Toward Radical Collective Care While Adjuncting, Studying, and Parenting

Radical Honesty about Adjuncting and Time

In recent semesters, I have been more forthcoming with my students about how I show up in the classroom. I have made a point to acknowledge that, while they can and usually do call me “Professor,” my official job title is “adjunct lecturer,” and they should be aware of the limited job security, low pay, and uncertain futures of people in those roles, people who also teach the majority of classes at CUNY. When I bring this up, most of my students have no idea about these differences or how the lack of pay parity for adjunct instructors deeply impacts both the working and living conditions of instructors and the learning conditions of all CUNY students. Following Bianca C. Williams’s pedagogy of “radical honesty,” I think introducing this aspect of how I show up in the classroom is an important first step from shame to truth-telling on individual and collective scales. Williams argues that this is pedagogically useful since it promotes treating “life experience as a rich object of study… [and training] my students to use themselves as case studies.”5 I open a window to my personal life and offer an implicit vision of what university teaching and learning could look like by telling them that I may not have as much time as I would like to support, mentor, and get to know them, but I will show up for them as best as I can and respect their time invested in readings and assignments. This introduction serves as an entry point to more forms of radical collective care in the classroom and, hopefully, beyond.

Slowing Down for Relationships and Co-Discovery

Next, I focus on opportunities for relationship building, which is not just good for student mental health but reinforces learning with social bonds and deepens long-term comprehension and intellectual engagement. To set the stage, I learn about where my students come from and what prior knowledge and contexts they bring with them. They introduce themselves and answer some general questions about their cultural and linguistic backgrounds, their neighborhoods and families, and their dreams for the future. I have also had my students interview each other to learn about anthropological research methods and to encourage supportive relationships in the classroom. When given the opportunity, most students delight in this exercise and relish learning about each other and spending time on relationship building. This resonates with my parenting experiences as well—just as educator Christopher Emdin counsels teachers to help students see the content as infinite and ripe for co-discovery, I find that parenting pushes me into a mode of co-discovery unlike any other.6 Exploring the world with my sixteen-month-old daughter has generated a new sense of being-in-the-moment and the preciousness of time spent mentoring and parenting. For co-discovery to unfold, I have to show up and slow down to my daughter’s pace of back-and-forth exchanges of sound, motion, affect, and emotion. Higher education, not just early childhood education, also requires attention to those relational foundations for learning to take root.

The Care-Full Rigor of Linking Content to Reality

Part of Christopher Emdin’s “reality pedagogy” is the premise that while teachers have expertise in the content areas, students are the experts of content delivery and know how to draw the connections to different contexts and make the content relevant and important to themselves and their peers.7 This is akin to how I follow my daughter’s lead in interacting with an object: I may be an expert on reading, but for her to enjoy books, she needs the freedom to turn it upside down, flip forwards and backwards, etc. I read to her and show her how I turn the pages or indicate certain connections between images and sounds. But she also engages the books on her own terms. To this end, I have broadened the mediums that students can use in my courses and invited more creativity in engaging with critical social theory. In recent semesters, I have asked students to create zines filled with artwork, imagery, and quotations from the readings. One student created a zine that engaged with the topic of universal childcare from the perspective of engaging parents in co-governing the daycares and building community-based relationships of trust. She assessed the current political moment based on her experiences of growing up with an extended network of family members who provided childcare that was intellectually stimulating and encouraged her to study science and medicine. She worried that the goal of universality might obscure the crucial focus on relationship-building in childcare institutions. My initial feedback to her was that the Mamdani administration would surely benefit from her perspective. To encourage more students to reflect creatively and make arguments for change they want to see, I am staying open to other forms and mediums for processing, curating, and presenting ideas, like art, music, technology, social events, and political action.

To push the limits of what they know and invite them into forging their own critical and generative insights about the world, I ask them to consider social problems in light of their own “realities,” including their personal passions and interests. The courses I teach at CUNY are most often introductory cultural anthropology courses taken by many students to fulfill general education requirements. My course is already designed for students to think critically about social inequalities around race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc., but I have revised some of my assignments to help students analyze how their own lives are caught up in political, economic, and social processes and to imagine possible pathways for their careers, vocations, academic courses of study, and everyday lives to matter in ways that matter to them. Through the zine assignment, I ask them to envision a world in which social inequalities are solved and care is equitably distributed to all. This has led students to draw on interests in architecture, education, religion and spirituality, climate and the environment, healthcare, and more, to elaborate how material and social worlds could be better organized. Likewise, through other writing assignments, I have pushed students to develop “calls to action” for social problems, by drawing on anthropological research as supporting evidence and by having them envision practical political steps towards solutions. These assignments are designed to build a kind of “care-full rigor” focused on attuning to the realities of both problems in the world and their own interests and passions.

Being a parent, adjunct, and student at this time in history has pushed me to imagine what radical collective care might look like in my personal and professional lives—while blurring and mixing those roles and responsibilities together in surprising ways. To me, radical collective care is both a strategy for surviving care crises, because I’m prioritizing the labor of care over the labor of professionalism and mastery, and a vision of how public higher education might look if guided by care, equity, and justice. As long as public higher education is not fully funded and adjuncts don’t have pay parity, I may have to rely on Ms. Rachel videos more often than I would like. I may not be able to slow down and show up for my students as much as they deserve. Yet, pedagogically, I aim to continue incorporating radical honesty into my classroom, finding ways to slow down enough to allow passionate co-discovery in diverse forms to emerge, and encouraging my students to connect the content and contexts that matter to them.

About the Author

James Tolleson (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology)