Notes from the Writing Instruction Underground

Just like 4th grade, every semester I split the class up into boys and girls and put them into different rooms. Their task in these homogeneous groups is to list “how might we describe men and women in the classroom.” Before they head off into different areas, I tell them that what we are after are the “common assumptions” one might make about someone else based on their gender. That is, we’re after the generalizations, the stereotypes, the “things we all know.”

After allowing the two gender specific groups to get into the discussion (and usually it doesn’t take long until both groups are laughing at the commonalities of their observations) and generate a list for both “men” and “women,” I bring them all back into the same class and we put the lists up on the blackboard for everyone to see/discuss.

What follows is a fascinating exploration into normative expectations of gender as well as the mechanisms of social identification. First the images:

Men (by Men)

Women (by Men)

Men (by Women)

Women (by Women)

What we talk about and consequently spend time thinking about are these gender based “normative expectations” we all recognize and apply to people. That is, these patterns (and I have done this particular exercise for 8 semesters now…the lists are almost always identical) are real and easily observed once we look for them. “Gender” is not just an abstract concept, but something that readily organizes the way we not only understand the world but also operate within it. The concept of “social identification” weaves into the discussion as we note that while it is true that one can “do anything they want,” in order to be recognized as a particular sort of being (that is male/female) there are certain things one must do that are familiar and within these frameworks.

The question we take up at the conclusion of this exercise focuses on how successfully performing within these normative expectations for gender are advantageous in some environments and not in others (what I might call the kairos of gender). For instance, one very common observation is the rebellious/distant/”tuned out” male. As we discuss, males often feel the need to act “too cool for school” in order to preserve an image of masculinity. This performance might earn acceptance into certain male communities while at the same time prohibiting certain kinds of academic success.

As an educator, these sorts of exercises are not just interesting but terribly important. What they signal to me is that “difference” and “experience” in the classroom can be utilized to uncover or remove the invisibility of things such as the social and cultural importance of gender. Many students are resistant to the idea that one’s gender is a determinant in the availability of cultural capital. I believe this resistance stems from a prohibition against recognizing difference in primary and secondary education. That is, students are taught that everyone is equal and that who you are cannot determine you who you can be. While these are incredibly important hopes we might have for society, the lived effect on students is that they see a recognition of difference as breaking the rule that everyone should be considered equal, thus squelching any recognition of structural inequality.

More importantly, though, these exercises work well when difference in student experience can be leveraged in the classroom itself.. In my classes, gender is a particularly easy concept to work with simply because I have both male and females in the classroom. Race, however, is different because my classes in these post-secondary environments are typically 95%+ white. This is particularly troublesome for educators committed to anti-racist work within the post-secondary environment, something I myself have struggled to theorize. Dialogue is incredibly potent in terms of being able to open a productive space to work in simply because “difference” produces raw material to work with. Monologues such as whiteness in many post-secondary classrooms, however, shut down these productive spaces and leave us with little raw material to work with—the end result usually being a reification of previously held attitudes instead of an opportunity to transform such attitudes.

The one constant practice I’ve had since I started teaching college level classes in the fall of 2004 was to ask two questions of students: how do we understand how a classroom works and how do we think they should work? Or, more simply, describe the reality of classrooms and the ideal classroom.

This practice started, for me, in a moment of crisis during my first semester as an instructor. Hung out to dry by an English department that was not so subtle in its hostility toward quality instruction, I turned to my students for inspiration after every thing else I was doing felt dull and flat. My class that semester was neither here nor there. They did what I asked and did it dutifully. There were no instances of open rebellion, nor any sort of flashes of brilliance. It was this dullness, I think, that upset me the most. That’s when I turned to them. I wanted to know why it all seemed so robotic, to understand from their experiences and perspectives what they were looking for. I wanted our discussions to cease feeling like a root canal and to take on the vibrancy and authentic feel of a discussion one might have with good friends over things that really mattered. What can I say? It was my first semester teaching.

The responses I got back were somewhat revolutionary for me. Students talked about a feeling of powerlessness. They constructed the “actual” classrooms in unflattering ways, with out of touch professors who couldn’t be bothered to care less about their lives. In their classrooms, it was the “professors” who listened to the students.

