Joanna Kenty
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jokenty.bsky.social
Joanna Kenty
@jokenty.bsky.social
970 followers 610 following 190 posts
Former professor of Latin/Roman history, author of Cicero’s Political Personae (2020). I write Humanist, a blog about teaching humanities in higher ed (humanist.ghost.io), and write about democracy for The Renovator (therenovator.substack.com). She/her
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jokenty.bsky.social
Some people say this; however, others say this. It's so offhand you can think you're gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two "sides," or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling "appraisal"
November 8, 2025 at 9:45 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
This is patriotism!
Fans in Philadelphia are passing around and signing a poster with the Declaration of Independence on it and a plea for the Phillies to re-sign Kyle Schwarber IN CONGRESS. JULY 1. 1776. nons Wolaration so emm as States of America, WE THE PEOPLE OF DIDN'T FIGHT THE JUST TO Us LOSE PHILADELPHIA BRITISH SCHWARBER!!
August 3, 2025 at 2:23 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Come for the takedown of Reagan-era education substituting patriotism for citizenship and social control for critical thinking, stay for the…rant about Rambo and Top Gun? www.jstor.org/stable/1177205
Journal Article Educational Leadership and the Crisis of Democratic Government Henry A. Giroux Educational Researcher, Vol. 21, No. 4 (May, 1992), pp. 4-11 (8 pages) the battle is between the free world, led by the United States, and the Communists, represented by the Soviets. Almost without exception, the exaggerations that structure these films eliminate the complexities of the events and histories they portray. Similarly, they exhibit a patronizing posture fueled by a moral evangelicism that approaches the exigence of the Crusades. What it means to be a citizen and a patriot in these films is very clear. It is to be a man who is willing to fight the godless hordes in order to save all that is decent in the "free" world. There are no choices here, nor are there any reservations about the interrelation between means and ends.
July 16, 2025 at 10:46 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Banger of a quote from U Maryland’s Barbara Finkelstein from 1984(!), quoted in Giroux:
Contemporary reformers seem to be recalling public education from its traditional utopian mission - to nurture a critical and committed citizenry that would stimulate the process of political and cultural transformation and refine and extend the workings of political democracy... Reformers seem to imagine public schools as economic rather than political instrumentalities. They forge no new visions of political and social possibilities. Instead, they call public schools to industrial and cultural service exclusively. ... Reformers have disjoined their calls for educational reform from calls for a redistribution of power and authority, and the cultivation of cultural forms celebrating pluralism and diversity. As if they have had enough of political democracy, Americans, for the first time in a one-hundred-and-fifty-year history, seem ready to do ideological surgery on their public schools - cutting them away from the fate of social justice and political democracy completely and grafting them instead onto elite corporate, industrial, military, and cultural interests
July 16, 2025 at 10:25 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Hope we’re all remembering lessons we learned from 2020 today: whyy.org/articles/wes...
#nokings
June 14, 2025 at 1:26 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
. In the privileged liberal arts colleges, it is acceptable for professors to respect the "voice" of any student who wants to make a point. Many students in those institutions feel they are entitled--that their voices deserve to be heard. But students in public institutions, mostly from working-class backgrounds, come to college assuming that professors see them as having nothing of value to say, no valuable contribution to make to a dialectical exchange of ideas. RS: Sometimes professors may even act as though personal recognition is important, but they do so in a superficial way. Professors, even those who view themselves as liberal, may think that it's good for students to speak, only to proceed in a manner that devalues what the students say. bh: We're willing to hear Suzie speak even as we then immediately turn away from her words, erasing them. This undermines a pedagogy that seeks constantly to affirm the value of student voices. It suggests a democratic process by which we erase words, and their capacity to influence and affirm. With that erasure Suzie is not able to see herself as a speaking subject worthy of voice. I don't mean only in terms of how she names her personal expe-rience, but how she interrogates both the experiences of others, and how she responds to knowledge presented.
