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A COMMITMENT TO LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
from SLA Spring 2021
With a myriad of courses, centers, and programs, Tulane University is committed to cutting-edge research on Latin America. Students can enroll in a variety of courses about Latin America—ranging from geography to communication, art history, political science, and anthropology—and also visit special collections, gain hands on experience, and attend programs and events centered on Latin America through the university’s many resources. On average, more than 700 students enroll in courses with Latin American Studies content across all schools. Here are just a few of Tulane's Latin American centers and programs.
Middle American Research Institute (M.A.R.I.)
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Founded in 1924, the Middle American Research Institute (M.A.R.I.) strives to promote greater understanding of the vibrant and diverse cultures of Middle America. It stewards an extensive collection of textiles, artifacts, and an archive of letters, field notes, maps, and photographs from the scores of field projects it has sponsored and continues to sponsor, and strives to make these accessible to researchers and the general public through a variety of exhibitions, workshops, and symposia.
Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies
The Stone Center coordinates the research and teaching activities of more than 120 affiliated faculty, 70 of which are core faculty, in schools and departments across several Tulane campuses. In addition, the center’s students and faculty benefit from a network of contacts with public officials, non-governmental organizations, and academic leaders in Latin America. The Stone Center also has very strong regional expertise in Brazilian Studies and Cuban & Caribbean Studies.
Latin American Studies Program, School of Liberal Arts
The Bachelor of Latin American Studies curriculum focuses on achieving an interdisciplinary understanding of the region relative to an increasingly globalizing world. Students also have the opportunity to pursue graduate degrees in this field, for which curriculum in Latin American Studies is dependent upon the student’s particular research interests. While all areas of interdisciplinary research on Latin America are welcome, Tulane has developed significant faculty strengths in Economics, Politics, and Society and Arts, Media, Culture, and Politics.
The Latin American Library (LAL) works to generate scholarly community, building on the historical connections between New Orleans and the Americas. By responsibly collecting, preserving, and providing access to historical and contemporary resources on Latin America, the Caribbean, and diasporic communities, LAL strives to be central to the processes of discovery and dissemination of knowledge at Tulane University.
HONORING STUDENTS’ POTENTIAL
BY MARY GLAVAN, VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Something magical happens when we give students control over their learning. They ask better questions, make better mistakes, and may even become motivated to work beyond the requirements of an assignment. Yet ceding control to students has sometimes felt counter-intuitive to me, especially when the uncertainties of hybrid learning seem to suggest that students need stronger boundaries and clearer guidelines. Without them, won’t students just do whatever they want?
Perhaps the answer is, “yes, they may,” but also, “that’s ok.” As a disability scholar and advocate, I’ve been trained to recognize that our boundaries and guidelines can become barriers to student learning when we prescribe how students should work to such a degree that it becomes counterproductive, especially for disabled students. I’ve also learned that higher education creates unnecessary barriers for any student who falls outside the perceived norm, and if we’re committed to inclusive education, we have to be willing to question where these barriers come from—to consider for example, why we enforce classroom policies that ban technology or that limit classroom participation to verbal discussion.
Because these barriers are connected to systems of power and privilege, dismantling them is often difficult—a process that takes reflection,
planning, and time. For me, it started with the growing recognition that my teaching in rhetoric and writing didn’t always align with the critical and emancipatory commitments of my research in disability studies. Standard assignments for a first-year writing class, like reading a 15-page academic article and discussing it verbally in class, made little space for students who struggle to process written information or students fluent in languages other than standard English. The 500word written summary of the article I expected students to submit by a specific deadline made little room for students whose bodies challenge normative notions of time and space. In short, I was forced to ask myself: what assumptions am I making about what my students should and shouldn’t be able to do? And what do these assumptions reveal about whom I’m committed to honoring in the classroom?
These questions led me to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an education framework that offers principles for replacing unnecessary obstacles with accessible, flexible, and responsive learning practices. UDL recognizes that the multifold ways of learning, knowing, and being that all students bring to the classroom are not barriers, although they do create diverse student needs. UDL instead locates barriers in the material and social environment, and then asks that we proactively redesign the environment by planning and making space for variation. While this redesign might mean something simple like including image descriptions in lecture slides, it can also mean more complex work, like reimagining classroom activities, assignments, or even learning objectives.
In the first-year writing and honors classes I teach at Tulane, we still read articles, discuss them, and write summaries; we also watch videos, design digital maps, and make things out of Mardi Gras beads. We compose not just traditional academic essays, but also redesign these essays into formats that enable students to showcase their strongest “voice:” comic strips, videos, podcasts, song lyrics, and other genres that challenge the boundaries and power dynamics of academic discourse. Whenever possible, students get to decide how they will access information or complete an assignment, and they submit their work when it best fits their schedule. While these reenvisoned practices are well suited to the unique environment of the small, workshop-style classes I teach, UDL principles—accessibility, flexibility, and responsivity—can be applied usefully, albeit differently, to any pedagogical environment that centers the student.
