Lisa Bergin is a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and a faculty development consultant in the Center for Teaching and Learning at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Anti-racist and culturally responsive pedagogies infuse all her work.
What type of civically engaged philosophy do you do?
I am using my background in multicultural/feminist philosophy as a support for work that I’ve been doing to build trainings in Anti-racist/Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (AR/CRP) for my campus and the Minnesota State Colleges and University System. These trainings focus on building skills and knowledge around 1) the (overdue) need for anti-racist pedagogies, 2) how to show up as an anti-racist/culturally responsive instructor, and 3) how to infuse AR/CRP in course design: Outcomes, assessments, activities, materials, spaces. The trainings also utilize the overlapping perspectives of Trauma Responsive Pedagogy, Equity-Mindfulness Pedagogy, Poverty Responsive Pedagogy, Open Educational Pedagogy, and Universal Design in Learning. The year-long training provides a CRP Checklist that includes links to resources on these issues.
Give an example of a successful project.
So far, I have run three different versions of the AR/CRP training: A quick 3-week overview, a more in-depth 8-week version that allows participants to start shifting practices and personas, and a 12-week version that allows participants a more leisurely pace. I’ve learned so much from each of my cohorts as we support each other in deepening our practices and I’ve been heartened by how hungry, ready, and willing folks have been for the work.
What motivates you to do this work?
My students motivate the work! On my first day teaching at an open-access community college where the majority of our students are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), students demanded that I show up differently than I had learned to show up while teaching at predominantly white, small liberal arts colleges and large universities. In the past, I would give a quick overview of the syllabus: Boring! Students silent! Maybe one or two questions from them. Not at Minneapolis College: The older Black women in the room opened up space for students to collectively advocate for themselves, showing me how confusing my syllabus was. They called me into the work of reframing my own understandings of philosophy, and into teaching through valuing their knowledges and lifeways enough to incorporate them into our understandings of philosophy.
In what ways does the work inform your research?
I’ve always centered my work in philosophy in my teaching, rather than in research. Yet I never knew until I came to a community college that there is scholarship around teaching well. I am inspired by what I learn from the work in SOTL (Scholarship on Teaching and Learning). I’m also a do-er (gardener, knitter, baker) and I get antsy when things get too “in the head.” I love reading a book on teaching well and getting sparks of inspiration that I can translate into my own teaching and use to pass along the flame to my students.
In what ways does the work inform your teaching?
So many—I am such a different teacher now than I was before embarking on my CRP journey! This even though since my undergraduate days I’ve been invested in bringing a global approach to how philosophy is often taught in the US, rejecting its exclusive focus on the perspective of the most privileged. I’m continuing to de-center myself in the classroom and invite students into the work. I’m willing to be much more vulnerable, more compassionate, more collaborative…I try hard to hear student complaints as nuggets of wisdom that can improve our experience.
How do you motivate yourself to do civically engaged work in times of political or personal struggle?
For me, these times of political struggle motivate the work. I live very close to George Floyd Square. I was building an online version of the CRP training when he was murdered and so this injustice is infused deeply in my work. I have a timer on my watch that buzzes me at 11:55 AM every day. That’s my George Floyd moment, when I say something to him—when I tell him what I have done or will do toward justice that day. Doing this keeps me accountable to my own goals, to my BIPOC neighbors, to his memory, to my students. I find that I mostly struggle personally around having an overabundance of work. My planner helps motivate me here—I use it to calm myself down, offer gratitude to the many who are helping me, take the smallest micro-action possible that will get me back to the practice/habit. I try to offer myself compassion when I don’t finish my to-dos—that I’m still practicing!
Did you have an experience as a student or in your life that leads you to embrace your civically engaged work?
When I was an undergraduate, I had the great fortune to have Katheryn Doran and Ifeanyi Menkiti as professors. After I had spent a couple of years learning philosophy that was really Western philosophy but was presented to me as just philosophy, my mind was blown when I was able to engage with the work that Katheryn and Ifeanyi offered us: Feminist philosophy, Martin Luther King Jr. as a philosopher, African Philosophy. For example, before taking the African Philosophy course, I didn’t know that time could be thought of differently by peoples around the world, that my linear conception of time was not held universally by other folks, and that that made a real difference in how one lived one’s life. Both Katheryn and Ifeanyi made us feel like they loved being with us and loved learning with us. Finally, they also taught me new ways to think about myself. I had learned from Descartes the proof of our own existence, “I think, therefore I am,” Ifeanyi taught me the Ubuntu conception of self as, “I am because we are.” Katheryn brought me to Audre Lorde’s conception “I feel, therefore I can be free.” And those shifts from the very individual to the social, from the purely rational to the rational/emotional, from the status quo to the liberatory, have especially helped me in my work with anti-racist/culturally responsive pedagogy, as I center my teaching on relationship, and the collective building of knowledge toward the ending of suffering and oppression.
If you had to pick a “theme song” for your civically engaged work, what would it be?
“O-o-h, Child” sung by the Five Stairsteps – “Someday, we’ll put it together and we’ll get it undone…Someday we’ll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun. Someday, when the world is much brighter.”
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