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"Letting it All Hang Out...While Keeping the Passion"
by Stephen Harrington
Over the last half-decade, teaching politics in Australia has become fraught with some danger. The current conservative government (and its leader) have been in power for over ten years, and in that time (though, especially recently) various public institutions within the Australian community have been coming under increasing pressure in regards to the promotion of certain political ideologies. Australia’s public service broadcaster, the ABC, has been attacked fiercely by prominent conservatives for peddling a supposedly left-wing, anti-government point of view, even though this regular claim has never been conclusively verified by real research. Education, though, has felt the pinch perhaps even harder. Teaching institutions have been feeling a growing sense of public animosity towards what are perceived as radical theories being taught in schools and universities. Even the federal Minister for Education Julie Bishop commented recently that many of the lessons schools teach seem to come straight from Chairman Mao (though I would note with a wry smile here that if even a quarter of school-aged students actually knew who Mao was, then we should actually be suitably proud of the state of our public education system). There exists now a political climate and a subsequent public culture that is extremely quick to demonize any slight whiff of ‘Marxist-leftism’ entering the classroom, and this feeling is now spreading to become sceptical of the place of even post-structuralist theory in high-school classrooms: I mean, “how dare Shakespeare be analysed through a feminist paradigm!”
Sensing a theme here? Yes, that’s right… for proud moderate liberals (though, as we would say down here, lefties) like me it is getting harder and harder to teach politics safely in a university classroom without fear of some sort of reprisal.
Of course, the state of play I am talking about here is certainly not the quasi-McCarthyism that we have seen in the United States over recent years – we are not in the habit of publicly ‘outing’ liberal academics just yet—but the supposed culture war has definitely been at the forefront of the public consciousness in recent years. This means that, as a lecturer and tutor in an undergraduate unit focusing on political communication, I am faced with two possible options. Either I can choose to bury my political beliefs under a façade of objectivity, or I can choose to be honest about my feelings and openly display my emotions when it comes to political matters. Luckily for me—and, I like to think, my students as well—I have chosen the latter over the former. For me, nothing kills the joy of a political awakening—and, for many of my students, this is their first real exposure to politics and political analysis—like a teacher who does not freely give up their thoughts, beliefs and emotions. So, right up front, while I am introducing myself in the very first lesson of semester, I tell my students all about my ideological leanings, but always note that this does not mean that I do not want them to voice their own opinion if they disagree. I therefore ask exactly the same of them, telling them that throughout the entire course of the subject, they should always feel free to voice their own feelings on the matter—and never to dismiss another student simply for thinking differently.
What all of this opens up is actually a very free, frank and honest environment in which we are able to not only investigate and interrogate ideas, but also the reasons for those ideas’ existence in the first place. The various times when the in-class discussion has verged on a shouting match have been watered down with ease, but I always avoid ending such moments unnecessarily because a lesson such as this is always remembered fondly in the end and makes everyone so passionate about their own points of view. I am always keen to rebut a student’s idea or a statement, but I know that I am doing my job well when my students point out the failings of my own thoughts and arguments. It would be so easy for me to hide my own convictions simply to ensure that my practice as an educator was never taken the wrong way, but I think such an approach would actually detract from the pleasure I get out of seeing my students begin to question their own opinions, and those of fellow students. Politics – at least, in a utopian sense—is all about various ideas clashing in a fight for survival and supremacy, so why should it not also be present during its teaching?
If the purpose of teaching is not to give our students ‘fish’ but to show our students how to ‘fish’, then I would say it is best to first show them the myriad of ways to catch a fish: that is, expose them to as many different ways of viewing the world as is possible. The idea that a teacher of any kind can simply ‘convert’ a student to a particular way of thinking is, to me, naïve and misinformed—if anything, exposure to conflicting political viewpoints should enhance the ability of the student to defend their own views or, at the very least, make them more passionate. Of course, there is always the risk that a student or five might take offence (though nobody has yet complained about my approach), however I think that this open and honest method for both student and teacher does, if anything, enhance the learning environment for students. Strangely enough, being up-front with my teaching style actually seems to make them forget the crazy notion that I might be giving them biased information, and it actually seems to make them stop looking at people’s political beliefs though the simplistic and outdated left—right spectrum. Well, I guess that’s one way of getting damn ‘leftist’ political teachings out of the classroom…
Stephen Harrington is a Ph.D. Student and Member of the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology,Brisbane, Australia.
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