A few years ago, Kevin M. Gannon was coming off a difficult semester of teaching. At the same time, higher education was under siege, thought Gannon, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a professor of history at Grand View University, in Iowa. He felt the pull of despair: Does teaching really matter?
That summer, Gannon wrote a “teaching manifesto,” to clarify why he still believed teaching matters, and posted it on his blog, The Tattooed Professor. It closed with the words “Teaching is a radical act of hope.”
Those words resonated. Gannon was invited to talk about his post on Bonni Stachowiak’s Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. That led to an invitation from James M. Lang, a professor of English at Assumption College and editor of West Virginia University Press’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series, to turn the manifesto into a book.
The book, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, to be officially released on April 1, is meant to help professors put into action an idea called critical pedagogy — the notion that teaching is a deeply political act and instructors should encourage students to challenge the status quo.
Teaching, Gannon writes, is radical because it’s about transformation. It’s hopeful because that transformation is positive. “A better future,” he writes, “takes shape out of our students’ critical refusal to abide the limitations of the present.”
The Chronicle asked Gannon, who writes regularly about teaching and learning in these pages, how his view of teaching could change professors’ interactions with their students — and how it could challenge colleges’ priorities. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
What feedback do you get when people hear you’re writing a book called Radical Hope?
A lot of funny looks followed by awkward pauses, and then some variation of the question: So how’s that going?
How have you responded?
I tell them it’s certainly an interesting time to be trying to do that. But I think the stakes are higher, too, to really talk about hope, and what that means in action.
What I’m really concerned about is that we don’t spend so much time sitting in this place of “I hope things get better,’ and forget that we’re the ones who actually have to bring that about.
A lot of the book is about how professors interact with their students. You tell a story about a student who was struggling in one of your classes and made a bunch of excuses you could see through. And then she finally admitted that she’d been in treatment for heroin addiction. It’s a dramatic example of something I’ve heard from lots of professors — that an encounter with a particular student challenged their assumptions about students in general. What do stories like this tell us about professors’ assumptions?
It becomes all too easy for us to see students as adversaries and not allies. There’s a lot of stress and angst associated with being in academia, particularly if one is contingent, as 75 percent of our faculty are. It’s easy for that stress to latch on to students as the target of convenience.
It becomes all too easy for us to see students as adversaries and not allies.
You know the Facebook posts and the other narratives: You won’t believe what they wrote in this essay, or here’s how stupid these answers they gave me were.
Sometimes it takes an individual story like that to shake us out of our complacency and help us realize that, you know, we know a lot of stuff, but there is a lot about our students that we don’t know. And rather than try to fill in the blanks ourselves, maybe we should listen to them.
As you describe it, you weren’t a particularly good student yourself in undergrad. How does that inform the way you think about students?
I was what we might call an academic late bloomer. I always did well in history courses in undergrad, but there was a lot of other stuff that I didn’t do well. In my case, I just partied way too much. I was a typical college student, you know, white guy from the suburbs, who got to college and had all sorts of options that he didn’t have in front of him before, and then selected all the wrong ones. I got the first F I ever got in my life, my first semester, freshman year. I was admitted to the honors program when I was admitted to my undergraduate college; I got kicked out by the end of my first year. It took a while for me to figure things out.
I had a lot of faculty who saw what I could do rather than what I was doing, and believed in that potential. So when I finally came around and was getting my act together, I hadn’t burned those bridges. I wouldn’t have been able to get into graduate school and to succeed through that if it wasn’t for folks who had been giving me the benefit of the doubt.
I try to pay that forward to students with whom I’m working now.
You describe feeling like you had to prove your authority to your students right out of graduate school. And then toward the end of the book, you argue that one of the most meaningful things instructors can do is admit to students when they don’t know something. Maybe this is just the natural progression as professors get more comfortable in the classroom over time. But I wonder how colleges could help professors be authentic sooner.
First and foremost, there should absolutely be more pedagogical training in graduate programs. When you come out of graduate school and you’re in a teaching environment, all of a sudden you realize you’ve been trained to do a lot of things, but what you’re being asked to do the most now wasn’t one of those things. It’s not as if impostor syndrome isn’t already a thing in graduate education, but it gets exacerbated that first year or two out when you realize: Oh my God, I’m highly credentialed, but I have no idea what to do with these 50 students in front of me right now.
What we need to be doing as well is faculty development. We do a mentorship program here, and one of the things that new faculty colleagues tell me is: Without this, I wouldn’t have been able to settle in like I was able to. We also need to support minority faculty and our women faculty colleagues. We know that students in general tend to question their expertise. It’s one thing for me, a white dude, to say, Hey, don’t be afraid to fail. But it’s another thing, if I was a young black woman just starting out.
Let’s say a professor reads this and thinks: You know, I have been treating my students as adversaries, and that’s not really what I want to do. What’s the first thing you’d encourage that person to try?
The place to start is creating the space and opportunities to talk with students more, and more meaningfully. Can you come into class 10 minutes early, as people are coming in, and talk with them about whatever? Instead of calling them “office hours,” call them “student hours.” Can you hold them somewhere else on campus? Maybe require that students come for a brief conference at the beginning of the semester?
One of the most important things that we can do as faculty is to listen to our students’ stories, find out who they are and why they’re here. The more students’ stories we know, the less they are a homogenous category to us, the more they are actual, full, and complicated human beings, just as we are.
How can college leaders better support professors in this?
One of the most important things that we can do as faculty is to listen to our students’ stories, find out who they are and why they’re here.
Faculty development is key. We also need to create the space for faculty to fail, just like we would say we want our students to take risks and not be afraid to fail. How can we do that for contingent faculty? How do we make those positions more secure? How do we encourage innovation and new pedagogies without this fear that the student evaluations will be bad? One specific way to do that as an institution is to say: If you’re a faculty member who’s going to be trying a significant course revision or pedagogical change, we won’t look at the student ratings from that class, because we know that that will be an outlier in terms of the data.
We have to understand that we can’t get faculty to innovate if we haven’t created the space where they feel like they can do that without having to continually look over their shoulder.
In addition to challenging professors to look at their students differently, you’re challenging colleges to look at teaching differently. Tell me more about that.
We see all of these lamentations — often written by very prominent academics who are at elite institutions — about the declining relevance of higher ed, and in particular the humanities. These pleas are that we do public outreach. What they mean by public outreach is: Write books like I do for a general audience.
The most important form of public outreach that we can do in higher ed is teaching, and we’re not supporting the ways in which it’s done most effectively. Recentering teaching and learning is where our success and a sustainable future lies.
