It's the start of a new semester and this one already promises to be better than the last. Don't get me wrong, last semester was great and I feel like I transitioned back into being a student with relative ease. I had some great classes that really stimulated my thinking and helped me formulate my ideas for research and academic interests. This semester, however, builds significantly on some of the foundational classes I took last semester and gets deeper into some more specific issues such as financial administration in higher education, education and development in the Middle East, and postcolonialism and education (those are actually the names of three out of four of my classes). The first two are pretty straight forward and are very thought provoking but the concepts themselves in the courses I think won't be too challenging. Postcolonialism... not so much. In one reading alone I found over a dozen words that I didn't know and attempted to look up in the dictionary but were inevitably nowhere to be found. Words like postcoloniality, counterhegemonic, binarism, obfuscation (okay that one's in the dictionary but seriously... who uses it?!), and many other combinations of roots and suffixes of which you can guess the meaning but still have no definitive evidence that it is in fact a word that the author did not make up. But I guess if you know me, you would judge me for my annoyance of this given my propensity for making up words. But I digress...
This class, "Postcolonial Studies in Education," will probably be one of the most challenging courses I take in my time at TC. It's a theory-heavy course and just in the first official lecture and discussion of reading we've already dug into some pretty deep stuff, including understanding the nature of the constructed identity in modern society and the phenomenon of the proliferation of "post"- theories in the last several decades. Basically, it's a mind-blower and I'm likely going to need some sort of outlet through which to better come to terms with my incredibly scattered and unorganized thoughts. Fortunately, this class is the last one of the week (Wednesday night, I know tough life right? I have a 3-day academic week, but all my classes meet for 2 hours at a time) so even though my brain may turn to mush, I don't actually have to use it again until... oh, wait... when I have to start reading again for the next week's classes, which will probably be Thursday. At least I have Wednesday night to decompress.
I had an interesting realization today in class in the middle of the discussion. We had made it through at least 1/3 of the class time and I realized I was the only person who hadn't spoken yet in a class that places heavy emphasis on participation. I didn't feel too bad about this just yet because I had the rest of class and I also had this professor for a class last semester and he knows that I typically contribute to discussion. We were talking about concepts of identity (truly one of my favorite topics over which to postulate) and I started chiming in about multiple identities and the ability to pick from, control, and utilize from an array of identities in certain contexts for political reasons. Several people in the class responded to my comments in particularly combative ways, which was surprising for me considering we had talked about these exact ideas in a class I had taken last semester. In other words, these weren't radical new ideas I was espousing, and I was therefore surprised to hear them being met with such adversity. It was generally acknowledged that I was missing an equal and opposite force of the attributed identity in any context and the political ramifications of that, with which I entirely agreed (I think I had actually assumed this was implicit which was why I didn't bother to mention it in the first place. regardless...). My realization had nothing to do with this dialogue. Rather, it quickly became extremely evident to me that I was one of the only "white" people in the room and that out of a class of 15 or so, there was not one single white male. They were either male of some other ethnic or cultural group or a female of various different backgrounds. This realization came almost instantaneous to a shift in the conversation towards understanding postcolonial studies as an avenue, a language for the politics of resistance and it quickly became evident to me why the demographics of the class are as they are. I guess I never thought that it *wouldn't* be that way, but it never even crossed my mind that a class on postcolonialism would in fact be about (a) resistance to various forms of domination and (as much as it pains me to say this) (b) counter-hegemonic forces. Considering this fact, it's now no surprise at all that the class has such a demographic makeup. What's certain is that I'll need to keep an open mind, be okay with opposition and open disagreement, and probably think more about some things before I actually say them.
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