Sometimes theories of critical pedagogy can be quite abstract. What does it look like to front concrete practices in our approaches to this tradition? How do those practices change in the context of community colleges? What can radical community college educators teach us about radical teaching and learning broadly?

Our July 2024 episode features three community college educators who co-edited the recent edited collection Humanizing Collectivist Critical Pedagogy: Teaching the Humanities in Community College and Beyond (Peter Lang 2024). This book is a must-read for teachers curious about the practical applications of critical pedagogy for crafting syllabi, building more democratic classroom structures, creating socially engaged classrooms, and fighting for more just and equitable educational systems. 

Sujung Kim is an interdisciplinary scholar of critical pedagogy of higher education who is currently a research associate with the Futures Initiative and Humanities Alliance at CUNY Graduate Center. Leigh Garrison-Fetcher is a linguistics professor in the Education and Language Acquisition Department at LaGuardia Community College. Kaysi Holman is the Director of People and Culture at the California-based educational equity nonprofit 10,000 Degrees. Sujung, Leigh, and Kaysi met in the context of their shared work with the Mellon-funded CUNY Humanities Alliance—of which Kaysi was a key creator and leader—where they worked graduate teachers and faculty on creating social justice oriented classrooms.

CREDITS

Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

Editor and Audio Engineer: Aliyah Harris

Summer 2024 Intern: Ella Stuccio

Theme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins

Outro Music: “hemlock hed” by Akrasis

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Humanizing Critical Pedagogy: The Promise of Community Colleges

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This book provides an important and very useful collection of essays, and we recommend it highly. In this podcast, Soo Jung Leigh and Casey relate their passion for democratic teaching, their commitment to trusting their students, and what makes for a joyful classroom. Welcome, Soo Jung Leigh and Casey, to Nothing Never Happens.

Lucia Hulsether: Well, all of you, welcome to Nothing Never Happens. We love your work and we're so happy to, to get to be in this conversation with you. I'm wondering if to start out, you might just tell us how you came to work together and maybe situate yourselves a little bit with respect to the work you do in critical pedagogy, but also the work you do as a collaborative group.

Absolutely. This is

And then also, within CUNY Humanities Alliance, you know, faculty mentors and professional development and so on. So, so much. And then, so, my work, as part of my ethnographic work, observing classrooms, and then, you know, hang out with doctor fellows, observing professional development, and then hang out with undergraduate students, and interviewing is like that.

And then it's more like a collaborative learning community. they formed, and then so, and then they kind of, they were, they had freedom to experiment, you know, to kind of launch, to try new, you know, teaching methods and new activities, new ideas, and that, you know, within kind of professional, development space or outside of, you know, institution.

when we are hanging out, you know, they kept talking about their, you know, pedagogy and then, you know, their class practices as like that. So I think this is a great, you know, how can I say, channel for, you know, to share with people, who are more interested in, you know, pedagogy, critical pedagogy and humanities.

I did my dissertation research about the, you know, community college international students. And so I analyzed lots of, you know, critical discourse analysts on government documents and so on. And then I found the dominant discourse was really, you know, community colleges are identified as vocational center.

And this really kind of, I personally, I felt like it's kind of crisis of community college education. So, That's why I, you know, suggested this idea of book, book, you know, collaborative book project.

Leigh Garrison-Fletcher: Yeah, and hello, my name is Leigh. I am a faculty member at LaGuardia Community College. I teach in the Education and Language Acquisition Department and I was first, I first joined the CUNY Humanities Alliance as a faculty mentor.

And so, I worked with three different graduate fellows, and I think the beautiful thing about the group, program was that undergrad, not undergrads, graduate students got, uh, training in teaching undergraduates, which I think all too often is not part of doctoral education, so that a lot of times, you know, in higher education, the faculty and instructors don't have much pedagogical training.

Tina Pippin: Well, now's a good time to talk about the book and if you would unpack the title for us, Humanizing Collectivist Critical Pedagogy. There are a lot of pieces there. tell us how you got involved. into critical pedagogies, I guess plural, and how you humanize and collectivize all that.

