African American Womanist Pedagogy - Paper for Senior Seminar
The use of the Greek terms Praxis, Ethos, Pathos
and Logos were a calculated choice by Rev. Dr. Cannon. Not only were they used
simply because they fit the notion of what she was trying to convey, but I
think that she used them because they are so often associated with ideals of
platonic reason and academic rigor. There is a very strong bent within academia
to use language that can often obfuscate the true meaning of something, or make
a concept seem more complex than it is, however this is not what Cannon was
doing here. These words relate to some of the most foundational aspects of
teaching and education, and their use elicits a sense of seriousness and
professionalism that she wanted to highlight in her explication of African American
Womanist pedagogy.
While
I did become somewhat jaded with the use of the term praxis while I was living
in Silicon Valley, when it comes to actual teaching, its use implies not just
that there is action going on, but that there is a depth of tradition that
African American women are drawing on in their teaching styles and the ways
that they work within a classroom.
Because they often had to work with so little in terms of physical and
monetary resources, they had to draw from the depths of their own personal
knowledge, experiences, and communities in order to give the best that they
could to their students. We have seen this historically in the ways that
African American educators have taught children in primary and secondary
school, and it has also carried over into the ways that they teach in
post-secondary institutions as well.
When
Cannon discusses the Historical Ethos, Embodied Pathos, and Communal Logos of
African American Womanist pedagogy, she is setting a rhetorical tone in her
writing that denotes depth, complexity, longevity, persistence and
sustainability of practice. African American women had to struggle against
multiple systems of oppression in order to get to the point where they were
able to teach, whether it be children or adults. Some of these struggles were
part of their upbringing in the USA where they were treated as less than whole
people, and part was during the course of their educational processes which
again told them that they were not worthy. In order to get through, they had to
often work harder, with the constant disruption of sexist behavior and
harassment at every turn. Their work was scrutinized and nitpicked and they
were simply dragged over every possible coal in order to pass muster. As Cannon
states:
“The
invisible imbalance of cognitive imperialism gets played out in the culture of
education in very visible expectations. The ubiquitous assumption of many
scholars as well as students in the
womanist classroom is that they are not learning, that they are not participating in the rigor of
academic excellence, that they are not getting the biggest bang for their educational buck if
they are not beaten up, if they are not being
told repeatedly how they got it wrong, how they messed up, if their
papers are not bleeding with red ink
from nonstop nitpicking of minor flaws.”[1]
This
is a common thread in many academic settings, and particularly in theological
schools and ivy league institutions. Where learning and rigor have been
conflated with a very masculine-centric, punishing model of education, that
manifests itself in the larger culture as well in things like “hustle culture”.
In graduate school in particular students are pushed to forgo normal healthy
self-care, rest, good nutrition, and having even a small modicum of mental
well-being in order to be “successful” students. These women developed an ethos
regarding teaching and learning that arose from their histories and their
experiences, and determined that learning did not have to look this way to be
rigorous, and teachers did not have to be draconian to be effective.
In
most of my classes at PSR I have not really had the same experience of
cognitive imperialism, that I experienced at my previous university. There, it
really was push push push, no matter what was happening in the rest of your
life or in your body. I actually had my PhD advisor instruct me to not tell
people in the department about my illness, because they would think less of me,
and that in order to ensure that they did not think I was defective. And,
because I already had told them about my illness, I would now need to work
harder and prove myself to be superior to the others in every academic way to
be taken seriously. This was absolutely brutal on my body and my health, not to
mention my mental wellbeing. Here at PSR I have been able to benefit from the
decolonized pedagogical styles of a number of professors, who, while ensuring
we learned and stretched ourselves, did not do so at the expense of our health.
I have witnessed on many occasions that instructors here want to truly help
students not just survive but thrive in grad school and I find that very
liberating and life-giving.
Beyond
her own personal lived experience, Cannon draws on the experiences of other
women of color and their writings to support her arguments. She shows how the
deep cultural understanding of the value of black souls informs classrooms that
are caring, nurturing, that produce good fruit.She describes this in her idea
of “wheels within wheels” as stated here:
“One wheel deals with the intellectual
predisposition of traditional male thinkers,
usually dead or of European ancestry whose very language of objective
universality masks our existence, forces
persistence in the binary opposition of either-or, and looks askance at black women as superfluous
appendages, saddled with odd concerns about race, sex, and class oppression.