May 22, 2025 at 3:22 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
There is a major backlash that seeks to delegitimize progressive pedagogy by saying, "This keeps us from having serious thoughts and serious education." That critique returns us to the issue surrounding teaching differently. How do we cope with how we are perceived by our colleagues? I've actually had colleagues say to me, "Students seem to really enjoy your class. What are you doing wrong?" RS: Colleagues say to me, "Your students seem to be enjoying themselves, they seem to be laughing whenever I walk by, you seem to be having a good time." And the implication is that you're a good joke-teller, you're a good performer, but no serious teaching is happening. Pleasure in the classroom is feared. If there is laughter, a reciprocal exchange may be taking place. You're laughing, the students are laughing, and someone walks by, looks in and says, "OK, you're able to make them laugh. But so what? Anyone can entertain." They can take this attitude because the idea of reciprocity, of respect, is not ever assumed. It is not assumed that your ideas can be entertaining, moving. To prove your academic seriousness, students should be almost dead, quiet, asleep, not up, excited, and buzzing, lingering around the classroom. bh: It is as though we are to imagine that knowledge is this rich creamy pudding students should consume and be nourished by, but not that the process of gestation should also be pleasurable.
May 22, 2025 at 3:16 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Reading bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and thinking about the "everyone is cheating with ChatGPT" discourse - if students feel that they have no responsibility for learning, of course they'll choose a shortcut instead of thinking independently:

#TeachLearnSky
#EduSky
bh: What's really scary is that the negative critique of progressive pedagogy affects us--makes teachers afraid to change--to try new strategies. Many feminist professors, for example, begin their careers working to institutionalize more radical pedagogical practices, but when students did not appear to "respect their authority" they felt these practices were faulty, unreliable, and returned to traditional practices. Of course, they should have expected that students who have had a more conventional education would be threatened by and even resist teaching practices which insist that students participate in education and not be passive consumers. Rs: That's very difficult to communicate to students because many of them are already convinced that they cannot respond to appeals that they be engaged in the classroom, because they've already been trained to view themselves as not the ones in authority, not the ones with legitimacy. … When we try to change the classroom so that there is a sense of mutual responsibility for learning, students get scared that you are now not the captain working with them, but that you are after all just another crew member--and not a reliable one at that.
May 22, 2025 at 3:13 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
#academicsky
The start of the current academic year at the University of Pennsylvania was rocked when campus police and a Philadelphia cop donned riot gear and stormed an off-campus apartment, seeking the alleged vandals of the iconic campus statue of the school's founding father, Benjamin Franklin. In apparent response to Trump executive orders seeking to bar federal aid to colleges and universities that promote policies around diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, Penn administrators scrubbed the school's former main DEI webpage harder than the crews tasked with cleaning up damage to the Franklin stature in front of College Hall. A site once full of charts and lists showing what an elite university was doing to welcome more Black and brown students and staff, now hosts just three lonely sentences about "Belonging at Penn.”
February 21, 2025 at 10:23 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Thrilled to be working on learning design for the Civic Learning Institute - new courses are launching in a few weeks, including one on the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap! #edusky #teachlearnsky
Making History and Civic Learning Meaningful: Using the “Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy” to Engage Students in Deeper Civic Learning February 13 - March 18, 2025 | Register by February 7 Live instruction: February 13 and March 18; 7-9 PM ET (view the full course schedule) Instructor: Natacha Scott, Director of Educator Engagement, iCivics Dive into key themes, questions, and pedagogical principles designed to make civic learning accessible to all students, and get useful guidance for creating or reworking powerful learning experiences for students. What do you get when you ask 300 educators and academic experts, all across the political spectrum, what “excellence in teaching history and civics” really looks like? You get the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, a set of key themes, questions, challenges, and pedagogical principles that guide us on our way to best practices. The Roadmap helps us to think about how to make civic learning and rigorous civic dialogue accessible for all students in the United States, how to cultivate students’ civic identity and sense of responsibility, and how to support students as they learn to act in a responsible and informed manner as citizens
January 21, 2025 at 3:37 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
And Chandra Mohanty, ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles” (2003):

www.jstor.org/stable/10.10...
