The focus of this research design will hopefully to be examining the role of intersectional education, which will bring up questions of consent, safe and brave spaces, internationalized texts, and compassionate communication. Even laying all of that out, my first question is if it’s too much, and then at one point is it not enough? I do believe that intersectional education links well to safe and brave spaces, since questions of identity need to be focused on. Likewise, internationalized texts feel like a natural connection, since to represent more identities, there should be texts from more places than the United States and the United Kingdom. I do believe that some work with consent and compassionate communicate is helpful in creating safe and brave spaces as well, so my gut reaction to include all of those options seems important, if quite a bit of work. The research question I have is “How does an intentionally intersectional classroom compare to a classroom that is not intentionally intersectional?” To build my knowledge of intersectionality, I will read Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Mapping in the Margins, which is also linked to a project in English 501 I’m working on. The most interesting thing I’ve discovered so far is the lack of the word “consent” in work I’ve found. Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of state ideologies manufacturing consent is the main place in critical theory that I’ve found mention of the word consent, but I don’t recall theorists I admire like Butler, hooks, or Derrida mentioning them. I’m hopeful to discover in readings by these authors that I revisit or encounter for the first time, that I can find more information about this.

Beyond secondary source research, I’m interested in examining how our curriculum binder can be modified to intentionally insert more intersectionality into the classroom. My dream for a class would be to have everything from the start be consent based, with the hopes that leads to an intersectional classroom, but it feels like I should pick one focus, and I believe there is more data on intersectionality that can help me build toward a consent focused classroom. The biggest work for me would be questions of preparation to internationalize the curriculum. What do I include with Deborah Brandt? Should I include posters in another language? Could I specifically choose literacy narratives that highlight multiple cultures? Then there’s starting the class in a way that highlights identity in the literacy narrative. Many of my cohort have expressed that they were concerned the students focused too much on writing as an expression of literacy from the students, so maybe more time could be focused on the literacy timeline, including more examples from past classes and grad students.

To gather data, I would interview instructors to get a sense of how intersectional and international their classrooms are, gather data on what materials they used in it, possibly conduct ethnography in the form of class observation, and then survey the students on the level of effectiveness of their class materials. I would do the same in an intentionally intersectional and internationalized classroom. English 101 could be a prime research platform for this, as there are several sections and it would be possible to follow multiple classes at once, instead of needing to wait each year for a few new classes to appear.

For the completion of this project, I imagine I should develop the templates for the research materials, create a draft for an intentionally intersectional classroom, and then present all of that coupled with research, possibly gathered from my second RAB (and hopefully my third).