Revisionist history

A pandemic. Racial reckoning. Civil unrest. Political uprising. For many of us, the year 2020 motivated self-examination across every spectrum of our consciousness — social, cultural, economic and intellectual. Academia provided space for impact. None of us had ever developed pedagogy overnight — we were building the plane while flying. My impulse to instruct remotely was at first off-base. The students clearly needed time to adjust to the improbability of it all. And so we traded leads; we flattened the pedagogical hierarchy. An egalitarian architecture materialized where students led and I followed. Students felt fragile, we all did, as individuals seeking to normalize mammoth instability. This vulnerability underscored the value of inclusivity, all voices deserved a platform. Was my pedagogy inclusive enough? Was it empathic enough? How did it speak to our social and political context that was under intense scrutiny? Instead of a pedagogy informed by my own lived experiences, a bias especially visible in my Graphic Design History curriculum, I wondered what would inspire students to independently ask the same important questions we are reflecting on in this publication.