Abstract
I was not a good teacher at the outset—almost not a teacher at all. I struggled on the job market and my first academic position very nearly ended in disaster. Somewhere along the way, through a process I cannot fully map, I became a good teacher. Part of that required being at the right place, which for me has been Macalester College. Part of it involved learning to teach to my strengths. Part of it may be that I came to see pedagogy as largely about “reading, thinking, and writing.” Early in my career, I embraced disempowering my relatively elite students, but now I am uncertain, since my students no longer seem to feel empowered and I have the sense of teaching in an era of capitalist ruins.
Thanks to Naeem Inayatullah, Jamie Frueh, and Lisa Mueller for insightful and occasionally painful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
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Notes
- 1.
An insight Naeem insisted on here.
- 2.
David L. Blaney, “International Politics: as it is, as it might be,” Critical Studies on Security 1:3 (2013), 275–6.
- 3.
Something like this revision came out when I was asked to say a few words on the occasion of receiving that teaching award in 2011, the occasion of the enumeration of my self-exploitation described above.
- 4.
I should have referenced Foucault here, in light of the growing role of footnoting in teaching statements.
- 5.
I am quoting myself: David L Blaney, “Global Education, Disempowerment, and Curricula for a World Politics,” Journal of Studies in International Education 6:3 (Fall 2002), 268–82. I think Himadeep Muppidi suggested this language to me.
- 6.
Blaney, “Global Education,” 278.
- 7.
I may not have been willing to put it quite this way in materials to be read by a promotion committee.
- 8.
Jamie Frueh, David Blaney, Kevin Dunn, Patricia Goff, Erik K. Leonard, and Simona Sharoni, “Political Beliefs and the Academic Responsibilities of Undergraduate Teaching,” Journal of Political Science Education 4:4 (2008), 447–62.
- 9.
See Naeem Inayatullah on the problem with helping: “Why do some people think they know what is good for others?” in Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss (eds) Global Politics: A New Introduction (Routledge, 2008), pp. 344–69.
- 10.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University, 2015).
- 11.
See “Tea and Text: Cultivated Intuition as Methodological Process,” for Johnna Montgomerie, major author and editor, Critical Methods in Political and Cultural Economy (London: Routledge, 2017).
References
Blaney, David L. 2002. Global Education, Disempowerment, and Curricula for a World Politics. Journal of Studies in International Education 6 (3): 268–282. https://doi.org/10.1177/102831530263007.
———. 2013. International Politics: As it Is, as it Might be. Critical Studies on Security 1 (3): 358–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2013.850227.
Frueh, Jamie, David L. Blaney, Kevin Dunn, Patricia Goff, Eric K. Leonard, and Simona Sharoni. 2008. Political Beliefs and the Academic Responsibilities of Undergraduate Teaching. Journal of Political Science Education 4 (4): 447–462. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512160802413725.
Inayatullah, Naeem. 2008. Why Do some People Think they Know What Is Good for Others? In Global Politics: A New Introduction, ed. Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss, 344–369. London: Routledge.
Inayatullah, Naeem, and David Blaney. 2017. Tea and Text: Cultivated Intuition as Methodological Process. In Critical Methods in Political and Cultural Economy, ed. Johnna Montgomerie, 23–27. London: Routledge.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Blaney, D.L. (2020). Teaching in Capitalist Ruins. In: Frueh, J. (eds) Pedagogical Journeys through World Politics. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20305-4_8
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