Teaching Portfolio
Jacob (Jenna) McWilliams
Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences Program
University of Colorado Boulder
j.mcwilliams@colorado.edu
ph. (617) 447-1137
“There is reason to believe that vision is better from below the brilliant space-platforms of the powerful.”
(Haraway, 1988)
Educational Philosophy
In my theoretical and pedagogical commitments, and in my classroom practice, I strive always to align
myself with the principles undergirding feminist and queer theoretical frameworks. My theoretical
commitments and my efforts to implement these commitments in the classroom are detailed below.
Theoretical commitments
There is no “normal”; learning and knowledge are visible in contradictions and resistance. I resist
mainstream theories of learning that hold that there exists a “typical” learning trajectory across the
lifespan. Educational theories typically conceive of learning as featuring “increase”—an increase in
opportunities for action (Boyer & Roth, 2005), for example, or increased attunement to or facility with the
affordances of cultural tools, knowledge-as-tools, and language-as-tools (Brown, Collins, & Duguid,
1989; Greeno, 1998). This perspective enables educators to privilege transformations that fit into a
narrative of positive development: Over time, learners should “advance” toward a more complex, more
sophisticated view of their social world and should act in ways that recognizably and consistently reflect
increased complexity in cognition (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, Tulviste, &
Hagstrom, 1993).
The emphasis on positive change normalizes one learning trajectory, as a result obscuring or effacing
other possible pathways including resistance, rejection, or failure (Britzman, 1998; Britzman & Gilbert,
2004). Queer and feminist theory tell us that learning is neither a steady movement toward a better self
nor a simple process of replacing misconceptions with “better” knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Weiler,
1994). Instead, learning is characterized by resistance, by contradictions, by changes that may or may not
look like progress to outside observers or even to the learner themself.
“By now,” writes Britzman (1998, p. 51), “we should be wary of the promise of progress, not because
development does not occur but because progress must forget the conflicts it requires.” Poststructuralism
warns us against the comforting narrative of progress that characterizes dominant frameworks in cultural
studies and the social sciences. Education, premised as it is on the core principle of cognitive change over
time, is particularly prone to the dangerous fiction of the progress narrative. Queer and feminist theory
urge us, instead, to treat learning as an unsteady movement, as change not oriented to progress but to the
simple human imperative to keep moving (Kumashiro, 2000).
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Education must be directed at social transformation, by rejecting the tyranny of normal and resisting the
progress narrative. It should be news to nobody that we live in a deeply unjust world whose social
structures are committed to legitimizing some forms of humanity while rendering others illegible (Butler,
2004; Crenshaw, 1989; Erevelles, 2000; Foucault, 1979, 1980). Education that sets as its goal social
transformation must take on the tyranny of normal across the curriculum, in the name of dismantling
these unjust social structures and working toward rendering legible new forms of human experience.
Putting it into practice
Feminist and queer approaches to teaching and learning call for a consistent commitment to disruption. I
have adopted strategies for disruptive education at both the macro and micro levels. My classes are
designed around engaging dominant theories and texts—interrogating them in order to understand what
forms of life become normalized through them and in order to develop approaches to challenging the
discourses they reflect and reproduce. Dominant theories of learning and pedagogy were developed
primarily by cisgender, heterosexual white men from wealthy families who received mainstream
educational opportunities. Those who challenge those theories are framed as either iconoclastic
revolutionaries (if they look similar enough to the theorists whose work they critique) or substandard
educators whose work is theoretically limited (if they look different enough from the theorists whose
work they critique).
All of my courses are built around the premise that none of this is an accident—that education was and
continues to be a field committed to reproducing masculinist, Eurocentric and heteronormative ways of
thinking and acting. I guide my students toward rooting out these biases at every opportunity. I begin by
“occupying the syllabus” (Kazuo & Perret, 2015)—shifting reading and writing assignments to account
for a wider variety of voices and perspectives. We consider alternative models for theorizing the world,
including feminist and queer frameworks (Britzman, 1995; hooks, 2014; Kumashiro, 2002; Weiler, 1991),
Critical Race Theory (Collins, 1999; hooks, 2014; Smith, 1989), and theories emerging from disability
studies (Clare, 2015; Erevelles, 2000; Gabel, 2005). I also draw on these theories to shape my approach to
engaging students. Discussions and assignments aim to illuminate the varied experiences with and
interpretations of the world that students bring to the classroom, laying these varieties against each other
for examination.
Always, across the days and weeks and semesters of my courses, I returned to a cluster of questions: What
is normal? Why is it considered normal? What experiences, identities, and lives become erased by the
normal, and how can we challenge and resist that erasure?
