Teaching and writing in the slipstream: aphorisms of precarity

ABSTRACT

Having recently completed my first decade in China's Normal System, in this Point of Departure (PoD) I explore precarity in higher education teaching using four tools: slipstream, fugia hacia adelante, exophony, and autoethnography. This is an exploration in the form of a structured performance of precarities that I witness in my praxis, e.g., geopolitical, emotional, and health. I illustrate the potential of humanities-infused social science writing to translate emotions and experiences around precarity that are ‘in the room’ in higher education teaching (Rohrer, J. 2018. ‘It's in the room’: Reinvigorating feminist pedagogy, contesting neoliberalism, and trumping post-truth populism. Teaching in Higher Education 23, no. 5: 576–92). In a think-piece style epilogue, I propose that perhaps our best teacher is precarity itself and our best teaching is done in precarity.

在中国师范教育体系工作十年后, 在这篇Point of Departure (PoD)文章中, 我使用四种工具来探讨高等教育领域中教学的不稳定性问题, 这四种工具包括“滑流流派”、“逃离母语”、“向前飞”以及自传式民族志。这篇文章旨在探索我在实践中所目睹的具有结构化表现的不稳定性。比如, 在地缘政治、情感以及健康等方面的不稳定性。我阐述了在高等教育教学中, 受到人文学科启发的社会科学写作, 在表达 ‘在场’的不稳定情感与经历方面具有潜力 (Rohrer, 2018)。在本文的评论型结语中, 我提出我们最好的教师就是不稳定性本身, 最好的教学就是在不稳定性中完成的。

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• exophony
• China
• precarity
• writing pedagogy

Acknowledgments

I owe an intellectual debt to Dr. ZHANG Wenchao (张文超) for her expert editing of my Chinese and her translation of the abstract.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.