"Hopping on the Tips of a Trident": Two Graduate Students of Color Reflect on Teaching Critical Content at Predominantly White Institutions

Abstract

A growing body of feminist and critical pedagogy literature positions teaching as transformative, for both teachers and students, as the classroom has the potential to become a site of exploration, liberation, and empowerment (hooks 16). The classroom is indeed a powerful social tool that can serve as a catalyst for personal development and social change on many levels. Scholarship, however, has also documented the noteworthy power dynamic between privileged students and professors of underprivileged backgrounds. When such faculty employ critical and/or feminist pedagogical practices, students can begin to question the professor’s credentials rather than the unequal institutional arrangements of society (Rodriguez 485). We intend to acknowledge the precarious position of graduate instructors from underprivileged backgrounds who teach about power and privilege to students who embody varying levels of privilege through race, gender, class, nationality, and linguistic ability—in other words, students who benefit from the existing power structure. In this article, we capture the complexity of being a marginalized individual with institutional authority who encourages students to question all levels of power; simultaneously, we are acutely aware of the social implications of students challenging our authority, our intellectual aptitude, and our critical orientation. We also outline techniques that we have developed through trial and error that we hope to impart on fellow critical educators from marginalized backgrounds, with particular attention paid to graduate instructors. Our title, “hopping on the tips of a trident” refers to our attempt to conceptualize the unique experience of facing three concurrent challenges: teaching critical content, being minorities, and being graduate instructors. We seek to characterize the distinct reality that these co-existing challenges create and hope to contribute to the race, gender, and pedagogy scholarship. As academia becomes more diverse, understanding the unique experiences of women, racial minorities, and graduate students will improve the academic environment and, ultimately, enrich everyone’s experience in higher education.