Abstract
Teaching politics is political. Teaching politics in the Trump era presents challenges: many established practices and norms of international politics are in flux. In addition to the effect these changes may have on course content and focus, rhetorical strategies of the Trump administration can seep into classroom conversations. I have noticed increased student demand for “both sides” of topical issues to be “presented equally” in the classroom. This chapter considers critics’ accusations of the Academy as proliferating left-leaning bias, liberal propaganda, or “cultural Marxism” at the expense of properly debating “both sides” of an issue [sic]. The demand for “both sides” has a central assumption that all ideas have equal merit and that all persons in the classroom are equally affected by ideas—an assumption that is problematic and obscures power relations that exist in the classroom. While instructors should cover various ideological perspectives on issues, the content we present is hardly neutral and the ways we teach and facilitate is inherently political. The ways that instructors facilitate classroom discussion is as important as the content we include in the syllabus. The chapter seeks to conceptualize teaching as both an act of politics and a tool to disrupt injustice in the classroom space.
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Notes
- 1.
For more, see Jordan B Peterson’s argument that women’s studies and “ethnic and racial studies” on campus should have their funding cuts and his criticism that humanities and social sciences have been “corrupted quite terribly by the postmodern doctrine”. Available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4c-jOdPTN8&t=280s (Retrieved 17 January 2020).
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Wegner, N. (2021). Connecting Feminist Theory and Critical Pedagogies: Disrupting Assumptions About Teaching and Canon. In: Smith, H.A., Hornsby, D.J. (eds) Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_3
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