Supporting Students Outside the Classroom: One Radical Educator’s Thoughts

On October 3, 2022October 3, 2022 By composingpossibilitiesIn antiracist pedagogy, empowering students, equity, supporting studentsLeave a comment

By Robert Hyers

When I think about my students’ struggles, the ones they share both in my office and in their class writing, it saddens and angers me. I have had students share memories of living in the family van for periods as a child, adult students living out of their cars before attending college, students living in their cars and using our showers while in college, students hiding in fear from abusive relatives, hungry students, students with mental health issues who had limited or no access to the medication they needed, students who were forced to watch undocumented relatives slowly die because they had no legal right to healthcare, students who missed blocks of class from working a tremendous amount of hours to pay household bills because their parents are undocumented and therefore underpaid, student-mothers who could not finish my classes because their childcare changed suddenly mid-semester, students being kicked out of their family homes. I know you all have had similar student experiences shared with you. All of these issues happening outside of our classrooms can take our students away from their academics inside the classroom. What can we as instructors do to help our students in crisis? In order to begin formulating strategies which are not performative and would therefore actually help our students rather than simply help us feel less sadness and anger, we need to explore a few different areas. Because most of these student struggles live within the realm of the family and home, and because the family and home have traditionally been sites of struggle for women, we need to start our exploration with feminism.

Bourgeois Feminism vs Marxist Feminism

The feminism that most of us have grown up with (and consequently then teach) is, in fact, bourgeois feminism. And while bourgeois feminism is only one kind of feminism, it is thought of as the definitive feminism because its dominance or its understanding as “common sense,”¹ serves the purposes of capital. Bourgeois feminism believes in gender equality while also believing in the validity of meritocracy under capitalism. Therefore, while gender relations should be challenged, the political economy those gender relations are formed within does not need to be challenged. Put simply, once gender relations have been equalized, the fight has been won. If women are educated and free to compete for work in the same way men are, then the most talented women will be freed to rise to the top or, at the very least, possess the resources to purchase whatever they want and/or need on the private market. And while this vision has been freeing for small sections of women (mostly white and middle class), because it lacks any critique of the racist, ableist, and heterosexist forces capitalism disciplines for its own survival, it leaves many women out of its vision,² many of whom are our students: Black women, women of color, women with disabilities, trans folx, just to name a few.

Marxist feminism is interested in gender equality as well, but because it is based in the Marxist critique of capitalism, it comes to different conclusions about where the areas of struggle are and what to do about them. Marx argued that capitalism was a struggle between two factions, the working class (workers) and the bourgeoisie (owners). The bourgeoisie is always looking to make a profit by taking new value added to the system (surplus value) and the only way to do this is to pay workers less than their work (labor power) is worth and pocket the difference. Workers are always trying to maximize the price of their labor power but have little power, especially individually, to do so because they do not own the materials they work with (means of production) and they are coerced through the threat of starvation and houselessness to continue participating in this exploitative system. (In other words, every job will exploit my labor power, but I have to have a job because I need a paycheck to pay for the things I need to live, like food and housing.) This then means that most of the surplus value which the working class has created with their labor power within capitalism is captured (or stolen) by the bourgeoisie. This is how you then get individual millionaires and billionaires, individuals with more money than they could spend in their lifetimes, while large swaths of the working class suffer in poverty. ³

While Marx’s analysis was focused on what happens at work, he did acknowledge that certain processes were necessary outside of work to make sure that the worker could show up to work again the next day. Labor power in some ways is like a battery; it has to be recharged. The worker has to eat; has to have a place to rest, to relax; has to be able to raise children to replace the worker when they are too old to work. This is called “social reproduction,” what Marxist feminists focus on. Although housing, feeding, clothing, and caring for workers (including children who will be workers and the elderly who can no longer work) is not seen as work in the same way a job with a paycheck is, it is still work. It takes time; it takes labor; it costs money. And capital gets to use it for free⁴ because caretakers within each family structure (who are still predominantly women⁵) have to find the time outside of their paid jobs to perform this uncompensated work and the family structure itself is left with the cost of any care services that must be purchased on the private market, such as daycare, assisted living, and healthcare to name a few. The stresses of performing this work have been felt more acutely as a whole on the working class since the 1980s because of our current brand of capitalism, neoliberalism. While the economic theory of the early to mid-twentieth century understood that some of the costs of social reproduction needed to be borne by the bourgeoisie through taxation and the family wage, (an understanding which was sexist and racist), neoliberalism rejects that idea. Each family is on its own to provide for itself. And as the spending power of the working class has diminished in the last few decades, it has become harder for each family to provide for itself.⁶ And we are seeing those extreme struggles play out with our students.

In addition, some who study social reproduction have also turned their attention to two areas previously overlooked: environmentalism and the prison industrial complex.

Within bourgeois thinking, environmentalism has always been framed as individual sacrifices the working class must make in order to bring us to sustainability while the bourgeoisie continues with business as usual. This is reflected in such initiatives as water and power usage restrictions, fuel taxes, and congestion pricing. (The results of this contradiction are being felt by our working-class students whose families are being forced to restrict their water use⁷ while a private equity firm continues to steal water from Strawberry Creek in order to sell it back to all of us in bottles labeled Arrowhead⁸, and, in a more extreme example, working-class families in Central Valley whose household well water has dried up because, for the last hundred years, their agribusiness neighbors have been allowed to siphon as much groundwater as they wanted^.9) And although some extreme mitigation measures, such as getting off of gas and coal, is necessary to avoid our near-term future destruction, this thinking is always doomed to fail in the long term because it does not actually target the problem which is causing the destruction of the planet. Rather than a fictional over-indulgent working class, the problem results from capitalism itself. As Marx pointed out, the bourgeoisie is always looking to make as much money as possible, in as little time as possible, in a consistent manner (accumulation). This means that the system must always be expanding and expand at a higher rate than the environment can tolerate.¹⁰ In addition, the negative effects of this accumulation, namely pollution, are most acutely felt by the most marginalized of the working class because of the way the system allocates housing to those who can afford it. Quite simply, it is cheaper to live in a more polluted area; this, along with classist and racist zoning, is why our students live in diesel death zones.¹¹

The working class’s interactions with the police and prison system are also framed as individual; each working-class member’s experience with the law is unique and dependent on that individual’s behavior. But Marxism sees it differently. As capitalism naturally moves to automate jobs (technological change) in order to increase profits (relative surplus value), it throws more and more people out of work. As the costs of social reproduction are now borne by each individual family unit under neoliberalism, these “excessed” populations must figure out how to survive. This increases crime and violence which then must be managed by police, the courts, and prison.¹² The state violence necessary for this management is felt most acutely by our students, who are forced to deal with the Riverside Police Department who ranks sixth in the nation for the most taxpayer money paid for police misconduct (the majority for excessive force), only outdone by locales with much higher population densities like L.A.¹³

The answer to these problems for Marxist feminists then lies not in teaching girls to use their girlboss power to break any glass ceilings or infiltrate the men’s only clubs, but to (1) help workers survive the current conditions of social reproduction under neoliberalism and (2) work towards a socialist future in which the working class can own the means of production and use surplus value to help one another thrive. While bourgeois feminism does not recognize these kinds of connections, Marxist feminism does. For example, let’s look at the IE. There is a strong connection between the fact that our students, living in the one of the poorest regions in the country, struggle with providing housing, childcare, and healthcare for their families, while Jeff Bezos, the founder of the largest private employer in the IE,¹⁴ Amazon, has the money to shoot himself and William Shatner out into space.¹⁵Imagine if that money that our students made for Bezos using their labor power was democratically harnessed to help our students, to pay for educational resources, for universal housing, universal food programs, universal healthcare, universal child and elder care, all initiatives which would decrease our overall need for police and prisons. And imagine if our students only worked to provide for each other rather than for the ever increasing and insatiable demand for profit by the bourgeoisie, which would reduce pollution levels. This is the vision of Marxist feminists.

