I met the students in my tutorials for the first time on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. While preparing for my first day of class, I sat down to savor my morning coffee while watching the news. The news, that morning in September, was of course a live unfolding of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Like countless others, I watched the attacks, the explosions, the crumbling towers. I showered and dressed while keeping an eye on the television, not believing anything I saw or heard. My journey up to York on Route 196 was equally surreal. The bus was abuzz with word of the attacks. Pieces of information and misinformation were transmitted from one stranger to the next. I disembarked, ready for my first class, yet unwilling to step back into the now seemingly small world of academia. I did not discuss much of what I had seen with my students that met later that afternoon. Many had not seen the events first-hand and many seemed eager to fly home to their families and to their television sets.
As a historian, I was always aware of the making of that moment, the impact of that day, the resonance of the attacks. Historians tend to eschew the present, viewing the contemporary as ahistorical. History tends to address the contemporary only as a reference point, and not as a focus of inquiry. In classrooms, we struggle to move our students beyond the presentist and personal, to the historical and analytical. We teach them that while contemporary discussions offer some insight into the past, they alone cannot be our window to the past. As a result, conventional history instructs us, as Teaching Assistants, to leave the outside world outside of the classroom.
After five years as a TA at York, I find this method unsatisfactory and unrealistic: you cannot leave the "real world" outside of the classroom because it is the "real world" to which we belong. The world – its events, its history and its future – does not exist in the ethereal "out there." World events, religious discord, racial, sexual and national identities all manifest themselves in the classroom and our understanding of the past. Unacknowledged, these "outside" factors can assume a cryptic control in shaping the learning process. We need to dismantle this obstruction by providing a controlled space for the "outside world" in our classrooms.
As a TA in the third year course, the History of Sexuality in America, I know that sexual, gender, religious, racial, national, and class politics all work in shaping the dynamic of the classroom. We discuss a host of sexual issues in their historical context, and these issues are equally viable today. Monogamy, hetero/homo/bi-sexuality, reproductive rights, and interracial sexuality are only some of the topics we discuss and students struggle with their own identities and ideologies throughout these discussions.
Throughout the year, while students grow more comfortable with me and I with them, they often expose their own personal histories. In a recent tutorial discussion on the social construction of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, students shared their experiences of sex education in high school. While the conventional historian may discount this exchange as ahistorical and presentist, we traced the historical line between the use of "fear" tactics in 1940s and 1950s sex education for youth, to the types of methods to which my students had been exposed. We learnt from each other that cultural, religious and gender differences stratified the way we learned about sex, and in turn, structured the way we viewed the history of sexuality. We created our own histories in dialogue with the course readings and as a result, we became more engaged with the material. To deny that personal histories work in tandem with public histories is to overlook the complexity of the historical experience. To suppress that viewpoint from my students, to chant the mantra that the classroom is no place to discuss personal experience, is to deprive them from learning the interpretative nature of history. Our views, our attitudes, our politics all play a role in reading/writing historical accounts. There is no objective truth in History – this is not a Science.
But some may argue that elucidating the interpretative nature of History can be successfully achieved without revealing one's own position to the subject. And I agree that it is not always necessary to do so. But often the masking of positionality means that we have not interrogated our position adequately; that we hold our own views as "personal" and not open to scrutiny; that we disentangle ourselves from the messy business of personal involvement with our students; that we believe that the outside world does not influence the classroom in which we teach. As TAs, we need to address the factors that contribute to our positionality in the classroom. We are not simply the worker, the marker, the tutorial leader: we play out multi-layered existences in the theatre of the classroom in unconscious ways. Sometimes the persona of our "audience" assumes more prominence &andash; we are willing to learn about our students' views, their cultural and religious backgrounds, their sexual identities, but grant our own little attention in the classroom. Sometimes we use the shield of TA "authority" to prevent any divulgence of the personal, the political and the problematic.
I do not reveal all in the classroom. On some subjects, I remain more detached, less willing to reveal my politics and my opinions – I use judgement as my guide, and I always listen to my students before I express my own vision. I am respectful of our differences in the classroom, and I am aware of the power and privilege I hold in a position of authority. Some topics are best left for another arena. One such topic, related to the events of September 11th, raised the question of religion, nationhood, and cultural hegemony, especially for Palestinians and Israelis. The topic emerged in a discussion of interracial sexuality. One student identified herself as being of Israeli parentage and related her opposition to interracial marriages to her ancestry. Several comments from class members and this student expressed the tensions between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian views, and a lack of understanding for both the Jewish and the Palestinian experience. I moved on, or rather away from the contemporary, and returned to the assigned reading that had inspired the discussion-a monograph of the history of interracial sexuality where Jewish Americans were situated quite prominently. We returned to the discussion quite aware of the lack of consensus on this topic. The environment remained open and friendly, but we were more respectful and aware of our own diversity.
The diversity of York's student population is one of its greatest strengths and as TAs we should encourage the recognition and exploration of these differences in relation to the discipline in which we teach. We must continue to relate our academic subject to our students in meaningful, constructive and relevant ways. We must continue to demonstrate that one can be passionate and pragmatic about a discipline without being disciplined by its constraints. We must continue to allow the "outside world" to permeate our tutorials without flooding its structure. As we move closer to our goal of professorial teaching, we must remember that the "outside world" exists in the very world of the classroom. Next year, when we look at the faces of our students we should remember that something propelled them into taking the course – something perhaps as mundane as a departmental requirement, or as personal as fleeing one's country. Whatever the reason, interest in the topic often begins with interest in one's own history and one's own pathway to knowledge. We can ignite these sparks by understanding that as each new group of students saunters in to the class for the first time, a whole new world begins anew.
1 James Douglas Morrison, Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1988, p. 103.