The classroom can be a space where students can encounter possibilities, confront challenges, and become persons engaging in creative, critical, and compassionate thought.
I approach teaching and learning in a way that centers students’ voices and provides them with an environment to develop their own ideas in relation to authors, texts, politics, and society. As an instructor, I am firstly a mentor, helping students navigate their way through often difficult tasks.
Slow Pedagogy: When we focus less on student consumption of content and information, we foster space to think creatively, critically, and compassionately. My classes focus less on rote memorization and more on what students do with the material they’re given. One set of readings early in the week sets a foundation for reflection alongside film and TV media in the latter half, allowing students not to memorize what they read but instead to put it into practice. Students’ weekly written assignments are often of higher quality than what I have seen in the past. I ask much of them, but I also give them time.
Meta-Reflection: My classes are designed to place students and their own voices and ideas at the front of the class. I become a mentor, while they become the teachers. In my upper-division courses, students are responsible for designing and leading class lessons. They are required to meet with me beforehand for idea generation and afterward for a meta-reflection on the experience itself. In these meetings, opportunities for students and me to be partners in teaching and learning, we discuss and propose new ideas for generating rich conversations in the classrooms.
Resonation & Resistance: Critical and creative thought begins in learning our own reactions to the ideas with which we’re confronted. I have designed templates for note-taking that moves beyond the tendency to think that we must understand what we read perfectly before having anything to say about it. Students have used these materials to prepare entire class lessons, with successful and meaningful lectures, discussions, and activities.
Zaccary A. Haney, PhD 