Kaysi Holman: This is Casey again, and thank you both so much for having us on the podcast today.

Sujung Kim: Yeah, so I just want to add, you know, two cases, you know, talk and then so, as I mentioned before, you know, briefly, you know, I mentioned about the dominant discourse about the community colleges and then so in even, you know, community colleges summit or, you know, Or, you know, dominant policies and then government documents.

So the way in each how, you know, communications are I identified by the know dominant, um, discourses and the policies is really dehumanizing, just kind of describing them or, you know, positioning them as kind of a, um, kind of economic employee, you know, soldiers or, you know, contributors for who can work for, you know, business, you know, property.

you know, accumulation regimes. And then so we really want to revise. These kind of dominant discourses. So, you know, humanizing is the most important, you know, we really highlight that aspect. And then also, you know, collective, collectivist means that, you know, as case mentioned that we are kind of really emphasizing mutual agency.

Lucia Hulsether: I'm curious. Just to jump right into examples, if you might give an example of how in your classrooms, or maybe in your departments, it could, it could be in or out of the context of an actual class, you work against some of these dehumanizing, messages, also funding structures that you and your students are confronting.

What does it look like to teach when that is a kind of shadow, that is shaping the context in, to, in which you sort of enter into these relationships with, with one another.

Sujung Kim: So, and then also I want to share a, Dr. Fellows who tried, so she concerned about the power relationship in the classroom, so she was white woman, and then she really recognized, be aware of her positionality, and then her students are mostly like students of colors, you know, non native English speaker, it's like that.

So, one day she talked, when. And we have kind of chatting when we're chatting. She talks about Sujeong, I'm thinking about how to about my, you know, what kind of shoes I want, I want to, you know, have or what kind of clothes I want to wear when I go to, you know, classrooms. And then so, usually she mentioned that her students.

And then also another case is that even in my class, My own class teaching too. So there are, you know, non native English speakers and then so in the first assignment, you know, when I gave them also another, you know, TA, undergraduate TA, who helped the course, also kind you know, talk, gave a guideline about, you know, writing in your own languages.

can't understand Spanish just like that, then I kind of told the students, oh, because my, you know, linguistic skills in Spanish is so low, and then so, it's my also kind of responsibility as an instructor, but I will do my best to find someone who can, you know, comment on your papers like that. So this is a kind of a one.

Leigh Garrison-Fletcher: And maybe I could just add a little bit. This is Leigh again. so. thinking about syllabi, that Casey was mentioning, and also thinking more about my own approaches, humanizing collectivist critical pedagogy in my classes. a lot of the syllabus I co construct with students, so we always do community agreements. usually I have a blueprint of like when certain assignments, are going to be due, but that's open for debate. or, you know, students can always propose changes or, and, and so I set it up from the beginning as, you know, it's not top down. I'm, you know, whatever I say goes. but we're a community and we do all this together and we make these decisions together.

And, you know, that's no problem. but then I still am aware of my, my positionality, cause I'm also a white, I'm a white middle class native English speaker. and so usually, like I said, a lot of students at the beginning of my classes, I asked what they hope to learn. A lot of them say they, they want to learn how to properly speak English. and I think that has a lot to do with, they, they probably think that That's what I'm thinking as well. so I use, a lot of times I use my background from, I'm from Missouri and I say like certain things a lot differently than them. So it kind of brings in like, wait, do you say caramel or caramel? because I say caramel, but they all say caramel.

And we don't just focus on like a certain type of English and understanding and talking about language. We talk about their languages and how they use them.

Tina Pippin: I want to continue this discussion of examples because the, your book is full of them and you critique a lot of critical pedgy, critical pedagogy theorists, for not including those kind of concrete, ways of trusting students and doing democratic education in the classroom.

What's the argument here? What, information are we gathering, right, to back that up? And it really allows people to go deeply, And I think that so many of our practical examples like that, are, are assignments that can be taught and can be used, not just in community college settings, um, and not just in, any humanities class, but could be used outside of it as well to deepen, engagement with text, to deepen critical thinking around text, to be like, To be analyzing our world, in a way that orients us to, like, how we fit in the broader context of the world, right?

