Savitri Maya Kunze

I base my approach to reading, class participation, and writing on the assumption that the classroom space is for academic and civic development.

The Covid-19 pandemic profoundly shifted what it means to navigate academic institutions successfully. When colleges asked students to leave campus in March 2020, the assumption that all students had a family home to return to was laid bare. This, along with the jarring experiences of shifting mid-semester to online teaching and navigating student quarantines, led me to interrogate what equity means for my teaching practice. As a result, I have incorporated more flexibility into my lesson plans, allowing for synchronous and asynchronous accountability, and found new ways to build community in a socially distanced college classroom. I have also set aside time to directly address some of the mental health impacts Covid-19 has created and exposed. While I adopted some of these practices in direct response to the pandemic, I plan to continue to use many in a non-pandemic context.

Offering transparent conduct and learning expectations is necessary to enable the success of all students. At Wabash College, I contributed to a program designed to help first-generation students successfully navigate college by leading a workshop about how to assess professorial expectations and appropriately communicate with professors. Similarly, in the classroom, I provide models of successful engagement by focusing on skills educators often take for granted, such as analytical reading.

I assume that even the most advanced students need prompting to identify and critically assess evidence and explicitly describe how to approach different class materials. When we read a primary source, for example, I ask that my students assess who wrote the piece, their background, and what might have prompted or enabled them to produce this piece of writing. My goal is to make visible the factors that have enabled scholars to hear certain voices and, in turn, leave others out of the historical narrative. I assess the latter using non-textual sources, such as paintings, songs, and films. By prompting students to assess history as contingent on many competing factors, they can begin to ask the questions at the heart of humanistic inquiry and contribute to creating a civically engaged community.

Institutions reflect the same silences that I help students identify in the sources we analyze. As I work to diversify my syllabi, I also consider ways to do so at an institutional and curricular level. My academic and institutional service to date has focused on creating mechanisms to facilitate networks that will enable access to people who have historically been underrepresented in the academy.

At the curricular level, hesitation to incorporate different voices is often due to a fear of addressing culturally sensitive issues in the classroom. To address this, I facilitate workshops and develop teaching material on the ways faculty and staff can successfully talk about issues like race and how to navigate the mistakes we make when engaging in these conversations.

Inside and outside the classroom, I demonstrate how humanistic thinking can promote intellectual discovery and civic development. As I present my work, whether via a public lecture or in the classroom, I aim to show why continued social and political engagement is necessary to facilitate lasting change. I problematize political givens, such as the inevitability of race and racial thinking or the beneficence of human rights, and consider them as historically specific developments in order to better understand what enabled their existence and endurance.