Communication and Identity in the Classroom

Reviews / Votes

This powerful, inclusive, and timely collection of critical essays engage the meaningful ways educators bring to bear their intersectional identities through critical pedagogy, consequently transforming the classroom (physical, virtual, or otherwise) into sites for social change. This collection offers diverse accounts of intersectional experiences that include moments of success, failure, reflection, privilege, oppression, empathy, and growth. This book deserves to be in the repertoire of any teacher invested in developing a more holistic and critical understanding of how we can center social justice, self-reflexivity, vulnerability, and care to create a more ethically engaged pedagogy fueled by radical love. -- Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, San Francisco State University Communication and Identity in the Classroom presents bracing autoethnographic articulations of educational experience; selves critically telling and unpacking experiences in/on the cultural terrain of education that are reflective, reflexive and refractive in their critical intent. Each autoethnography of educational experience thus provides the reader with templates of sociality that help to render extraordinary and everyday experiences readable while inspiring acts of educational justice. Communication and Identity in the Classroom: Intersectional Perspectives of Critical Pedagogy is a must read for those interested in the confluence of keywords in critical cultural analysis: communication, identity, classroom, intersectionality, autoethnography and critical pedagogy. And how these keywords speak in a tensive collaboration to the practiced positionality of human social exchange and meaning making in educational contexts. All of which, recognizes the whole person in the challenged construal of transforming self and society through educational activism, building a politic of critical praxis. -- Bryant Keith Alexander, Loyola Marymount University This timely, engaging, and fluid-edited book shows a step forward in the scholarship of Critical Communication Pedagogy. By bringing voices from Other bodies and interweaving the thick and layered intersectionalities, Communication and Identity in the Classroom showcases the vulnerable, embodied, imperfect, and emotional experiences from instructors within and beyond the college classroom. This edited collection is a powerful intervention to disrupt white and Western productions of pedagogy scholarships and is a must read for students and scholars in the field of Communication Studies. -- Dr. Andy Kai-chun Chuang, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY In this current political and historical moment, critical pedagogies are as crucial as ever to raising awareness about and making meaningful changes for marginalized people and their communities. In Daniel S. Strasser's Communication and Identity in the Classroom: Intersectional Perspectives of Critical Pedagogy, some of the most brilliant critical pedagogy scholars come together to offer 14 compelling chapters that are deeply personal, continuously thought-provoking, and that constitute indispensable contributions to an ongoing and vital academic movement. This book is essential reading for those who seek to make positive social impacts through their teaching and mentoring. -- Jimmie Manning, University of Nevada Communication and Identity in the Classroom: Intersectional Perspectives of Critical Pedagogy is an important edited book that centralizes intersectional perspectives on communication education. It not only locates critical issues in differences such as race, gender, sexuality, queerness, class, and the body; but it also brings forth diverse sets of conceptual and methodological orientations to critical pedagogy. This book is meant to open up more space to (re)consider communication issues in the classroom more now than ever. -- Dr. Shinsuke Eguchi, University of New Mexico Invaluable to the zeitgeist of social change in 2020, this book meets calls for diversity and inclusion in the academy through its breadth of intersectionally marginalized voices. The authors inspire solidarity and allyship, while inviting introspection, by uniquely situating their critical pedagogies through lived experience. A robust reader, this collection offers tangible outcomes towards a pedagogical epistemology and praxis that fosters social justice in the classroom. -- Dr. Nicole Files-Thompson, Lincoln University In Communication and Identity in the Classroom: Intersectional Perspectives of Critical Pedagogy, Strasser brought together a collection of powerful autoethnographies and narratives that approach difference not as something that needs to be avoided but as an axiom for effective pedagogy. The critical pieces in this volume center marginalized voices in the academy through intersectional perspectives and provide a rigorous critique of the normative assumptions that operate in our classrooms-it's a must-read for any scholar and educator committed to advancing progressive social change in and beyond their teaching. -- Dr. Yannick Kluch, Rowan University Communication and Identity in the Classroom: Intersectional Perspectives of Critical Pedagogy is an inspiring volume that invites readers to acknowledge and hold space with critical communication studies scholars who testify to the heartaches, confusion, and joys of teaching from positions of precarity. In collecting these voices, Dr. Strasser has shown how turning our attention to these voices can begin to "mend the broken bridges" left by years of exclusion from the ivory tower. This volume, though, is also a powerfully triumphant example of how critical pedagogy scholarship is necessary, perhaps more now than ever. -- Dr. Michael Lechuga, The University of New Mexico Much (maybe even enough) has been written about pedagogy from a white cisgender male hetero-normative perspective. This diverse collection raises voices that have, until now, been marginalized or under-represented in the scholarly conversations about critical pedagogy. From many standpoints, these striking/evocative intersectional tales bring pedagogical theory and praxis into deep dialogue with a multiplicity of identities. This is important work. If you read this book, you will be startled into action, and your teaching will be transformed. And that is something indeed. -- Dr. Christopher N. Poulos, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Strasser's volume offers a much-needed look at the junctures of identity, power, and pedagogy at a time in the world when doing so matters the most. As the collection's authors share their stories, they gift readers with critical insight into the pain and possibility inherent in navigating the academy. This volume is an essential read for students, teachers, and scholars called to make the classroom a more just place to learn, work, and radically love. -- Dr. Erin K. Willer, University of Denver