And from that, we could build a whole new set, a whole new set of activities and stuff.

Leigh Garrison-Fletcher: Yeah. And I just want to add to that, that, yeah, the, the teaching the humanities and community college and beyond, we want to move past any sort of stigma that we kind of discussed earlier on community colleges and say that community colleges can offer a lot in terms of, sharing pedagogy.

Uh, I also just wanted to quickly, um, mention a chapter by Mike Ruffino, um, Subverting White Androcentricism in Psychology Curricula, which I think is another great chapter, um, where he talks about, um, uh, a project he does in his psychology classes. that really questions kind of the, colonial and masculine, basis of a lot of what's taught and learned in psychology classes. and so he talks about feminist and decolonial, pedagogy and has, has his students use, like be in conversation with two different, psychologists. And so it's, I think it's a great, another great example, to look at as, um. example of critical pedagogy.

Kaysi Holman: Uh, and when we're thinking about and beyond, I also want to highlight, uh, I didn't talk about it much in the chapter, but we have a couple of extracurricular programs.

So I think some of those are really fun. And honestly, taking students out of the classroom to, you know, Allowed us to have such deeper conversations with them, um, than we did in sort of structured atmospheres. it was really remarkable to me the exact same conversation, the exact same questions I would ask in a classroom would just not get the same receptivity and the same engagement as it would if I took them to a free museum across the street.

Right? It just wasn't the same discussion. so it was nice to have that.

Because, you know, you know, the value of humanities in higher education discourse is really kind of focusing on, you know, work skills, you know, job readiness is like that. So we are really kind of, you know, raising this question to four year institutions too. So what is the value of humanities? in higher education beyond the community colleges.

And then also the, you know, beyond means also that, you know, I just want to point out, you know, in addition to Casey's comment, you know, at within the CUNY Alliance as a practice is kind of bringing students to a community. where, you know, races are so diverse, their linguistic, you know, backgrounds were so diverse.

So this is really kind of the notion of a community. It's not just limited to a notion of a community within classrooms. So the notion of a community is extending beyond the classrooms too. So there is one, you know, one goal that, uh, the instructor aimed and then so I joined and then so it was really eye opening, you know, for me and then for students too.

So how the, you know, those class learning is really directly related to their, you know, local community context too. So once students mentioned that Wow, I didn't know, you know, such many languages are spoken in my community even though I was born here. So

I'm curious. These are really, really ambitious. and Urgent Goals. And I can only imagine that you all have met different kinds of resistance, expected and unexpected. I'm curious if you could give us some examples of what resistance has looked like in different, you know, in, in, in different times and places, and how you have moved through that.

Kaysi Holman: So I'm happy to start and I, I love that you call out these challenges that we make we try to make them boldly in the book. I think that in reframing student success, the anger for me is a quote from a student actually in the first year of the program, a community college student who said, you know, my 3.

And the university would hear it, you know, they would. And I think that it's a challenge for sure. It's not something everyone's prepared to do and to fight. but it's a battle worth, worth fighting on behalf of people who can't and who don't have a voice in those rooms.

Sujung Kim: So I just briefly mentioned about the, you know, my, from my work.

You know, I found that, you know, as Casey mentioned, that department in the community, in the case of community colleges, you know, certain introductory courses are kind of syllab syllabus are designed by the department and the text. book is assigned by the department. So in the case of adjuncts, they have very limited, you know, freedom to choose their own textbooks, or, you know, design their own textbooks, and then, you know, redesigning, re articulating the course goals, and so on.

So there's some kind of, it depends on department, but there's a certain kind of department, resistance from certain department. And then another aspect I want to point out is that the level of really, you know, um, building certain kind of community of teaching. So, even in the case of one case, you know, even education relate to, you know, some kind of critical pedagogy or education is like that.

