Teaching Generation Z

by time news

The third season ofSex education (Sex Education), which just launched on Netflix, is absolutely fascinating. We see Hope, the new principal of a high school in her thirties, attempting to “repair” the reputation of the establishment with its donors after the decidedly positive and open attitude of the students to the school. ‘regard to their sexuality had made the headlines.

Hope is motivated above all by what is often called respectability: she knows that the adult world includes its share of sharks and wants young people to adapt to it. Students, for their part, firmly believe in the free expression of the multiple nuances of their developing identities. There is no question for them to play the game of clean marketing which stifles and necessarily instrumentalizes the most vulnerable among them – the queers, the non-binary, the “model minorities” and several young girls.

Before this series, I had never seen represented on television this conflict of values ​​- and let’s say, of survival strategy – between Generation Y and Generation Z. It is a caricature, certainly, but a necessary caricature.

I have witnessed this generational contrast on campus several times in my life. I am, for example, a former resident of Massey College at the University of Toronto, an institution that could be described as… traditionalist. When I was there, the only other black person residing there was a friend whom I had encouraged to sign up with me. Have we experienced incidents of ordinary racism? Sure. Often. But we were too isolated to even consider denouncing them on a daily basis.

Instead, a committee was founded that helped the administration diversify the profile of fellows. Result: a few years after our departure, the new generation of young people felt the strength to demand serious reforms. One might think that the scandal came from a climate that had become toxic, but it is rather the opposite: it is because this generation felt more confident there that the silence was finally broken in a way, let’s say, less diplomatic. .

I returned (virtually) to the University of Toronto last winter to deliver a course on representations of the Black Lives Matter movement – and black people more generally – in the media. No, the students did not eat me raw for having dared to tackle delicate themes: I did however deal with a group that had very different expectations of the university than those I would have dared to formulate myself. out loud 10 or 15 years ago.

In particular, the young people expected to make connections in class between the concepts discussed and what is called “experiential knowledge”: the expertise that the young people draw from their own experiences. For example, during the session on the concept of colorism (the preference, even within so-called racialized communities, for people who have a lighter complexion), Latinas, African, Arab, Indian and Chinese students spontaneously intervened to provide examples from their particular cultural context. After asking the group to view Laverne Cox’s documentary, Disclosure, on the representations of trans people (especially black) in American cinema, a trans student felt comfortable not only to define himself as such with his peers, but to talk to us about the impact of transphobia on its own journey of transition. In these discussions, and many others, I have learned a great deal from my students, and they have learned from each other. My role was then to encourage them to use the theories I presented to articulate their thinking, and not to hold a monopoly on scientific expertise.

A lecturer who rejected this pedagogical approach and who received these interventions as interruptions to her carefully prepared lesson would have felt, say, “challenged” by my group. But when you embrace it, teaching Gen Z suddenly becomes a huge privilege.

The truth is that I am far from being exceptional, and that the vast majority of CEGEP and university teachers adapt without problem to this new genre of youth. This is why the anecdotes that have been hypermedia in the last year do not allow us to arrive at an adequate representation of social changes on university campuses.

Personally, when I was at the baccalaureate in French literature, I would have liked to be taught a greater diversity of works, but also to approach the classics differently. I would have liked to be asked, during the review on Madame Bovary, what are the visions of woman and femininity that are conveyed in Flaubert’s work – rather than treating feminist exegesis as an “attack” on the “canon”. I would have liked to be presented with the Candide by Voltaire not as the apotheosis of tolerance, but as a work which promotes respect between European gentlemen while also conveying an anti-Semitism and negrophobia which will have an important influence on the French Enlightenment.

In short, I would have loved to have had the “great works” presented to us, in a less… candid way! If we had proceeded in this way, I would not have left the department after a year for that of comparative literature, where one fell a little less easily into hagiography.

Like many people my age who are traditionally under-represented at university, I had the instinct to leave rather than demand better. If the young people who follow me are more likely to feel the strength to respond, it is because somewhere, society has changed for the better. I sincerely believe that it is better to listen to them and to have a dialogue than to behave like Hope in Sex education, and to presume, to paraphrase Voltaire, that all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, when the young people have resolved to… “grow up”.

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