This essay shares techniques to help instructors explicitly address the vulnerabilities and power dynamics operating in their media classrooms. Given the saturation of media in our daily lives, these classes often draw students that are deeply invested in their own expertise—whether or not they have been trained in the field. Various scholars and practitioners have addressed how media classrooms can be gendered and racialized in particular ways. For example, white male students—inspired by aesthetic, technological, and other media histories long organized around male auteurs—can sometimes resist critical approaches to beloved texts or industrial practices. Whether in production or critical studies classes, this resistance can be especially pronounced when the instructor is a woman, BIPOC, and/or queer. For such reasons, instructors who appear or sound Other may feel precarious in a predominantly white media classroom because it can be all too easy for students to challenge our authority in ways that pedagogical training and support systems do not prepare us to address.[1]

As a woman of color teaching popular U.S. media at a predominantly white institution (PWI) in Oregon, I gradually developed a reflexive pedagogy—a kind of “strategic vulnerability”—to navigate necessary discussions about race and media. Strategic vulnerability has helped me effectively engage the classroom community while enabling individual students—across and within various racialized locations—to practice difficult conversations with each other. The urgency of antiracist pedagogy requires hard, personal work; this is my still-evolving method for navigating those challenges.

WHERE AM I STARTING FROM? (POSITIONALITY)

This essay models the vulnerability that I strategically employ in my own antiracist pedagogy. When I first began teaching, showing any vulnerability in the classroom—never mind explicitly addressing it—was unthinkable. As a brown, first-generation woman explicitly teaching about race and popular media in the U.S., I was too busy managing my own imposter syndrome and posturing as a professor. The classroom was the most potent site of these anxieties and explicitly sharing my struggles with students felt dangerous and uncomfortable. This feeling was exacerbated by the fact that academic institutions are structured to reward productivity and perfection; such pressures are exponential for women, BIPOC, queer, and/or first-generation instructors. The incredible sense of responsibility I feel to “get it right”—or at least, “do no harm”—when addressing race and power in aesthetics, history, theory, or practice courses is the most overwhelming aspect of those anxieties. Gradually, I gained confidence as an instructor and consciously channeled my hyper-awareness of systemic power as well as my own privileges and struggles to actively generate discussion. I can now model how we are ALL—always—learning and reprogramming our brains in one way or another. By strategically identifying my own vulnerability as an instructor, I have begun to build deeper connections with students in terms of race, power, and media representation/production.

HOW DO I DO IT? (TRANSLATION)

Leaning into the specific contours and limits of our own identities encourages intercultural dialogue; proactively challenges racist beliefs and systems; and models civilized, compassionate, and critical thinking. This approach is different for every instructor, may evolve at different rates over time, and is riddled with self-doubt: Am I doing enough? Did I meet my nonwhite, white, and white-presenting students where they are—helping them open up rather than shutting down?

Because antiracist pedagogies require us to continually and communally re-program our thinking and actions, it is helpful to remind our students—and ourselves—that failure can be productive. By acknowledging aloud that instructors are also grappling with these complex issues and actions—in real time, in front of an audience—students witness intellectual growth as a complex process that extends beyond formal education. I now see my style of antiracist pedagogy to be akin to translation; I work to help students from divergent backgrounds and with different investments to better understand each other while advocating for structural change. 

The media courses I teach tend to have an alpha goal and a beta goal. Some classes explicitly focus on race, power, and intersectionality; more frequently, though, these concepts are the ever-present beta goal of courses that focus on aesthetics, industry, history, etc. This alpha/beta balance helps me reach students that are not necessarily self-selecting for such important issues in the curriculum.

To support my strategic vulnerability in the media classroom, I now employ two practical methods: labor-based grading and collaborative training. While these tools are not unique to teaching media, they neatly contribute to the critical thinking and collaborative labor that both scholarly and practitioner classes require. 