So the existing culture itself is really, as Lei mentioned, that. You know, one also faculty member, full time faculty member mentioned that if I close my class door, nobody comes in, and then so they really appreciate the feedback from the, you know, Dr. Fellows, you know, for participating in their classes and giving comments on teaching.

Kaysi Holman: Resistance that I want to call out here, and that is a resistance that, that happens for students who are engaging in this with us. and I think that, you know, I've, I met third year undergraduate students. who had never once so far in their journey had an interactive class. All of the classes that they had had, the teacher got up in front of the room and just talked to them for the hour, hour and a half, or however much time, the class was.

And it was heartbreaking To hear some of those students really struggling, really struggling when we allowed them to follow their own aspirations, their own hopes, their own dreams, right? And, and find creative pathways for themselves with their own fandoms and their own interests, to, they really struggled.

And they were very isolated from other students and from their community and, um, felt so burdened, um, by sort of the educational process that was very static and very banking method, right? That they were experiencing. that it just, it just had such an emotional impact and so we sort of unpack, the, they had an extracurricular program where students would sit together and talk about, that, like, affective impact of education on them and sort of learn with each other.

Leigh Garrison-Fletcher: And I just, could I add that I think, hopefully people who write our book who are instructors will move to that kind of mindset, not only with their own students, but with themselves and their colleagues. We hope that we kind of can start some sort of community where it's, you know, We welcome discussion about pedagogy, about what we're doing, and there's no, no need to, you know, feel this sense of pressure, very individualized pressure that I think is very common.

Kaysi Holman: It's an excellent question and a difficult one, I think, to answer. I think, you know, I think that we all had to approach this project with a large amount of humility, and understanding that we didn't know everything and that there wasn't a single person in that room who knew everything, um, and we really were learning together through the whole process.

There were many times. that, you know, Soo Jung as a, as the senior researcher on the project would come to me and be like, you know, this isn't working and that isn't working. I'm like, great, let's change it, right? Or, graduate fellows would come to me and be like, this isn't working. I'm like, great, let's change it.

I think that, this is a whole other sort of TED talk of mine, but, I think that we are in for a major generational shift coming in the next 10 ish years, in, in education, but really is sort of globally, as sort of the culture that, was born in a very different generation, in the boomer generation, where, where, um, Folks were very, like, you know, there was one person in the household who either graduated high school and went to work a nine to five or went immediately through a four year college and then started working nine to five and other people in the house were there to do all the care support and all the work.

socioeconomic situation that we're all living through. And so I think not just with, um, technology shifts, I think that's sort of like surface level, uh, one of the shifts that's happening in education, but I think there's like deep cultural norms that are shifting, right? We are seeing a rise of, you know, students going to community college first before they go into a four year university, either because that's, an easier pathway of entry for them, but also because it's less expensive for collegiate education, um, that may not pay off, uh, in the end for them economically, um, as much as it once did.

The more stability we can provide and the more resources we can provide, the better overall that they will produce and more that they will do. so I think, I think those culture shifts are coming for us. and I think that's going to be a challenge for everybody to both adjust their, their, teaching and methodology to, those cultural shifts and also just to, to ride through it.

And I would. It'll think challenges.

So, am I in a current position? I feel like I see the challenge, you know, how to address this, you know, critical pedagogy and then, you know, humanizing and collectives, you know, critical pedagogy and. Teaching practices in STEM areas. And then I hope, you know, there's some kind of new, work, you know, collective work, you know, how to change STEM education too.

Sujung Kim: Maybe I go first.

So I would say community. Caring and supportive community, you know, building that kind of community. as in between instructor and students and then among students, too. So, when I taught, you know, and then also as part of my research, one student mentioned that, oh, if I go to classroom, I feel like I'm on isolated island. Just sit and then nobody talks, nobody interacts until the professor comes in and teach something.

So, Intentionally mixing students with, you know, different races, ethnicities, and language, linguistic backgrounds, and so on, so give them about five minutes to talk about the, you know, questions, it's like that. And then also, some students, if I got to know about, you know, some students, you know, father passed away, for example, you know, I asked the question, you know, asked the student, it would be okay, you know, for me to share it.

