By Pauline Couper.

Decolonisation can feel overwhelming. Perhaps that is inevitable if we are taking the challenge seriously, but ‘overwhelming’ can prevent, rather help, us progress it. Decolonisation is something I have long been interested in, and gradually reading to understand more, but I’m no expert. I still have a long way to go. But when I saw the call for contributions for the June Talk About Teaching event, it connected with something already on my mind.

My research is not about decolonisation. My current project is on fieldwork as a knowledge producing activity in geomorphology, a particular branch of physical geography (think landforms and the processes that shape them). Last semester I taught our first-year geomorphology module and, as epistemology figures in my research, inevitably that shaped the way I was teaching the module. But the journal article I had in progress when the last academic year started had a different focus again. Among my interviewees’ accounts of their fieldwork was quite a lot of negative ‘social stuff’ going on. Like many field sciences, Geography’s history is entwined with colonial exploration, leaving as legacy a dominant fieldwork culture that has been robustly critiqued in recent decades as masculinist and ‘heroic’: the more extreme, the better. My participants were revealing the emotion work that goes into conforming with this kind of culture. I had got as far as writing an account of that emotion work – but not yet articulated the ‘feeling rules’ (c.f. Hochschild 2012) at work – when September arrived, and progress on the article stalled.

Skip forwards to the end of March, I took the students to the North York Moors for a day of fieldwork. We arrived in thick mist, which meant the observation activities planned were scuppered. We managed some ground surveying, by which time the students (and staff) were wet and beginning to get cold, so we ended the trip earlier than planned. That was the last day of teaching before the students’ Easter vacation.

I returned to my research, articulating those feeling rules of fieldwork. And there it was: a list of feeling rules that I had entirely, yet unconsciously, reproduced in the field with students the week before. A list of feeling rules that ultimately stem from Geography’s colonial history. I realised it would be very easy to continue to reproduce those feeling rules – telling students what to think and feel about the fieldwork – in class. Realising that meant I could choose differently. And then the call for contributions to Talk About Teaching landed in my inbox.

I think I’m making two points here. First, that contributing to Talk About Teaching does not have to be about a major initiative, pedagogical research or radical change. Second, steps towards decolonisation don’t have to be overwhelming. Taking heed from Hoskin and Jones (2023), perhaps a good start is to understand ourselves first, and understand how our everyday disciplinary practices may reproduce coloniality. In the specific instances of enacting disciplinary cultures, we find potential to do things differently. At Talk About Teaching, I was grateful for the engagement of colleagues in the room and the chance to situate what I am doing in the broader context of what others are doing and learning. It’s OK to take small steps, reflect on one thing, and share that with others so that we can learn from each other. Isn’t that what we are here for?

References

Hochschild, A.R. (1979) ‘Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure’. American Journal of Sociology, 85 (3), pp. 551-575.

Hochschild, A.R. (2012) The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. 20^th anniversary edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hoskins, T.K. and Jones, A. (2023) ‘Indigenising our universities’. E-Tangata, 14 April. https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/indigenising-our-universities/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=17042023