The Personal is Historical: Journaling About Race

This chapter explores how alternative forms of assessment might be used to encourage students to think about their own positionality when it comes to engaging with historical struggles for racial justice. Specifically, it examines how journaling can be used as an assignment that has the potential to breakdown personal, social and cultural barriers when it comes to discussing race in the classroom - while also encouraging students to think through the contemporary political meaning of the histories they are studying. Drawing on my own experience as a white educator teaching a survey module on the US Black freedom struggle in the UK, the chapter will address how student journals might be used to help us respond to bell hooks’ insistence on the need to de-centre the professor in the experience of learning, while also making sure that “everyone’s presence is acknowledged” in the spaces where we teach. Encouraging students to articulate their own knowledge of and personal relationship to the history that they’re studying through the act of journaling can prepare the ground work for disrupting racial hierarchies in the classroom. Furthermore, the foregrounding of issues raised in individual journals in the seminar space can help with making the classroom a more communal and equitable environment, where differences of experience can actively inform shared learning experiences.