Human Capital vs Social Reproduction

Using this Marxist feminist lens, how do we as college instructors help our students within these areas of social reproduction in which they struggle? For the first part, helping our students survive right now, the answer is simple: direct them to the many campus resources RCC has. In addition, we can also connect them to local direct-action groups in which they can not only get help but also feel empowered by helping others. A list of all of these resources is at the end of this post. But what about that second part, helping our students (and ourselves) move towards a future where we have captured the resources necessary to fully take care of one another? This one is much more complex because, before we can strategize on how to do that, we must first understand our role as educators in social reproduction.

Social reproduction is not just about reproducing the worker in a material sense, but also reproducing the ideology of the society the worker is within. This then means that education is an area of social reproduction just as much as housing, food, and healthcare are. But education stands out in this way: our students have a right to education in a way that they do not have for every other area of social reproduction. Take college for example: even if they do not have the financial means at that moment, they can take out loans for their schooling. But if they do not make three times the required rent for an apartment, they are unhoused. Why is this? It is because, on a fundamental level, capital needs education to teach future workers their inferior place in the system and that, even if they don’t like it, it’s the best system they’re going to get. As educators, our job is to force our students to reconcile the contradiction of living as the working class under bourgeois liberalism—of being forced to serve the authoritarian needs of capital which demand total access to their bodies, minds, and souls when it is profitable while also believing they are free individuals participating in a full democracy.¹⁶ A salient example of this would be our current economic moment in which the Fed is restricting the money supply to raise interest rates—in effect, making money more expensive—because the common sense of bourgeois economic thought cannot imagine how to tame inflation outside of reliving the horrors of the Volcker shock.¹⁷ This exercise disproportionately harms the most marginalized portions of the working class,¹⁸ our students, by keeping them out of work for longer and driving down wages when they do find work, thereby driving down their potential lifetime earnings. Despite this economic moment being completely out of our students’ control, the common sense of our profession dictates that I continue this dangerous game of pretend in the classroom which my students have participated in since grade school, in which we both reinforce the belief that their fortunes are wholly controlled by each student’s individual behaviors and attitudes towards schooling, something which is contrary to what our students are actually experiencing right now outside of the classroom.

Of course, if we take the example I used about the student taking out a loan for their college education, this makes sense because of the “epochal unit” (to borrow a term from Freire) we find ourselves in: the human capital epochal unit. Human capital is a theory fleshed out in the 1960s by the neoliberal economist Gary Becker, who argued that we should all view ourselves like companies. Just as companies make capital investments in order to grow their profits, individuals should invest in their human capital through schooling which will then allow them access to jobs with specialized knowledge and, because of that specialized knowledge, higher wages.¹⁹ And while human capital has always had serious criticism as a viable economic theory as well as a functional social policy,²⁰ it quickly rose into common sense to the point where, in the 1990s, I remember being told in high school that I had to go to college if I wanted a decent life. Every semester I ask my students when they were told they had to go to college. Most say middle school; one student recently told me grammar school.

I want to focus on the relationship between the dominance of the human capital theory and our students’ struggles within the areas of social reproduction. Teaching our students that their only route to a better life is through investing in their human capital by attending college may keep us in business but it does nothing to help our students fundamentally transform their struggles within social reproduction. This is for two reasons: (1) It pushes the solutions for any present problems into the future; if our students can survive college, once they are credentialed and their labor power can demand a higher wage, they will be able to reliably purchase the things they are struggling with now, such as housing and food. It offers no possibilities for empowering solutions right now; it offers no room for collective action with their working-class comrades in the forms of groupings such as labor and tenant unions or mutual aid which have the potential to actually transform the forces currently oppressing them. (2) Human capital’s only solution to these struggles is for our exploited students to then exploit others in order to reliably meet their needs in social reproduction; this transformation is what we label as success. For example, I am now a tenured professor and therefore a success using the human capital theory. Before this, I was at times both an adjunct professor and a retail worker. As a tenured professor, I now benefit from the super-exploitation of my adjunct comrades. And as a member of the Professional Managerial Class,²¹ I benefit from the low pay and erratic schedules of my retail comrades (some of whom are my students) who now are part of my service class. I am supposed to believe that because I have moved from exploited to exploiter, I am a success. But this is a false consciousness. If we are actually looking to help our students transform society, how we define success must change and our classroom is the place to begin that change.

Limit-Situations vs Untested Feasibility

While a lot of this post may sound like gloom and doom—don’t despair! While we as educators are embedded within a system designed to replicate inequality, as educators we have a certain amount of freedom within this system to push back against it.²² While there a more than a few roadmaps to help us with this, the one I return to the most often is Paulo Freire’s classic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.²³

And while the most popular discussion of this text has traditionally been with narration sickness versus problem-posing education, here I want to work through concepts later in the text, namely where Freire focuses on limit-situations versus untested feasibility.

Freire argues that students bring “limit-situations” into our classrooms. These limit-situations could be many different things (and he argues for creating “generative themes” for classroom discussion by asking students about their limit-situations) but for the purposes of this post, let’s assume that our students’ limit-situations are limited to the areas of social reproduction discussed. If we as instructors are truly dedicated to our students’ (and our own) liberation, our interactions with our students must open up new possibilities for the future, rather than close them down. This is why it is so important for us to fully understand our role as educators within the social reproduction process of education, of the ways in which we reproduce the ideologies which then reproduce inequality. Only by using the same techniques Freire argues for in the classroom with each other as educators before we walk into our classrooms, naming the world through dialogue, can we identify the problems within our own profession to then work on how to solve them. These dialogues will then help us when orchestrating problem-posing education in our classrooms and reduce the likelihood that our classroom discussions, while appearing as liberatory, will continue to oppress our students.

Our goal then with problem-posing education is to move our students towards “limit-acts,” which are concrete actions students can take to begin surpassing their limit-situations into “untested feasibility” or reorganizations of social relations which would help our working-class students in concrete ways but threaten the functionality of capitalism, social relations which we as educators are supposed to teach our students are impossible and off-limits in order to ensure capital can live another day. How might this process specifically work in the classroom? Let’s take housing as an example.

Housing is one of the most pressing issues for our students. The most productive thing we could do as a society at this point would be to make housing a human right and guarantee it to everyone regardless of income. But this would wipe out the coffers of the rentier class (made up of both corporate and “mom and pop” landlords) within the bourgeoisie and threaten the inflated market values of single-family homes still owned by individual members of the PMC, so we are normally taught (and, in turn, teach our students) that this is pie-in-the-sky thinking if the idea is brought up at all. And if we look at the current epochal unit of neoliberalism, we are moving in the wrong direction. The California legislature worked with the neoliberal think-tank American Enterprise Institute and, with Newsom’s signature, made the “Light Touch Density” program law²⁴ (an idea Riverside adopted two years earlier²⁵) which encourages homeowners to create Accessory Dwelling Units, which would be new apartments the homeowner could rent out or sell on their existing property in order to make housing more affordable by increasing the overall local supply. Using AEI’s own “success stories,”²⁶ not only would this program be unable to help the most marginalized of the working class including most of our students whose incomes are so low they qualify for the California College Promise Grant, it is moving us as a society away from liberation. By making homeowners a new miniature rentier class, we are continuing the viciousness of the human capital mythology: telling our students that the only path to success, the only way they can escape exploitation, is to become exploiters themselves.

Like all untested feasibility in the classroom, we need to approach with caution and meet our students where they are at. In general, the private market as a solution to all of society’s ills is part of our identity as Americans, especially since American neoliberalism is so closely aligned with American liberalism.²⁷ Charging into class, firing on all cylinders, and attacking our students’ identity will not end up in the “dialogical relations” necessary to move us towards limit-acts. And we do not know what our students’ home lives are like. While we may have some students who are currently unhoused or have experienced houselessness, we may have other students who are landlords, perhaps students whose homeowner parents are currently building ADUs. And other students who have never had to worry about housing and therefore, have never thought about this before in a meaningful way. As instructors we need to move slowly and purposefully, introducing the limit-situation, allowing our students to write about it, discuss it, and then moving onto possible solutions. Private market solutions will be presented first because they are currently common sense. Let that conversation happen. At some point the limit-situations of that proposal will present themselves and then you can direct those students towards limit-acts and then to untested feasibility. These discussions can be facilitated by various media (listed later) of activist groups working on housing as well as historical instances where universal housing adjacent ideas have been proposed or attempted. Finally, each student can begin drafting an essay that explores whatever limit-situation versus untested feasibility on this continuum that interests them the most, even if those are private market solutions. And no matter what area the student explores, encouraging introspection in the drafting is crucial; this process of limit-situation versus untested feasibility does not stop at any given point; each movement into untested feasibility creates a new limit-situation which needs new limit-acts to overcome into a new area of untested feasibility which then presents a new limit-situation and so on.

