Embracing Disciplinary Trouble: Silos, Identity, and Shared Intellectual Endeavor

Abstract:This essay introduces an initiative designed to build bridges across languages and to promote collaboration with those closest to us in disciplinary terms within the humanities. We describe our collaborative teaching experience in a course on cultures of immigration at the University of West Georgia in which students and professors of three languages shared the classroom, brought their disciplinary expertise to bear, and traded positionalities. We outline how we organized the course, including the practicalities of accommodating both traditional and innovative curricular demands. We discuss the strategies we used to emphasize that the project was an experimental endeavor rooted in a Freirean understanding of collaborative learning as well as of teaching. Finally, we consider how such collaboration fosters empathy daily, emphasizes our similarities while not undermining our differences, and cultivates productive, cross-fertilizing reflection on identity (personal, departmental, national, and other) among students and faculty alike.