Ghosts of Courses Past

This week my blog is going to focus on something I have been thinking a lot about and talking about with colleagues and friends, which is the courses that we used to teach or the sessions we used to facilitate, that we don't anymore, and how they still haunt us in different ways.

I used to teach a women's literature course, one version at a university, and one at a community college, for around a decade. A decade is a long time to teach a class. In a decade a lot of the ways you teach the course will definitely shift. Your assessments will change, the texts will change, the way you facilitate and guide discussions of particular topics will change. That change is often part of what makes teaching so exciting, but also the source of a lot of anxiety for folk. 

Reactivity to the conversation that happens both inside the educational space, and outside the educational space in terms of socio-political or socio-cultural developments is often a difficult thing to balance. It is a skill set that is assumed everyone who is in education will possess, but it is also an assumption that is ableist. Not everyone processes information in the same way, not everyone can react to situations instantaneously. We sadly often find ourselves in environments where "can I get back to you?" or "lets pick that up again next week" is seen with a particular connotation that can impact the trust and inclusion of a space.

I would love for us to get to a point in pedagogy where "can we get back to that" is a given. Because of the reactive instant nature of a lot of things that happen in HigherEd there is a belief that the same reactive instant nature needs to apply to all spaces. Having more time for reflection and thought, to respond meaningfully to a thing that was said, or an important concept that has many points of view, is so important.

And yet the ghosts of those conversations and courses sort of haunt us, in an "l'esprit d'escalier" sort of way. But they can also haunt us in positive ways, remembering important conversations that were had in classes, moments that happened organically that can never be repeated because it required the right combination of prompting and people in the room (virtual or on-campus) for it to happen in the first place.

We bring our whole selves to the places we embody educationally. We cannot erase the past teaching experiences we have had; we cannot erase the past learning experiences we have had. All of these become part of who we are and how we identify, as instructors, teaching assistants, educational developers, instructional designers, and workshop facilitators. Sometimes HigherEd sort of systemically wishes us to erase those parts of ourselves and be a different person in whatever spaces we find ourselves in, when in reality it is the totality of our lived experience that makes us who we are, that brings valuable insight to conversations.

Sometimes the ghosts of courses past are forgotten and reappear at different times. I always think about those women's literature courses because they are a moment in time for me, a precariously employed moment in time, but a moment in time nonetheless. There are so many conversations and strategies that I used in those courses that I use still to this day in the professional communications course I teach, and the educational developer work I do. And though these ghosts are often brought up when folk put dossiers together for various things in HigherEd, I wish there was a more real and consistent way to acknowledge them and the ways they inform who we are. 

What ghosts of courses past do you carry with you? What moments resonate the most when you think of past courses?