Un-knowing expertise in the time of pandemic: Three teaching perspectives

Abstract

This article frames three individual perspectives on the experience of unsettling disciplinary and institutional subjectivities through teaching and learning practices in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. At the centre of this experience is a common engagement of teaching and learning with sovereign knowledges. More specifically, the accounts in the article are drawn from experiences in 2020, when the forces of extra-academic life – especially lockdown during COVID-19 in Victoria – intensified the objectives and the means of challenging the boundaries of settler colonial expertise. The authors find that collaborative and iterative sharing of teaching experiences and methods not only supported them during a time of acute change but also empowered them to take risks that challenge disciplinary authority. In seeking to un-learn their privilege together and with their students, the authors reflect here on a set of new pedagogical contexts and approaches that are perpetually in-process.