Ultimately, continuing the tradition of gaslighting that our students have endured inside the classroom since middle school, in which they are told to grin and bear their struggles outside the classroom for now to focus on investing in their human capital because it will save them and their families one anonymous day in the future when they will move from exploited to exploiter, will not help them, or any of us in the working class. Instead, using the bourgeois resources we have at our disposal right now to help our students survive, directing our students to local community action and mutual aid groups where they can not only have their needs met but become empowered in the process, and using our classrooms to further empower our students with the knowledge that a socialist future is available and worth struggling towards now, will help them. While the fact of our students living in one of the poorest regions in the country may feel overwhelming, that fact also holds a multitude of possibilities. As the environmental justice activist Andres Garcia observes: “One thing about people in the Inland Empire is that, like, the material conditions here will make an organizer or activist out of just about anybody.”²⁸

Question for Practice

Identify a class assignment in which students explore problems within one or more areas of social reproduction. Are they given the space and direction to imagine solutions which are not tied to the human capital theory? Does the scaffolding structure of the assignment allow for an interplay between limit-situations and untested feasibility? If not, how might the assignment be modified to allow for these?

RCC Campus Resources

The English Department has an extensive list of campus resources for our students. In order to access them, go into the Canvas Commons, filter for Modules only, and search “Supporting Students.” Choose the module that says “Supporting Students 12-Graduate”
RCC’s Basic Needs Resource Center
Year of Sustainability Canvas Course
Student-Parent Resources

Local Community Direct-Action Groups/Resources (Kind of Alphabetized)

While this list can be given to, and utilized by, our students, I have also compiled this list for our adjunct comrades who, because of the super-exploitation of their labor power, may be struggling in the same areas of social reproduction as our students. In addition, I do not have an opinion on any of these groups; they are all working in their own ways to improve life in the IE. For anyone who uses this list, they will need to do their own research on whichever group(s)/resource(s) interest them.

Media For Classroom Discussion

Resources for Further Inquiry

Workers at the University and Iowa store in Riverside, CA are forming a union!!! pic.twitter.com/YgmXP1CxO2
— SBWorkersUnited (@SBWorkersUnited) May 24, 2022

Amazon workers walk off at major west coast air hub
Amazon workers at fulfillment center in Moreno Valley announce union drive
Spotlight On: Workers and Community Taking on Amazon in the Inland Empire (powerswitchaction.org)
Autonomous Tenants Union Network (atun-rsia.org)
“We Make Our Community By Defending It” – Tracy Rosenthal on the Homeless Industrial Complex, Housing and Tenant Union Organizing – Millennials Are Killing Capitalism | Podcast on Spotify
While this podcast focuses on LA, the same techniques LA has successfully used to criminalize the unhoused are now being used in Riverside: “Riverside – Camping now off-limits in riverbed, other fire-prone areas – New rules aim to move homeless people into shelters or area housing” Of course, this then means that the same forms of resistance the working class has enacted in LA could also be utilized here in the IE.
‘Can’t afford to live’: California heatwave leaves older adults teetering on edge | California | The Guardian
“San Bernardino Planning Commission approves Bloomington warehouse project, protestors face translations difficulties at meeting amidst possibility of displacement – Viewpoints Online”
Sheriff Bianco strikes again, inmates die, ‘peace officers’ abuse necessary funds – Viewpoints Online
“We mapped the warehouse takeover of the Inland Empire. The results are overwhelming”

Notes

Co-Creating In the Classroom

On April 4, 2022 By Wendy L. SilvaIn empowering students, equity, student centered teaching1 Comment

By Wendy Silva, Dr. Audrey Holod, and Dr. Bryan Keene

Many of us probably did not know we wanted to be college professors when we began our varying college journeys, and we would venture to say that some of us didn’t even know we wanted to teach, in any capacity. Unlike K-12 teachers that often need credentials, student-teaching experience, and a plethora of other requirements in order to teach, our jobs require something else: specific degrees and expertise in the coinciding fields or disciplines. Few of us actually studied how to teach adult learners, or andragogy, in-depth before becoming college professors. So, we use our own experiences as frameworks for how to teach, just as our own students use their own educational experiences to learn whatever it is we ask them to learn in our classrooms. The challenge is that many have adopted methods of teaching in the ways we were taught, ways that have been proven ineffective by many educational scholars (i.e. Freire, hooks, Bovill, Bondi, etc.). For example, a banking model of teach-memorize-repeat does not (necessarily) require the critical thinking skills that a problem-based model does.

It can be difficult and humbling to look inward and be willing to recognize that some of the practices we’ve been utilizing for years might not be the most effective or might, even, be harmful to certain groups of students. But that is part of the beauty and challenge of our jobs; we get the opportunity to continue learning, to make changes, to assess, and to experiment semester to semester, week to week, day to day. Our colleagues in the two previous community of practice events have presented us with a lot to reflect on in terms of how inequities show up in our teaching, in our policies, in what we decide to grade, and how we decide to grade. Many of us have been working diligently to consider and implement what we have learned in order to best serve our students. However, this process is not one we need to do alone; our students can be active participants in helping us create the changes needed to improve the outcomes of the courses, overall student learning, and the quality of our teaching, especially as adult learners.

Adult learning is at the center of what we do. Before discussing the benefits of co-creation in adult learning contexts, we feel it is important to briefly revisit what we already know about adult learners, and why practicing through the lens of an andragogical framework (rather than a pedagogical one) is vital to adult learning success. Adult Education experts Merriam & Bierema (2014) clarify specific ways that adult learners differ from children.

A pedagogical framework assumes that child learners are still developing physically and cognitively, relying on others for their general care, well-being, and guidance in transitioning to adulthood. Being a student is the main activity in their lives. In contrast, adult learners are often in a completely different position in their life cycle. Years of prior life experiences constitute and construct adult learners’ reality, which guides how they navigate their learning context, let alone the world around them. Adult learners already have several roles and responsibilities within their social context, such as worker, caretaker, and parent. The “student” role may be one aspect of their identity.

Therefore, adult learning needs are significantly different from children, as motivation in the classroom is often connected to improving adults’ life situation, whether in relation to work, personal, or social life. This leads to the fundamental assumptions of andragogy, that adults have a desire and readiness to learn, are problem-centered, and desire direct application of knowledge to their lives (Merriam & Bierema, 2014). These needs are all adequately addressed through co-creation strategies and activities.
Co-creation is defined as “occupying the space between student engagement and partnership, to suggest a meaningful collaboration between students and staff, with students becoming more active participants in the learning process, constructing understanding and resources with academic staff” (Bovill 2019). The act of co-creating in the classroom can come to fruition in many different ways and at different stages of the learning processes. For example, students can co-create assignments or assessments, can co-evaluate courses or activities, or even co-create curricula.

But co-creation can only happen when we, as instructors, fully trust our students and see them as equals in the classroom, fully capable of engaging in this teaching and learning process with us. It means we have to loosen our reins on what we think is best and be open and willing to try new approaches to teaching and to really listen to what students are saying, not as a performative gesture, but as a genuine attempt at giving them the opportunity to contribute to their learning in meaningful ways.

One concrete way Stephanie Bondi argues students can co-create is by engaging in “cogenerative dialogue” (cogen). Cogen takes place through “dialoguing with participants about what is happening in the class” and then coming “to consensus about changes to be made for subsequent classes” (Bondi, 2013). She emphasizes how cogen allows students to share their personal needs and through this, students can consider “how to incorporate the needs of the individual as part of the needs of the collective” (Bondi, 2013). Cogen is built upon the idea that “learning is a social process” and “hing[es] on social interactions” (Bondi, 2013). Instead of individualism or competition being the core value in the learning process, true collaboration and co-creation can take place.

