Peggy Macintosh

Peggy Macintosh, who came to Bryn Mawr during my freshman year, was one of my favorite speakers I’ve heard throughout my time here. Four years later, however, having dissected her writing in a number of my classes, what remains distinct about the workshops she led was not the content of what we talked about, but the way in which we did the talking.  Macintosh’s workshops were one of the first times I saw students and teachers interacting on an equal level – equally vulnerable and equally worthy of speaking – and it upended some of my assumptions about what school should be and how professors should behave.  I would later go on to attend Posse retreats and be in classrooms with some pretty radical educators, but these workshops were the first time I saw teachers and students discussing the complexities of their lived experiences.  I saw students comforting professors who were crying and professors in awe of what students had to say.  I now think that that schools should be egalitarian environments where learning is mutual, and Macintosh was the first to introduce to that model.