I'll be tweeting thoughts from our panel on Inclusive Pedagogies in Medieval Studies for the next three days--feel free to mute me if you're not into that!
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Next up: Dr. Leanne MacDonald (
@medievalmac) on "Decolonizing the Classroom Through Two-Spirit Critique." Dr. MacDonald shares how indigenous thinking shapes her work on gender and her pedagogy.Show this thread -
MacDonald's primary text is "A Handbook of Educators of Aboriginal Students". Best practices include: focus on experiential learning, storytelling, sharing circles, and attention to the "whole" student.
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MacDonald: "Two-Spirit" is an umbrella term describing indigenous folks who identify outside or beyond the gender binary. Weaving Two Spirit critique into medieval studies can illuminate the colonial and heteropatriarchal structures which underlie modern conceptions of gender.
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MacDonald's reading of Eugenia shows that the Old English martyrology acknowledges the possibility of saintly bodies outside the gender binary: Eugenia is male, female, neither, and both.
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MacDonald: Crucially, OE saints did not face the same colonial violence as indigenous folks in North America, and should not be painted with the same brush. However, Two-Spirit critique can help to explain the relationship between gender and faith in the OE texts.
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MacDonald shares a pedagogical exercise: ask students about experiences with gender before reading BEOWULF, or about experiences with being an outsider before reading "Wonders of the East". Limit students to 90 seconds and emphasize the importance of learning from others.
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Next up: my dearly beloved
@krmaude on "Teaching Women and Queerness, but Without Interrogating Whiteness." Begins by admitting that she wrote a Brit Lit before 1800 syllabus without dead white men--but full of dead white women. (I am also guilty of this!)Show this thread -
Teaching Brit Lit before 1800 at the American University of Beirut, Maude teaches primarily Lebanese students, mostly English majors. For many of her students, this is the first time they encounter medieval texts. How can we introduce students to the medieval in an inclusive way?
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"They don't know what the canon is--which is very freeing."pic.twitter.com/plAlCwPlXP
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Maude assumed race and ethnicity would "just happen" in the classroom, given her position. It didn't: "By not foregrounding race, my class was inadvertently adding to the idea that 'whiteness' was unmarked and the norm in the medieval world."
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(That last is me summarizing Kath poorly but it was so good that I wanted it in)
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Maude: adding more people of color (in primary and critical texts) to the syllabus is not enough. We have to do more. Maude adds a new goal to the course: for students to think about the continuities and discontinuities in thinking on race in the medieval and modern worlds.
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A cool resource Maude uses in class: https://www.englandsimmigrants.com/
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I really can't emphasize enough how radical and brave and BRILLIANT it is for
@krmaude to give a talk about her journey of revising a syllabus to be more inclusive.Show this thread -
Last speaker: Jennifer Knight (University of South Florida) on "Making Boudicca a 'Global Citizen': Teaching Sexual Violence and Exploitative Colonization through a Celtic Queen."
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In their exploration of the story of Boudicca, Knight asks students to consider the portrayal of Boudicca as a female leader and the sexual violence against indigenous bodies.
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The irony of using Boudicca as a symbol of British empire is that she was clearly anti-imperialism. So why the comparisons to Margaret Thatcher (!!!) and Queen Victoria?
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Knight finds that Boudicca's story is useful for students thinking through the reality and violence of Roman imperialism: the ideal vector for helping shape students prepared for "a modern globalized world," as per USF's "global citizens project"
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The story of Boudicca helps students to identify sexual assault, exploitation, violence against indigenous bodies, and punitive enslavement as the impetus behind anti-colonial movements. That understanding of imperial power is crucial for students.
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Also, crucially: demystifies and challenges the Roman empire for students who may not have ever questioned its presence of expansion.
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Day two! First up: Melissa Heide (
@vanderheathen) on "Native Medievalisms and the Graduate Experience." Heide begins by exploring how her identity as a Eastern Band Cherokee/Choctaw woman informs her work in medieval studies.Show this thread -
"Where do I belong if I'm not quite Indian enough? Am I passing, or am I invisible?"
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Heide explains that graduate work in medieval studies "provided a set of tools so I could better begin investigating my private life." Those tools include archival work, better understanding of migration and oral traditions, etc.
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Heide's final thoughts: "Encourage your students to reclaim theory, and take it down from the Ivory tower. We can bring those skills back to our community...why choose to be a scholar or an activist, when we can be both?"
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Next up: Jay Paul Gates on "Making It Our Own: The Colonizers' Corpus in the HSI/MSI/MMI Classroom."
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Gates begin by contextualizing his teaching at CUNY: 15,000 working-class students, many of whom work full-time, part-time, and/or are caretakers for family. Most are bilingual. CUNY celebrates the "upward mobility" of its students. Gates asks: "what else are we offering them?"
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One of Gates' major goals in every class: help students develop skills that give them access to texts they don't have immediate access to. These skills carry over into any text they're interested in--in and outside of the classroom.
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Another goal: giving students the tools to be comfortable with and authoritative on "cultural capital" (i.e., the medieval canon) even if that capital is outside their own culture. Empowering students to take ownership of the colonizers' corpus!
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Gates: in a classroom where the vast majority of students don't identify culturally with the material, students are able to safely "try out" new theoretical and analytical modes.
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