Since I am a Black feminist educator, my courses always take an intersectional approach to examining oppression, subjugation, resistance, and solidarity. I am also committed to collaborative, creative, and interdisciplinary teaching in service to broad, yet meaningful, impact. Since earning tenure in 2018, I’ve continued co-teaching with faculty in Film & Media Studies and Southwest Studies, and the majority of my courses cross-list with Race, Ethnicity, & Migration Studies, Film & Media Studies, and other programs and departments. Additionally, most contribute to several college wide initiatives, including General Education, and the First Year, Bridge Scholars, Writing Intensive, Pre-College, Dynamic Half Block, and pilot remote only programs. Because my courses are largely focused on traumatic content and because most of my students are unfamiliar with the intricacies of my fields, I focus here on my pedagogical commitments to curiosity and joy.
Students have unprecedented, often overwhelming, access to information, and the ills of the world that are of great concern to my fields seem to require so much certainty and urgency. But as the late Toni Cade Bambara reminds us, “death is not a truth that inspires”1 and “not all speed is movement.”2 So, I am committed to curiosity now more than ever. I especially value opportunities to help students understand the importance of curiosity and to aid them in learning myriad ways of being appropriately inquisitive. This means I have most often taught courses at the novice and intermediate levels that assume no prior knowledge and that emphasize accessibility—more than 80% of my courses, to be more precise. My novice courses introduce students to foundational theories, modes of inquiry, and key debates, emphasizing breadth without preoccupation with comprehensiveness and locating and historicizing central thought and politics.3 My intermediate courses cultivate deeper understanding of theories, concepts, and sub-fields; emphasizing ways of connecting, synthesizing, and engaging with theories and concepts; and recognizing the always shifting landscape of the field.4 In my case, this has not only benefited students in Feminist & Gender Studies. In fact, just over 10% of students enrolled in Introduction to Feminist & Gender Studies over the past decade eventually declared the major. Most declared majors in the natural sciences then social sciences.
Hence, I take numerous approaches to fostering inquiry and encouraging critical dialogue appropriate to my fields and others. For example, rather than requiring students to submit thesis-driven projects in my 100 and 200-level courses, I most often ask them to focus on definition as praxis. This encourages them to pay particular attention to how central terms and concepts have been defined and understood in myriad, sometimes debated, ways dependent on intellectual preoccupations, sociopolitical context, and audience, for example. In lieu of focusing on their various opinions about texts or related occurrences, I first ask students to take texts on their own terms by developing effective questions focused on the key terms and concepts driving main ideas and/or arguments. I then encourage them to carefully consider various impetuses for and implications of related phenomena. Doing so allows them to better understand and synthesize material and to be appropriately conversant with more experienced thinkers. It allows them and me to resist the impulse to understand the college student as a harbinger of already achieved excellence. Instead, I aim to provide them with the space necessary to be students who still are (and always will be) learning. At first, this approach can seem boring at best or patronizing and inattentive to the urgency of addressing oppression at worst. By the end of class, though, most students express appreciation for having the opportunity to develop their inquiring minds and learning to do so in various ways.
At the same time, I still try to have fun in the classroom—not because I’m what some would simplistically call “an edutainer,” but because joy is a Black feminist politic. My off-campus courses, Hidden Spaces, Hidden Narratives: Intersectionality Studies in Berlin and Comedy and Culture in New York City (co-taught with Scott Krzych), are critically engaged but filled with excitement and wonder. I routinely facilitate field trips to the movies or theatre in my on-campuses courses for similar reasons. On the first day of class, I even host Jeopardy games that give us the opportunity to get to know one another and the course content a bit more closely and yes, hilariously. Small groups of students also lead discussion for an hour each day, focusing on a current event relevant to the course. Sometimes that means students converse with Lani Guinier and Cheryl I. Harris to discuss attacks on affirmative action in Critical Race Feminism. Other times, they converse in an interdisciplinary way with Gail Dines and Susan J. Douglas to discuss the Barbie movie in Critical Media Studies. In all cases, it means students are able to think collaboratively about how to facilitate a serious and creative discussion.
Last, but not least, I continue resisting the teaching-research dichotomy and supporting students’ curiosity outside the classroom, resulting in several noteworthy collaborations. Since 2018, I have conducted several independent studies and secured more than $40k for student researchers in support of Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap “Crisis.” Similarly, three students enrolled in my study abroad course served as the audiovisual engineer, co-editor, and copyeditor for In Audre’s Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk. Additionally, I’m currently working on two documentaries with former students, one focused on my work in Berlin and another on my experiences with a crack cocaine addicted father. I have also earned faculty-student collaborative research grants almost annually for the past near-decade, securing over $35k to fund student researchers supporting my other traditional and public-facing scholarship. Taking this approach has allowed me to focus on my scholarship without sacrificing my commitments to teaching and to support students’ professional development. As a result, I remain an active scholar and most of them have gone onto graduate school or into related professions, such as publishing, education, and the nonprofit sector.
1 Toni Cade Bambara, “What I Think It Is I’m Doing Anyway,” in The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternburg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980), 153-68.
2 Toni Cade Bambara, “On the Issue of Roles,” in The Black Woman, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), 123-36.
3 “Courses,” Feminist and Gender Studies, Colorado College, last updated August 21, 2023.
4 Ibid.
Dr. Heidi R. Lewis 