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.