Cogen often begins with this question: “What did you notice in class?” This question is intentionally open-ended. It allows for students to comment on what they felt was effective that day, what they felt was not effective, what parts of the lessons were unclear or confusing, who dominated conversations, how our body language or instructions affected them, etc. They can basically share their response to any part of the class. From there, the discussion transitions into how their responses can shape how the future classes unfold. For example, during my last cogen meeting with one group of students (my Puente class is split into Familias, and each week, I do cogen with one familia), they shared that even though they found peer review helpful, they noticed that many of their peers were still focusing too much on grammar and punctuation errors, not larger scale feedback. They express how this was not helpful for their revision process. One student suggested that we do more practice peer reviews. Another student suggested we practice peer review two essays the next time: one that has lots of grammar errors, but was a high quality essay, and one that had no grammar errors and was a low quality essay. He said this would be a way to show students that even though a paper has some grammar errors, the organization, cohesion, and quality of ideas can still be really strong, while a paper that has no grammar errors might still have larger problems that need to be addressed. So, by one student sharing their own needs, another student was able to step in and provide a suggestion that would address the larger, collective need.

Many of us are likely already using the strategies of co-creation and cogen. Opportunities for collaboration among students, such as discussions or group projects, can become co-creation experiences when educators clearly define the value placed on cogen and provide a timescape for how the process will develop collectively (Wallin, 2019). Redesigning a syllabus or module might be one example of a single task completed over varying class sessions, while sustained research requires a different set of scaffolding. As with any methodology, there are some challenges and possible instances of resistance, both from students and from or among educators. Foremost from an equity perspective may be establishing inclusive and accessible approaches. This reality is most apparent in a shared-work setting, in which students and faculty contribute varying degrees of content and time to a research project, for example. Clarifying the roles that students take is key: co-researcher, consultants, co-designers, or representatives are a few possible categories for distinguishing the responsibilities and expectations of students and faculty (Bovill et al., 2015). In these instances, consistent role definitions and providing proper credit is key.

Institutional culture from macro to micro levels can pose other challenges. Lecture-based models of teaching and high-value placed on assessments as a sign of learning or student success can feel at odds with the co-creation methodology (Bovill et al., 2015). Starting with establishing trust within a single class (versus an entire division or institution) through partnerships between students themselves and together with educators can help ease the perceived challenge (Bovill et al., 2015). Staff report in Bovill’s 2019 study that co-creation can feel risky, unpredictable, and challenging in getting the pace right, whereas students feel surprised to be invited to co-create and ultimately felt valued in the process. Class size matters, with smaller convenings or settings being ideal but that should not rule out gamification and cohort models in larger contexts, which in turn can mirror larger institutional structures and offer insights into how macro change is possible (Bovill, 2019). An important reminder cited in several studies about the benefits of cogen is Taylor and Robinson’s 2009 statement that, “student voice itself is a project of ethical responsibility.” The high-level aims of an institution – to be an equitable environment in which all feel included and can access the content and services needed to succeed – can be achieved through co-creation precisely because students know how students learn best (Bovill et al., 2015).

Questions to Consider:
1) In your own educational experience, were you ever given the opportunity to co-create in the classroom? What did that look like?
2) What does it look like for an instructor to fully trust their students? What might an instructor need to unlearn in order to establish that trust?
3) What challenges do you anticipate facing when trying to co-create with students?

References

Bondi, S. (2013). Using Cogenerative Dialogue to Improve Teaching and Learning. About Campus, 2-8, doi: 10.1002/abc.21117.
Bovill, C., Cook-Sather, A., Felten, P., Millard, L., Moore-Cherry, N. (2015). “Addressing Potential Challenges in Co-Creating Learning and Teaching: Overcoming Resistance, Navigating Institutional Norms, and Ensuring Inclusivity in Student-Staff Partnerships.” Science + Business Media, 195-208.
Bovill, C. (2019). Co-Creation in Learning and Teaching: The Case for a Whole-Class Approach in Higher Education.” Higher Education, (79), 1023-1037, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00453-w.
Merriam, S. B., & Bierema, L. L. (2014). Adult learning: Linking theory and practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Rethinking How Students Meet Course Outcomes – Part 1

On March 2, 2022April 4, 2022 By Dr. EddieIn antiracist pedagogy, assessment, empowering students, equity, gradingLeave a comment

In our January community of practice, our colleagues gave us so much to think about in terms of grading for equity that here we are, still thinking about it. In fact, we take as a starting point an idea that Kathleen highlighted at the end of her post: “All too often our grading practices…‘inadvertently [pull] students (and their teachers) farther away from a focus on learning. Rather than teach students to be curious about the academic content, to care about their progress as a learner to invest in the health of the classroom community, and to co-construct productive relationships with their peers or teacher, we teach [students] to care about points” or grades, and we perpetuate inequities (Feldman 35). While we have been asked to consider different ways that students can meet course outcomes, we can’t separate that conversation from grading. Alfie Kohn emphasizes, “We need to grapple with assessment” and find “more authentic and informative” ways of evaluating students. “Why bother,” he asks, to rethink and reimagine our grading practices “if we’re still using…defective method[s] of assessing achievement?” (xviii).

Welcome, friends. The blog path ahead is full of grappling.

“Are we here to teach or are we here to judge?”: A Sociological Perspective

Someone asked that question during a recent online workshop on ungrading. When thinking about how we have historically taught classes and used assignments with traditional grading practices and this idea of teaching vs. judging, a quote comes to mind:

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.”
― Paulo Freire

We need to ask ourselves what purpose do our grades serve? Are they for assessment of actual knowledge or are we marking down students for grammar, punctuation, lateness and other factors that insinuate non-compliance (aka not following the prompt)? In other words, are the grades we give on assignments an indication of conformity to our standards or is the grade a reflection of the learning experience of the student? Also, does the prompt allow for flexibility and freedom of thought and exploration, or is there a right and wrong way to do the assignment?

When asked to look at our assignments and grading practices oftentimes we as educators are reluctant in our willingness to change our policies and practices. I’m sure many of you reading this blog may have been challenged recently to move away from giving zeros to our students. I have to admit, I grappled with this idea myself: “How can I give points for a missing assignment? There is nothing there to grade.” Hence the zero. As I reflected on my reluctance to change my own ideas, it dawned on me that my ideas and beliefs regarding the zero and the types of assignments I dish out to my students are the exact things that are perpetuating the inequalities that Feldman (2019) refers to when he states, “we teach [students] to care about points” or grades (35). A student is going to care if they get a zero; it’s punitive and it sends a message: you need to follow directions and turn your work in on time. Points and grades are a measurement of conformity, as well as a message to students. This is the structural barrier that is baked right into our cultural ideas, norms, language, attitudes, and beliefs centered on the “A student.”

Recognizing structural barriers that are in our control and understanding how our beliefs, ideas and norms are the mechanisms that perpetuate inequalities is an important step in freeing our students from the constraints of points and grades. Oftentimes we place focus on support programs as being the solution to inequities on campus, but then we fail to acknowledge that our classroom policies contribute to the inequalities felt by our students. We as educators need to challenge and interrogate our assignments and assessments and ask ourselves: how can we reimagine our assignments and go about assessing the learning experience of our students differently so that we can free and empower the students?

A place where we might begin to think about assignments and grades, is simply asking what is the function of the assignment and grade. Most would agree that the function of an assignment is to determine what the student knows about subject matter; has the student mastered the materials? Depending on the level of their understanding, we assign a grade, either by point system or letter grade. With this we can determine who is proficient, approaching proficiency, or who is below proficiency. In essence, we rank students by performance. We might ask ourselves, how does this ranking of abilities relate to tracking students by ability? Tracking was/is a process that is often experienced in middle and high schools where students are set on an academic path that ultimately impacts social economic status, career choice (or lack of choice) and their overall quality of life. If we are still ranking our students based on ability indicated by grades, then are we doing what tracking was designed to do in American educational systems: placing students on a track and thus recreating social class, forcing conformity and assimilating students into dominant culture where they will become workers. Are we creating a learning environment that allows for flexibility, creativity, and are we freeing our students in order for them to become leaders?

