#BlackLivesMatter and Feminist Pedagogy: Teaching a Movement Unfolding

What are the stakes of teaching #BlackLivesMatter simultaneously in New Hampshire and in the national media? We draw upon our experiences leading two iterations of a #BlackLivesMatter course at Dartmouth College to consider the feminist pedagogical origins of “experiential learning,” the intersectional dynamics of enacting a teaching collective, and working in dialogue with the movement itself.

The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.(bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress) n November 2015, student activists at Dartmouth College garnered national media attention following a Black Lives Matter demonstration in the campus's main library.Initially organized in response to the vandalism of a campus exhibit on police brutality, the events at Dartmouth were also part of the national #CollegeBlackout mobilizations in solidarity with student activists at the University of Missouri and Yale University.On Thursday, November 12th, the Afro-American Society and the campus chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) urged students to wear black to show support for Black Lives Matter and hosted an open meeting to discuss racism on campus. 1 That evening, over 150 people gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall for a moment of silence and a group photo. 2 Following these planned events, approximately 30-40 people continued the demonstration in nearby Baker-Berry Library.The group marched through several floors of the library, chanting -Black Lives Matter,‖ -If we don't get it, shut it down,‖ and -If we can't study, you can't study.‖ 3 Fueled by an initial report in TheDartmouth Review, the conservative student newspaper, anda cell phone video of the library demonstration that went viral, conservative media outlets published sensationalized accounts of the protest in Baker-Berry, accusing students of assaulting bystanders and fomenting -race hatred.‖ 4 Investigations conducted by Dartmouth College officials in the aftermath of the protests found no evidence of violence.
Just six months later, student activists at Dartmouth captured the attention of the national media once again for their activism in support of Black Lives Matter.On May 13, 2016, a group of students removed a controversial billboard created by the College Republicans for National Police Week from the student center.Protesting the billboard's use of the slogan -Blue Lives Matter,‖ activists replaced the display with dozens of posters that proclaimed: -You cannot co-opt the movement against state violence to memorialize its perpetrators.#blacklivesmatter.‖ 5 Reports condemning the student activists appeared in several conservative media outlets and Dartmouth's senior administrators characterized the protest as -an unacceptable violation of freedom of expression" in a campus wide email. 6In the weeks following the controversy, students who participated in the protest faced widespread harassment, including death threats on social media. 7cated in the affluent rural town of Hanover, NH, Dartmouth College is a seemingly unlikely site for Black Lives Matter mobilizations.There are no #BlackLivesMatter chapters in New Hampshire and the state's major black civic organizations are headquartered far from campus in the cities of Manchester, Nashua, and Portsmouth.African Americans comprise just 2% of the population in Hanover and less than 7% of the undergraduate student body at Dartmouth. 8Among its counterparts in the Ivy League, the college has the lowest percentage of faculty of color. 9urthermore, Dartmouth has -earned a reputation as one of the more conservative institutions in the nation when it comes to race,‖ due to several dramatic and highlypublicized acts of intolerance targeting students and faculty of color since the 1980s. 10e emergence of the Black Lives Matter movementfollowing the killings of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014-provided a language for progressive students and their allies at Dartmouth to link campus activism to national struggles against state violence, white supremacy, capitalism, and homophobia.The #BlackLivesMatter course at Dartmouth emerged as educators across the country experimented with new ways to learn from and teach with a rapidly unfolding, multisited movement.Significantly, many of these efforts utilized or emerged from digital media.On Twitter, Georgetown University professor Marcia Chatelain launched the #FergusonSyllabus, a crowdsourced list of books, articles, films, and primary sources that provide context for the 2014 uprisings.The collective Sociologists for Justice also used Twitter to organize a crowdsourced bibliography through the #socforjustice hashtag.Librarians and faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis created Documenting Ferguson, an open-access digital repository that -seeks to preserve and make accessible the digital media captured and created by community members following the shooting death of Michael Brown.‖ 11 And in 2015, Frank Leon Roberts, a professor at New York University, taught the nation's first Black Lives Matter course accompanied by a multimedia digital syllabus. 12ubsequently, courses on the movement have been taught at Emory University, Wake Forest University, University of Florida, the University of Michigan, and Mount St. Mary's University.