There’s no easy or perfect way to dismantle barriers to student learning, but a commitment to honoring all students’ potential is a solid place to start. When we start changing our classroom environments, we risk students doing whatever they want. However, we might find that students want to go far beyond our expectations. We may find that it’s really not magic at all: it’s motivation, curiosity, and growth.
COURSE SPOTLIGHT
Cross-Cultural Analysis
Cross-Cultural Analysis examines the formation of relationships and identities in different historical, cultural, and communication contexts as these have been structured by histories and dynamics of power. Faculty in the Department of Communication, including Mohan Ambikaipaker, Laura-Zoë Humphreys, and Liam Olson-Mayes, present a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches designed to investigate communication as a site for the enactment of power, struggle, and the formation of identity and difference.
EBONY PERRO, PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH. PHOTO BY PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO.
LIBERATION AND LIBERAL ARTS: Writing as Resistance
Teaching first-year writing and honors colloquium courses, I encounter students who envision education as a pathway for change. Though each semester brings a spectrum of students—from aspiring activists who take my courses to learn how to channel their rage to students who learned that emotions do not belong in the classroom—2020 was different. In 2020, I witnessed the resurgence of mass, publicly visible anger and outrage toward structural violence and encountered students who entered college during what many media outlets call unprecedented times. Because of this, more students sought to discuss their feelings and find ways to engage in resistance work.
EBONY PERRO WITH A QUOTE THAT GUIDES HER TEACHING BY AUTHOR AND ART HISTORIAN TEJU PICTURE CAPTION COLE. PHOTO BY PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO.
“I’ve never taught outside of a social movement.” I’ve said this to colleagues, friends, and students on numerous occasions, and this fact informs my research and pedagogy. I study the archive of angry Black girls in Black women’s coming-of-age novels from the “angry decade” (the 1960s) to the “age of rage” (present-day). Through Black girl protagonists, Black women writers present counternarratives of rage that illuminate it as a valid response to injustice. They also demonstrate the ways rage informs resistance and initiates change.
As students come of age in what scholars call the “age of rage,” I center pedagogical strategies that interrogate the relationship between the social climate and emotions. I show students how rage against injustice becomes an assertion of humanity, citizenship, and voice. Based on these ideas, we develop writing principles that inform paper topics and citational practices. These ideas also become pillars for teaching students to examine rhetorical situations, think critically about inserting themselves into academic conversations, and discern whose voices to represent in their work.
When I proposed the honors course “Rage: Movements, Media, and the Politics of Being Mad,” I didn't expect the myriad events of summer that sent surges of rage through every hemisphere. I didn’t imagine that the largest movement in U.S. history—Black Lives Matter—would extend its reach during a pandemic. Millions of people were quarantined with their rage and desired freedom in so many ways. In Fall 2020, students and faculty came face-to-face and screen-to-screen with their isolation and injustice-fueled anger, grappling with what to do with it in the classroom. As the intersections of pain, protest, and pedagogy sparked nationwide anti-racist initiatives and student demands for institutional changes, I afforded students space to channel their anger and write about issues that altered their learning environment.
Every semester, I start my courses with a tweet by author and art historian Teju Cole. Cole’s notion of “Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three,” presents its productive possibilities. When I ask students what Cole means, I get responses like “writing allows us to speak up for change, explain our perspective, and heal our communities. It provokes new thought, empathy, and action.” With the collective responses in mind, students think deeply about their writing and research as resistance. I also implore that they envision rage in these ways. Instead of attaching rage to violence, I teach students to consider rage as a consciousness-raising emotion. We link their rage to the “rioting” and “righting” in their work, where they challenge the status quo and present correctives through their arguments. As they bridge the personal and political, they commit to social justice. Students host a range of conversations in their writing from campus issues to climate change. Despite differing frustrations and sources of rage, students use their knowledge of rage and the writing practices extracted from Cole’s tweet to develop arguments that explore the historical, social, political underpinnings of the problems they address in their writing. Since students bring their joy, burdens, and rage into the educational space in (in)visible ways, I center Deborah J. Cohan’s concept of pedagogical rage. Cohan explains that as students see the ways rage catalyzes social and personal change, rage initiates a process of educating for critical consciousness. Cohan demonstrates that teaching about rage and resistance does not equate to centering physical violence—instead, it shows students to harness their rage for transforming their communities. Students come to see rage as more than an emotion; it is an “analytical tool” and stimulus to respond to societal problems. These concepts, coupled with students’ writing, empower them to seek ways to be heard in a world that is often strategically deaf to their voices.
Though I didn’t imagine Summer 2020 unleashing so much rage, I do imagine—and teach students to imagine—the liberation that righteous rage can bring. Each day, as the sounds of literal and figurative freedom songs permeate the class, I remind students of the power of their anger, taking up the imperative of teaching writing as non-violent resistance. We write through and to our rage, holding space for it as we work toward healing. As national and global discourses are underscored by rage, educators can consider the utility of anger and the possibilities of liberal arts education for liberation.