Ungrading, which we’ll dive into more in another post next week, is an idea and a practice that is a departure from the old ways of doing things. Those who entertain the idea and practice of ungrading are the deviants of our campus. Be careful of the crowd you run with – you don’t want to be labeled as a deviant professor! The horror!! But if we consider deviants of the past then we find that social and cultural change often begins with those who depart from the cultural norms. They share new ideas and have the capacity to imagine that there are other ways of doing things. They challenge the naysayers and the status quo and ultimately create cultural change. Our goal is to create cultural change that eliminates structural barriers that exist in our assignments and grading practices.

As you read “How to Ungrade” by Jesse Stommel, think about these questions:

What assignments have you utilized in your class that you consider a staple assignment? And why is that assignment and the way you grade it so comfortable for you?
What are some of your fears and/or anxieties when you consider the notion of ungrading and changing the way you conduct your assignments and assessments?
What are some of the take aways you would love to see your students get from assignments in your courses?

Works Cited

Feldman, Joe. Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms. Corwin, 2019.

Kohn, Alfie. Foreword. Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum, West Virginia UP, 2020, pp. xiii-xx.

Addressing Hot Moments in the Classroom through Democratic Participation Strategies

On September 2, 2021September 3, 2021 By ProfHIn antiracist pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, empowering students, equity4 Comments

THE IMPORTANCE OF DISCUSSION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Critical thinking and discussion are important parts of the higher education classroom, let alone important skills for a thriving democracy. Adult education theorist John Dewey (2011) describes the necessity for challenging discussion as a democratic imperative. Discussion is a fundamental strategy for developing a critical consciousness and promoting an educated citizenry that is capable of making effective decisions in a democratic society.

Steven Brookfield (2013) details the way discussion should reflect democratic values in the higher education classroom. He defines a democratic classroom in three specific ways: (1) It is a space where multiple voices and perspectives are always included, and participation occurs in ways that do not always privilege euro-centric ideals, such as speech. (2) Learners are directly involved in the decision-making processes, which allows them a certain level of power and control over their own learning process. (3) Unfamiliar perspectives that often challenge dominant perspectives are constantly incorporated into the discussion.

Enacting democratic principles is a rigorous learning process that is always a “partially functioning ideal,” and discussion is a vital way that this process thrives (Brookfield, 2014, p. 123).

COMMON ROADBLOCKS OF EFFECTIVE DISCUSSION

However, for many reasons, discussions can lead to more problems than to enlightenment. For instance, most people may lack skills that allow them to communicate effectively, to resolve conflict, or to view the subtle nuances of social situations in order to address those situations in ways that acknowledge the needs of others who are different from them.

Additionally, given the highly polarized political environment in the country in the last 4-5 years, students, particularly those with privileged identities, are more resistant to discussions that include diverse perspectives (Cabrera et al.). Specifically, this is referring to white students, as the scholarship documents many white students’ assumptions that America is a post-racial society, and success is a result of hard work and merit (Delano-Orarian & Parks, 2015). These assumptions can make an instructor want to avoid challenging topics altogether to avoid uncomfortable situations.

Also, there is the ongoing conundrum of reconciling notions of “freedom” and “democracy.” In other words, as Brookfield describes, living in a society with other citizens requires that we “acknowledge their presence and adjust our lives accordingly” (2014, p. 125). For many, it is a challenge to promote individual rights and “freedom” (however this is freely defined), all within a context that should seek the welfare and benefit of the larger group.

OTHER ISSUES

Finally, as instructors, Brookfield details how we often make the following assumptions…

“Discussions are Free & Open Conversations”
- We often assume that classroom conversation is “open” and “free,” a “safe space” to express one’s feelings and experiences. In contrast, the classroom is the very place where structures of power and privilege manifest. As Tatum et al. (2013) state, the classroom is merely the microcosm of the larger society, and therefore, it is riddled with social hierarchies that allow some voices to dominate, while others are silenced. This silencing is not always explicit, but expressed through subtle methods, for instance, through microaggressions. Additionally, because discussion is often directly connected to one’s participation grade in the class, it can become a highly competitive atmosphere that can focus less on genuine inquiry, and more on a battle for the students to demonstrate how smart they are, or what Brookfield refers to as “intellectual besting.”
“Discussion Is a Democratic Process in Which Diverse Voices Are Included”
- The field of Adult Education is ever changing, yet higher education still shares a foundation with ideologies rooted in imperialism, colonization, and white supremacy (Cabrera et al., 2016; Museus et al., 2015). With this in mind, it is misinformed to think that hierarchies of privilege and power contextualized within notions of identity, particularly race, do not continue to manifest in the classroom, affecting the ways, for instance, that students of color feel comfortable or encouraged to participate (or do not). For instance, studies have shown that African-American students tend to enter college with the idea that they do not belong in the academic atmosphere and feel like outsiders among other students who are more likely to assimilate (Dancy, 2014; Ford & Moore, 2013).
“All Students Are Equipped to Participate”
- Not all students are equipped to (or want to) participate in the competitive “one-upmanship” that discussions can represent. Also, not all learners possess the cultural capital to participate in ways that allow them to feel confident or compete with other dominating voices that do. Brookfield defines cultural capital as having abilities, such as a varied vocabulary, confidence and ease in public speaking situations, and an assumption that one’s commentary belongs in that context, is valued, and will be listened to. This cultural capital, or lack thereof, is emphasized as significant for determining the academic success of certain groups of students, such as black males (Brooms, 2018; Brooms et al., 2015).
“The Instructor is Part of the Respectful, Democratic Process”
- In assuming that an instructor has the best intentions to tease out important concepts and perspectives in a discussion, Brookfield reminds us that the situation is still a panoptical illusion, referring to Foucault’s (1977) point that the “judges of normality are everywhere,” or more specifically, as they are established by the instructor. As the facilitator of the discussion, we set the tone and establish norms within that speaking context, and students are often looking for verbal or non-verbal cues that their participation is in alignment with those expectations. Seeking to “please” the instructor in this way can encourage a more competitive atmosphere of who has the most cultural capital to compete, and it can also distract from genuine and critical inquiry.
- One last point with this assumption is that often as a facilitator, instructors ask questions to ignite good discussion without giving student sufficient time to think about a response. Students who are able may respond quickly so as not to appear stupid, which can prevent deeper thinking and critical reflection. As Brookfield emphasizes, “good questions needs time for a response” (2013, p. 67).

IMPLEMENTING A DEMOCRATIC FRAMEWORK AS A FOUNDATION

So, how can we facilitate discussions that accomplish the following tenets of democracy and appropriately handle classrooms that might normally generate “hot moments” or conflict? Brookfield outlines important aspects of democratic conversations along with specific criteria that might produce more fruitful conversations:

Students must have opportunities:

For structured silence to reflect and think deeply, aside from typical Eurocentric patterns of communication, such as speech.
To have power and control over their own learning process, including content and materials
To be heard – by participating in multiple ways
To hear the varied voices of others in order to develop empathy for others’ experiences that are different from their own and recognize that they live within systems of power and privilege to which they both contribute and relate.
To learn about and challenge dominant ideologies that they contribute to and/or are affected by, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, classism, racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, eurocentrism, etc.
To contribute, consider, and value the voices and experiences of others and take these voices and experiences into account during important decision-making processes.

QUESTIONS

What kind of misguided assumptions might you make about discussions in the classroom?
Considering the list of criteria above these questions, how might you incorporate 1-2 of them in your in-class discussions?

Sources

Brookfield, S. D. (2013). Powerful techniques for teaching adults. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brooms, D. R. (2018). Exploring Black male initiative programs: Potential and possibilities for supporting Black male success in college. Journal of Negro Education, 87(1), 59–72.

Brooms, D. R., Goodman, J., & Clark, J. (2015). “We need more of this”: Engaging Black men on college campuses. College Student Affairs Journal, 33(1), 106–123.

Cabrera, N. L., Franklin, J. D., & Watson, J. S. (2016). Whiteness in higher education: The invisible missing link in diversity and racial analyses. ASHE Higher Education Report, 42(6), 7–125.

Dancy, T. E. (2014). (Un)Doing hegemony in education: Disrupting school-to-prison pipelines for Black males. Equity & Excellence in Education, 47(4), 476-493.