We offer up this reflection piece as a means of interrogating both the possibilities and limitations of teaching #BlackLivesMatter at an institution of higher education during a media-saturated moment.What does it even mean to teach a hashtag?For, while one of our aims was to provide a history and context for the social movement that accompanies the hashtag, we also wanted to consider the particular interface with social media and digital community making for contemporary organizing.In this essay, we move from a brief narrative overview of how and why the course became a reality, onto a discussion of its second run, the adjustments we made, the structural shifts that enabled these changes, and what remained central to the course all along: a commitment to feminist pedagogy.Ultimately, this discussion will bring us to a reflection on the course itself as a curricular intervention and as intellectual labor designed to push the conventions of what counts as academic rigor at an Ivy League institution.Bringing #BlackLivesMatter into an Ivy League Classroom The grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson was announced on November 24, 2014, as Dartmouth students were finishing up their fall quarter exams and checking out of campus.Over the following weeks and months, #BlackLivesMatter would galvanize a movement taken to the streets as well as to social media while most of northern New England was preparing for hibernation.Though there would be two die-ins organized in Hanover-one by faculty and staff (including Reena) on December 4th and the other by Dartmouth medical students on December 10th-it would be many weeks before the main pulse of campus returned. 13 The logistical obstacles were many, and we met those challenges with the strength that a sense of urgency and commitment to a burgeoning national movement can bring.We would not have time to send a new course proposal through the conventional review process, nor would the course be taught by instructors getting teaching credit for their labor.As new courses at Dartmouth often enjoy a trial run as special topics courses, we found a willing and generous department in Geography to host this pedagogical experiment forged amidst the exigencies of a quickly emerging social movement.Anticipating that the labor for this course would largely have to be volunteered, in addition to already full workloads, we kept at the forefront of our brainstorming the need to distribute the work of in-the-classroom teaching, grading, course development and maintenance as evenly as possible across the two dozen or so faculty and staff who had stepped forward to form The Ferguson Teaching Collective.Along with an amazing team of instructional designers, librarians, and media learning technologists, faculty from across the disciplines came together over the course of the next few months to develop a syllabus that could work for students with a wide range of familiarity with critical discussions about race and gender.We worked collaboratively through documents shared online and small task forces, as well as meetings of the whole Collective in one room, to design course assignments, discuss course goals, and strategize the means of assessment.

Though members of the Teaching Collective shared a desire to bring the discussion of racialized police violence to campus, we each had different relationships to civic engagement, to practices of activist organizing, and to experiences of discrimination.
To some extent, the preliminary run of the course (a.k.a.#BLM 1.0) necessitated pooling the parts of courses already on the books, drawing on people's teaching comfort zones and areas of specialization to piece together a syllabus. 14After all, Dartmouth does occasionally teach across various departments about structural racism, intersectional feminist analysis, queer notions of family, race in media and performance, histories of social injustice, protest literature, and theoretical engagements with human rights discourse.Though members of the Teaching Collective shared a desire to bring the discussion of racialized police violence to campus, we each had different relationships to civic engagement, to practices of activist organizing, and to experiences of discrimination.Comprised of administrators, staff, adjunct instructors, tenured and untenured faculty, as well as undergraduate students, the Collective included members situated across a range of relationships to institutional power and cultural privilege.One of the first adjustments we would have to make in order to work together was to teach/model/practice a mode of feminist collaboration and grow a modicum of trust in one another.

Growing Collectivity at the Corporate University
The Ferguson Teaching Collective was formed in solidarity with experimental practices of living, working, and/or thinking in common that take place among grassroots organizers, artists, environmentalists, DIY communities, radical open source movements, and even some academics who dare to flout demands for more quantifiable outcomes for tenure and promotion in an increasingly corporatized university.In this context, the Combahee River Collective grounded our endeavor in Black feminist praxis.In part, the collective as a formation allowed for reflection on the -thousands upon thousands unknown‖ agents of social change across political scales and platforms. 15ack feminist collectives are tricky to enact, though, especially at predominantly white institutions.Every collective will experience a tension between its democratic ideals and its will to action.Democracy, after all, is not efficient.Its virtue is complexity, multiplicity, and even disagreement.In order for social movements to move, room for discussion and debate is as crucial as political organizing.The space for dissent, or at least -dissensus,‖ must remain sacrosanct and prioritized over consensus.We disagreed often-about capping the course at a certain number, the syllabus, the assignments, the budget, the guest speaker list, etc.However, what EwaZiarek calls an -ethics of dissensus‖ constituted the engine that kept the movement moving. 16Indeed, we would revisit this question in the second iteration of the course when students joined us in reading Cathy Cohen's foundational essay on the radical potential of queer politics, -Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.