The feminist solidarity or comparative feminist studies model. This curricular strategy is based on the premise that the local and the global are not defined in terms of physical geography or territory but exist simultaneously and constitute each other. It is then the links, the relationships, between the local and the global that are foregrounded, and these links are conceptual, material, temporal, contextual, and so on. This framework assumes a comparative focus and analysis of the directionality of power no matter what the subiect of the women's studies course is--and it assumes both distance and proximity (specific/universal) as its analytic strategy. Differences and commonalities thus exist in relation and tension with each other in all contexts. What is emphasized are relations of mutuality, coresponsibility, and common interests, anchoring the idea of feminist solidarity. For example, within this model, one would not teach a U.S. women of color course with additions on Third World/South or white women, but a comparative course that shows the interconnectedness of the histories, experiences, and struggles of U.S. women of color, white women, and women from the Third World/South. By doing this kind of comparative teaching that is attentive to power, cach historical experience illuminates the experiences of the others. Thus, the focus is not just on the intersections of race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality in different communities of women but on mutuality and complication, which suggests attentiveness to the interweaving of the histories of these commu-nities. In addition the focus is simultaneously on individual and collective experiences of oppression and exploitation and of struggle and resistance. Students potentially move away from the "add and stir" and the relativist "separate but equal" (or different) perspective to the complication/ solidarity one. This solidarity perspective requires understanding the historical and experiential specificities and differences of women's lives as well as the historical and experiential connections between women from different national, racial, and cultural communities. Thus it suggests organizing syllabi around social and economic processes and histories of various communities of women in particular substantive areas like sex work, militarization, environmental justice, the prison/industrial complex, and human rights, and looking for points of contact and connection as well as disjunctures. It is important to always foreground not just the connections of domination but those of struggle and resistance as well. its focus on mutuality and common interests, it requires one to formulate questions about connection and disconnection between activist women's movements around the world. Rather than formulating activism and agency in terms of discrete and disconnected cultures and nations, it allows us to frame agency and resistance across the borders of nation and culture. I think feminist pedagogy should not simply expose students to a particularized academic scholarship but that it should also envision the possibility of activism and struggle outside the academy. Political education through feminist pedagogy should teach active citizenship in such struggles for justice. My recurring question is how pedagogies can supplement, consolidate, or resist the dominant logic of globalization. How do students learn about the inequities among women and men around the world? For instance, traditional liberal and liberal feminist pedagogies disallow historical and comparative thinking, radical feminist pedagogies often singularize gen-der, and Marxist pedagogy silences race and gender in its focus on cap-italism. I look to create pedagogies that allow students to see the com-plexities, singularities, and interconnections between communities of women such that power, privilege, agency, and dissent can be made visible and engaged with.
December 3, 2024 at 8:48 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Continuing my reading about feminist pedagogy, I am just having the best time in the company of great work! Today, Sally Miller Gearhart, “If the mortarboard fits” (1983):

archive.org/details/lear...
As radical feminists we'll never be comfortable in academia. We can't expect completely to transform it or even to find in it an open political arena. If we work or study there, we'll have to be satisfied with compromises and small changes, and we'll be opening ourselves to constant frustration, a host of dangers, and even some deep pain. But if we do cast our lot with that time-honored institution, there are satisfactions and joys too. As a place to put to work our skills and our politics, academia is as good as any other. It's satisfying to learn, and to learn through teaching, and to be in an atmosphere where knowledge is available. It's especially rewarding to be part of a place where women's lives are changing, in which their pain is becoming more manageable and their strengths more useful. It is good to be working with women. Period. Academia brooks only token deviance from its norms, just enough to demonstrate its democratic principles or its "innovative" atmosphere. It offers survival and acceptance (graduation, a job, prestige) to those who will quietly take their place on the assembly line or who are themselves willing to be mutilated into professionals. Feminism, on the other hand, claims wholeness to be possible and desirable. Early on, the women's movement challenged the "myth of the half-person," i.e. the existence of something called "feminini-ty" and something else called "masculinity" in human beings, and it deplored society's overvaluing of rational ("masculine") functions (objectivity, logic, analysis, linearity) to the near exclusion of nonrational ("feminine") functions (subjectivity, emotionality, intui-tion, synchronicity). Academia - even the woman's college - is based on the myth of the half-person and stubbornly continues to lay out its fragmented disciplines in patterns that perpetuate stereotypes of "men's work" and "women's work" (science-math-we-know-the-list versus nursing-teaching-and-we-know-that-list-too). Academia fears the unpredictability (read "uncontrollability") of nonrational functions.
December 3, 2024 at 8:48 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
And bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, which is somehow both a foundational text and a critique of feminist pedagogy at the same time?
