Lee Rodney

Field trips and site visits 

Over the last 15 years, two key motifs have emerged in my courses: the city as classroom and the gallery as classroom. These sites have been a vital part of the courses I’ve designed and taught. While I remain rooted in visual culture and media studies, having taught Introduction to Visual Culture between 2005 - 2015, I am tied to the observation that learning often happens outside of the classroom or lecture hall when reflection and observation are met with experience. 

Detroit borderlands as classroom

Border Culture is the first course I developed in 2005 and it has run most years until 2020. The first iteration was developed with a colleague teaching in the architecture program at the University of Detroit Mercy (Marcel O’Gorman). It involved students from each institution meeting together weekly on either side of the border. This required the American students to travel to our campus in Windsor and the Canadian students to travel to theirs in Detroit. The course became a discursive exercise to explore the nuances and contradictions of national identity as well as the difficulties of crossing the border at a time when international borders were “hardening” after 9/11. The course has expanded and evolved over the years to consider decolonial approaches to the analysis of historical land use and place names, including a research project entitled “Street Names and Settler Colonialism” that investigated Windsor’s many streets named after Indigenous peoples of the Americas (with little real attribution).

Detroit visits continue to be an important part of an extended classroom. The city’s post-war history as a centre for urban activism and grassroots organization serves to ground theoretical concepts around architecture and the built environment, urban ecologies, borders, and community building through creative means. I have brought many students there through classes and workshops which have involved visits to grassroots organizations and projects in Detroit (Grace Lee Bogg’s Centre, Garage Cultural, Heidelberg Project, Design 99, etc.). The reconsideration of Detroit’s urban history (the racial segregation that emerged simultaneously with the auto industry) has influenced our research into the uneven development history in the city of Windsor and its environs.

Latency Learning and Situated knowledge 

The impact of my graduate education at York University (when I first started to teach) has been significant. There, the work of Barbara Godard and Deborah Britzman, along with others teaching with feminist approaches to pedagogy in the 1990s, had a deep and lasting effect on how I consider the classroom space and the time of learning. Britzman’s observations on education and its latency effects as well as “difficult” forms of knowledge were alien to the subject areas I had chosen to pursue at the time (art history and curating) where the slide lecture and the masterful performance of the lecturer reigned supreme in spite of the emergence of feminist art history in the 1980s. 

During one of our first workshops on teacher training, we were encouraged to consider the time of learning and the uneven ways that we gain insights from what happened in the classroom two hours ago, two months ago or a decade ago. This observation stuck with me.  The philosophical challenges that this perspective on learning activates are summarized by Britzman, following Hannah Arendt, as she writes that “the time of education is always out of joint because of the nature of the mind, because of the nature of the world, because of the nature of dependency, and because of the nature of responsibility” (Britzman, 18). 

This latency effect of learning is difficult to capture through most forms of assessment, especially with the 12-week semester and tightly packed academic schedules for most students.  As I do not follow disciplinary rubrics for assessments in the fields in which I was trained—slide tests or historiographic essays—my trajectory as an educator has felt unorthodox, particularly so at a mid-sized institution in a blended department in the Arts.  I don’t have a commanding physical classroom presence and the traditional structures of university teaching—lecterns, lecture halls and examinations—are conventions that fit the gendered conventions of male orators, or those inclined toward performing on a teaching stage. In recent years the “classroom experience” has become overvalued after two years of sensory deprivation during the COVID-19 pandemic; however this is not because we shifted to virtual spaces, but because we were robbed of normal social interaction more generally. Returning to the classroom has meant that the mass experiment in online education has been severely downgraded and I believe there are valuable lessons we have yet to quantify in terms of hybrid forms of education and the variety of spaces that we learn in and through.  

Many of the courses I have developed revolve around specific locales in order to move beyond the classroom lecture to connect course content to other sites such as museum and gallery visits (Curating as Cultural Practice) or through assignments that ask students to visit, observe, describe, sketch, map or photograph specific locations as the first stage of awareness of spatial politics (see Border Culture MACS 4500 and Urban Ecologies MACS 4250, for example).

This project was funded by the IN/TERMINUS research group (see research section). Twenty artists from across Canada and the US (emerging and established) participated in the exhibition and our students gained valuable experience organizing such a complex show that had multi-media installations as well as performances and walks by artists.