Kelleen O’Connell-Mock
As a college educator, I am increasingly concerned about my students’ lack of ability to assert individual critical thinking. There is no shortage of post-secondary writing guides that suggest strategies like avoiding first person. I argue that this is a damaging pedagogy: antithetical to teaching the original critical thinking and attribution that is integral to post-secondary writing; a weak relationship with the use of AI; culturally/socially dangerous – especially for historically marginalized students (e.g. BIPOC, female, and non-binary students). I argue that college educators should work to decolonize the academy and the classroom by engaging with taboo pedagogies: allowing the use of first person to proactively honor student cultural backgrounds, languages, worldviews, and non-binary gender identities as assets to their writing. Through referencing research and personal experience, I assert such radical pedagogy can enable writing students to discover individual voices and original critical contributions to global conversations.