The second wheel focuses on the specificity of African American Christian
culture, systematic accounts of the history and
achievements, perspectives and experiences of members of the black
church community. The third wheel explores the experiential dimensions of
women’s texts and interpretations. This
is the part of each course—theological and otherwise—wherein students listen to women of the African
diaspora speaking their mother’s tongue, as
black women refine and critique their own realities across time and
space through the written word”.[2]
She also states that womanist pedagogy is centered
around the concept of liberation ethics as defined by one of her former
professors at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Beverly Harrison defined it as
follows:
“Liberation ethics is debunking, unmasking and
disentangling the ideologies, theologies and systems of value operative in a
particular society. “How” is it done? By
analyzing the established power relationships that determine the cultural, political and economic
presuppositions and by evaluating the legitimating myths which sanction the
enforcement of such values. “Why” is it
worth doing? So that we may become responsible decision-makers who envision structural and systemic alternatives
that embrace the well-being of us all.” [3]
This allows classrooms to become communities,
where syllabi are created as covenants of intention and personal accountability
and intellectual inquiry are valued above all else, and students are situated
in such a way that they are able to teach themselves what they need to know,
and truly collaborative work can be done.
These
types of classrooms can help to lessen the impact of negative outside cultural
influences that continue to suppress black women’s voices to the detriment of
us all. Stereotypical representations of black women as somehow simultaneously
deficient and incapable of academic rigor, but at the same time strong and able
to take on anything, can create problems for both the women of color, and other
students in the class, setting everyone up for failure of one type or another.
Women of color may fail to connect with their own potential for growth and
flourishing, and white and male students may falsely assume that they are the
standard by which others will be judged. These kinds of relations of domination
are so common in our society that they may seem natural and normal, despite
their false nature. Cannon says that it may be quite disorienting for students
who are used to colonized classrooms to walk into a womanist classroom and
experience the very different environment that their historical ethos, and
embodied pathos create.
The
idea of reciprocity in the classroom assumes that students are not just like
hungry birds having tidbits of knowledge dropped into their heads by the
parent, but that there is a real relationship of exchange that is going on
between the teacher and the learners. Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book “Braiding
Sweetgrass” relayed a story about how she and her sister were “raised by
strawberries” to illustrate this idea of reciprocity. She and her sister would
come home from school in the late spring/early summer and run out into the yard
to see if the wild strawberries were ready yet, they would nurture the vines,
clear paths for them, and sure enough, the little vines would take root wherever
they cleared the soil beneath the runners and would grow bigger and prepare to
bear fruit. When the time was right, the strawberry plants would give them
berries, which they would give to their grandfather, who would bake with the
berries and give gifts of food back to the girls. The strawberries were free,
and gave their gifts freely, but also benefited from the nurturing they were
given by the girls. She then related how she and her sister worked at the
strawberry farm down the road as they got older, and that the woman who ran the
farm would tell them “don’t you eat any of these berries, these belong to me”.
Kimmerer contemplated about this fact, that the strawberries that were owned by
the woman were not free…they were a commodity and only given to those who could
pay, but the wild strawberries belonged only to themselves and could give their
gifts freely and abundantly to whomever found them, and that nurturing the wild
berries benefits everyone, while nurturing the captive berries only nurtures the
person who owns them. I think that this parallels well with the ideas of
womanist pedagogy, and this idea of reciprocity - the womanist teacher is
teaching to wild strawberries, nurturing, helping clear the way so that they
can do the job of growing, giving gifts and spreading freely wherever the soil
is good, and at the same time they are giving gifts, they are receiving them.
If our classrooms are relationships of reciprocity, this entails a
responsibility on the part of all participants, both the giver and the receiver
to promote the flourishing and wellbeing of the other (regardless of who is the
giver and who is the receiver). This really runs counter to the atmosphere in
many academic settings, from K-12 to Doctoral programs.
I
am not sure how I would enhance the communal logos in this seminar class, other
than that we work on these foundational ideas that were gifted to us by the
late Rev. Dr. Cannon, and truly think of the ways that we have a responsibility
to one another, and to our wider communities to promote each other’s
flourishing, with care and intentionality, knowing that the gifts we give to
each other can be “regifted” to others. Kimmerer states it so eloquently and
poetically in this passage:
“…he thought wild strawberry shortcake was the
best possible present, or so he had us convinced. It was a gift that could
never be bought. As children raised by strawberries, we were probably unaware
that the gift of berries was from the fields themselves, not from us. Our gift
was time and attention and care and red-stained fingers. Heart berries,
indeed”. [4]
References
Cannon, Katie G. The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology.
Edited by Katie G. Cannon and Anthony B. Pinn. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 2014.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, MN:
Milkweed Editions, 2013.
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