‖Citing Joshua Gamson's -Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?A Queer Dilemma,‖ Cohen directs our attention to how -the destabilization of collective identity is itself a goal and accomplishment of collective action.‖ 17en news broke that Dartmouth was to offer a Black Lives Matter course, we had to weather not only the unsurprising conservative media backlash but also the understandable request from #BlackLivesMatter organizers to speak with us about our intentions for the course.On the one hand, Fox Business News's audacity to question the intellectual value of a course on Black Lives Matter before we had even held our first class should be fairly obvious. 18It should have been just as obvious to us that including #BlackLivesMatter organizers in the shaping of this course would be a good idea and that a conservative Ivy League institution might be considered an unlikely place to find allies.Much more likely to expect a more appropriative move from a college that raised its founding funds on the notion that it could help bring enlightenment to Natives -in deserto,‖ even though the College would primarily serve the aspiring clergymen offspring of the landed gentry.A skeptic might have called this a branding issue.At the end of the day, perhaps part of the goal of creating the course was to make #BlackLivesMatter and #Dartmouth feel less incongruous-to affirm the value of black lives on our campus as well as in Ferguson, Staten Island, Baltimore, and elsewhere.Seeing those hashtags placed directly adjacent to one another in Twitter feeds across the nation confirmed the reach of Black Lives Matter, suggesting that college campuses could be an important staging ground for the burgeoning movement. 19estions about the course's relationship to political engagement and academic rigor highlight the stakes for black feminist scholarship in the racialized and gendered politics of knowledge production itself.Our course description frames this performative intervention of syllabus-creation-as-political-act from the outset: -Though the academy can never lay claim to social movements, this course seeks in part to answer the call of students and activists around the country to take the opportunity to raise questions about, offer studied reflection upon, and allocate dedicated institutional space to the failures of democracy, capitalism, and leadership and to make #BlackLivesMatter.‖Even if the course was taking up not only classroom but also curricular space at the institution, was it an occupation staged by an undercommons?Or, as an official course students could take for class credit, did it become part of the established university with all its limitations on more radical approaches to learning?Grades, for example, would be required, as would concrete evidence of deliverable and quantifiable outcomes.The Registrar would demand at least one instructor of record, despite our attempt to decentralize authority in the Teaching Collective.When presented with press requests, we would consult the legal team about whether journalists would be allowed into the classroom.In retrospect, some of us may have longed to have proceeded more along the lines of what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call -fugitive planning,‖ carving out a space -to be in but not of‖ the university. 20But in the push to make #BlackLivesMatter a credit-bearing course for students, we were rather quickly folded into an institutional framework and narrative. 21

Even if the course was taking up not only classroom but also curricular space at the institution, was it an occupation staged by an undercommons? Or, as an official course students could take for class credit, did it become part of the established university with all its limitations on more radical approaches to learning?
As we moved through the term, it was not only the structures of institutionalized learning that made us question what we were doing but also the struggle, even within the parameters of a higher education institutional model, to get the students engaged with the broader movement, especially when our other teaching commitments, service obligations, and research pressures constantly pulled our focus from cultivating a daily classroom environment built on trust and openmindedness.This was no doubt also a problem of labor.In its first iteration, class met every Monday afternoon in a three-hour long seminar format.Each week, and therefore each class, featured a new team of instructors who may or may not have been able to sustain the class discussion from the previous week or pass the conversational baton to the following week.While the hope was to allow the students and student teaching assistants to take on this work, the structure of the course was also designed as a labor-saving strategy.Plus, student-led courses necessitate training we didn't give them and couldn't model on a weekto-week basis.The student feedback would reveal that the course not only felt disjointed from one week to the next, but it also felt disconnected from the movement on the ground elsewhere.It felt as though every session was the first day of class, as though we were -starting over‖ again each week with a new set of instructors, methodologies, and dynamics.Instead of -spiraling in and getting deeper and deeper,‖ it felt more like -a mini lecture series.‖ 22Yet, students also stated that the Teaching Collective offered a powerful example of solidarity for budding activists on campus and urged us to continue to offer the course.So, we decided to change things up, starting with figuring out how to run the course again but with two significant adjustments.First, we wanted to address the continuity issue.Second, we wanted to revamp the readings and assignments to reflect a more direct engagement with the #BlackLivesMatter movement.Both concerns required a different structural base.
In February of 2015, just shortly after the initial sprint to get the course listed in the spring catalog, the College circulated a call to apply for -reallocation fund‖ support for innovative teaching.If selected for funding, our proposal would grant teaching credit for the course as well as $2000 to assist with programmatic costs.Because Abby would be spending much of the following year conducting research abroad, Reena stepped up to co-teach.In May of 2015, we heard that we had won the innovative course grant and set to work thinking about how to deepen the course's engagement with the movement across all aspects of the course.We were keen to make some significant changes and faced some immediate questions.