Delano-Oriaran, O. O., & Parks, M. W. (2015). One black, one white. Multicultural Education, 22(3/4), 15-19.

Dewey, J. (2011). Democracy and education. Digireads.com Publishing.

Ford, D. Y., & Moore, J. L. (2013). Understanding and reversing underachievement, low achievement, and achievement gaps among high-ability African American males in urban school contexts. The Urban Review, 45(4), 399-415

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (A. Sheridan, Trans.) New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published in 1975).

Museus, S. D., Ledesma, M. C., & Parker, T. L. (2015). Introduction. ASHE Higher Education Report, 42(1), 1–112.

Minding the Gap

On January 22, 2021January 29, 2021 By profscottcoeIn antiracist pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, empowering students, equity, supporting students3 Comments

In preparations for the January workshop, I have been thinking about the word “gap” in educational discourse. As we have discussed many times over the past decade, particularly moving through acceleration to answer the call of AB705, the term appeared in so many phrases that reflected deficit-minded judgments about students (e.g. “achievement gap,” “skills gap,” “readiness gap”). But now, as we look squarely at equity gaps in our classes, we also have to avoid turning that deficit mindset on ourselves. We are up to this challenge. It can feel daunting, though, closing the space between what we think we did, what we envisioned or intended, and how that may not match our students’ experiences.

What’s our “why”? As educators, we are often invited to overstate or hyper-perform our altruism, which can perpetuate an impossible “superperson” or “savior” narrative that is unsustainable, nevermind deeply isolating—especially in a culture that feminizes and racializes stories of self-sacrifice or effacement. Crediting Jennifer Taylor-Mendoza for the phrase, Leigh Ann Shaw and Jeramy Wallace suggest that an “obligation gap” offers us a much more student-centered view of our responsibilities. On the one hand, they write, “[A]n obligation-centered framework requires practitioners and educators to continually reflect on their interactions with students and their pedagogies.” I also appreciate how the “obligation gap” calls us beyond our individual classrooms, to improve our networks of collaboration across all the systems we navigate, benefit from, have been hurt by, and seek to change.

Information: Enthusiasm, good intentions, and even a sense of obligation to our students alone is not enough without a focus point, a tool to start with. Reflecting on our data on a regular basis holds us accountable for racial/ethnic and gender equity. But this also has to be collective labor. After I “zoom in” on my own data to ask what I can do to eliminate any disparate impacts on Native American and African American students, I also have to “zoom out” to look at broader trends across the department, division, college, and district. That’s where our networks, or coalitions, of obligation can come in, to advance questions together and follow-up to ensure against complacency. As we support our students’ success, what resources sustain that effort? Who do we need to be listening to?

Hope: Data has been exploited as such cudgel against publicly funded education, like code for a self-fulfilling prophecy. The federal policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top used high-stakes standardized test results for almost twenty years to “measure” student achievement in elementary and secondary education—ultimately re-inscribing patterns of racism and economic injustice. While the impact of teachers on student success has been acknowledged for years now in K-12 teacher effectiveness research, reductive accountability methods in the context of federal policies were highly demoralizing and did little to create meaningful change.

We do not need to repeat those mistakes. I am grateful that the Center for Urban Education (CUE) cautions about the fundamental differences between a “culture of evidence,” which can dangerously oversimplify, and a “culture of inquiry,” which asks us to engage in a recurring practice.

CUE identifies five specific strategies for working with data, with the purpose of achieving racial equity. Consider how these strategies may be useful as you “zoom in” and “zoom out” to mind the gaps you (and we) discover and reflect upon: 1. Diagnose inequities; 2. Locate data close to the work you do on a daily basis; 3. Ask equity-minded questions about the data; 4. Translate equity gaps into numbers of students; 5. Set equity goals.

Cited: The Center for Urban Education (2019). Equity-Minded Teaching Institute Workbook. Los Angeles CA: Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, pp. 58-59.

Here are a few questions I’ll offer as we keep the dialogue going:

What do you think about the concept of the “obligation gap” as a motivator?
Other than in your own classroom, where do you think you can best participate to advance equity-minded questions, conversations, and follow-up at RCC?
How might you go about expanding your current “data reflection” allies?
What is one area over the past two years where you have concentrated on helping minoritized students in your course planning, activities, assignments, or other practices? Where do you see effects? What are your new goals, based on your latest data?

This is Part I of a post on reflective data analysis and responsive teaching tools. To read Part II, click here.

Choosing Inclusive and Empowering Texts — Part II

On November 9, 2020November 9, 2020 By Wendy L. SilvaIn antiracist pedagogy, connecting to students, culturally responsive teaching, empowering students, equity3 Comments

This is Part 2 of a post on choosing inclusive and empowering texts. See the first post here.

In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Lesbian Chicanx writer, Gloria Anzaldua, shares her personal experience with reading LGBTQ+ Chicanx writers for the first time: “In the 1960s, I read my first Chicano novel. It was City of Night by John Rechy, a gay Texan, son of a Scottish father and a Mexican mother. For days I walked around in stunned amazement that a Chicano could write and could get published. When I read I Am Joaquin, I was surprised to see a bilingual book by a Chicano in print. When I saw poetry written in Tex-Mex for the first time, a feeling of pure joy flashed through me. I felt like we really existed as a people” (82).

In our September Community of Practice Blog, our colleague Miguel Reid shared his experience: “Although I failed almost every class throughout high school, I do remember reading two books: The Color Purple and The Autobiography of Malcolm X – nothing else. Despite being a young man who didn’t care about school, I somehow found interest in those two texts that highlighted the African-American experience.”

When I first read Anzaldua’s work, I felt how Miguel felt reading the work of Alice Walker and Malcolm X. Here was an actual published book, being taught in a college class, validating not only my people’s history and struggles, but my own identity in a space outside my home, that captured mine and my family’s experiences, our traditions, our values, our language. I had never even considered the idea that I was allowed to speak both English and Spanish together anywhere outside my home and my family. But here was a well-known scholar, telling me exactly that: I was allowed to exist in the world as I was. And I have to wonder, how many of my students have had the privilege of feeling this experience of validation? Which have not? And of course, what can I do to make sure that they all do?

From all the wonderful Community of Practice workshops we’ve had in the last year, we know that culturally responsive pedagogy means fully engaging with our students by finding creative ways to integrate student interests, identities, experiences, and knowledge into the classroom. Part of this work in our discipline requires strategic and intentional (as Kathleen mentioned last spring) incorporation of texts that also reflect who our students are, their experiences, and the types of knowledge they value.

As we know, the new language for the first SLO in the ENG 1A COR emphasizes that students learn to “analyze rhetorical strategies, content, and contexts in a variety of non-fiction texts written by authors representing and reflective of students in the classroom, including those written Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and People of Color and the LGBTQ+ community,” which really requires us to not only include a wide variety of voices in our text choices, but also revise and switch texts out as needed to reflect who are students are.

In Equity Talk to Equity Walk, McNair, Benisimon and Malcolm-Piqueux give an example of how to go about (and not go about), experimenting with new texts in a classroom, when discussing obstacle #2 (Not being able or willing to recognize racialized consequences) in blocking the path toward racial equity (24).

This is a huge task, but a necessary one. Dr. Jeannine L. Williams discusses in her article “Representations of the Racialized Experiences of African Americans in Developmental Reading Textbooks,” how historically, “ ‘reading material was used to inculcate dominant ideologies as common sense’ and how ‘books written for African American students were designed to reproduce dominant ideologies as natural, commonsensical, and universal’” (Williams 41). These dominant ideologies, that so commonly contained racist (and surely also sexist, classist, and homophobic) foundations, didn’t give students of color many choices beyond acceptance or rejection of the texts that perpetuated those ideologies. And many of these students of color rejected them (Williams 41). This rejection further emphasizes the obstacles our institutions have put in place impeding their success, which is why Williams suggests that “instructors should assign readings that speak to the students’ experiences” (Williams 40). Though William’s study focuses primary of African American students and African American representation, I see her argument informing the experiences of other students of color as well.

