Teaching During the Invasion of Ukraine

We’re nearly a week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and I’ve thought a lot about whether and how to address it in my composition classes. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

My starting place is this: valuing democracy, and seeing the invasion as part of a global attack on democratic values and institutions. And of course I need to tie that in with what we do in writing classes. 

So, in addition to providing some basic history of the current conflict, I’m going to share with my students a short chapter from Suki Kim’s book Without You There Is No Us, a memoir-ish account of her time teaching college English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology in North Korea. Kim is a Korean-American journalist, and her students at PUST were sons (not daughters) of North Korea’s elite – high-ranking government and military officials – preparing for futures in scientific and technological fields. Yet these elite students had no knowledge of the internet. They had never heard of, much less seen, any social media platform. Their knowledge of the world had been appallingly constricted by a lack of information and outright lies.

In the chapter we’ll read today – about 8 pages, so we can read it in class – Kim talks about the first time she asked her students to write an essay: a standard 5-paragraph theme with a thesis statement and supporting evidence. Her students are baffled by the assignment because no one has ever asked them to put forth an original thought and then prove it with evidence. Their world spins on the axis of Dear Leader, and all that happens does so because he wants it to.

Kim tells her story with a great deal of sympathy. Her students are smart and intuitive. They can tell that many things about their lives are not right, not in step with the wider world, even as they must insist that North Korea is the pinnacle of modern civilization for fear that saying the wrong thing will have dire consequences. And Kim’s love for her students puts her in a dreadful bind, which is the central tension of the book: how much of what she knows should she share with them, when it’s likely they’ll never leave the country-sized prison holding them, a prison-country that punishes knowledge and independent thought? 

While North Korea is not Vladimir Putin’s Russia, it illustrates the desires of autocracy, and Kim’s dilemma illustrates the fundamental conflict between democratic values and autocratic constriction. Real democracy requires knowledge of the world, curiosity, participation, and equality. Autocracy wants obedience, which is easier to achieve in a state of ignorance embedded in hierarchy. Democracy worth the name creates citizens, while autocracy creates soldiers. 

I want to be careful here. The last thing I want is to send the message that these democratic values are inherent qualities of “life in the West” that we’re entitled to (just writing that makes me feel a little gross), or even that we have achieved these values in the U.S. in any permanent or equitable way. My point is the opposite: that while we absolutely deserve, by virtue of being human, the right of free inquiry and citizen participation, we are by no means guaranteed these things. Learning and maintaining them takes work, and part of that work is an awareness of what citizenship looks like, what its absence looks like, and what the brutal act of taking it from people can look like.