded in these conversations is a critique of academic environments as closed and inaccessible. We might respond to this critique by “opening” up our work, a process which typically involves a reconsideration of technology platforms and licenses. But the work of “opening” should also involve considering new contexts for use (and building new infrastructure to support that use) because this is what makes information truly accessible and equitable.
The feminist scholar, Sara Ahmed, writes this about use (and the uses of use), “reflecting on usability is to reflect on who a world is built for” (Ahmed, 2019). In relation to openness, I think we need to consider: who we hope to reach when we make our work open; and how we expect new audiences to find, interact with, reuse, or take action in response to our work.
At City Tech, I co-teach an interdisciplinary, place-based course called Learning Places. Much of the work we do in this course happens in public; we study what ‘public’ means, how spatial norms are created and enforced by built environments and social systems; and we explore causes of and responses to urban social and ecological problems. Since I started teaching this course 5 years ago, I have observed the different ways that students engage with the curriculum and with each other once we leave the classroom and begin to learn directly from our collective experiences in public space. For example, we’ve learned about the problematic environmental legacy of New York City’s combined sewer system on a guided tour with educators from the Gowanus Canal Conservancy; we’ve seen the ongoing impact of redlining in Brooklyn by examining maps with librarians in the NYPL map collection; and we’ve walked the secret catwalk in the rafters of Grand Central Station.
Lately, I have started to think more about use (and usefulness) in relation to the public dimensions of teaching and learning. Learning Places has always been open, as all of my courses are, in that I use OpenLab, curate readings that are freely accessible to students (some are open access and some are available through the City Tech Library’s subscriptions), and share my syllabus and assignments with peers. In other ways, the course—even though so much of it happens out in the open—doesn’t always fully engage with or have a transformative effect on the public environments that we study. For a few years, I had students complete a podcast assignment for their final project. Working in groups, students created issue-specific podcasts based on field observations and research. Their podcasts, which are about everything from the health effects of air pollution to the impact of rezoning on housing costs, are also open (you can find them on Soundcloud), but it is likely that none of the people in the communities we study, who are directly impacted by these issues, ever come in contact with student podcasts or benefit from their research.
Two years ago, I redesigned Learning Place, which I now co-teach with a performance studies professor, to focus more on social performance, affective experiences of space, and subversion as a socio-political tool. We study environmental justice and the ways performative social interventions can change conversations about socio-political and ecological problems. We visit ecologically disturbed areas of New York City and, as with the original iteration of the course, rely on the expertise of guests like Lisa Bloodgood from the Newtown Creek Alliance and Andrea Haenggi from the Environmental Performance Agency.
The course content is flexible to leave room for engagement with ongoing political interventions conducted by groups like the Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement (students are required to attend and write about two public protests, meetings, or civic events). In addition to urban field visits, we practice media making and learn about the history of agit-prop. We also participate in performative activities in public: we’ve hugged trees in Metrotech Commons, conducted a queer-humming ritual with plants in Crown Heights, and participated in a ‘smell walk’ in Gowanus. When we feel weird about engaging in practices that deviate from normative social behaviors, we talk about why.
At the end of the semester, students research social issues and create site-specific public performances/interventions that raise awareness of, transform, or start conversations about social, political, and environmental issues. Working in groups, students create props and costumes and puppets and scripts. Some of them make zines to distribute, some design posters, and others invent their own instagram handles. At the end of the semester, they ‘perform’ as MTA bureaucrat villains at Atlantic Terminal, NYCHA officials at City Hall, recently evicted residents in Long Island City, recycling advocates in Brooklyn Bridge Park, public defenders outside the Supreme Court, and DACA recipients on campus.
“They thought we were real activists,” one student said, after a conversation about housing costs with a passerby in downtown Brooklyn last spring.
“What organization are you with?” a woman asked a group of costume-clad students in front of Atlantic Terminal who were handing out pamphlets about the MTA’s Fair Fares program last summer. “This is just a class,” one of them said, but on the best days, I think it might be something more.
Teaching in public is often messy, uncomfortable, and unpredictable. Sometimes it falls flat or we encounter resistance, like this past summer when we were removed from Metrotech Commons by private security for making and distributing free art. But I believe these risks are worth it if we can facilitate educational encounters that are not just publicly visible but that activate a public in some real, tangible way. The social justice imperative to “open” our work should also mean cultivating spaces of real exchange, where students can both study and confront the socio-political issues that impact them and their communities—on campus and off.
References
Ahmed, S. (2019, October 31). The Same Door. Feministkilljoys [Blog]. https://feministkilljoys.com/2019/10/31/the-same-door/
Nora Almeida (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor and Instruction / Outreach Librarian at the New York City College of Technology. She is also a long-time volunteer at Interference Archive where she works on educational programs and exhibitions. She researches and writes about critical pedagogy, social justice, neoliberalism, performance, and place. All of her publications are available open access and you can find them in CUNY Academic Works. She’s on Twitter: @nora_almeida.