There really isn’t such a thing as “graduate student pedagogy,” but I thought I would write about it anyway. I’m always hopeful about it, but I know why it doesn’t exist: People who want to teach graduate students don’t understand how teaching works, they aren’t interested in thinking or talking about teaching, and they also have a very high self-image of their own importance to the field and to their studies.

Graduate student pedagogy is essential, particularly in pedagogy. It is clear that nearly all future jobs for advanced degree holders are going to be in teaching, and will likely consist of a lot more teaching than we are used to in academic appointments. When departments don’t have serious conversations about course and assignment design, and don’t have regular conversations about how to teach, pretty terrible things happen as they recently did on my campus.

A graduate student was removed of his teaching duties after he tried to get a class to come up with arguments in favor of slavery. As someone who teaches argumentation for a living, and someone who thinks a lot about the power and nature of classroom speech, this assignment cannot adequately be described as terrible. It’s the epitome of bad graduate student mentoring and what happens when you don’t have open conversations about teaching and what it’s about. Professor Taylor’s terrible assignment is a symptom, not an independent problem. And it’s a symptom that exists at some level in higher education in general.

Graduate student supervisors, as a rule, are really nervous about talking about teaching quality with graduate students. I wonder why this is? Are they afraid? Are they unwilling to let the graduate students know that teaching is an art that requires a lot of work and thought just to realize you could have done it so much better? Is it that they don’t know what to say, they believe in a simple transmission and response model? Taylor is, to his credit, trying to have an interactive classroom. But his assumptions about things like critical thinking, student engagement, and what his role is as a professor are detrimental to his ability to teach. He is one of these people who seems to believe the professor’s role is to offer the opposite, to teach from the point of opposition, to take up the impossible position and push it toward the students to see if they can push back correctly. This is not teaching. This is like mixing chemicals as a Chemistry teacher to see how the students will react to the explosions. It’s irresponsible, and it’s simply not teaching.

This professor was trying to be edgy, he was trying to really get the students to “think outside the box” to have that moment of “Wow! I’ve never thought of that before,” or whatever trendy nonsense was going through his head. It is not teaching to rupture the students’ relationships with the things they bring into the classroom. It is also not appropriate to think that you are offering radical expose about ideas to them. This assignment screams the attitude that Taylor believed he knew more about this issue than his students. This is an inappropriate attitude for teaching anything. Good teaching is realizing that you know different ways to encounter knowledge, not that you have amassed more than they have.

Secondly, Taylor did not do any adequate research to try to teach this assignment. People have written books where they have contextualized the arguments in favor of slavery from American history as well as the history of other countries that practiced it. But this was done carefully, with research, with context, and with the understanding that bad and good are contextually understood. Taylor did not offer any of that to his students, by all reports, and just tried to get them to speculate what good could come from slavery as they were sitting there, in a classroom, in 2020, with no other resources than their own feelings and thoughts. Of course that is inappropriate. More than that, it’s irresponsible to think that this would help teach these students anything about how slavery was permitted to survive so long, or how people justified it in the time and place where it was practiced. How is this the teaching of history if you are not providing deep context? Again, there are entire books written on this topic.

Finally there is this idea floating around that the pedagogy of critical thinking consists of examining the extant “two sides” of every issue. These two sides exist already and can always be accessed. One is preferred now, the other is not although it could be preferred given the right argument.

This is an unhealthy and improper model of argument, controversy, and critical thinking. If you can access arguments in favor of something it does not mean this side of the issue has legitimacy. That legitimacy is always conferred by audiences. In order to think critically about any controversy, all positions must be situated within the discourse, the context, and the ideology of the time. This requires a lot more than just sitting and staring into space in a classroom and writing down whatever reasons come to mind.

Taylor seems to believe that a starting point for critical thinking and teaching is to tell students to imagine a horrible atrocity from a positive point of view. This stereotype of thought often appears in popular culture as what rhetoric or debate offer. Nothing is further from the truth. If Taylor had actually prepared to teach his class, he would have provided them ample readings from scholars of the time who discuss why it was that people who were decent citizens in every other respect would consider it normal and healthy to own other human beings. That’s a conversation worth having, and that’s something where the critical thinker could make connections between our discourse about global economics and the terrible conditions of Chinese labor could be recognized as a more modern version of this atrocity.

Thinking that coming up with a logical argument to justify atrocity without any consideration of context is evidence of only one argument: A lazy, unprepared teacher who should not be teaching in the first place. But isn’t the blame really with the supervisors and mentors who clearly didn’t inquire, or investigate, or suggest how to teach to their graduate student?