Chapter 6: Slip It in the Back Door: Queering the Transparency Imperative in Higher Education

As instructors of race, gender, and sexuality courses know, course material that asks students to identify their lives as intersectional sites of privilege and dis- privilege can lead to defensive emotional responses in the classroom (Bohmer & Briggs, 1991; Boler, 1999). In turn, these responses of anger, sadness, or vulnerability may cause students to dismiss the legitimacy of the instructor or the content (Miller, Donner, & Fraser, 2004) or withdraw from classroom activities (Mueller, 2013). Importantly, no matter how logically sound the argument or how credible and varied the evidence presented, a student in an emotionally defensive state may still resist or disengage from the classroom or the content. Because this problem is affective, we believe it must be met with an affectively attuned pedagogical strategy. This chapter offers such a strategy for priming students for intentional and reflexive engagement with difference. What we call translucent pedagogies strategically withhold learning goals for a classroom activity or course in order to pre-empt potential defensive responses to classroom content around social difference. We find this strategy particularly effective for students privileged along a number of identity markers.