Experience

I'm currently working on my Rhet 105 syllabus. The theme of my course is going to be Personal Writing in Public Spaces. I am in the process of choosing readings, and as I haven't chosen any yet, I am trying to consider ways to encourage my students to theorize and look critically at the personal, as well as using the personal to understand the world around them. So I find hooks discussion of "Essentialism and Experience" particularly relevant to this debate I'm having in my head. hooks seems to be saying that there must be a balance with the personal, that experience is important in what it can add to a course, but must be looked at critically. I agree.

In much of my reading on pedagogy, I find good teaching seems to come back to the way a teacher presents things in class. Different teachers can present the same things, and through their practices, convey those things in entirely different ways. As I work on what to present, I must also work on how to present it. In academia, the how has not been an issue: you present a paper at a conference, or you submit a paper to a journal. Papers generally look the same although may vary in style based on where you present it. But the how has been generally unimportant, and generally uncritiqued (although Writing Studies folks do this more and more; Anne Wyscoki is one example).

As I read this quote, I thought again that perhaps some of what might change the way we think in academia is to change how we write:

...largely because critics fail to interrogate the location from which they speak, often assuming, as it is now fashionable to do, that there is no need to question whether the perspective from which they write is informed by racist and sexist thinking, specifically as feminists perceive black women and women of color. (78)

Wouldn't it be something if our writing practices could do this? Couldn't we possibly abandon the forms of writing that create hierarchies and exclude? Probably a lot of wishful thinking on my part.