Over the years, I continued to ask these questions of students. What was at first a gesture of frustration with the system has turned into a deliberate and overtly political move in my own pedagogy. I now see “the question” as an affirmation of a deeply held belief that in my classroom, nothing is beyond question or reproach, including my own teaching methods. It was an encounter with the Brazilian theorist Augusto Boal’s work in theater that lead to my current form of asking “the question.” Playing off of Boal’s “image theater” I ask the students to construct and perform their own “scenes” of how education works and how they wish it to work. I’ve been doing these scenes now for 4 years in every single class I have taught. I have even used this “image theater” with other professors at conferences, with elementary and secondary teachers, even with friends not associated with academia.

In the ideal scenes, often times it was unclear who the professor was. Knowledge formulated in-between and around the participants, almost never solely originating from a single source. Students were portrayed not as “students” but often as friends. In these scenes, one constant element of the “ideal” classroom was the circle. This geometry of equality, in which all are at equal levels and knowledge is not centrally located nor unilateral in its movement, was almost so common that we’d often end up having an hour long discussion in which we continued to think about “the circle” and the classroom while different groups would enact a different (yet same) circle.

Following a long tradition of critical scholars in educational theory and research, I am deeply ambivalent about the circle. This gesture of equality often masks deep inequalities within society. We know that not everyone in the circle is equal. We know the histories of race, of gender, of class. While “the circle” displayed a hope in which we can all be at the same level, it also did not provide any mechanism to disrupt the structures of oppression prevalent in culture that were instrumental to producing injustice in the first place. Some semesters I have added a third scene, a “transitional” scene in which we try to understand how we can get from one image to a radically different one. These discussions were sometimes painful, as discussions that refuse to ignore racism, sexism, and class antagonisms often are.

Since 2004, the depictions and discussions of “how education really is” have changed little. I still see the bored students in seats, not knowing why they are there. I still see the aloof professor, often guarded by an earnest yet disempowered TA. I still see knowledge originating in some “book of truth” that no one even sees let alone challenges.

But in the past year, the “ideal” classrooms have changed dramatically. In the fall of 2009, I saw for the first time ever a class divided in to 6 groups not show a single circle when displaying their “ideal” classroom. In fact, the differences between the “real” and the “ideal” have grown so minute that it became difficult to produce discussion about why they are different.

This semester, that trend continued. Knowledge circulated in the same manner as before. A “powerpoint” presentation even made it into the “ideal” classroom (something unfathomable to my students even 3 years ago). Professors were the originators of knowledge and ideas, and students were still depicted as being “sponges” to figure out the “correct interpretation” of knowledge. If anything had changed, it was that the students in the images had become “better students” in the same structure. That is, instead of seeing their ennui as a consequence of the disconnection of “facts” and their actual lives, they saw their boredom as personal faults to be corrected. Basically, it isn’t the system that’s wrong, but us.

I learn a lot from my students. Sometimes I feel I learn more from them than they from me. So, after seeing this for the second straight semester, what are my students telling me? Here are some ideas that could account for this emerging pattern:

* The prevalence of a “student centered classroom” in elementary and secondary education is either severely eroded or completely eradicated. We are, in other words, finally seeing the full consequences of “no child left behind” educational reform. Students have had little to no exposure to any sort of pedagogy beyond “current traditional” forms of instruction. Maybe we don’t see the circle anymore because students have never encountered a class with one?

* A student told me (and the entire class) last semester that she found it ironic that she was here to pay for a degree and that the university had the gall to think she should actually learn something. I find this sentiment to be incredibly honest, yet deeply troubling. The university, in order to remain marketable, has eschewed its mission as a center for the production of socially valuable knowledge and instead actively markets itself (through various mechanisms) as “training institute” for corporate interests. Students know why they are here: to do what they are told to do in order to get out the other side as quickly and efficiently as possible. Disrupting the nearly straight line from professor knowledge to student absorption does not fit into this new understanding of the classroom nor the purpose and function of education. It, in fact, gets in the way of it.

* I was once able, I think, to rely on a notion of the “rebellious youth” who had a vested interest in tearing down everything their parents held to be dear. No longer. I have been noticing for quite some time now that many conclusions to ideas and concerns of students heavily involve “more parental involvement.” The solution to problematic underage drinking is “more parental involvement.” The solution to massive rifts between educational opportunities for black students and white students is…”more parental involvement” (presumably for the black students.) I have a feeling that the notion of “adolescence” as a social construct (see especially N. Lasko) has somehow been altered by college prep in such a way that students are even more the property of adults. Further, they see this as the proper role for themselves.

* The “strategic positioning” movement underway to raise our status to one of the top three research universities in the world has had the real effect of homogenizing the student body to the point in which there is very little dissent towards current-traditional teaching models.