Engaged Pedagogy within the Neoliberal University


Jade Da Costa, University of Guelph

From September 2016 to April 2023, I acted as a teacher’s assistant (TA) for the department of Sociology at York University. For the courses that I assisted, undergraduate students were asked to complete two ten-percent assignments that were entirely designed by their TA. In the winter of 2020, I began assigning the Student Choice Project as one of my tutorial activities. The design of the project is as named: students are asked to choose a platform through which they can explore and apply course material. The only requirement is that students must select a platform that is either creative and/or personalized. I have received countless submissions of wonder, art, and beauty since first assigning the Student Choice Project four years ago and consider the overall success of these assignments to be a testament to the project’s inspiration: bell hooks’ (1994) engaged pedagogy. Yet, I would be amiss if I said that students did not struggle with the project. I have found myself having to repeatedly assure students that they would not be penalized for their creativity or alternative thinking. Many seem to feel that the project’s intentional accessibility was a trick, whereas others found the agency of the project to be overwhelming, if not debilitating. Overtime, I have come to regard these reactions for what they are: symptoms of the neoliberal university (Mintz, 2021). Within this educational climate, emergent students and scholars are trained to follow strict, bureaucratic guidelines that not only encourage them to fear agency, but to disavow their embodied experiences and creative energies as legitimate sources of knowledge. Taking this realization as my point of entry, I explore what it means to do engaged pedagogy within a postsecondary climate that is increasingly defined by neoliberalism. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: