Dr. Rasheed Hinds is a doctoral lecturer in the English Department specializing in Romanticism/Afrodiasporic Literature. He earned his Ph.D. in English Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center.
Introduction: As part of our Spring 2025 issue of Pedagogy in Praxis, we present a series of conversations with Graduate Teaching Fellows and seasoned faculty, reflecting on the evolving landscape of pedagogy in higher education. These interviews explore diverse approaches to teaching, critical engagement, and the lived experience of navigating the classroom as both scholars and educators. Conducted over Zoom, the discussions have been transcribed and edited for clarity and focus, while preserving the texture and nuance of each speaker’s voice.
Maddie: Hi Dr. Hinds! I’m excited to interview you today about your teaching experience and expertise, specifically at Baruch. May I ask you how long you have been teaching?
Dr. Hinds: So Maddie, I’ve been teaching since 2012, right? That’s when I was placed in my first GTF assignment. As you know, we start off teaching really early in our Ph.D. programs. We have a lot of teaching experience, so it was like a baptism by fire, and I’ve been teaching ever since. So I’ll have been teaching for about thirteen years.
I was a GTF from 2012 to maybe 2014, and then I was an adjunct. I was adjuncting while I was studying for my Orals and defending. I kept going and defended in 2019, and that was delayed because my committee went through a lot of issues that we couldn’t avoid. But I held on to my dissertation because of COVID. When COVID ended, a position opened at Baruch and I applied to that. Since the fall of 2022, I have been a doctoral lecturer in the English Department here.
Maddie: Awesome! I have so many questions for you, but the first is this: What drew you to teaching, and what motivated you? And has your motivation changed?
Dr: Hinds: Okay, this is gonna be really corny. The way I realized that I wanted to be a teacher—because I had other career interests in mind when I first graduated from undergrad—I was in a bit of an undecided mode. Because, although I had a background in economics, part of me was thinking about international economic development, but then I also was in the drama department, and I wanted to experience that while I was young. I developed an interest in film and television. I started working in film and television, but I can honestly say that what drew me to teaching first and foremost was my love of literature, and that was something I could not get away from. I would become obsessed with it. There’s an old film. It’s embarrassing, but it’s the absolute truth. [Maddie and Dr. Hinds laughing] There’s an old film called To Sir, With Love–I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. It’s from the 1960s, and it’s a story about a Caribbean immigrant who moves to the UK and becomes a teacher, and he starts teaching cockney East End kids, and he has an experience that changes his life. I was obsessed with this film and couldn’t understand why. At the end, there’s this scene where Lulu, at the end of the school year, gives him a present and sings a song to him and dances. Every time I watched the film, I would break down crying. I realized I was crying because I wanted to do that job and have that kind of impact on students. I was working in film and television, thinking, I can’t do this. Somebody’s telling me that this is what I want to do, so I’m going to do it.
Maddie: I am going to watch this immediately after our interview!
Dr. Hinds: I will say my experience was crazy. My experience was not that much different from Sidney Poitier’s experience teaching. There’s this one scene where they say he traveled, he had all this education. He could come off as a worldly man. But as he was teaching the students, they were like, wait a minute, you’re just like us. And he was like, I am. And that’s what my experience at Baruch was like, because I was born and raised in New York, and I’m part of the school system. The students were reacting to him like, come on, Professor, you’re kind of like us. I’m like, well, I am. And with this connection, I was like, okay, this is what I’m supposed to do. This is what the film is telling me, and I love it.
Maddie: Were there times when you felt really drawn to teaching, but also afraid? Like, this is where I’m supposed to be, but it also feels so important that you have fears cropping up?
Dr. Hinds: Well, yeah, when I was first contemplating making the transition, I felt that desire within me. The first thing you think about is: do I want to teach at a high school level? That, to most teachers, is scary, right? The first fear is the reality that there’s sometimes very little you can do to change the life of a high school student or grade school student because they’re still so impacted by their family and environment, right? So in a way, society has changed since I was younger, and right now we have a new type of adolescent, a new type of student. And that can be scary. When I was adjuncting, there was honestly a period where I wasn’t sure if I could deal with the generational differences. So many of my colleagues and peers from the Graduate Center found adjuncting like the Hunger Games for various reasons. The question was whether or not they could deal with the public school students, a generation of students who lack respect for teachers. They’ve admitted this to me, knowing I am a product of the new public school system. They don’t come in like, “Oh, I love my teacher.” I don’t know what that’s about, but it’s these overcrowded situations and the impersonal nature of the public school system, but they don’t have that respect. Around 2015-2016, I was dealing with loss and doubting if I could handle kids from the public school system, but I sucked it up and got a second wind and I got through it. I wish that a lot of recent Ph.D. candidates who received their Ph.D. who were adjuncting had more time to get over that hump, because a lot of them do not make it.
Maddie: That’s so real. I’ve been trying to deal with some losses while working on the dissertation, and it gives me hope to hear you talk about getting through to the other side.
Dr. Hinds: You’re dealing with a whole new set of challenges. When did you start teaching?
Maddie: I started teaching within the CUNY system at Brooklyn College in 2018.
Dr. Hinds: All right, yeah, you were there right before COVID hit. So I’m sure you had a different type of student before. We have a different type of student afterward, and it can be frustrating, like what’s happening?
Maddie: Does anyone read? I also used to wonder about my teachers and how they were doing.
Dr. Hinds: I always wondered about my professors as well. It’s interesting, because on Thursday, one of my colleagues checked in and we were talking about tiredness and how we work really hard here and we’re realizing the capacity of the job. I sat back and thought, it’s not the workload. I was also talking with a mentor who said, you know, I go home and cry. And I was like, wait a minute, I’m depressed and feeling wiped out. You know what it was, I was teaching 2150, getting up there, working my behind and lecturing and nobody’s paying attention–I was like, you know what, I’m going to do something different because I can’t let this get to me.
Maddie: Exactly, this makes sense to me because you’re trying to find ways to engage students or create interactive situations. When I began teaching creative writing, my students enjoyed working together and being creative, but of course, in the required courses, many students don’t want to be there. I don’t ever want to be pressuring students to do activities, so I’m wondering if you have any advice.
Dr. Hinds: Full disclosure, I was never truly an activities type of guy. I think you can understand this, because to us, that’s not college. You were probably involved in a competitive academic program at some point. Obviously that’s not really what we do, right? It feels high school to me–activities, so I’ve always avoided them as much as possible. In a writing classroom, we of course have a couple of activities, like freewriting, a basic one. And then we would have a workshop where we’d do a few activities. I tried to focus on activities that got my students to work against reason and logic in order to discover and think divergently and outside of their box. It was working up until about 2021 it worked up until the point that we started to get students who were in high school during COVID, right? It wasn’t exact. It didn’t happen exactly when we got back and so we got to in person. It didn’t for me. I was pretty good online when we had remote learning—I was able to keep them together. But now we have students who were deeply affected, like they don’t understand what I’m talking about when I’m trying to get them to think intuitively.
Maddie: This!
Dr: Hinds: Whereas previously, students would be like, “Oh my god, I’ve discovered it, that was it, Professor, this is a turning point.” Now I’m getting like, “I had to do it.” And they literally did not come to the next class–they were not getting the same result. Right now, I am becoming way more activity-oriented. I don’t want to be like a pedantic or micro-managing high school teacher, but I’m realizing that this particular generation is different.
It became clear to me during that one class when no one was paying attention. I was like, I’m going to put them to work. I just happened to have printed stuff out just incase. So I said, now you’re going to this section, and that section and go in groups–which wastes my time, because it means I can’t get through what I planned in the schedule. But I’ve learn to let that go–let the syllabus go. There can be so many learning moments because there’s the impulse to be controlling, but this impulse arises from the abiding issue prior to COVID–students’ lack of drive to go the extra mile in terms of how to manage their desk. So I was doing a lot of that, typing up notes, and I had to get past that. What I did learn from this is that every generation has people who are “the older,” and “the younger.” They can be somewhat different and somewhat similar, and particularly with social media, the beginning generations weren’t as affected by it.
Maddie: Right, yes, particularly Instagram and X.
Dr. Hinds: Now they’re truly affected by it, right, which is almost scary, but the bottom line is that the students actually prefer activities now. I was shocked. They are very much what you would refer to as constructivist. They’re very hands-on, because most of them are used to doing stuff themselves, posting online, becoming an influencer, creating, creating, creating. And although sometimes they’re not that creative, they can be very constructivist. They like to do things. And I realized that although they can be anti-social, they’re not. When they’re working in a group with someone else, they’ll say, hey, I just learned this, like in the past.
Maddie: I need you to write about this experience! Can you talk more about constructivism and creativity? Is there a way you can use a constructivist approach to bring out students’ creativity?
Dr. Hinds: You know what? It could work. This is something a lot of my peers are doing. It keeps coming up. My students really like to collaborate and to work with their hands. They want to construct. So the number one thing I think everyone’s agreeing on when I talk to colleagues is that students struggle to follow instructions. I don’t know if it’s a lack of ability or a lack of confidence, or a lot of micromanaging at home and in high school, right? There may have been too much of that, because these kids were going through trauma, and there may have been a tendency to do things for them. Sometimes they have problems following instructions and doing things on their own. I think if I can get them to collaborate and use this constructivist model where they’re also creating their own activity, coming up with their own rules of engagement, which is something we’ve talked about in pedagogy seminars—coming up with our own rubrics. I won’t spell it out to much and I’ll instead let them come up with it.
Maddie: I love that and think that’s really powerful. Before COVID, my students would express fear about saying or writing the wrong thing and getting a bad grade as a consequence. They loved making rubrics together. And with all the AI stuff, it’s coming up again–am I going to get a bad grade? I heard that students like talking with AI because they don’t feel judged for writing “badly.” And even if we aren’t judging our students, they’ll say, “well, you’re grading us.” So it seems like students’ fears are evolving a bit–they’re relying on AI to give the “right” answer instead of their best possible answer.
Dr. Hinds: There’s also the fear of giving the wrong answer in class. That’s always been there, but it’s really intense now. I talked with my students about this, and they said, we’re afraid to be judged and labeled. And I think that’s the environment that older generations have allowed. They’re so afraid of being canceled and of embarrassing themselves that they won’t engage in debates. Before, they did not care what anybody thought. They could have these debates and not feed each other to the wolves, and then go out to lunch. They’re watching social media and the news and watching people tear each other apart, so I can understand why. But the classroom is supposed to be a place where that does not exist. They don’t trust it. There’s also this fear of the ideological professor.
Maddie: Yes! Tell me.
Dr. Hinds: I pride myself on being non-ideological, but we’re dealing with the suspicion of the liberal professor, right? They’re coming in assuming that you’re going to have an ideology and try to indoctrinate everyone with it, and when you don’t, they don’t know what to do.
Maddie: Sometimes my students would just go off wandering and I had to figure out how to handle that.
Dr. Hinds: Pay attention to what you’re talking about–a specific time period? Maybe you said something feminist, something about race.
Maddie: Exactly! I was like, are you guys restless?
Dr. Hinds: Mind you, this generation was hit with diversity training from day one, right? We would have liked to have more of it. But this amount of diversity training was probably a little bit too much for them. We never talked much about race and gender and sexuality when we were younger. Now that they’ve started to introduce these things earlier, maybe students are afraid that what they say or think will be too controversial, and there’s a tendency to shy away from things. There’s also a sentiment that whenever this subject comes up, that it’s an affront to somebody who might be white, straight, male–that we’re talking about them, and I want to get that out of the classroom. I’m not like that. I believe that some professors are, but I’m not. I usually pick a topic that is general that appeals to everybody, and we’ll look at it through various lenses that appeal to a wide array of people.
Maddie: Oh my god, that’s so much to deal with. Maybe it’s great that this happened during your observation, though, so you have someone who can say, this happened and this is the situation. How did you feel about it after?
Dr. Hinds: Maddie, I have students telling me that democracy is a failed experiment. I have students defending Putin against Ukraine, saying that he has every right to do things, saying we need a strong dictator. And I’m finding a way to communicate and have a rational conversation with these students. Keep in mind, these are young people, only nineteen years old.
Maddie: Exactly, and you want them to express themselves. I’m really struck by your dedication to teaching and communicating with your students. What has been your most meaningful teaching moment–one that comes back, or remains with you?
Dr. Hinds: Maddie, there’s been so many, right? Highs and lows–but there have been more highs, and those are what I focus on. I’m going to focus on the present–the major high is when Lisa Blankenship came to me and said, I have a SEEK class. I was going to have the opportunity to mentor not just men from underprivileged backgrounds, but primarily African American, Caribbean, and other underprivileged groups. Just to go in that classroom with kids from the inner city who have very little money, and to be in a classroom and to see them become more intellectually curious than the students with more privilege, and to sit down and debate with them about lofty philosophy, and then see them apply it to their lives in ways that students who went to better schools do not. This is the To Sir, With Love moment, right? I love it, you know. I have to be stern with them sometimes, and they start to engage with and trust me.
Maddie: That’s so powerful! I really wish I’d had you as a teacher–I can see how dedicated you are. You’re not afraid to challenge your students, and students need that. I had a student tell me back in 2018 to give them more challenges. I was surprised, and I said thank you for telling me, let’s do this. It takes a level of dedication and creativity as well, because we want to challenge our students without shutting them down. You want to strike a balance and give them something to work with so they’re growing in thought and perspective.
Dr. Hinds: I think that’s cool, and it’s really led to somewhat of an evolution of my teaching philosophy. We’ve been in these pedagogy seminars, and there’s this one thing that comes up in some of the readings and debates–it’s the question of what we should be doing as instructors and professors in the humanities department at a business school? What are we preparing the students for? The truth of the matter is, we’re not preparing students. Not for graduate studies. They’re mostly being prepared for law school, business, or to work at a corporation. Which is not necessarily the case if you were going into liberal arts where you have more students preparing for a life in academia.
Maddie: For sure.
Dr. Hinds: Some of these texts say that we’re supposed to be preparing them for a business career, irrespective of the department. That has been something I ascribe to, and it’s worked, because how do you get a business student taking your course for an easy A to be diligent in connecting the class to their real life? I do that through philosophical debates. But another thing I do is to steer the conversation and our analysis of a novel toward our real-life experiences, to what’s going on in the real world. But I’m also trying to impress upon them how some of the basic skills that I’m trying to teach them will translate into the workplace. I always say, you know, if I had treated academia like a job, I would have been more successful in my first years out of school. It was very challenging because I went from being able to look at my notes and take a photographic picture of them in my head and pass the test. I’m thinking, how do I teach them to manage a desk? I’ll treat the writing assignment like any other project that you need to deliver at work. I try to be similar to a boss or coach.
Maddie: I need that! How do they respond?
Dr. Hinds: I think it’s working well. We’re preparing them for life, all that comes with it, and the range of jobs out there.
Maddie: I’ll reflect on this a lot when I’m developing syllabi this summer.
Dr. Hinds: Yes, and I think this approach can encourage emotional growth for everyone involved. And it’s challenging because it can be hard to emphasize how important it can be to write and be detail-oriented in a whole range of jobs. It really matters, and maybe it takes a teacher saying, hey, I’ll teach you how to do this, because from my experience, this is what might be asked of you and I want you to be ready for this.
Maddie: This conversation has been so lovely, and I can’t wait to tell Joe about it. I have one million follow-up questions, but we’re at time and I fear I’m keeping you!
Dr. Hinds: Thank you for thinking of me, Maddie. I greatly appreciate you.
Maddie: Everything you said about finding your calling and the fear of a calling–and how to move forward. This has been incredibly helpful.
Dr. Hinds: Go watch To Sir, With Love.
Closing reflection: As I reflect on this conversation while editing, I am struck by Dr. Hinds’ candor, clarity, and humor, as well as his sociologically grounded insights into the challenges his students face. His depth of experience and his forthright engagement with both the difficulties and the profound rewards of teaching are deeply resonant. He approaches the complexities of today’s classroom with a sociological lens, seeking to understand his students’ behaviors and to situate them within broader social, educational, and historical contexts.
For instance, in considering why some students struggle to follow instructions, he reflects thoughtfully on their high school experiences and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their cognitive and emotional development. From this perspective, he explores the potential of constructivist pedagogy to foster creativity and agency in his students. I was especially moved by his passion for working with students in his SEEK class, and his commitment to challenging them intellectually, earning their trust, and engaging them in philosophical inquiry that, as he notes, often resonates more deeply for students with fewer privileges.
It was a privilege to speak with Dr. Hinds, and to witness a pedagogy rooted in both critical reflection and genuine care.
Key takeaways: Sometimes, fear accompanies a calling; we must watch To Sir, With Love; students have a fear of the ideological professor who is going to indoctrinate them, and they’re confused when that’s not your style; sometimes, students from the public schools don’t respect us the way students from the suburbs respect their teachers; what’s the deal with activities; students today seem to prefer constructivist approaches, and we can work with that by involving them in the creation of their activities; students are terrified of saying the wrong thing in their writing, and in class; students don’t want to be judged and labeled, and sometimes, they turn to AI for this reason; we must mentor; we must ask ourselves what we are preparing our students for, and how.