Introduction to Intercultural Pedagogy for Writing Instructors: IU Workshop Session I

Class Description

Please note: This session is open to GrubStreet instructors only. This session will also be recorded.

Craft is a set of expectations.

Expectations are not universal;

they are culturally specific

and standardized.

Matthew Salesses, 2021

…Workshop leaders teach their students of color to gaze through a lens of whiteness in order to access “the human element”, they teach their students of color to endorse racist representation of themselves as accurate, inconsequential, representative of a bygone era, or beside the point; they teach their students of color to mimic whiteness to “access their voice”.

Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop.

*******************

Participants will engage with the core skills, habits, and practices of Intercultural Understanding (IU), a pedagogy for equitable teaching & learning that invites instructors to explore the space between SELF, CRAFT, and WORLD in their creative workshop.

We will begin by interrogating our own personal and social identities and cultural values, as these

• shape and inform the cultural norms and expectations instructors set in their classroom/workshop,
• Shape and inform instructors’ interactions with workshop participants (including handling experiences of microaggressions and biases and communication) and
• impact motivation and/or resistance to designing curricula for equitable learning and expanding the range of voices and narratives in an effort to complete and complicate literary canons.

During this session, participants will engage with the foundations of IU, which supports educators in:

• creating a workshop culture that honors the complexities, cultural specificity, and dignity of every participant, including the texts we read and critique, which makes for an equitable and diversified workshop;
• facilitating reading activities and writing prompts that leverage and bring to life the differences in writers’ identities, life experiences, situated knowledge (D. Haraway), as well as craft traditions and inspiration;
• designing assignments through which all writers wrestle with and deepen the relationship between their identities, craft traditions of choice, the world around them and the world represented in the texts they read. Deepening the relationship self, craft, world translates into creating a more meaningful, intimate, multifaceted, and culturally responsive body of work;
• educating writers to honor and empower the cultural relevance and specificity of their own work, and discuss the “opacity” (E. Glissant) in their peers’ work in skillful ways;
• Setting cultural expectations that make writers responsible for their artistic, and personal agency, by contributing to a non-competitive community of peers that propels their growth and inspiration and keeps them accountable for a continuous intercultural reading of their own and their peers’ creative production;
• designing capacious learning goals that are tangible and specific, but also multidimensional and generous (e.g “contribute to the class understanding of interculturality in poetry in at least two different ways during workshop”, rather than “ writing two essays on climate change”), so that writers can enter and meet them in diversified, creative, confident and personal ways. Connecting each learning goal to specific values that matter to your teaching, articulating the reason behind each value;
• assessing the writers' processes and growth rather than the final product, and offering them the opportunity for self-assessment and feedback on our teaching and reading list.

Class Format

This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. About 15 minutes before your class is scheduled to begin, you'll receive an email from your instructor with a link to join the class meeting!