“The restoration of hope is an essential part of the learning process.”

-Beverly Daniel Tatum

As an instructor, I endeavor to provide my students with empathy and flexibility, dismantling the hierarchies of the classroom, and serving as an engaged interlocutor on the students’ educational journey. It is my hope that the classroom represents a space for students to pose questions, pursue ideas, and develop research interests, while also engaging in civil intellectual discourse and serious examination of ideas, cultivating what bell hooks describes in Teaching to Transgress as “seeing the classroom always as a communal space” leading to a “collective effort in creating and sustaining a learning community.”

I strive to develop culturally-responsive, multimodal pedagogies, incorporating high-impact educational practices such as collaborative learning (peer review, online and in-person small group discussions, in-class debates, research teams, collaborative culminating projects), scaffolding assignments, questioning and open dialogue, and transparent assignment design with clear learning objectives.

In my Black Women in Contemporary Times course, in lieu of a traditional midterm exam or essay, I have often assigned a Black women’s narratives oral history project in which students conducted oral interviews, analyzing Black feminist and Africana womanist theories we studied in class and relating them to the lived experiences of interviewees who identify as Black women.

While teaching first-year writing, I try to provide students with an opportunity to highlight the multiple literacies and languages they already possess. To do so, I have facilitated discussions about the politics of language, power, and nation as we consider the conventions and requirements of university writing.

Selected courses that I have taught in the Africana Studies Department at CSUN:

• Literature of the African and Caribbean Experience

• African American Literature since 1930

• Introduction to the African Diaspora

• The Black Woman in Contemporary Times

• Approaches to University Writing

• Black Women Writers

At UW-Madison, I have taught the following courses in the English Department:

• Afterlives of Slavery

• Afrodiasporic Intimacies (undergraduate and graduate course)

• Black Literature on Film

• Zora Neale Hurston

If you would like to learn more about these courses, see syllabi or sample assignments, I’d be happy to share. Please contact me: rkennon@wisc.edu.

[i] Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Teaching White Students about Racism: The Search for White Allies and the Restoration of Hope,” Teachers College Record, vol 95, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 473.

[ii] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, 1994, 8.