A Collaborative Approach to Antiracist Pedagogy

This cowritten Reflections essay describes an upper-division seminar for honours and master’s students that brought together established antiracist pedagogical principles (for example, decentering Britain) with a commitment to hands-on, in-class collaboration. This collaborative dimension buoyed the class’s capacity to encounter both the challenges and insights that the antiracist framework brought to the fore. In a course that sought to engage with Romantic poetry of “labour and longing” in the age of transatlantic slavery, working together became both an object of study and a learning practice. The coauthored nature of this essay therefore advances, beyond the end of term, the importance of listening and learning from one another in the pursuit of more inclusive, wide-ranging, and (very often) discomforting learning environments, even as such environments can only ever be imperfect.