And I start to
speak again, with an acute sense of my privilege and of how the privilege
to teach implies responsibility.
I am especially privileged to teach in what I believe is one of the
world’s greatest public universities. We have a public mandate
for inclusive education and a long history of transformative education.
I feel this, in palpable fashion, when I read and grade the student
research papers for my large undergraduate classes (I have stubbornly
continued to grade the 200+ or 100+ papers each semester). It is CP
115, Fall 2005, and a student writes in his term paper that a great
change is in the making, because here at UC Berkeley, in a class such
as this, students not only study economic globalization, but also that
he, son of a sweatshop worker, the first in his family to get a college
education, is present. His mother, her body bent over her sewing machine
in Los Angeles, he, in the classroom writing a structural analysis of
postfordist production. He is not alone. In a discussion of social movements,
I broach the issue with the class. I find a few students waiting for
me after the session, each sharing how he is the son of the slum dweller,
she too is the daughter of the sweatshop worker. Another student writes
in her term paper that a great change is in the making, because here
at UC Berkeley, in a class such as this, she learns about enclave urbanism
and begins to map the geographies of disadvantage and inequality that
shape our cities. She believes that a change is in the making when the
daughter of opportunity graduates from Berkeley with the ability to
dismantle the gated bastions of wealth and power within which she was
raised. This is the privilege, and responsibility, of teaching at Berkeley.
I
teach a wide range of subjects and enjoy a variety of teaching formats.
But three principles remain central and consistent in all of my teaching.
First, I seek to globalize the curriculum of urban studies and planning,
educating students about the great cities that lie outside the domain
of their EuroAmerican experiences: Calcutta, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro,
Manila, Nairobi. I want my students to rethink their pre-conceived atlases:
to not just fit these urbanisms into what they alreay know but rather
to craft entirely new paradigms of urban order and function. And more
boldly, I want them to call into question the geopolitical hierarchies,
such as First World and Third World, through which we have ordered the
world. I suggest to them the ways in which “elsewhere” might
allow us to interrogate the certainties of “home,” of how
a “Third World” lens on “First World” prosperity
might make possible a more acute analysis of poverty, deprivation, and
inequality and how it might also make possible a more interesting repertoire
of concepts of democracy, citizenship, and social change.
Second,
in my courses, I seek to link knowledge to action. Our graduate city
planning students train to be professionals but in doing so they aim
to be much more than technocrats. I teach my graduate students the value
of critique, doubt, and deconstruction, knowing that rather being paralyzed
by such epistemologies they will use them to craft spaces of negotiability
and terrains of ethical action in the context of professional practice.
Similarly, with my undergraduates who are eager to change the world
but often eschew status quo institutions, I challenge them to write
their research papers as briefing memos addressed to the president of
the World Bank, thereby encouraging them to speak to those in power
and to engage with powerful institutions.
Third,
in allowing students to learn about and rewrite the rules of the game,
I am committed to the teaching of theory. I take great delight in the
material realities of cities. I am, in many ways, an empiricist. But
theory is crucial. Ideas matter. Last week, in my The City class as
I started teaching urban theory to over a hundred undergraduates from
at least 10 different disciplines, I received an email from a student.
She said that the work we were doing reminded her of Audre Lorde’s
essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” She was right for “theory”
could stand in for the “poetry” of which Lorde writes: “Poetry
is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought…
Poetry is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations
for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never
been before.” Theory/ Poetry.
I am a teacher, and I am therefore also a mentor and advisor. I take
pride in my graduate students who develop their own identities and voices
as teachers. I am delighted as my undergraduates find their way to prestigious
jobs, fellowships, and graduate programs. But I also believe that teaching
requires something more than individual mentorship, that it requires
institution-building. To this end, I have worked with my colleagues
in City & Regional Planning to establish a new undergraduate, interdisciplinary
major in Urban Studies, a program that I now chair. In 2005, I accepted
a compelling offer to serve as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for
the Division of International & Area Studies. In this capacity,
I now oversee various undergraduate majors (e.g. Development Studies,
Peace & Conflict Studies) and a graduate M.A. program as well as
UC Berkeley’s Study Abroad office. There are days now spent in
programmatic review, committee meetings, fund-raising, meetings, proposal-writing,
resource allocation, more meetings. But when I am in my classroom it
all makes sense. For how can I challenge my students to open up new
terrains of action and negotiability in powerful institutions if I cannot
insist on a more equitable and accessible academy? How can I challenge
my students to craft new paradigms of knowledge if I cannot imagine
ways to implement and institutionalize new epistemologies, new scholarship,
and new traditions of excellence? We have to earn the privilege to teach
and I am paying my dues.