My approach to teaching is best summarized by a comment by one of my students in my upper-level class “The Rhetoric of Abolition.” In a discussion of Frederick Douglass’ “The Heroic Slave,” a student said that Madison Washington’s early monologue in which he begins to understand himself as partaking of humanity and deserving of freedom was like “assembling a plane while it’s already in flight.” This evocative comment not only captured Madison Washington’s struggle to rhetorically perform his sense of self in a language captive to racial politics of antebellum America while a fugitive from slavery, it also reflected a canny understanding of the relevance Douglass’s story had for our own historical moment. As we confront the histories of academic institutional spaces that have to often played a role in reproducing rather than resisting social inequality and oppression, we must use the classroom to enable our students to gain the rhetorical skills and critical knowledge they need to build identities and communities in a situation of imaginative and political flight.

My pedagogy is informed by this sense of building a community in flight from the social inequalities that have structured the American educational system. This means that the University space, the role of English education in reproducing and challenging social inequalities, and my students’ honest feelings about reading and writing are all a major part of my classroom discussions and assignments. For instance, in the advanced freshman writing course I am piloting at Howard, “Writing, Literacy, Discourse,” we spend a great deal of time reading and discussing the topics of rhetoric and language, focusing on how the English classroom in both secondary and higher education is over-determined by class, race, and gendered questions about what type of skills constitute true literacy and how literacy is perceived by the culture at large. While these questions may at first seem abstract to a group of freshman, they are quickly able to relate them to their own previous experiences in English classrooms, connecting our reading to stories of how their home languages were treated as secondary to standard English, or how their white peers reacted when they were forced to engage with dialect in books like Their Eyes Were Watching God.  These discussions are particularly effective at engaging students that previously may have felt alienated by English classrooms that did not take their language background seriously. They come to realize how those experiences are connected to larger problems of class, race, and social justice, and begin to see how important being able to articulate these thoughts in writing and speech can be to correcting the inequalities that previously alienated them.

Thus, my approach as a teacher is focused on allowing for a true diversity of viewpoint and perspective in the classroom. By this, I don’t just mean engaging a variety of viewpoints as if the classroom was a utopian space abstracted from society, but rather providing a platform for my students to think about social, racial, and class inequality and the role of our own classroom in producing or resisting those structures. To give another example, one day in class we were talking about what Keith Gilyard's rhetorical analysis of the way everyday language reflects dominant ideologies and power hierarchies. We talked about default uses of masculine pronouns and Malcolm X’s discovery in prison of positive and negative connotations of the words white and black in the dictionary. Later in class, I committed one of the linguistic assumptions we had been talking about, referring to “businessmen” when I meant all people in business. Immediately, one of my students called out what I had done and this became a wonderful teaching opportunity. Not only was it a great example of the problem we just talked about, but it also opened a space for my students to speak back to the power differentials of the classroom and the university by challenging me. From that day onward, my students understood that I was less an infallible fountain of knowledge, and more an interlocutor for their own ideas, thoughts, and struggles with the material. They began teaching each other more, and thinking very insightfully about what they were doing at college and how it supported and in some cases stymied their personal and political desires.

My approach to diversity and critical thinking about the classroom space continues in my thematic and subject courses. Teaching abolitionism in my upper-level course, I emphasize the rhetorical situation of abolitionist writing by thinking about what it meant for people like Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown to write and speak in situations of great racial prejudice, unequal power, and prestige, and in presses and in company controlled by white abolitionists who were not always concerned (and sometimes hostile to) the vital problems of black citizenship and education. Understanding that context, we then think about the relevance of abolitionism today in context of The Black Lives Matter movement, Angela Davis’s arguments for prison abolition, and corruption in politics. Constructing ourselves on the fly, we try to build a discursive community in the classroom committed to using rhetorical skills for social change. I facilitate this by asking my students to write abolitionist editorials set in the present day, and then get together with a group to put together a proposal for an abolitionist publication (be it newspaper or website) by theorizing its political goals, its audience, and its modes and tone of address to its publics. 

In the past, I have taught Afrofuturism in a similar manner, asking my students to imagine themselves writing for an Afrofuturist magazine and formulate an idea for a short story based on our readings in Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany. And in the future, I am planning a course on the rhetoric and politics of friendship, examining how communities have formed in the context of political struggle, from abolition to Black Power to Black Lives Matter, how they have been shaped by rhetoric and argument, and over-determined by histories of oppression. As in my research, my teaching is focused on how critical resistance functions in the shadows of systems and concepts structured by histories of oppression, working to build skills and communities committed to a more diverse and just world.