Moji / Miss / Dr Moji has a reputation among students. I am entertaining, I am passionate and I am a hard marker. My reputation draws students to my classes; it also keeps students away. The students who are keen to engage in difference and push their epistemological boundaries will take as many of my classes as they can. Those whose primary focus is their GPAs and the piece of paper they will receive after three years’ incarceration in the ivory tower avoid me if they can. So in the course of one semester I will hear, “There’s never a dull moment with you, Moji” and, “This class is blowing my mind” … and, “I would love to take your classes, but I can’t do that to my GPA” and, “I have never gotten such a low mark before.” Students will volunteer to be my research assistants; a student will email me for more ammunition in his fight against his friends’ prejudices about Africa… and students will tell me they have been warned not to take my classes because I mark hard. 

My classes are entertaining. I tell jokes, I tell funny stories, I explain concepts in humorous ways. I tell students to pull on an imaginary beard and say “interesting!” when they are tempted to say “that’s weird/stupid/backward”; sometimes, they even do it without prompting. I will ask my students to act out a conversation I scripted between a Nandi “female husband” and her wife and a flustered anthropologist who asks impudent questions about same-sex marriage. I will tell stories about myself in which I look the fool. I will ask students to do the Harlem Shake; I, of course, lead by example. There is method to this: students must be at ease to receive my messages. Under cover of humour I prompt students to think in ways they never have before, and to see people (including themselves) in ways they never have before.

I am passionate about communicating anthropology’s raison d’être: to humanize by “making the strange familiar and the familiar strange”, to quote a non-anthropologist. We do our work so that others will see that humans are similar to each other in the most basic ways and that difference should be embraced. An almost inevitable result of this work is a long hard look in the mirror. When we begin to consider cannibals as rational people, for example, we are simultaneously pushed to interrogate our own beliefs. This can lead to epiphanies: “Now I question everything and I see why Jamaicans [insert cultural practice]!” and “I had no idea how to answer such a strange question at first, but now I get it!” Students become engaged in intellectual work that will not expire upon graduation.

Without realizing it, I have been following bell hooks’ lead in many ways. For example, I recently discovered her book Teaching Critical Thinking and learned that I had been living her “radical openness” in my classroom for years. She tells teachers to accept the possibility that we can be wrong, and to “acknowledge what we do not know” (p.10). I have admitted to being wrong many times in class, and in fact tell students about what I have learned from past errors. This way, they know that I do not believe I have the monopoly on truth; indeed, my discipline tells us that there is no ultimate truth, but a myriad of them. As well, I often ask my students questions because I am genuinely interested in their perspective; I am not the only teacher in the room.

hooks believes in the importance of conversation. She quotes a colleague’s praise of conversation’s ability to “’cleanse poisons, such as false assumptions, prejudices, ignorance [and] misinformation’” (p.45). I agree: that is why after engaging students in conversation about Africa in the first Anthropology of Africa class I taught, I had to make a radical change to the coursework assignments. Since then, students have spent every tutorial excavating the meanings of Africa for us as a colonized diasporic people, by discussing words and phrases like “black”, “civilization”, and so on.
In sum, I agree with hooks and others’ belief in “education for freedom”. I offer students the tools and encouragement to understand how our perception of reality is constrained by powerful others, to make sense of the world in their own way, and to embrace the world with both arms and both eyes wide open. Here lie the seeds of change, as the taken-for-granted is interrogated and, hopefully, critiqued. When students can see Rastafari as some of Jamaica’s greatest radicals, when they return from a Revival church service in woi woi saying, “there was nothing to be frightened of after all!”, when they can see street children not as vermin but as a symptom of a dysfunctional society, then I know I have done my job. 

Or, a part of it. I am a hard marker. As an educator it is not enough to guide students conceptually. When they leave the university our students become UWI’s most important PR tool. So I must do my part to ensure that they impress at all levels. I demand the highest standards in written work. And that is why students exclaim, “Moji, the page is bleeding!” Indeed, I wield my pen with grim determination, trying to teach students how to express themselves clearly and correctly. They are often disturbed to see the amount of corrections I make. Even though I now try to minimise anxiety by abandoning the red pen, I still cross out words, fix sentences, identify problems in the margin, and give copious comments at the end of the paper so that students are very clear on what they have done well and what needs improvement. While the experience can be distressing, I have on occasion been thanked for my thoroughness: a student recently said my comments were the kind of feedback she had been “begging” other lecturers for throughout her studies; others say their writing has improved tremendously since taking my classes.
I hope that my teaching philosophy trifecta of enthusiasm, fun and rigour puts willing students on the path to becoming open, humble, inquisitive, competent, critical and committed citizens of Jamaica and the world. This is what I think bell hooks means when she calls for “critical, engaged pedagogy”. I can only do so much, however; the students are the ones with the truly difficult work to do.