Al Weyant-Forbes mentioned in an equity-related workshop during fall FLEX, that often times equity feels like a loss to those in power. It feels like something has to be given up, and they are right, but that doesn’t mean what is being gained is not as valuable or more so, than what is being “lost.” RCC is a Hispanic Serving Institution, for example, which means that if we are really reflecting our students in our text choices, then a good amount of texts we teach should be written for and by Latinx voices, right? How many can you name? How many contemporary Black writers can you name? African? Native American? Middle Eastern? White? Chances are, many of us can probably name more white writers than any other race. Maybe it is time we examine this, and substitute what we’ve been taught to value as traditional literary texts (predominantly white texts seeped in racism, capitalism, and white supremacy, as Williams mentions) with new texts that the majority of our students can see themselves in and gives us insights into perspectives we didn’t even realize we hadn’t considered. Williams argues that often “college faculty ignore the role of race and its systematic complexities … further disadvantage[ing] students of color. Emphasizing the importance of reading curriculum and pedagogy that reflects the racialized identities and experiences of African American students,” along with other students of color, is a great tool for getting students engaged in our classes, in their own college experiences, and in their overall success (Williams 43).

As Rob mentioned in his post, this anti-racist work goes hand in hand with anti-capitalist work because racism and capitalism are when Dr. Ibram X. Kendi calls the “conjoined twins” in his book How to be an Anti-Racist (163). Dr. Kendi argues that “the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural…it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism” (56). He then adds that “to love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism. The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body” (Kendi 163). To me, this speaks to the importance of acknowledging our students lives experiences in the texts we choose, not only because most of our students are student of color, but because they are predominantly working class, our “essential workers,” the ones who are most vulnerable to what Angela Davis calls “super-exploitation.” If we hope to contribute to the process of liberation and dismantling oppressive structures concretely, we have to give students the tools to engage with critical thinking and critical imagining, as Rob encourages. Our text choices can help them not only better understand the systems that shape their daily lives, but how to begin imagining a world where these systems are no longer in place.

I’ve begun this work by gauging students’ reactions and thoughts on the texts we read each semester (though projects, critical reflections, discussion posts, and in-class conversations.) When checking in with my students this semester, I asked them about the importance of exposing students to texts that reflected who they were, their identities, values, experiences, and knowledge. Here is what just a few of them said:

1) “I think it is important for students to see themselves in the stories because this allows them to relate to the situations that are happening in the stories. It also builds confidence in the reader because if student sees the character in the story doing something exciting, important, and adventurous, then the student will understand that they could do it too!”

2) “I think it is very important for students to read texts that reflect who we are and our identities because if we’re just being thrown random text that we have no connection to, we start to become less interested. Therefore, less attention will be given to the subject by us and we leave the class without learning a thing. However, I think it is important to read articles to read articles such as the one we do for this class because it brings a lot of relevancy to our lives that keeps informed.”

3) “I think it’s crucial for students to read texts in an English class that reflect who they are because visibility makes students feel like they’re not alone. Reading shared experiences makes students feel included and like they belong in certain spaces. It’s especially important now because academic spaces have historically been predominantly White, cisgendered, heterosexual males and the texts that higher academia tend to study are usually eurocentric. Having that representation makes the learning environment feel a lot safer and more inclusive of experiences that are not centered on the White cis, het male perspective.”

4) “I believe that it is valuable for students to read texts that reflect who they are, identities, experiences, etc. because the student can most likely relate with the text. Making it easier for them to make strong arguments in their writing. For a long time schools have had students reading books that are heavily based on white characters. Not showing any cultural representation when it comes to minorities and POC’s. By having representation students will be able to relate to what they are reading.”

5) “I truly believe that it is important for students to read texts in an English class that reflect who they are, their identities, their experiences, and their knowledge. I think this because doing so makes meaningful connections between what students learn in school and their cultures, languages, and life experiences. These connections help students develop higher academic skills and see the relevance between what they learn at school and their lives.”

As we can see, our students themselves KNOW that higher ed. has been a white-centered space for a long time. They get it. They are counting on us to disrupt this tradition.

Here are a few anecdotes pulled from critical reflections in both my English 1B class and English 1A class that further exemplify this point. Student are asked, as the final question, what they learned this unit and why they find this lesson valuable:

“I learned a lot in this unit, I learned to appreciate poetry a lot more. Before I was not a huge fan on poetry because I could not understand it. That is because I always over thought it when I had to read poetry. In high school we had a unit based on poetry and the main poet we had to focus on was Sylvia Plath. She had many good poems, but I could never understand them and frustrated me to not like reading poetry. After this unit I got to read some really good poems that I enjoyed and understood. I also learned to appreciate for who am and love my culture even more. Life is hard and many of us complain, not understanding the struggle others face and we tend to take that for granted. I plan to embrace my culture even more in the future and to not feel shame for who I am.” (referring to Eduardo Corral’s “Border Triptych” and Ada Limon’s “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”)

“I have always understood the importance of literature and its impact on the world. That being said I have never really felt that impact or actually been involved in it too much. When writing this essay I felt like I was a part of it and the impact it has on the whole world. My topics are something that is looming in today’s world and only seems to get worse or avoided. I feel like a voice even though I know not many people will get to read this and it is not as good as some top writers out there. But I see as it’s not a topic that should be read by important people alone but everyone. We can all add things to literature and make an impact which I feel I did or could do.” (referring to Natalie Diaz’s “Why I Hate Raisins” and Jericho Brown’s “Bullet Points”)

“During this unit i learned a lot, the two pieces that impacted me the most were “White Privilege and “ The New Jim Crow” because as a black person it important that someone is speaking up for us as a whole, there are a lot of bad things going on right now with racial injustice and as a black person when people speak out no matter their race or background, to help our cause we notice it and we appreciate it. I’m glad i read two pieces that i can relate to because in high school the only type of black people we would read about were Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa parks. I’m glad that [we] read current pieces that everybody can relate to in their own way.”

Are we listening? Are we really listening?

Choosing texts, as I mentioned above, is difficult, and it does require a lot of time and effort. Most of us probably began teaching using texts we were familiar with, texts we read in college, or for fun on our own time. But, if we are still teaching only the same texts we did when we started teaching, chances are we need to make some changes, and with change, comes push back. Part of our anti-racist work as equitable instructors, however, is to change and adapt to the needs of our students, and as the research above indicates, our students need us to do just that. To be anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and an ally to marginalized communities, we need to acknowledge their lived experiences. If we don’t know what those lived experiences are, we need to educate ourselves. We need to take initiative to read texts outside of our own comfort zones by voices different from our own. As Professor. Taylor said in the last blog post, we need change now, and this is just one way we can do something concrete, here and now, to further our anti-racist and equity work.

Not sure where to start? Last year, our wonderful colleagues Star Taylor, Miguel Reid, Jon Anguiano, Tucker Amidon, and James Ducat took time to compile a list of culturally responsive text ideas for our English classes. They have been gracious enough to share this list and allow all of us to continue building upon this collaborative work for the years to come.

Here is a link to the editable Google Sheets. This is a living document that we can all contribute to collaboratively and revise as needed. I have begun organizing the original text list on this document, but still have a long way to go. If you are interested in helping transfer what we have on other various other lists, into this one master list, please feel free to reach out to me. I can use all the help I can get.

In our workshop, Rob and I will spend some time sharing techniques we use to choose empowering, inclusive texts for our classes that are not only culturally responsive, but also allow for critical thinking and critical imagining. We look forward to having you all there!

Sources:

Anzaldua, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Borderlands/La Frontera, Aunt Lute Books, 2007, pp. 75-86.

Kendi, Ibrim X. How to Be an Antiracist, One World, 2019.

Williams, Jeanine L. “Representations of the Racialized Experiences of African Americans in Developmental Reading Textbooks.” Journal of College Reading and Learning, vol. 43, no. 2, 7 July 2014, pp. 39-69, DOI: 10.1080/10790195.2013.10850366, Accessed 7 Oct. 2020.

Questions:

What is one text you read in college that was of particular interest to you and why? What impact did that text have on you and why?
How often to you reflect and challenge yourself to change texts you’ve been using for a long time, to better meet student needs and interests?
How do you decide what texts you will include in your course? What criteria do you use? Where do you go to search for them?
If you have not already, how might you set up a system in class to gauge how the students feel about your text selections, to allow your students to have a voice in text selection?
Does your text selection tie to your anti-racist work? Why? How?

