Post authored by Rashmi Kumari:
A few weeks ago, a twitter user tweeted: “what troubles me about urban education, in the US, is that it is interchangeably used with race.” The tweet got me thinking about my first independent course (of which, I am quite proud of!), Urban Education. I teach this course as part of an undergraduate course offered by the Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University.
Wait a second! Urban Education (do you mean schools for children of color?)
And…
Childhood Studies (does that even exist? What does that even mean? Is it part of childhood psychology? Are you a nursing student? Is it about education?). I am frequently asked these questions every single time I try to explain my doctoral program.
To some of you, yes, I am interested in childhoods of children of color. I am interested in intersecting inequalities that children (and youth) of color continue to face because of institutional racism, unequal class-structure, gender-order, and of course many other things like geographical locations, immigration status, disability, skin-color, and religion and ethnicity, that compound the challenges of teaching-learning processes in urban schools.
So, getting back, I am currently teaching, and transitioning to teaching remotely, Urban Education. My experience so far and my musings amidst the COVID-19 crisis:
Several of my class discussions have been around the aspects of structural racism, and intersecting systems of oppression that shape the education scenes for many African American youth in cities. In the past, when I was a teaching assistant for this course, for Dr. Lauren Silver, many of the concepts were new to me. As an international student, from India, the idea that Urban Education would essentially mean race and education was definitely not what I thought of when I consider urban schooling. For the students, on the other hand, it meant to grapple with the idea that institutional racism is more prevalent in school than widely assumed, and it is a lived reality for black and brown students.
However, in my current class, I find myself repeating these understandings and oftentimes, I’m challenged by my students’ knowledge and awareness of the topic. I am not going to take the trouble to explain the topics that I teach in the class in this blog post. Want to know more? You are welcome to reach out!
There is a new challenge to the course now! No – not the COVID-19, but teaching online to students who were forced to vacate their university housing, students who had to face incarceration because they were forced out of their dorms, students who’ve had to work double shift as health-care providers, students who have to figure out child care, school closures, and home schooling their children before they get online for their own classes.
The pandemic, and the responses towards it, makes urban education harder for many of my students – the students who do not need a course explaining to them that the system is against them. Their lived experiences of this system instead offer learning for many of us, educators and scholars, in higher education.
While understanding the systemic challenges and to continue the process of learning, how do we respond when the “university is business as usual”? – when university demands that there be a smooth transition from face-to-face classroom interactions to a remote learning course. When, as an educator, I am unable to concentrate on any of my impending deadlines, how do I expect my students to continue to submit assignments, continue to keep their attendance up in the remote classrooms, and continue to be involved in group projects and presentations in the time of ‘social distancing’? What about the technological affordances that some students might have and others might not?
Over the last one week, I have found myself assuring students over phone, emails and other platforms, that their ‘late assignments’ will be considered on time, that I am not going to deduct points for the lateness of their submissions, and that they are not making mistakes by choosing their lives over the course right now.
My sociologically trained brain identifies all of this as invisible labor of care that all of us educators and students are engaging in. My cynical pedagogy also questions this labeling of care as ‘emotional labor’. While I understand that it is important to make this care-work visible, I also question labeling the care-work into a category of labor.
Is this not the language of capitalism?
For some of us who come from not-so industrial capitalist communities, the care work is more organically performed, and we do not see it as gendered emotional labor. How do we continue to perform care by not valuing it against labor but also making those systems of care visible?
How do we remain open to the emotional labor that this system demands of us while also demanding that this emotional care be supported through systemic infrastructural transformations?
Only when there is a reciprocity in emotional care, it can be looked at as more than the mere label of emotional labor.