Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

A month ago I practiced using video for guest engagement discussions between other scholars and my student-colleagues. With the practice under my belt, I asked Professor Vershawn Ashanti Young, author of Your Average Nigga (2007), currently at University of Waterloo, Ontario. I had reached out to him over the summer and asked him to work with my class, coming next week. In exchange, he asked if I would explain my ethnographic studies to his own class, titled "Love, Language, and Leadership." Specifically, he asked me to address themes from Pelias's book of personal relationships, especially his autoethnography of his family. Thinking that his students would appreciate learning from my student-colleagues more than me, hearing voices from racial and class backgrounds unfamiliar to most Waterloo students, I arranged for a Latina student working on a family project and an African-American student working on a black barbershop project to speak briefly about their work and...

Yesterday eight students participated in a video chat via Google Hangouts with Dr. Andrew Joseph Pagoda on the subject of racialization, white privilege, and some other similar topics. I had arranged with Pagoda weeks ago not only to open the conversation about these topics with my students, but also to test the technology available on our campus. Pagoda had sent some documents that the students were asked to read before to give students some experience in the topics to be more comfortably engaged. Some observations: 1. My college feels that students should not be engaged in these long distance video conferences. With a student population near 20,000 students, we are not prepared to have these conference where students actually engage with another voice. The potential for unidirectional video is easy -- nearly any room could show a talking head using the banking model of education throwing words at a class. But what has appeared more difficult is to arrange an actual conference whe...