Teaching Diversity — Im/Possible Pedagogy

Abstract

A turn to 'cultural diversity' in the curriculum offers a multitude of opportunities for educational practitioners: questioning Eurocentric knowledge; deconstructing 'marginality'; recognising the ensuing hybridities, intercultural dialogues and encounters in a globalizing world. However, this article questions the current representational pedagogies of cultural and media studies in relation to how they address the epistemic and political grounds upon which the antagonisms of multiculture are played out. It argues that a point of departure for teaching diversity needs to acknowledge the contestations of racialized difference, and the pedagogic im/possibility of encountering otherness outside of domination. A key aim of the article is to explore the entangled politics and practice of teaching diversity, through scrutinizing the challenges of using a 'multicultural' film such as Bend it Like Beckham (dir. Gurinder Chadha, 2002). It has become increasingly common in cultural and media studies to use 'ethnically marked' texts to examine and deconstruct the dynamics of cultural-racial identity formation and representations of otherness. The article interrogates the productive possibilities and limits of such approaches.

Creating spaces for radical pedagogy in higher education

“…At the same time, learners are often anxious to include many fieldwork meetings in their Sydney schedules, without having the time to reflect on those adequately, nor to engage with discordant viewpoints in ways that can open their thinking to the possibility of transformation. As discussed in theoretical detail below, we see the difficulties here of breaking with relations of domination and assimilation, and positioning themselves as 'outsiders', when student researchers engage with 'otherness', even when they do so with good intentions (Sharma, 2006;Davis, 2004, pp. 4-7).…”

“…Furthermore, it became gradually obvious to us that more informal spaces for 'encounters with alterity' (Sharma, 2006)-such as participation in the Community Kitchen at Auburn Centre for Community, in which we are one group amongst many participants-encouraged the exchange of stories, or 'yarning,' 4 and enabled the development of more relaxed, attentive and equal relationships than was the case in formal fieldwork meetings. As a consequence of all of this reflective thinking about SALP and what it means to do research with others, we have come to see ourselves, and to encourage our students to see, that the quality of the research we are doing depends very much on the nature of the relationships we construct.…”

Talking About ‘Diverse Genders and Sexualities’ Means Talking About More than White Middle-Class Queers

“…In regards to the question of who is standing, and in reference to my gender and sexuality class, the task we engaged in was to find ways of looking at who we stand as through our relationships to other people. This involved, as Sanjay Sharma (2006) notes, a focus both on the 'concrete other' (i.e., the actual people upon whose disadvantage our privilege rests), and the 'ontological other' (i.e., the other as a category against and through which our sense of self is formed). To stand as a non-indigenous Australian, and moreover to teach as a nonindigenous Australian to non-indigenous students, is to acknowledge that who we stand as is always a consequence: it is always a product or outcome of an ongoing series of historical relations between actual colonisers and actual Indigenous nations and peoples, as well as the ongoing social hierarchies in which these categories are made to matter.…”

“…Thinking about how non-indigenous people (including myself and my students) can understand our location in Australia and our gendered and sexualised identities thus required us to take this critical constructionist framework and use it to examine which models of the self are typically privileged when we talk about gender and sexuality. Sharma's (2006) work is useful in attempting to grapple with issues of difference and identity. He proposes the figure of the rhizome as way of understanding relationships, by placing 'both the inside/outside in the same field of immanence.…”

Talking it out

“…I find this to be the only effective approach; although it does not entirely overcome resistance, it sets up the possibility of winning trainees over so that they are prepared to work through their resistance and make connections. After all, anti-racism is only partly about the acquisition of new knowledge: more importantly, it is about developing new perspectives and new ways of thinking about existing knowledge (Rorty, 1989;Sharma, 2006).…”