(EDU7a) Creating Care and Community in the Neoliberal University I: Classrooms and Pedagogy

Scholars have observed the increasing neoliberalization of higher education, wherein education is transformed into a commodity or service that is provided by faculty and consumed by students (Mohanty 2003). In this climate, the pursuit of profit takes precedence over the pursuit of knowledge and the well-being of students and faculty, often putting students and faculty into adversarial positions. These effects are particularly acute for those already marginalized in academia, such as racialized, working class, first generation, queer and trans, and Indigenous members of the university community. At the same time, universities are sites of resistance enacted by students, faculty, and staff. This session features papers that investigate how instructors are using innovative pedagogy to create community and care, and how students respond to these new ways of teaching and learning. These papers explore the possibilities opened up by giving students greater autonomy over course content, assignments, and evaluation, and the challenges students and instructors face when implementing new practices in the context of the neoliberal university. Other papers examine the results of educational experiments that bring the world outside the university into closer dialogue with the classroom. Together, these papers draw attention to ways instructors and students are working to challenge isolation and create communities of solidarity and care. Tags: Communities, Education, Equality and Inequality, Teaching

Organizers: Yukiko Tanaka, University of Toronto Scarborough, Bahar Hashemi, University of Toronto Scarborough

Presentations

Claire Polster, University of Regina

Transforming the Neoliberal Univeristy to Create Community and Care

Drawing on my own and others research on the corporatization of higher education in Canada and elsewhere, I argue that the dearth of community and care in contemporary PSE is not simply a negative side effect of university neoliberalization, but an integral part of this process. As such, if we wish to cultivate greater community and care in our universities, we need intentionally and strategically to target key aspects of neoliberalization as part of our efforts. Both to concretize this argument and to clarify what such strategic interventions would entail, I discuss my efforts over the past two years to foster community and care in and through the content, and especially the pedagogical practices, of a third year course on the Sociology of Wellbeing and Happiness. Among other things, I address how practices of "ungrading", mandatory attendance, greater student autonomy and responsibility for course content, and a collective project to build community across the campus both challenged, and were challenged by, the neoliberal university. I close the paper with some reflections on the benefits and limitations of small-scale efforts to nurture community and care in PSE, and I offer some examples of more broad- based initiatives on the part of faculty, students, and citizens that promote community and care in and through their opposition to university neoliberalization.  

Bahar Hashemi, University of Toronto Scarborough

Creating a Sense of Community in a Large Introductory Sociology Course

Feeling a sense of community and caring in the post-secondary setting is a key factor in academic success. That sense of community is more difficult to achieve when course enrolments are large (Mulryan-Kyne 2010) and when students are commuters (Chickering 1974; Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005), as is the case in our introductory course at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This sense of community was further hampered in our class during the pandemic, as the shift to virtual platforms disrupted the face-to-face interactions among students and with the teaching team. This paper is based on a multiple-stage project, which included 1) a scoping review to determine factors contributing to a sense of community in classrooms, 2) incorporation of selected factors into course design, 3) a survey of students in the course to determine associations between levels of perceived classroom community and teaching practices, and 4) semi-structured interviews with students to further investigate their experiences in the course and their sense of classroom community. In this paper, we report on our quantitative and qualitative analyses and suggest future avenues of research.

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Non-presenting author: Kathy Liddle, University of Toronto

Jade Da Costa, University of Guelph

Engaged Pedagogy within the Neoliberal University

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. 

Grisha Cowal, Academic

Bridging the Divides of Educational Exclusion Across Neoliberalized Institutions

With the intent of combatting the neoliberalization and exclusivity of higher education, a small team of professors and students at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia have created a grassroots Prison Education Program to target the overlapping inequities that neoliberalism in both higher education and Canada’s prison industrial complex create. Drawing on both research and personal experience as a student in the shared development and implementation of the Prison Education Program, this paper will utilize an abolitionist feminist theoretical framework to highlight the barriers that incarcerated people experience to obtaining higher education as well as the unique ways that professors and students are taking collective action to increase education access and expand the program. Neoliberal encroachment is evident in both the academic and prison industries through its features of profit maximization and social control; thus, the Prison Education Program believes that efforts to de-commodify education should be intimately connected to abolitionist efforts that reject carcerality as it serves as a physical and ideological space for the reproduction of capitalist relations (LeBaron and Roberts, 2010). The corporatization of Canadian universities is underpinned by broader transnational economic shifts that have occurred since the 1970s, in which social welfare began to see divestments both financially and ideologically (Olssen and Peters, 2005). During this same period, uptake in neoliberal policy reforms supported the development of the prison-industrial complex which quickly became a globalized industry serving the overlapping interests of colonial governments, corporations, and correctional departments (Sudbury, 2002). Discourses of crisis played a key role in cementing neoliberalism within universities (Ramírez and Hyslop-Margison, 2015) and are also apparent in Canada’s “tough on crime” rhetoric, which fueled the expansion of a prison nation founded on racial capitalism (Davis et al., 2022; Harris, 2018; Mallea, 2011). Moreover, discourses of crisis are utilized by Correctional Services Canada to justify banning internet access for prisoners under the guise of threatened security. The ban on internet access poses significant barriers to obtaining post-secondary education for prisoners, requiring the Prison Education Program to develop alternative methods of course delivery. By regulating the information that comes into the prison, and subsequently, the information that prisoners can put out, the carceral state maintains power through perception. Foucauldian perspectives highlight the ways in which neoliberalized institutions, such as universities and prisons, enact governmentality through policies, practices, and discourses that are aimed at creating self-disciplining subjects plagued by ideologies of individualism, constant demands for self-improvement, and an ongoing pressure to compete for limited resources (Ross and Savage, 2021). Students are decreasingly viewed as colleagues of academia and are instead targeted as consumers of knowledge capitalism (Olssen, 2006). On par with their status as consumers of knowledge capitalism within academia, students and professors are similarly positioned as the producers of knowledge in a relentless cycle of production-to-consumption that demands constant output of research (Berg et al., 2016). Within academia, the neoliberal foundation of which the production and consumption of knowledge is situated has dire consequences as academics become estranged to their research and teaching labour. By connecting academia directly to community care through collegial relationship building between professors, incarcerated students, and non-incarcerated students, the Prison Education Program resists the estrangement and isolation that both prisons and universities generate, as we aim to give new meaning to the creation of knowledge. Knowledge production and validation within western academia has historically reflected the values of the white men who hold power within these institutions, disregarding the lived experiences of people who face intersecting oppressions and excluding their truths from dominant epistemological discourses (Collins, 2000). The colonial roots of western academia combined with the overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous people in Canadian prisons (Paynter et al., 2023) results in intersecting barriers to education for Black and Indigenous students. The Prison Education Program prioritizes centering the voices and experiences of incarcerated students in the production of knowledge, and employs the radical imagination (Khasnabish and Haiven, 2014) to engage in collective conversations to envision an inclusive future for academia that transcends the boundaries of the carceral state. Efforts to de-commodify academia and carcerality must be relational, as community care is central to reclaiming academia as a site of radical resistance in a time of austerity.