Choosing Inclusive and Empowering Texts — Part I

On November 3, 2020November 9, 2020 By robhyersIn antiracist pedagogy, connecting to students, culturally responsive teaching, empowering students, equity, supporting students5 Comments

In thinking about antiracist practices, as a white professor, before I work through my thoughts on choosing antiracist texts (which I hope will be helpful to you), I first need to acknowledge and credit the Black and Latinx thinkers who have informed this process for me.

First, I need to talk about the framework I use. I call the framework “critical thinking/critical imagination.” It comes from a talk I attended given by two Latinx professors, Genvieve Carpio and Juan D. DeLara. Both professors had written recent Marxist histories of the Inland Empire. I am relatively new to the Inland Empire. During the Q&A, I asked what I as a 1A professor could do to empower my students. Carpio said “Have your students question why things are the way they are,” (critical thinking) and DeLara said “Ask your students to imagine the way they want things to be.” (critical imagination).

With that being said, I also need to back up in time a little bit. I’ve been practicing antiracist andragogy for 10 years now. This antiracist practice has recently, in the last 5 or so years, also become anticapitalist. This is due, in part, to Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). One of its arguments builds on the idea of racial capitalism, and argues that capitalism needs racism to function. Capitalism needs groups of workers to be utilized for, as Angela Davis argues, “super-exploitation,” and we construct race to figure out which workers meet that criteria. And as Robin D. G. Kelley explains, “There is no such thing as non-racist capitalism.”

Over the years, when I review my antiracist/anticapitalist text selections and the units in which they exist (and by text I am referring both to written articles and multimedia) one thing I have noticed is that some units speak to something universal and unchanging about racial capitalism, while others speak to specific moments and therefore need to be changed out when that specific moment changes. This is because, as Robinson argues in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007), “racial regimes are unrelentingly hostile to their exhibition,” and

are subsequently unstable truth systems. Like Ptolemaic astronomy, they may “collapse” under the weight of their own artifices, practices, and apparatuses; they may fragment, desiccated by new realities, which discard some fragments wholly while appropriating others into newer regimes. Indeed, the possibilities are the stuff of history.

And I realized, as I moved from my Spring to Summer classes this year, that we were moving into a new historical moment after the public execution of George Floyd. As Angela Davis argues: “This particular historical conjuncture holds possibilities for change that we’ve never before experienced in this country.” This change includes demands not only for the police who murder to be brought to justice, but for things like police defunding and prison abolition, for a re-imagining of social relations which would empower workers, especially Black and Latinx workers.

But if we look at the current bourgeois sanctioned political landscape there is very little for our Black and Latinx students to feel invested in. They are forced to watch, powerless, as one political party is determined to march us into a fascism crafted onto an existing structure of white supremacy, and the only other viable political party is unable to ultimately stop that march because they have been forged inside a tradition which refuses to understand the racialization of the liberalism they desperately want to save, caused by a cognitive dissonance regarding race identified by Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract (1997), which produces “the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.” So, as instructors, how do we begin to change that? How do we select texts which will create a site of struggle for our students which will leave them empowered rather than defeated?

To begin this journey for myself at this particular historical moment, I returned to one of the many texts I’ve been reading over the past few years to familiarize myself with California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007) which charts the whys and hows involved in California becoming the largest carceral state in the largest carceral nation on the planet. And while this text is too advanced to use in class, it is a place to start in thinking about my criteria for new 1A selections because its arguments are related to this particular historical moment.

One argument stood out to me: Gilmore’s argument regarding how labor functions within the spaces of the prison industrial complex. She argues that the super-exploited under racial capitalism have suffered “organized abandonment” as their jobs have been displaced or replaced by forces like globalized capitalism and technological change. This abandonment stems from the government at all levels who, in this current iteration of neoliberal capitalism, see their role, as Reagan so famously put it, as getting “out of the way of business” so that money can be made. (We can see this in the two major political parties today: Republicans see it as the state’s sole purpose while Democrats see it as the primary purpose). Of course, because surplus value can only be derived from labor, this then is at the cost of the worker.

And as more workers’ livelihoods evaporated in the name of increasing profits for less owners, there are two groups of workers who emerge and fuel the rise of prisons: those excess workers who have been convicted of “crime” engaged in to survive and are now being housed in prison, and those workers who, desperate for any job that will provide them with something close to a middle class existence, are in charge of transporting, housing, monitoring, and disciplining those caged excess workers. I then thought of my relationship to this second group of workers, as the first stop in college, or in the human capital development they need to ultimately find employment within one of the many and overlapping areas of the prison industrial complex, which include policing and healthcare. I had found my starting point.

Once identified, the first step for me is to problematize the issue. I try as much as I can to put as many of the things “on the ground” for students using texts which contain narrative elements and, whenever possible, are local. I came across “Somebody’s Gotta Help Me,” a ProPublica investigation into the 2017 death of a Latinx man from Indio while in Riverside Police Department’s custody and in the care of the Riverside University Health System. All of the boxes are checked here: it presents the problem, it is local, and it uses narrative elements.

Once the issue has been problematized, I move onto critical thinking. One place I like to go for this is NPR, especially its “Hidden Brain” podcast. And in looking through them, I found one, “In the Air We Breathe” which deals with implicit bias within the framework of policing. One thing I like about “Hidden Brain” is that it shows students how to work through critical thinking; it shows them that exploring different angles on an issue, and even questioning your own thesis, is not only okay, but should be encouraged. But while it is good for critical thinking, it is not good for critical imagination. And now we are at the point where our Black and Latinx students may feel ultimately defeated within a framework that offers no viable solutions for them other than “reform,” which can at its best only aspire to a performative version of actual change.

To move on to critical imagination, I turned to the thinkers who are engaged with these issues and returned to Gilmore who, because of this new historical moment in which our conceptions of race are being reworked, has been doing interviews on prison abolition, something she and others like Angela Davis have been arguing for since at least the 1990s. One podcast in particular “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition” stood out to me for three reasons. First, you have two African American scholars, Chenjerai Kumanyika and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in conversation. This is very important. Not only should our Black and Latinx students consume texts by and about people like them, they should see people like them in the academy, especially if we as instructors are serious about diversifying our own ranks. Second, they talk about issues already talked about in the last two texts, so connections can be made by the students. Third, Gilmore not only critically imagines a new future but also discusses different areas we can work on right now to move towards that future.

To finish out the unit, I am using the concluding chapter “Abolitionist Alternatives” of Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003). I like to use concluding chapters of works in my 1A, especially towards the end of the semester, because it shows students that a conclusion can be complex and that it can span more than one paragraph. Davis’ work here, like Gilmore’s interview, frees itself from the confines of what is to imagine what could be and offers some concrete first steps to get there. Both this work and Gilmore’s interview model critical imagination for our students; and while some may reject it, others will be empowered by the model to build their own solutions from the first steps outlined by Gilmore and Davis, free of the confines of racial capitalism, which we are taught to regard as inescapable.

When the two were collaborating on the original Rainbow Coalition in Chicago, Hy Thurman of the Young Patriots, a white street gang, was given the following advice on organizing by Bobby Lee of the Black Panthers, a radical organization which had evolved into multiple chapters across the country and was administering different types of mutual aid programs for its communities, including free breakfast for children to maximize their education: “If you don’t know where to start organizing, you walk to your front door and you look in front of you, you look behind you, you look to the left, you look to the right, and then you pick a direction.” This is, ultimately, the kind of empowerment I want my students to have when they leave my classroom at the end of the semester. And one of the first steps towards that empowerment is my selection of antiracist/anticapitalist texts.

Below are a few questions to get you thinking about your own practice:

Questions

Have you been resistant to making changes like this in your classroom, and if so, why do you think that might be?
What sites of struggle do you want to set up in the classroom for your students?
What areas of critical imagination do you want your students to engage with and why?
Looking at your current text selections, are there any that could be used for critical imagination?

This is Part I of a post on choosing inclusive and empowering texts. To read Part II, click here.

Composing Possibilities

Category: empowering students