We also viewed experiential learning as a vehicle for students to enact a feminist political praxis as they collaborated with community organizers, activist media makers, and artists-both on and off campus.
Though there were some consistencies across the two versions of the course worth noting-(in both instances, the course largely relied on the labor of untenured women)-the second iteration witnessed some significant changes.If two of us were receiving teaching credit, what would happen to the Collective?While people's enthusiasm for the course remained strong, it no longer seemed fair to call upon them to sustain the same level of responsibility to the course as in previous years.We began to reformulate the Collective as a supplement to the course-for organizing, circulating information, and continuing a practice of ongoing study-study which would become the ever-evolving heart of our practice.To that end, we hoped to kickstart that initiative by purchasing all the required books for the second run of the course for all Teaching Collective members.Ultimately, the Collective did become a locus of organizing-composing and distributing an open letter of support for student protesters, for example-as well as a resource for ongoing news gathering of more incidents of police violence as well as Black Lives Matter actions.
As we were preparing to launch the -#BLM 2.0‖ course, we received a major grant from Dartmouth's new Experiential Learning Initiative, a -campus-wide, strategic effort to actively resource, connect, promote, and assess intentional, reflective, high-impact learning experiences in and beyond the classroom.‖This grant money would give legs to the public outreach project assignment and our attempts to connect with the Black Lives Matter movement from the first iteration of the course.Students had responded enthusiastically both to the call to public engagement, which resulted in the proliferation of studentled teach-ins, op-eds, and social media conversations, and our Skype session with Grand Rapids #BLM chapter founder Anita Moore.(In fact, one of our students is now the chair of that chapter!).Even as our $45,000 Experiential Learning Initiative grant became a necessary windfall for facilitating more engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement, we were wary of using this money to supply a temporary experience for students-a sort of drop-in activism model-that would leave students feeling good about themselves and the little they had done to make an effort without developing a lasting relationship and impact more directly channeled to grassroots organizations.At Dartmouth, with Ivy League money, it is all too easy to reproduce -the very power inequalities that feminists have worked so diligently to expose and challenge. 23eking to craft a feminist alternative to -voluntourism‖ and service learning, we designed the new experiential learning components of the course to foster three outcomes: critical awareness, sustained dialogue, and personal reflection.We drew inspiration in this effort from the writings of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire as well as the work of women of color feminists who have long argued for, and modeled, forms of -community accountable scholarship.‖ 24We extended the ethos of public engagement from our first iteration of the course, designed to encourage students to -reclaim learning as a popular and democratic activity that resists the hierarchies and exploitative social relations fostered by education as we know it.‖ 25Our four core books for the course-written by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Michelle Alexander, Angela Y. Davis, and Ta-Nehisi Coates-provided necessary context for both the current crisis of state violence and the powerful surge in grassroots resistance.By combining interdisciplinary inquiry with experiential learning, we prompted students to relate scholarly research and theory to the pressing social problems of our contemporary moment.
We also viewed experiential learning as a vehicle for students to enact a feminist political praxis as they collaborated with community organizers, activist media makers, and artists-both on and off campus.While on campus, students participated in discussion-based workshops with community organizers Osagyefo Sekou, Jay-Marie Hill, Darnell Moore, and Pete White.The workshops, in large part made possible by the grant money, examined the process of movement buildingthrough media, music, and community campaigns-in the era of Black Lives Matter.Each visiting speaker also enacted for our students what -theory as liberatory practice‖ looks like at its best. 26Following each workshop, we invited to students to join the visiting organizer(s) for a free-flowing conversation session, where they often posed questions about building a progressive movement culture Beyond campus, students conducted short-term fieldwork with #BlackLivesMatter chapters and other community-based activist organizations across the nation.Given Dartmouth's physical distance from the epicenters of Black Lives Matter mobilizations, we thought it was crucial that our course allocate significant time for students to observe, document, and study the of activists -on the ground."To facilitate sustained engagement with local movements beyond the end of the term, we encouraged students to collaborate with a #BlackLivesMatter chapter or an allied organization in their hometown or in another locale where they had preexisting ties to the community.Students selected a variety of sites for their fieldwork, including chapters of #BlackLivesMatter and Black Youth Project (BYP 100); cooperative urban farms in upstate New York; and a spoken word youth organization in Philadelphia.Significantly, four students traveled to California to conduct fieldwork with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) after meeting Pete White, the organization's Founder and Executive Director, during one of the campus workshops.
