Theory in the classroom and in the plural

The past week I’ve been steeped in the theory and practice of pedagogy. I’m working on a paper about teaching cultural theory at the same time as I wade through end of semester assignments. Sounds like a symbiotic exercise, doesn’t it? But I’ve been struggling to funnel my many thoughts. I’m writing the paper in conjunction with a colleague and I think our perspectives are going to be quite different. Aesthetically, that’s fine, we’ve decided to split the paper in half so that it’s clear we have different positions. But I’m noticing that my usual confidence cues have been muddled by the prospect of having to write ‘as a teacher’. I don’t feel particularly in control of my teaching as a postdoc. I do so little of it that I don’t get any ongoing contact with students, I have no real say in what I teach and my encounters with fellow teaching staff are few. All of this makes it hard to know when or if I’m doing OK. I just sort of blow in every so often and try not to sound too abstract, while waiting with terror for the evaluation forms to arrive twice a year.

The paper I’m writing is part of a special journal issue responding to an Honours dissertation - an anthropological study called ‘The Silent Social Order of the Theory Classroom’. It’s certainly a clever piece of work, submitted to a pretty high brow US university, and it’s precisely this cleverness that annoys me about it. Essentially the thesis acts as a critique of the way academic discourse reproduces itself - sort of Bourdieu style, but without the class awareness. I’m trying to come up with a diplomatic way of saying that the thesis employs the very same strategies of self-effacement that are revealed in its analysis. I haven’t quite made it yet.

We’ve decided to name our paper “Successful Resistance or Resisting Success? Teaching Cultural Theory in Brisbane.” It’s an attempt to reflect on the ironies of teaching ‘radical’ cultural theory in an institutional setting and in a city with a conservative past, while raising questions about cultural studies’ place and function in the university. We’re trying to draw attention to the social context which bleeds into the classroom encounter given that these dimensions are played down in the thesis. So it’s also a discussion of what might be different about teaching cultural studies theory as opposed to theory in other disciplines, given that the thesis generalises its findings from observing theory classes in two different fields (and at two different levels of difficulty).

I’ve tried to entertain the idea that in conservative contexts teaching theory involves encouraging students to feel comfortable in thinking new thoughts rather than mastering existing theoretical tenets, a position I put down to understanding theory as a sensibility as opposed to an epistemological endpoint. It all sounds a bit idealistic though, and few students are ever really satisfied with the open-endedness that such a position takes for granted. But to me it’s a way of avoiding both the fetishisation of Theory and the reproduction of a system in which a thesis like this one succeeds so well.