Teaching Spotlight: Michael Wilson Becerril (Peace & Conflict Studies)

February 2025

“[Professor Wilson Becerril] not only wants to help you ace the next assignment, but also wants to help you realize your potential -- in college and beyond. The excitement he has for sharing his knowledge, the commitment he upholds to social justice in the world, and the space he makes for his students to learn and grow is inspiring.” (Ari Mosqueda, Class of ‘25)

“Professor Becerril has always been the most supportive, energetic, enthusiastic, and caring professor, mentor, and teacher. He brings the most energy to his classes, ensures that classes are accessible, centers and uplifts everyone's voice, and cares deeply for all of his students.” (Hannah Breithaupt, Class of ‘26)

Elaine sat down with Mike in December 2024 to learn about his approach to teaching and mentoring. This profile was developed from that interview. 

Slow education, collective education, and anti-oppressive pedagogy:  these are the principles which ground Michael Wilson Becerril’s approach to teaching and learning. Developed over the past decade as a graduate student in politics and through self-directed reading, Mike put these commitments into practice in visiting positions at Colgate University and Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota before bringing his talents to Swarthmore in 2022. Describing teaching as his passion, Mike explained what each of these three principles look like, in theory and practice.

By inviting students to engage in slow education, Mike asks them to actively resist the tendency to “cram and skim and procrastinate and wait until the last minute and pull an all-nighter, which doesn't enable [them] to actually process and retain the information.” He connects these kinds of practices with the insidious erosion of our attention spans and the problem of mediocrity “failing upwards” in which people who haven’t done the reading end up in charge. “If students are here [it’s] because they are passionate about learning,” he said, “If you want to get smart, then you have to take your time.”  Wilson Becerril challenges students to reject hegemonic cultural narratives that “instruct them to think in the short term and game the system” and instead invites students to remember, 

We only have one life and it's a miracle and it lasts no time and then it's gone, so what did you do with it? Did you actually dedicate the time to invest in your intellectual ability so that you could make the most out of it? Slow education means taking time, going back over the paragraph… three or more times if you need it, going back five pages now that you've understood the argument a little bit better, re-reading it with a … better sense of where the author is going, reading really slowly.

Outside of their reading time, Mike invites students to lean on him and each other as learning resources. By collective education, Mike understands that “knowledge is for sharing and it's something that we make together by conversing with each other.” This theory of learning (which resonates with constructivist philosophy) is reflected in how he structures class time and space. Mike has his students sit in a circle, makes sure they know each other’s names, and devotes at least a third of class time each week to student-led discussion (much more in seminar classes). Further, he offers multiple ways to participate, both in and out of class (e.g. in addition to speaking up, he invites students to send him their thoughts via email or to stop by and talk). One of the students who nominated Prof Becerril marveled at how he remembered each student’s comments and referred back to them in future class sessions, demonstrating the value he puts on students’ contributions to the learning process.

All of this is also closely connected to his third grounding principle, anti-oppressive pedagogy, which aims to challenge traditional hierarchies of teaching and learning. Mike explained: 

I don't want to reproduce an imperial political economy of knowledge. I want to use education to lift people up and so that requires a lot of intention. I've seen that that can work, but it's also not the dominant model. The dominant model, as bell hooks says, is this ‘receptacle system’ of the professor who has authority and imparts information to the students, who have to obey. I think that is very problematic, and in order to change the world, we need to change the way we think about education. 

To this end, Mike reminds students of their shared responsibility to make sure that everyone in the class has a voice in discussions and that participation is balanced. To do this, he facilitates a conversation at the beginning of the semester about how and why to “take space and make space” (i.e. for those who are not talking to speak up and for those who have been talking to give the floor to others) and to think “reflexively about our positionalities, and who we are, and how some of us have been allowed and encouraged to take up more space and to interrupt” while others haven’t. He emphasizes the responsibility of those with more privilege to “make an intervention that…open[s] space for others to show their intelligence” and bring their experiences to bear on the discussion.

I asked what he does when participation gets unbalanced in spite of these efforts, and he described some facilitation cues that usually work: “‘Let's hear from other folks’ is one easy thing that I find myself saying sometimes. ‘Okay, we've heard what you're saying. That is interesting. Let's hear from other folks in the room.’ and ‘Who hasn't spoken yet?’ and especially, as we're getting into the final 15 minutes of the discussion, [I say], ‘I especially want to hear from folks who haven't spoken today.’”

Mike credits his graduate education at UC Santa Cruz for shaping his approaches to teaching and mentoring, including observing great professors, being mentored by older students, and participating in a graduate teaching seminar where he learned many of these ideas. From there, he says, he discovered bell hooks', Teaching to Transgress, which offered a framework for understanding the types of teaching he was drawn to. Since then has often sought out works on anti-hierarchical education.

I tell students, if you want to learn more about where I drew these principles of my education philosophy from, you can read bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, you can read Love in Action by Thich Nhat Hanh. Love in Action: it's a short book, but it's so beautiful and brilliant. It is about how to put love into action because love is not just a slogan on a t-shirt, right? It's a way of life. It is a mission. It is an everyday radical mission, and it takes a lot of work.

Students and colleagues will be pleased to know that we can spend a couple more years learning from Prof. Wilson Becerril, whose visiting contract in the Department of Peace & Conflict Studies has been extended an additional two years.  -- Elaine Allard, February 2025