Reading the Room
Lessons on Pedagogy and Curriculum from the Gender and Sexuality Studies Classroom
The contemporary post-secondary classroom has become a flashpoint in public debate on gender and sexuality, with controversy over gender-inclusive policies, “trigger warnings,” and “cancel culture” that have been misrepresented by opportunistic and divisive voices within and outside of the education sector. However, gender and sexuality studies scholars have long engaged in these debates over pedagogy and closer study of gender and sexuality classroom practices reveals constructive and transformative ways of learning that grapple with power, conflict, discomfort, and safety in the classroom. Reading the Room collects candid discussions of classroom experiences from instructors and students throughout Canada to provide guidance to educators on often-fraught issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and decolonization. Working from a place of coalition building, this volume is a frank, insightful, and pragmatic invitation to share different pedagogical practices with educators in a range of academic disciplines.
Contributors to this volume discuss an array of topics including asymmetrical power relations between students and teachers, how students and professors learn from each other, how to negotiate conflict in a classroom, and how to be self-reflective about methods of teaching and learning. They also consider debates around trigger warnings and students’ expectations, discuss methods for curriculum selection and pedagogical practices, reflect on what it is like to embody a subject one teaches, and show how university equity, diversity, and inclusion work is often offloaded to overburdened racialized students and precariously employed staff.
A thoughtful and generous work, Reading the Room shows how teachers and students can navigate the difficulty and discomfort of contentious topics and learn more from each other.
Reading the Room is a deeply engaging volume that demonstrates the courage, vulnerability, creativity, and scholarly rigour that goes into authentic critical pedagogical praxis. The strong quality and clarity of the writing across the chapters of this book is remarkably consistent. The overall willingness and commitment of the authors to wade into emotionally and politically charged areas of inquiry and to engage in profoundly difficult conversations and learning with students, where comfortable outcomes are certainly never guaranteed, is inspiring.
Reading this book is like entering into a familiar yet always necessary conversation about many issues that arise in a feminist classroom. These include teaching and learning as both intellectual and emotional labour, navigating and challenging the overwhelming whiteness of academia, confronting complicity, thinking about the potentials and pitfalls of content warnings, considering the classroom as a site of pleasure and desire, and more. This is the first volume to bring them together in a specifically Canadian context, and with an explicit focus on pedagogy.
