“I Can’t Relate”…

By Professor Ian Barnard (English Department)


Last month I attended the
Conference on College Composition and Communication
annual convention in Tampa, Florida, where I gave a presentation titled “‘I Can’t Relate’: The Risks of Identification Demands in Teaching and Learning.”

My presentation took aim at the pressure put on teachers to make pedagogical materials “relateable” to students, and, consequently, on the ways in which students dismiss texts with which they don’t “identify,” or domesticate these texts to conform to their own assumptions and ideologies.

Can we find interest or pleasure in or learn from something that we find alien or that we don’t identify with? I argued that to do so could mean giving up conventional paradigms of (thesis-driven) textual or topic mastery, and instead actively seeking to produce fissures in identification and understanding,

recognizing radical incommensurability not as the place where learning begins but as its desired destination.