When everyone first began to speak about cultural diversity, it was exciting. For those of us on the margins (people of color, folks from working class backgrounds, gays, and lesbians, and so on) who had always felt ambivalent about our presence in institutions where knowledge was shared in ways that re-inscribed colonialism and domination, it was thrilling to think that the vision of justice and democracy that was at the very heart of civil rights movement would be realized in the acade-my. At last, there was the possibility of a learning community, a place where difference could be acknowledged, where we would finally all understand, accept, and affirm that our ways of knowing are forged in history and relations of power. Finally, we were all going to break through collective academic denial and acknowledge that the education most of us had received and were giving was not and is never politically neutral. Though it was evident that change would not be immediate, there was tremendous hope that this process we had set in motion would lead to a fulfillment of the dream of education as the practice of freedom. Many of our colleagues were initially reluctant participants in this change. Many folks found that as they tried to respect "cultural diversity" they had to confront the limitations of their training and knowledge, as well as a possible loss of "authority. And, despite those times when students abused that freedom in the classroom by only wanting to dwell on personal experience, feminist classrooms were, on the whole, one location where I witnessed professors striving to create participatory spaces for the sharing of knowledge. Nowadays, most women's studies professors are not as committed to exploring new pedagogical strategies. Despite this shift, many students still seek to enter feminist classrooms because they continue to believe that there, more than in any other place in the academy, they will have an opportunity to experience education as the practice of freedom. Progressive, holistic education, "engaged pedagogy" is more demanding than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy. For, unlike these two teaching practices, it emphasizes well-being. That means that teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own wellbeing if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that "the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher or any helping professional should be directed toward his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people."
November 27, 2024 at 3:47 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Braiding sweetgrass Soul of an octopus
November 22, 2024 at 2:33 AM
jokenty.bsky.social
Very secret society of irregular witches My life among the underdogs All creatures great and small Very sincerely yours
November 22, 2024 at 2:33 AM
jokenty.bsky.social
My little black dog wearing her toga Halloween costume
November 18, 2024 at 7:03 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Photo of Zion National Park
November 16, 2024 at 7:42 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
With alt text:
Al/ChatGPT Policy The use of ChatGPT or any other Al platform or tool to generate either ideas or written content (not including spelling/grammar check such as Grammarly), or to produce any other material is prohibited in this course. This policy is for a number of reasons: • This class is designed to improve your writing skills; if you're not writing, you're not improving. • Using Al opens up academic honesty issues, both because it raises the question of whether the work is "your" work, and also because tools like ChatGPT rely on taking uncredited material from scholars and writers. • Using Al does not produce reliably accurate results. • ChatGPT has serious negative environmental impacts, particularly in relation to water usage (see here G, here B, here. Gand here B› for more info). • OpenAl has exploited workers from the global south, especially workers in prisons and refugee camps, and workers in Kenya, the Philippines, Colombia, and elsewhere (see here B, here & here B, here B, here &, and here & for more info). To put it more bluntly: there are thousands of people in the world who would love to be in your position-getting to be a student at a major US research university with relatively small class sizes and extremely prestigious faculty. Education like this is not available to everyone. Furthermore, someone is paying for you to be here (whether that's yourself, parents/relatives, scholarships/grants, loans, etc). If you choose to spend this (both incredible and incredibly expensive) opportunity to learn by trying to avoid doing the work and learning through the use of Al tools, you are only cheating yourself-and contributing to environmental harms and labor exploitation in the process. For these reasons, the use of ChatGPT or any other Al tools is not a part of this classroom community, no exceptions.
November 15, 2024 at 3:21 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
From bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress:
November 1, 2024 at 9:30 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
#teachlearnsky
#edusky
October 22, 2024 at 1:51 AM
jokenty.bsky.social
www.cambridge.org/core/books/c...

#classicsbluesky
#ancientsky
#teamrhetoric
October 18, 2024 at 8:23 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
www.thedailybeast.com/philly-resta...
October 7, 2024 at 12:07 AM
jokenty.bsky.social
bit.ly/Yizkor5785
September 17, 2024 at 5:53 PM
jokenty.bsky.social
Loving this AI policy for syllabi from Olivia Stowell!

#TeachLearnSky
#EduSky
#ClassicsBlueSky
June 18, 2024 at 3:47 PM