The culminating assignment for the course prompted students to design multimedia projects that engaged with Black Lives Matter.In these projects, media served as a vehicle for research-based public scholarship on the movement and as a means to stand in solidarity with the movement.Working collaboratively in groups of 2-3, students addressed the reverberations of Black Lives Matter on college campuses as well as the movement's ongoing impact on the national stage.Their projects featured several different media formats-from documentary films, podcasts, and music videos to Facebook pages, digital archives, and Zines-and highlighted the potential and challenges of documenting a movement as it unfolds.In keeping with the aims of the course, the students presented their projects at a public event attended by local community members as well as Dartmouth students, staff, and faculty.These group media projects required a collaborative ethos we had been cultivating through our readings and daily practice over the course of the term.Most days we met in a special active learning space that did the physical work of distributing attention around the room. 29Students often worked in -pods‖ gathered around six multimedia stations equipped with projector and wireless connection to their laptops.We used this configuration often for small group exercises, including on-the-spot, real-time synthesis of a group's responses to a critical passage or media clip.Students could collaborate even in their note-taking, thinking together on a shared screen, where they could collect their questions and comments for presenting to the larger group later.As this was our default set-up, we enjoyed seeing how our various guest speakers used the space, criss-crossing the center of the room, writing notes on all four walls of whiteboard, becoming a moving cursor, hovering over different groups of students at various moments of the discussion.Some days, though, required steadier communing.Midway through the term, students had formed such an intense and trusting community in that room, they started to construct the space themselves, asking if we could sit all at one big seminar table one day, or in a big free-floating circle -so we could all face each other‖ the next.Students brought in their organizing from beyond the classroom, too, often opening and closing class sharing with their peers what projects they were working on elsewhere on campus and how to get involved.In part, the gathering inward and the attention outward became a routine ebb and flow of the class.This telescoping movement was, in fact, part of the goal of the course, threaded through the kinds of work they were being asked to do for class: writing op-eds, listening to professorcurated playlists of the movement, and creating Instagram essays (one of which would earn its place in an arty publication called Documentum in an issue guest-edited by Teju Cole and Teaching Collective member Jeff Sharlet).For all the money and structural orchestration of this course, ultimately, these remarkable students took the reins of the experiment.Without their trust and willingness to participate, none of it would have worked.elite spaces‖? 30We pose these questions with the knowledge that the pedagogical work of teaching #BlackLivesMatter will be borne disproportionately by people by color.

Midway through the term, students had formed such an intense and trusting community in that room, they started to construct the space themselves, asking if we could sit all at one big seminar table one day, or in a big free-floating circle "so we could all face each other" the next.
And how do we even get to the part of the tale where we must face our classroom, full of black and brown faces, on the days when another police shooting of an unarmed black person has occurred?How do we write the part where we stop in our tracks and remember all the families who will likely never receive any justice, the lives cut short?Dedicated teachers often talk about extending conversations beyond the classroom.In this case, though we include a link to our publicly available syllabus, some of the most important lessons cannot be represented on those pages.What did it mean to lie ourselves down on the pavement, to embody and reenact the position of the unarmed victims of these police shootings?How do you show up for school every day when you feel the -between the world and me‖ gap that Ta-Nehisi Coates attempts to set down in words?As we collabo-write this piece in a shared document online, with media feeds running in adjacent tabs, two more stories of audacious police shootings of black men-one in need of roadside assistance and another reading in his car waiting to pick up his kiddemand our attention.In addition to the stories of Terence Crutcher and Keith Lamont Scott, we have also learned that the Baltimore County officer who fatally shot Korryn Gaines and wounded her five-year old son would not face criminal charges.And consequently we witness many of our friends needing to take a break from social media, needing to close the tabs, needing to carve out some space to respond to an unrelenting stream of deaths caught on video-to respond on their own terms, where their own words and silences can surface at their own pace.This is the kind of space we wanted to carve out at our institution, where we could help one another shuttle between media saturated life online and the all-too-quiet Ivory Tower in the so-called Hanover bubble.bell hooks writes that -the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.‖ 31The possibilities we glimpsed at many moments over the course of the past two years in the #BlackLivesMatter course have moved us and made us grateful to our students who will maybe grow similar spaces beyond the academy.This piece is dedicated to them, the ones who hold the key to a movement still unfolding.
We would like to thank all the members of the Ferguson Teaching Collective at Dartmouth for their collaborative spirit and material contributions to the making of these courses.We also thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their feedback and support.Most of all, we thank and would like to dedicate this piece to the students.
Reflecting on their engagement with organizers in the classroom, students commented that the experience helped them to gain a deeper understanding of the -tangible impacts and work of the movement.‖ 27With a classroom comprised of about 75% students of color (around 66% in the first iteration), these Black Lives Matter organizers offered students a language, set of tactics, and broader conversation to participate in that could help address long standing grievances.