Documentation:New Faculty Orientation Guide/Classroom Climate/Faculty Spotlight 2

Faculty Spotlight - Classroom Climate

John Paul (JP) Catungal, Instructor

Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice

I have come to appreciate the classroom as embedded in larger historical and political contexts, where we, as teachers and students, meet not as blank slates, but as complicated and differently positioned subjects.

I am teaching a fourth-year seminar this term that specifically looks at the politics of the university. In this seminar, we will reflect as a learning community on a variety of topics, including UBC’s location on unceded Musqueam territory, questions of positionality and accessibility and why they matter for how we experience the university.

Excessive emotions, such as anger, are particularly challenging for classroom spaces—challenging because they force us to acknowledge that trust, belonging and community in learning relationships and spaces are never a guarantee and, in fact, take constant tending. These excessive emotions are also challenging in a second way, which is that, in some classrooms, they arise out of social structural dynamics—e.g., misogyny, racism, colonialism, homophobia—that may or may not be the central focus of a course, but that nevertheless exist in classroom spaces through the very bodies and minds that are in these spaces.