Over the years, my teaching philosophy has been, and continues to be, guided by three values: integrity, inclusion, and creativity. These values are constantly interconnected in the pedagogical methods I develop and the way I build my courses. More importantly, these values foreground my anticolonial approach to curricula in sociology, for a more critical and ethical knowledge transmission.
Integrity. As a student, I rapidly developed a frustration regarding the references my teachers included in their courses, especially regarding research ethics. My first ethnographic fieldworks made me aware of social dynamics, power relations, and ethical dilemma that were never discussed in the classroom – such as how to handle sexual harassment by informants in the field. However, the experience of failures, mess and affects in the field (pain, doubt, insecurity, etc.) actively shapes the production of ethnographic knowledge, and ultimately the production of all sociological knowledge. Several years of research and teaching later, one of my priorities is to build a safe space for my students and to help them gain a strong sense of research ethics through intellectual honesty and positionality. Even more since my previous position of Lecturer in Russia, i.e., where national politics strongly influences academia and curricula, I am convinced that academic excellence is, first and foremost, a matter of integrity. As further developed below, this emphasis on integrity is closely related to inclusion and further engages students in an ethics of being in the world that goes beyond the completion of their degree.
Inclusion. For me, integrity also means being true to one’s values and transparent in one’s engagements. In addition to committing to 2SLGBTQA+ safeness and valorizing non-Western knowledge in my courses (for instance, through the systematic inclusion of marginalized scholars in my curricula and the discussion of the politics of citation with my students), I try to make my courses as accessible as possible considering a wide range of disabilities. Over the years, I had the opportunity to work with students with partial blindness, reduced mobility, and mental disorders. As I don’t believe in standards that fit the majority while further marginalizing others, furthermore in knowledge transmission, I constantly adapt my teaching methods and improve my ability to build new contents using many different media (please see below). Because my research has always strongly influenced the way I teach and how I envision inclusion, feminist ethics and Indigenous praxis are today important parts of my pedagogy. Considering that knowledge production is always socially situated and the result of inspiring interactions between people, I am especially attentive to how my teaching can run the risk of supporting forms oppression. My main achievement as a university teacher is that my students feel supported in their intellectual growth and empowered by the knowledge and values I humbly contribute to pass on to them.
Creativity. Inclusiveness and further accessibility to higher education sometimes require to innovate beyond the models inherited from Western scholarship. Feminist and decolonial ethics rely on the principles of care and reciprocity. By doing so, these ethics force to be attentive to how the teacher/student relation can sustain power relationships, and to how techniques like mentoring, collective learning, and multilingualism can support inclusive education. For example, techniques of arpentage reading (or “surveying reading), poetry, autoethnography, ethnotheater, and performance, which originate in popular culture and are widely used in anticolonial movements, provide a wide variety of approaches to knowledge transmission in the respect of non-Western cultures. This apprehension of creativity as a vector of inclusion leads me to work extensively with audiovisual pedagogies (photography, documentary film, podcast, sound recordings), in order to adapt my courses both to students’ sensibilities and class configurations (in person, remote, etc.).
These three values of integrity, inclusion, and creativity foreground my program of decolonial curricula in sociology. Decolonization is a long-term strategy that engages with various directions for action, because it requires to disrupt the colonial narrative that shaped our world (including academia) in recent history. First, to decolonize a curriculum means to recognize the current effects of colonialism in knowledge transmission, and by doing so, to unmask the anti-Blackness/Indigenousness of Western curricula. The constant inclusion of marginalized scholars in course documents is a starting point, although decolonization is not “only” a diversification of bibliographies but further requires to avoid any forms of intellectual expropriation (e.g., when an Indigenous concept is used by White scholars without citing their original authors). Consequently, decolonization forces us to reflect on what reconciliation means for the transmission of sociological knowledge – e.g., letting students rely on creative ways of building narratives that counteract the colonial forms of knowledge legitimization and authority. This is why decolonialism is grounded in creativity, and why assignments can enable liberatory methods that further help students to reclaim what they learn in the classroom (as mentioned above, using poetry, collective writing and reading, multilingualism, performance, but also mentoring). Although they do not exclude more conventional assignments (e.g., dissertation, book report), these creative ways of reporting and assessing highlight how some of our academic codes have historically shaped ways to legitimize knowledge at the expense of other ways of knowing. Lastly, the decolonization of curricula is not only a question of justice, but furthermore a matter of ethics: racialized and marginalized students come to the world with a blindness unless the university education they went through avoids the reproduction of intellectual biases and structural dynamics of oppression. As a consequence, decolonizing curricula remains intimately connected to the need to develop decolonial research – both because knowledge production is knowledge dissemination, and because higher education in sociology transmits an ethics of being in the world as much as it transmits social theory.
Julie Patarin-Jossec 