As a first-gen student from a small town in India, from a backward caste family barely lifting itself from its working-class roots, I lacked knowledge about higher education. Access to such information was controlled mainly by privileged class and caste groups. Teachers from various caste, religious and cultural backgrounds played a critical role in shaping my intellectual trajectories. They not only taught me what to read and how to read but to seek knowledge with courage and conviction. Owing to filial obligations, I pursued my undergraduate degree in civil engineering. As a part-time lecturer, I worked as a design engineer for several years while teaching engineering to students from Africa. While in college, I was part of the civil rights movement that demanded equal access to education and social mobility for all historically oppressed caste groups. While tutoring math and science to children from underprivileged backgrounds, as I read the works of Paulo Fierera and Augusto Boal, I realized the need to connect learning to the everyday lived, embodied experiences of children. They opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about learning and teaching. Particularly, Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed had a profound impact on my life. These formative experiences shaped my decision to leave my engineering career to become a psychologist. I came to the U.S. in the late 1980s for my PhD in psychology.
Since caste hierarchy and access to information played a vital role in shaping my educational experiences, issues related to power, identity, and access to knowledge shaped my pedagogical commitments. I have been diligent in raising awareness about how our hierarchical social positioning of identities affects our capacity to connect with people. I was very committed to helping students to cultivate a situated intersectional awareness (Mahalingam, 2019) of identities as a phenomenological window to connect others with a keen understanding of their privileged and marginalized identities. When it comes to access to information, I thought that the information age would democratize our access to information. Paradoxically, in an increasingly networked and globalized world, students are hyper-connected via mobiles and social media yet feel disconnected from others. Such disconnection affects their psychological and academic well-being and diminishes their ability to engage with their communities.
Drawing inspiration from William James's notion of radical empiricism, I use qualitative inquiry to challenge students to rethink their taken-for-granted assumptions about people and everyday experiences. I have led three focused international student trips to understand people from cultures and social locations with reflexive cultural humility. On one trip, I took African American women students to engage in a dialog with Dalit (formerly treated as "untouchables") women activists while exchanging life stories to learn how caste, race, class, and religion intersect the experience of gender (Mahalingam & Reid, 2007). On another trip, American undergraduate students explored the impact of globalization on gender in three locations: (a) a college run for women students from a poor working-class background; (b) A village primary school for students from Dalit and most backward caste backgrounds; (c) A top engineering university with more than 50% of women students in IT and Computer Science fields. Using photovoice, survey, interviews, and collaborating on a community mural art project with school children under the guidance of a well-known animator and painter, Marudu Trotsky, students learned about the lived realities of globalization at the intersections of gender, class, and caste. They learned how women and children in these three social locations negotiate the complex realities of globalization. My third trip was a global peace leadership program where I took undergraduate students to Hiroshima, where they listened to the personal stories of Hibakushas (survivors of the atomic bombing) about the day of the bombing. The Hibakushas shared their memories of how that day unfolded in vivid detail with a plea for commitment to world peace, followed by a tour of the peace park and the museum. Students met many young peace activists to learn about various efforts to build world peace. In the last part of the program, students were in a silent mindfulness retreat in a Koyasan Zen temple, reflecting on their role as Americans in the proliferation of nuclear arms and the importance of harmony between inner and outer peace. The students developed a personal vision and commitment to peace using the many contemplative practices they learned during the class. They made presentations to various communities, including the dean for undergraduate education, emphasizing the need for more courses on peace education and peace psychology.
I developed a Mindful Mindset (Mahalingam, 2019) framework to deepen our personal, social, and ecological connectedness with a specific focus on dignity. Using my mindful mindset framework, I empower students to think of identities beyond binaries to realize that our lives are interdependent and interconnected. In my mindfulness course, I use various qualitative methods (e,g., photovoice, life history narrative, contemplative poetry, art, and mindfulness practices). I enable students to overcome their obliviousness to epistemic injustices and invisibilities that fail to recognize the dignity of fellow human beings. Specifically, I raise awareness about our indifference to the everyday struggles of workers who embody marginalized ethnic and occupational identities (e.g., janitors on campus). Through these exercises, students realize that when we fail to see these workers as people who deserve a life with dignity, we ignore the naturalization of their sufferings. For example, the cash counter workers at check-out counters in grocery stores need to stand while scanning the items. Although the long-term health consequences of women standing all day have been well-documented, the practice has not been changed because the customers prefer the clerks to stand while serving. Students explore the phenomenology of pain and suffering using photovoice, contemplative art, and life history narratives.
I curated a multimedia installation exhibit in collaboration with an artist and a communications scholar, Being Brown: South Asian Narratives of Brownness in South East Michigan. I investigated the experiences of the South Asian immigrant community settling in the African American communities near Detroit in the early 1900s. The exhibit offered life stories of people who felt they were the “wrong minority” in American society. Students in my class learned about the various modes of artistic and qualitative inquiry (poetry, animation, documentary, ink paintings, narrative performance, photovoice, and archival research) that captured the lived experiences of South Asian immigrants. In all my pedagogical interventions, I concentrate on teaching my students to cultivate an interconnected self, enhancing their academic engagement, creativity, and well-being (Mahalingam & Rabelo, 2019). I still use Boal's exercises in my class, including photovoice, to help students understand that learning is a process of unfolding the intrigue, tension, conflict, and congruence between psychological descriptions of quantitative and qualitative and embodied life experiences. Through diverse approaches to students' mindful learning experiences, I expose ways of thinking about their own embodied lived experiences, which are essential for long-term, in-depth learning. Using qualitative inquiry, my students develop a vision to lead an interconnected life with a commitment to preserve the dignity of self, others, and nature.