Jami L. Carlacio

If university education means anything beyond the processing of human beings into expected roles, through credit hours, tests, and grades [. . .], it implies an ethical and intellectual contract between the teacher and the student. – Adrienne Rich

As Rich suggests in the above epigraph, teaching is an ethical responsibility and I envision my role as modeling for students how learning takes place—as part of a critical conversation about social issues that happens both in and outside of the classroom. We can only participate in this conversation, however, by examining our lives and our relationships with others. For the fourteen years I have been teaching, I have encouraged students to think critically about their role in a society where power is gained at the expense of others—usually members of marginalized groups. One of the ways we accomplish this cultural work is through reading, interpreting, discussing, and writing about texts that challenge our assumptions about what we know. My training in rhetoric and literary studies has necessarily offered me the opportunity to study how the dominant social order affects us in terms of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and so on. Thus, I see the work teachers and students do in the university classroom as potentially mitigating the effect that social oppressions have on all people. My classroom is a dynamic space for learning how to help build a world that is more equitable for traditionally “powerless” people.