TEACHING STATEMENT Charles Ayitey Fall ’23 GSI - Dept. African American Studies Teaching is thrilling. That feeling of fulfillment is so intense, especially after a thriving discussion section. Teaching a unit this semester reechoes this feeling. My taught course in the Fall Semester – Minorites in a Majority Culture – was on race in America from 1492 to the present. We (my students and I) began reading "Racial Formation" by Omi and Winant and "The Intellectuals" by Antonio Gramsci. We looked at various modules for the theme of racism, from Hegemony to Racial Projects. It was eerie quiet. Some students were faceburied in their books, and others looked lost. I realized my students were losing, if not lost, interest – I was losing them. I had to switch strategies, so I asked them to close their books and disperse into groups of four. The task was for them to discuss and jot down how the models applied to racism in the pre-industrial revolution age of America. Immediately, the conversation took off. Reserved students now got out of their shelves, responding to each other. My strategy was not what I planned for the section, but the one most responded to by my students. By the end of the first section, my students were engaged - lively. It felt rewarding that I entered my class not only with a Plan A but also with alternative teaching strategies. As a GSI with the African American Department, I endeavor to foster knowledge-sharing and meaningful connections among students. Also, I encourage them to cultivate and communicate a thoroughly well-defined and logical historical essay – making academic interpretations of what race is and how it shapes the lives of racialized minorities in the United States. I have observed that simple teaching methods work best in discussion sections. I use interactive tools, including jam boards, group discussions, and peer-to-peer reviews, to explore the modules of the course materials. My students remark that these tools - especially the jam board- are their most valuable learning tools. They construct short templates with varied interpretations of historical modules incrusted in the reading materials: for example, applying Hegemony to how Redlining in the 19th century and its trickledown effect on the Black Community. The interactive impact of live sharing and how these events relate is powerful, and students learn from each other. My students' developing historical empathy is part of my teaching goals as a GSI. I am interested in seeing my students have that socio-intellectual bond with the characters or subjects of their course materials. African American history goes beyond the past to appreciating or studying how people lived or are living the past. I introduce(d) role-playing and debating exercises to achieve this approach, splitting them into three groups. A thriving discussion section (on how Frederick Douglass laid the groundwork for a Civil War) acts the character roles of Douglas, his enslaver, and his colleague enslaved people – as they answered the question of how the modules of double consciousness, coercion, and dissent contributed to the liberation movement. In the final analysis, I appreciate teaching as an art best perfected when the focus on student participation is the priority.
