Academic think pieces lamenting a Covid-driven turn away from “rigor” by turns blame lazy students, over-indulgent faculty, and global crises for communal burn-out. Panics about ChatGPT (e.g. in Forbes, NY Post, Psychology Today) presume that some students will obviously cheat given the slightest opportunity. Demanding we abandon pandemic leniency, some faculty have gone so far as to advocate a return to widespread grades of F, to toughen up lazy, coddled college students. The common implication here is that our primary job as professors is to be enforcers, policing students into learning.

This session offers an alternative solution, arguing that pedagogies centering pleasure are a necessary antidote to so-called “rigor.” We see colleagues who want to resist the traditional grind, but who nonetheless find that global crises (climate change, decolonial efforts, state violence, etc.) are obvious organizing topics for classes that seek to offer students the building blocks for making change. What if, our session asks, one of the vital building blocks they also need is joy?

Our presenters demonstrate that leaning into joy does not require anodyne subject matter or treating students as if they are so fragile that they cannot be exposed to difficult ideas. Rather, it means moving away from punitive frameworks and towards intellectual curiosity and engagement. Their lightning talks show that if one builds an assignment, a course, and a classroom atmosphere in which students are invited to revel in their own delight, they will also ask themselves and each other complex questions.

Session plan

Presider introduces the session’s catalyzing ideas and its panelists (10 minutes), who range through every rank from graduate student to tenured professor to academic staff, and come from regional state universities, flagship institutions, and small liberal arts colleges. Panelists give lightning talks (36min total), as follows:

• Natalie McGartland (PhD candidate, UMD) demonstrates how archival materials and instruction in bookmaking processes inspire student learning, including examples from open-access archives;
• Dannie Leigh Chalk (Instructor, U Pitt) discusses her composition syllabus, retooled in response to the student-mental-health crisis, using camp, colorful, queer films to help students resist notions of perfectionism;
• Shannon Draucker (Assistant Professor, Siena College) focuses on a teaching tool, demonstrating the affordances of Google Jamboard (free) for facilitating a pedagogy of play that encourages collaborative learning;
• Rita Mookerjee (Assistant Professor, Worcester State) advocates for the radical politics of food and mess-making as a means of drawing multiply marginalized students into the center of the learning process;
• Clayton Colmon (Associate Director of Instructional Design, U Penn) argues that there is justice in joy, and offers specific examples of technology’s affordances for community building for minoritized groups;
• Melissa Free (Associate Professor, Arizona State) shares the teaching process that has resulted in a simple prompt—to visually depict a character or event from one text on the syllabus—yielding astonishingly creative results from needlepoint to sculpture to film in her classes.

The session's remaining 30min will be devoted to brainstorming, example sharing, and discussion with attendees.

Rationale

By foregrounding experimentation, play, and joy, these presenters demonstrate that entire courses can become ones in which exploration—even of subject matter that is politically charged or historically demanding—becomes its own reward. An important corollary principle is that such classrooms also may offer sustenance rather than work-overload for both students and faculty.

The CFP for this session generated tremendous interest from applicants (I received double what I could accept) as well as in discussion on social media where the conversation reiterated scores of times that “this is such an important and necessary topic.” I even received four personal emails from faculty I did not know, who were inspired to reach out to share examples of joy from their classrooms. On a more formal note, the editor of the journal Pedagogy (Duke UP) would like to publish an essay cluster deriving from this panel in the issue that goes to press in the May after MLA. In our extended conversation about this prospect, she was particularly excited about the idea of an experimental format for this cluster, which might include quotations from the session conversation, and written dialogue between panelists as they respond to one another’s ideas.

Faculty are hungry to talk about positive—and specific—interventions to resist the multiple crises facing higher education. This session aims to begin that conversation, opening with inspiring, playful ideas from panelists and devoting half an hour to attendees’ adding their own, so the session is not just an idea but a practical resource towards reinvigorating classroom delight.