And then that was, I think it just really kind of, even though it does a very small practice, I felt like myself feeling like I'm building certain kind of community and connecting each other in one another as like that. And then also the joy is like that in the seminar class, not just sitting or like that, You know sometimes I bring snacks and then later students bring snacks, drinks.

It's like that and then having discussions and then, you know, sometimes over I think, they say like, unusual, but it's like, oh, you know, the, the, the Discussions getting much deeper and then then we're kind of talking 30 more discussing 30 more minutes just like that and then so the students also those kind of discussions happened out of classrooms too and then so they, uh, that was a really joy and then so I really appreciating students that, you know, encouragement.

And then that is really kind of joy and then encouragement that I got from the students. So I would say very, you know, supportive and caring community is much more, uh, it is the most important things that I'm, you know, caring to build a joyful, classroom.

And, in a project of their choosing that was designed to, to sort of mix with their aspirations and seeing the amount of confidence that they had after publicly showcasing their work all night long was just such a joyful moment because you could see that they were really transforming their work.

into who they wanted to be in the world, right? They were doing the work that they wanted to do. They were sharing it in public with deans and professors and other, other folks who stumbled in, family members, of folks who came in, came to join, and they got to celebrate, sort of what they had done for themselves. and that was amazing. And like with, with the support of their peers. And I think, those were really joyful for me.

Tina Pippin: is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to make sure gets discussed today? Cause we are getting right at time here.

Kaysi Holman: This was so wonderful to have this conversation.

Tina Pippin: Yeah, yeah, we have two, well, we're at then our last question. We could keep talking, but we, we have to honor your time, which is what are you watching, consuming, listening to, highbrow, lowbrow that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Kaysi Holman: I recently read, Minor Feelings and I just love, I just love the book. I do some, DEIB sort of consulting and, and work in my, in my current job. and so I've been reading a lot of texts and I think that the author just does such a good job of depicting her own experience, and really challenging the norms that she's had to live through. so yeah, I would highly recommend it.

So it's really beautiful. And then, so I really, I would like to recommend to you.

Leigh Garrison-Fletcher: And for me, it's, it's summer, so I'm decompressing. I am reading now, the fifth season, like a sci fi. start of a trilogy that I'm really excited about, so I'm going to read the trilogy, it's by N. K. Jemisin, if I'm pronouncing that right, and then, I'm rewatching The Good Place with my daughter, so that's been a lot of fun too.

Tina Pippin: Okay, Lucia, anything to add?

All right, Tina.

There's some stuff that gets reflected back.

So, Casey, Leigh, Sujung, thank you so much for your book and for joining us in the middle of your summers. you have really made us happy. Thank you for being on Nothing Never Happens and have a joyful rest of your summer.

Sujung Kim: Thank you so much. So much. Hope you have a great summer, too. Great to talk with you.

Tina Pippin: You've been listening to Nothing Never Happens, the Radical Pedagogy Podcast.

And our conversation continues. With Soo Jung Kim, Leigh Garrison Fletcher, and Casey Holman. Authors of Humanizing Collectivist Critical Pedagogy, Teaching the Humanities in Community College, and beyond. Our audio engineer is Aaliyah Harris. Our summer intern is Ella Stuccio. Apollo M. Hassan is our web designer.

The Radical Pedagogy Podcast is a mostly self-funded operation. We've decided to open up opportunities for our listeners to support our work. Your donations will help cover the cost for maintaining our website and streaming services, as well as the pay for our amazing audio editors and student interns.

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Shifts and symptoms masking a lack of wisdom. When I'm alone, I put on in disguise to hide behind obscure the facts that. Absence marks everything, the world's for themselves, but I am so full of myself, and therefore empty. Significance is nothing, signifies anything, except for what I signify to you. And the symbolic language of my mind isn't relatable or true.

Giving people clues, swap metaphysical shoes, feet hop over cracks in the concrete.