Communication Teacher

Forum: Precarious Teaching, Precarious Learning

Building from our inaugural forum on communication pedagogy, Communication Teacher is seeking reflections on classroom climate, teaching, and the administration thereof under the current attacks on universities and higher education. Universities, regardless of geographic location, are erasing classes and cutting faculty who teach about inequities among social group identities and broader topics of social justice in worst cases or asking teachers to censor their course titles and content in the best case scenario. Precarious employment for untenured and lecture-faculty that often teach the majority of undergraduate core courses seems to be conditioned by submission to constraints on what and how students can be taught as well as what topics are off-limits. Reversal or elimination of justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion programming on our campuses has immediate and long lasting effects on university community culture and critical pedagogy. While critical pedagogy has always been somewhat “dangerous” to employ and embody within the colonial institution of the university, we ask authors to consider the particular challenges that tenured and untenured faculty face in our sometimes anti-intellectual and hostile contemporary environment. We welcome forum submissions that contend with teaching, censorship, learning, and intellectual freedom.

In line with the above call, Forum submissions can address:

• Current institutional pressures on teaching about inequities, social justice, inclusion and belonging, and responses to these pressures among faculty and students (e.g., how instructors alter or resist changing syllabi/course titles to comply with institutional or state mandates; emotional labor and pedagogical strategies involved in teaching censored material).
• Specific moments in the classroom that are representative of struggles for intellectual freedom (e.g. performances of (re/un) naming).
• Recognizing and addressing the embodiment of marginalized identities among teachers and students when communication of those identities is under threat.
• Tactics for intervention and resistance inside and outside of the classroom, (e.g., tactical examples of how instructors resist administrative and political pressures. Discussion of student support for resistance to censorship).
• Topics under erasure or preservation. Mapping which topics are disappearing, altered, or at risk; the role of Communication as a discipline in preserving/erasing critical content.
• Cross-rank collaborations (TT, NTT, grad instructors) to support teaching freedom and shared resistance practices within or across departments.
• Student surveillance (e.g., filming lectures) and chilling effects on discourse and classroom climate.

Manuscripts can be submitted as first person narratives or critical commentaries. Submissions should consider the call to reflect on 1) passions and practice more broadly (though examples of specific classroom activities are welcome) and 2) on the ways that teaching and learning about communication reflects our current social and political climates and 3) the potential to prepare students to engage more fully as critical thinkers and participants in a rapidly shifting society.