I began experimenting with a “labor based” grading model right before the pandemic began: by default, students have a “B” in the class and maintain this grade by completing coursework in a timely manner. Students seeking to improve their grades have opportunities to do so; conversely, students that do not meet the obligations of the course can dip below a B. Students can contribute additional intellectual labor to the classroom community or submit annotations of assigned readings, for example, to bump their grade towards an “A” and/or offset any assignments or absences that need to be made up. 

Labor-based grading—a version of #ungrading that has gained traction during the pandemic—can be more inclusive and pedagogically liberating: it is easier for instructors to encourage experimentation and support students “where they’re at.” This is especially true for learning accommodations or addressing variables of language, writing, or other skills. For me, this method reduces the emotional toll of grading—especially in courses that address race and/or popular culture, where feelings run high. The simple act of decoupling higher letter grades from traditional notions of merit or so-called quality helps me be more honest with feedback. In courses with content that explicitly addresses race and power, I can ask challenging questions and engage in deeper conversations with less worry that it will be disregarded (or outright rejected) because of my identity or their perception of it. Similarly, grading is easier because I am less concerned that students perceive my grading to be biased (due to my positionality and/or theirs). 

My antiracist pedagogy also borrows from media production “best practices” for classroom collaboration, such as those promoted by EDIT Media. I now provide basic collaboration guidelines and require check-ins at the beginning, middle, and end of a term. Students can address concerns or request support regarding respectful dialogues, divisions of labor, etc. By collaborating on ground rules at the start of the term and recalibrating as needed, students can address disagreements, differences of opinion, or tensions that may emerge. Classes that explicitly focus on race and power benefit from collaborative “rules of engagement” by providing students—each coming to the classroom with different needs, skills, positionalities, and/or privileges—with scaffolding for effective communication and collaboration. Regular check-ins also provide timely opportunities to address miscommunication, microaggressions, or other issues as they appear. There is no way to fully eliminate difficult moments when addressing race or racism in the contemporary U.S. college classroom, regardless of demographics. But by explicitly meeting students where they are, we as instructors can help them become generous and supportive collaborators more capable of resisting the racist histories and tendencies of the media, its industries, and its studies.

WHAT IF I FAIL? (STRATEGIC VULNERABILITY)

Teaching to dismantle the racist logics operating within and around popular media remains the most challenging aspect of my career, even still.[2] If it feels this way for you, please know you are not alone. For better or worse, however, such doubts can keep us attuned to the potential limitations, doubts, and/or fears that students may face but never share in the classroom.

Sharing these strategies does not mean that I always get it right: I regularly struggle and sometimes fail. Memories of students that I didn’t effectively support or challenge during classroom discussions about race and power haunt me still. Because I didn’t intervene sooner or better. Because I misinterpreted discomfort or failed to identify it. Strategic vulnerability has helped me recognize such “failures” as a productive force and enabled me to speak about it. Thanks to EDIT Media and countless colleagues (such as the great folks contributing to this dossier), my antiracist pedagogies toolkit continues to expand in practical ways; the concept of strategic vulnerability helps me incorporate those tools in a way that fits my existing skills and experience.[3]

I write this essay as a faculty member, department chair, and president of SCMS—and am mindful of how each “hat” can shift my positionality in unintended ways. Effectively eradicating racism is a continuing community effort: we need all hands and institutions on deck, with as many different skills and experiences as possible. Strategic vulnerability is one way that leaders—from instructors to community organizers—can engage community partners, co-conspirators, and peers. I hope that the strategic vulnerability I employed in this essay—and the practical methods that anchor it—will be useful as you forge your own antiracist pedagogies.

Priscilla Peña Ovalle (she + they) is a researcher and media educator at the University of Oregon. Her scholarship has appeared in Media Industries, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and American Quarterly; they currently serve as president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. 

1. My approach has benefited from various models shared with me by UO colleagues, including: members of the Inclusive Pedagogies Reading Interest Group, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society; the UO Department of Cinema Studies, the UO Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; Michael Aronson; Stephanie Mastrostefano and Carol Stabile; Oscar Navas; and countless others. ↑

2. I recognize the privileges that my tenured position affords me, from research support to job security. Unfortunately, these benefits do not prevent imposter syndrome or classroom mistakes. ↑