In a nutshell: It’s been a year of Pedagogishness. Where have we been and where do we go from here?
On January 1, 2012, I launched Pedagogishness, a blog whose not very clever tagline is “Michael Broder on teaching and learning in the humanities.” Now it’s New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2012. Pedagogishness has had about 8500 visitors, an average of about 700 per month. I’ve written about teaching and learning language, literature, and culture, even declaring the End of Western Civilization.
When I launched Pedagogishness a year ago, I said it was going to be a virtual vitrine for ideas and insights based on my own experience in the classroom. Perhaps that is why Pedagogishness went completely silent from September through November, when I was so burnt out from the most traumatic year in my academic life that I felt completely drained of any insights or ideas. I fear it may be alarming for my colleagues, students, and friends where I taught from August 2011 to August 2012 to see me characterize my time with them as traumatic. But trauma is not always a bad thing. As Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson both aver, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. In August 2011 I left home and family in the bluest state for a one-year gig teaching in the reddest state. There were ups and downs, successes and failures, wins and losses. Much of the trauma had nothing to do with the job itself, but with the context of food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and human contact in which my academic life was embedded. My furnished room came furnished with bed bugs, for example. Bad things happened to the people I loved back home and I was not there to help. The full-time, permanent academic job I hoped would materialize last winter was not in fact to be. Then, over the summer, I fulfilled a lifelong academic dream. My daily blog entries accentuated the positive aspects of that experience, but life is not a golden line, and you have to take the ictus with the arsis.
You can’t really keep a good pedagogue down, however, and as I limped through the fall semester back at my beloved Brooklyn College, my insights and ideas began to wake up and smell the pedagogy. By December I was back to posting weekly on average, revisiting favorite topics like critical theory, critical race, critical pedagogy, diversity and inclusion, education policy, the intersections of literature with the other arts, the intersection of high culture with popular culture. I declared the End of Western Civilization and I switched my blogging platform from Blogger, the IHOP of blogging platforms, to WordPress, the blogging world’s Veuve Clicquot.
And here we are. You know how hard it is for me to keep blog posts at a reasonable length, but I’ll try to start wrapping this up. In my very first post on January 1, 2012, I claimed that I would spend a lot of time blogging about nuts-and-bolts topics like course design, learning objectives, assessment tools, and writing across the curriculum. As it turned out, I’m much more interested in the fate of humanism and critical thinking, particularly the problems of where they fit into an American educational culture in crisis over how to deal with globalization and the waning economic dominance of the United States. In a sense, Pedagogishness has turned out to be mostly about the topic I mentioned as a sort of aside: why we teach.
More about all of the above in 2013. In the meantime, Happy New Year.