I have always undertaken this work from inside of “normal” educational settings—public and private
institutions of higher education where grades and test scores and rankings play significant and undeniable
roles. As the instructor, I am expected to provide a valid and reliable assessment of each student’s change
over time, and my continued employment is predicated on demonstrating “progress”: positive change
between Point A and Point B. One way to determine a student’s grade is by determining whether they
know more at Point B than they did at Point A. Another way—the way I prefer—is to consider whether,
across a given chunk of time, a student took on the struggle of learning. Did they grapple? Did they
engage? Did they get angry or frustrated? What did they do with these negative reactions (and did I guide
them effectively through the difficult times)? Did they take on increasing responsibility for interrogating
their assumptions, for challenging themselves to be better?
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In my courses, an ‘A’ student is one for whom the struggle becomes increasingly real. How to define
“struggle” varies depending on the student, the content, and the context of the course, but the work of
learning is the work of engaging—not always, and not always in the same way or with the same level of
energy, but increasingly consistently over time.
Of course, this turns teaching into a very different endeavor than it is framed as by dominant pedagogical
discourses. If learning is viewed as an emotional, psychically disruptive experience, then the teacher must
approach the class from an ethic of care and a desire to build trust and kindness. At the beginning of each
semester, I provide students with a written description of the kind of emotional engagement I anticipate,
and we spend significant time across the course revisiting the challenge of supporting students in the often
painful experience of disruption. My approach to this is exemplified in the content warning I provided to
students in a class I am currently teaching on nonviolent social movements; this class focuses deeply on
the history of race and racism in America, and strategies for resisting racism and racist structures. On the
first day of class, students read this:
Content warning: This course focuses on issues of deep social injustice and the strategies used
by oppressed groups to resist subjugation. It is impossible to explore these issues without also
considering the tools of oppression—including instances of physical, verbal, emotional, and
social violence. These are stories of trauma, and engaging with them may be distressing or
painful. I will do my best to provide advance warning when we will be reading, watching, or
discussing stories of trauma. If you anticipate needing additional accommodations—or if at any
time in the semester you find yourself needing additional accommodations—in order to engage
effectively with course materials, please let me know.
Additionally, we will spend a good deal of time this semester discussing issues of deep social
injustice—including racism, sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia. Some of what we read or
view in class could well leave you feeling guilty, uncomfortable, anxious, and sad. These are
normal and healthy responses to exploring social injustice, and I will do my best to build a
community in which these feelings can be discussed honestly and openly if necessary. If at any
time you have ideas for how I can be more effective at supporting you or your classmates as we
grapple with personal and societal injustices, please let me know.
I see my work as a teacher as bringing students to the level of struggle that is implied in the content
warning above, and as supporting them in finding ways to produce social change as a result. This process
is never simple, never straightforward, and never easy; but I view it as the most important work I do as a
feminist and queer theorist/activist working in academia.
References
Boyer, L., & Roth, W. M. (2005). Individual| collective dialectic of free‐choice learning in a community‐
based mapping project. Environmental Education Research, 11(3), 335-351.
Britzman, D. P. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight. Educational Theory, 45(2),
151-165.
Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning.
New York: SUNY Press.
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Britzman, D. P., & Gilbert, J. (2004). What will have been said about gayness in teacher education.
Teaching Education, 15(1), 81-96.
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational
Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Clare, E. (2015). Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Collins, P. H. (1999). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of
empowerment: Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of
antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. U. Chi. Legal F., 139.
Erevelles, N. (2000). Educating unruly bodies: Critical pedagogy, disability studies, and the politics of
schooling. Educational Theory, 50(1), 25-47.
Foucault, M. (1979). History of sexuality volume 1: An introduction. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977: Random
House Digital, Inc.
Gabel, S. L. (2005). Disability studies in education: Readings in theory and method (Vol. 3): Peter Lang.
Greeno, J. G. (1998). The situativity of knowing, learning, and research. American psychologist, 53(1), 5.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial
perspective. Feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599.
hooks, b. (2014). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.
Kazuo, R., & Perret, M. (2015). Occupy the syllabus. The daily Californian. Retrieved from:
http://www.dailycal.org/2015/01/20/occupy-syllabus/
Kumashiro, K. K. (2000). Toward a theory of anti-oppressive education. Review of Educational Research,
70(1), 25-53.
Kumashiro, K. K. (2002). Troubling Education: "Queer" Activism and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy. New
York: Routledge.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Smith, V. (1989). Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the 'Other.'. Feminisms. An Anthology
of literary theory and criticism, 311-325.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Weiler, K. (1991). Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference. Harvard Educational Review, 61(4),
449-475.
Weiler, K. (1994). Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference. Politics of liberation: Paths from Freire,
12-40.
Wertsch, J. V., Tulviste, P., & Hagstrom, F. (1993). A sociocultural approach to agency. Contexts for
learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children’s development, 336-356.
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