Political and societal activism at university is perhaps most obvious outside the classroom, in the form of organizational activities. However, political and societal issues are also present in the classroom – we interviewed Nely Keinänen about the role of these issues in teaching. Nely is a teacher and researcher in the English Philology unit at the University of Helsinki, and her main fields in teaching are English literature and translation. Here she tells us about handling political and societal issues in university teaching, and shares what current issues she would like to encourage her students to think about.
Do you find it important to encourage your students to think about political and societal issues? Do you think university teachers in general should do this?
The role of education in general is to help people think more critically about all issues, including political and societal ones. I believe university teachers should allow political and societal issues into the classroom, within certain limits.
What means of addressing current issues do university teachers have? Would you rather try to integrate political and societal issues in your subject teaching, or somehow deal with them separately?
Teachers can raise such issues in several ways, for example through course design, methodologies chosen, and offhand comments, “digressions” if you will.
A very clear way to integrate political and societal issues into a classroom is through course topics and reading lists. So for example this year, I’m teaching an undergraduate thesis seminar on the broad topic of “Literature and Nature” because I am myself concerned about global warming and the seeming inability of us as a society to make meaningful changes to reduce our carbon footprint. The course is full, so students clearly share these concerns. Class discussions, however, focus quite specifically on the selected texts, examining ways the various authors conceptualize a nature/culture hierarchy, the gendering of nature, and so forth. I’m hoping that these discussions will help us all better understand the impediments to meaningful action on the environment, but also enable the students to develop the skills needed to write their undergraduate theses. The students selected the texts they wanted to read, and in fact mainly chose works I have not read before or read from this point of view. So it’s been illuminating for me as well. Not all teachers offer such clearly ideologically-based courses, and this is an area where there is room for further discussion. I am myself fascinated by the workings of power on many levels, and so tend to design courses where these questions are going to come up.
Within the field of literary studies, it is also easy to bring up political and societal issues through the methodologies chosen. And indeed, it is hard not to raise such issues due to the nature of the questions we ask about literary texts. Much literary criticism is ideological at heart: we examine depictions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, power, the environment, etc. Some people feel strongly that these kinds of ideological approaches are limiting and indeed oppressive, but others argue that non-ideological readings are impossible, so it’s better to be aware of your own biases. I’ve been influenced by feminism, cultural materialism, and ecocriticism, and have taught courses with names like “Shakespeare and Gender,” where an approach is clearly indicated at the outset. But I also think students should be exposed to many approaches, and be given the freedom to choose those which most correspond to their own interests.
And finally, political and societal issues can be raised in digressions, moments when you’re discussing something else but suddenly think of a link to a current social issue. So, for example, a depiction of mothering in a Shakespeare text might lead to a brief discussion about whether children have a “subjective” right to government-subsidized daycare in modern Finland. If I felt that a discussion about daycare was illuminating something in the literary text, I wouldn’t object to its being brought up, and might even bring it up myself.
Should I do so? The answer to that question will vary by student. The important point is whether these “digressions” support student learning of the topic at hand or their development as engaged public citizens. I do believe that the aims of a university education can be understood more widely, and an engaged public citizenry is a good thing. So then it becomes a question of focus and limits.
How do you think political or societal issues could be integrated in your subject area? For example in translation, would you choose a particular source text to raise interest in its topic?
Yes, I do choose translation texts based on topic, but they need to have the linguistic features I’m focusing on for that session. I sometimes choose very polemical texts, especially those I think students will disagree with (both to give them opportunity to sharpen their own counter-arguments, but also so we can discuss the difficulties of objectively translating ideas they might not like). In translation classes, we’ve discussed any number of topics, including economic policy, the environment, and gender relations. One of my colleagues points out that in fact we ought to choose at least some texts based on current issues, as our students need to develop the vocabulary and linguistic competence to discuss them in two languages.
Do you think it’s “off topic” to bring up a current political issue in class, even if it concerns university students in particular? Do students think it’s off topic? How do they react?
I have certainly been known to “digress” into a discussion of a current political issue. My general sense is that students like these digressions very much, and indeed the whole class perks up a little and seems to pay closer attention.
I remember one time, however, where a student had a very negative reaction. We were discussing the English Civil War during a large lecture course on British Literature just a few days after reported Russian interventions in the Ukraine, and something in the work we were discussing made me think of the uncertainty of media reports, how during a war situation it’s very difficult to get accurate information. I asked students what they had been reading about the Ukrainian developments and what they thought about the situation. Many students participated, and I let the discussion go on for maybe 4-5 minutes before turning the subject back to our literary texts. At the end of class, a student came up to me, visibly upset, and said she thought it was inappropriate to discuss developments in the Ukraine in a course on British Literature. I apologized to her, but found myself thinking later about her reaction and my response to her. I think we need to discuss sensitive political and other issues, and indeed one of the purposes of a university education is to equip students to do so. But as teachers we also need to be aware that students have very different experiences and points of view, and they need to feel safe in the classroom. After that incident, I have perhaps paused a bit more to ask whether students want to discuss a political or societal issue which comes up in class discussion. Most do.
I sometimes think about the level of demands we make on students in this regard. Can I expect students to make time to get informed on current issues along with all the work I’m expecting them to do for my class, plus all their other classes? During the last election, I was rather embarrassed to notice that I didn’t have opinions on many of the topics raised in the online candidate selectors.
When some societal issue comes to your mind in class, what sort of things affect your decision to either bring it up or keep it to yourself?
If there is something which I think is important for students, I will allow time if the topic has grown naturally from our shared work. On the other hand, I do keep an eye on the clock: if the goal of the class is to learn something about poetic forms, I cannot spend too much of it discussing proposed cuts to university budgets.
When talking about a societal issue, do you think it’s acceptable, or even desirable, for university teachers to express their personal opinions and values in class? How might this affect the students’ thinking?
A great deal depends on the kind of atmosphere for expressing opinions teachers and students have built together. If the classroom has achieved an atmosphere where students feel free to disagree with each other and the teacher, then there are not likely to be problems, and there is indeed much to be gained in articulating and defending different points of view. But I try to avoid expressing my personal opinions about divisive topics. For example, I don’t express religious views in class. We need to be very sensitive to the inevitable power issues in a classroom, as no matter how collaborative learning is, at least thus far I am still required to assign a grade to a student at the end of the course. Students expressing a political or any other opinion in class should never have to fear that they will be penalized for what they say.
At the moment, what political or societal issues would you like to encourage your students to think about?
There is so much to think about just now. While the Finnish government is rightly concerned about growing debt and balancing the budget, its proposed solutions—cutting wages and social services, including education—are in themselves questionable, but worse, do nothing to address the even larger problem of global environmental degradation. To put it bluntly, we don’t need a more efficient economy, we need a different type of economy altogether, one less driven by consumer goods, the ideology of continuous growth and unlimited exploitation of the earth’s natural resources.
I am also concerned about the expansion of income inequality, especially given that political power seems inexorably to concentrate in those with more wealth. Progressive taxation can do much to redress these problems, but there seems not to be the political will to raise taxes on those who could afford to pay more (and I include myself in that group). Connected to income is the question of work. New technologies create some jobs, but eliminate others. If in the future more work is done by robots and machines, what will happen to the humans thus displaced? Will most of the wealth concentrate in those who own, design and maintain the machines?
And finally, we in Europe are facing a refugee crisis of unprecedented scale, forcing people and nations to confront their anxieties about fellow humans they think of as “Other,” plus consider how to make already strained resources stretch even farther. I’d like to think that we in foreign language departments have an important role to play in this, as our students and graduates can serve as bridges between peoples and cultures.