Pedagogy of the Depressed

Description

This book is one English professor's assessment of university life in the early 21st century. From rising mental health concerns and trigger warnings to learning management systems and the COVID pandemic, Christopher Schaberg reflects on the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education. Adopting an interdisciplinary public humanities approach, Schaberg considers the frequently exhausting and depressing realities of college today. Yet in these meditations he also finds hope: collaboration, mentoring, less grading, surface reading, and other pedagogical strategies open up opportunities to reinvigorate teaching and learning in the current turbulent decade.

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2011), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017), as well as The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), and Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities (December, 2019). He is co-series editor, with Ian Bogost, of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

What readers may not anticipate and should be delighted by the presence of, is a vast range of topics-seemingly randomly interspersed throughout the book-that break up the chapters of both theoretical musings and practical applications of managing the college literature classroom in the early twenty-first century world of pandemic lockdowns, changing university concerns, and the post-Postmodern world of businessmen in the White House. The honest tone of Schaberg's prose is refreshingly welcome-he is continuously questioning what he is doing, why, and how is it affecting his students as well as providing critiques of what is wrong with higher education. [...] The optimism and pessimism of our current teaching mode alternate throughout Pedagogy of the Depressed. Schaberg's deepest concerns mirror many of ours. That administration will not see moving online as a fearful, temporary situation, but rather as a new efficient system that eliminates all sorts of issues, including those of class size limits or scheduling issues. We are depressingly isolated from our colleagues and valuable impromptu discussions and collaborations. A bonus? Throughout the book, Schaberg also talks about other texts that speak to the issues he is addressing. This is a great, and much appreciated, way to increase our academic TBR piles. * Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice * How do you teach through trauma? All college instructors have found themselves facing this question in recent days, but few with the insight and poignancy of Christopher Schaberg. Pedagogy of the Depressed provides both diagnosis and balm for those anxious about the possibilities for higher education in the midst of climate change and active shooter events and pandemic response and budgetary collapse, a profound reckoning with the conditions of learning today. * Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English, Michigan State University, USA, and author of Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University * If the title page didn't say Christopher Schaberg so plainly, I might have assumed the author was Guy Montag, protagonist of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Both are suffering through a takeover by the machinery, technological and bureaucratic; both hold onto a humanistic ideal in the midst of it all. Pedagogy of the Depressed is in some ways precisely the opposite of what its title promises: rather than depressing, it's a hopeful pushback against the pervasive air of depression and lowered expectations that has overtaken too many of our classrooms, and whose metaphor-if not cause-is Covid-19 and the ubiquity of the Zoom screen. Come for the jeremiad-but stay for the wise encouragement, that this work we do with students still matters. Perhaps matters more than ever. * Kevin Dettmar, W.M. Keck Professor of English and Director, The Humanities Studio, Pomona College, USA *