“I am aware
that I tend to romanticize education. It is my chosen object; the longest and
most beneficial relationship to which I have ever committed. I hate when
teachers corrupt education because I simply love school. I love its ideals and
values. I believe in its promises. Even though I have endured much emotional
and physical trauma throughout my schooling, usually perpetuated by teachers
who did not understand how or why I value education, I still hold education to
be true and good. ”
––Tapo Chimbganda, The Classroom as
Privileged Space: Psychoanalytic Paradigms for Social Justice in Pedagogy
It is ever
more evident to me, as it is to many others, the energy of love itself is
supportive of, maybe even critical to learning.
My own best
teachers introduced me to the following idea; a loving environment is
recognizable by the presence of three distinct elements:
- Safety (physical, emotional, and spiritual)
- Validation and acceptance (no one is trying to “fix”
anyone else)
- Inter-relationship and connectedness (to people, shared
activities, and texts)
Since being
introduced to this working definition of love, I’ve found it useful in
surveying my own classrooms for love's presence. My assumption being, that when
love is in the room tensions ease and learning deepens.
Love is a
kind of nutrient, feeding students and teachers alike. It allows for greater
intellectual and creative risks, and it provides a sense of purpose and hope
when the other less pleasing and inevitable aspects of learning arise––challenge,
discomfort, and threat. After all, in order to integrate new ideas, we often
have to let go what we already believe to be true. That’s seldom pleasant,
especially if it brushes up against what we call the self.
Chimbganda,
a Canadian psychotherapist and educator, who is quoted above, has a lot
to say about these dynamics. She doesn’t shy away from the idea that aggression
is naturally present in educational environments, but she also highlights the
harmful ways aggression plays out in classrooms where historical, social, and
political inequities are also part of the picture.
For
example, at the rural community college where I teach most instructors and
administrators are white, as am I, but most of our students are people of
color. Nevertheless, we seldom explicitly reflect on how that might be
affecting our campus or our classrooms. Part of this sabbatical project will be to better understand these dynamics and to look for ways to mitigate their harms.
Considering
love’s three elements is one way for me to start a conversation.
ARE WE SAFE
HERE?
At one
time, it felt simple to believe my students and I were physically safe during a
class, but the proliferation of guns and a more fearful and divided nation have
lessened my sense that our campus is safe. Still, in order to teach, I must
proceed from the assumption that in any given moment, at least, my students and
I can grant each other physical safety.
To attain
emotional safety, we must first become a community. This takes time to
establish. Naming our purpose, forming and then agreeing to communication
norms, experiencing classroom rituals, such as regular periods of freewriting,
mindfulness, and movement between activities calm brain and body.
This promotes
a positive learning environment, especially as ideas and relationships get more
complicated, as they are bound to do the more time we spend with each other and
commit to our work.
The
presence of emotional safety, however, doesn’t mean everyone is guaranteed constant emotional comfort. Learning is difficult. People are complicated. Teachers
sometimes suffer for it. So do students. It helps when people are allowed to
ask for what they need while being held accountable to a group’s larger
purpose, a purpose the group itself collaborates in naming before the
inevitable difficulties arise.
It also helps
to remember we have choice. No one can make another person learn something.
It’s never worked that way, even when we organize our schools and classrooms as
if forced learning is possible, even preferable to a more collaborative
approach.
Especially
at the community college level, safety can sometimes be established simply by
reminding ourselves, we chose to enter this classroom together, and it is
possible to leave at any time.
Because of
some specialized training I’ve had in trauma informed practices, I now invite
rather than demand students engage in particular activities. “Are you willing?”
I often ask them. Sometimes extending the question to include, “Are you willing
to fail?” It’s meant as invitation, not threat. I find the more failure becomes
possible, so do the joys that arise from creation.
Asking, “Are
you willing?” reminds everyone, I can’t make students do anything they don’t
want to. I can only work with them to set the conditions where desire and
willingness bloom despite the specific barriers we each bring to the room.
DO WE SEE
OUR STUDENTS?
In my
profession, there is a long tradition of teachers claiming commitment to an
asset model. In theory, this means we actively embrace and recognize students’ specific
intellectual and expressive gifts.
But
teaching is hard and often emotionally so. Chimbganda speaks of teaching as an
“impossible” profession, one that largely happens through the complicated realm
of human emotions, which are sometimes only marginally connected to class content.
Teachers and students alike are swimming in feeling as they make through
various assignments and some of those feelings are attached to social, economic, and political marginalization.
At my
school, for example, we teachers still easily fall into speaking about multi-lingual
students as problems for us. Most of us are untrained in helping fix the particular
sorts of errors they make in their writing. We feel like failures, and we focus
on flaws (theirs and ours) rather than on the fact they these students are generally
far more language fluid than us teachers and that such fluidity is a tangible benefit in and out of the classroom.
As with all
things, it’s easier to identify the finite way in which something isn’t working
than the infinite ways it may be working well. Such distinctions become
especially stark at institutions like mine where there is ethnic and racial
segregation between the people serving and the people being served.
Old ideas
about who writes well and who lacks what are perpetuated within this structure,
therefore, the expressive and linguistic bounty in our classrooms goes unnamed and the students unseen.
But if I don’t see my students, I can’t understand them, and if I can’t
understand them, I won’t ever recognize them for all that they are and all that they
hold. This lessens the chance our classroom community (much less the
institution as a whole) will ever become inclusive and strong.
If this sabbatical project has taught me anything, it’s that I
don’t see my students half as well as I thought I did.
Books like
Chimbganda’s alongside Christopher Emdin’s For White Folks who Teach in
the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too, Gilda Ochoa’s Academic
Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap, Claude
Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi and other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us,
and Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People
to Talk about Racism, sre helping me confront the limitations of my own perspective
and understand why it’s necessary to acknowledge my limitations when working
with students of color. That acknowledgement alone can validate a student’s experience.
WHERE DO WE
CONNECT?
My
background closely mirrors that which the academy most values. My speaking and
writing arise from its preferred linguistic and cultural practices. But these
represent only one strand among many possible discourses. My students usually have
a broader perspective and are engaged in many more possibilities each day. They
speak languages I don’t, understand the world in ways I can’t name, and have
experiences outside of what I can imagine.
If we can learn to name and
welcome their viewpoints, realities, and earned wisdom the academy will benefit. They can help an old structure become more expansive, fluid, and useful
to society in a time of great upheaval and change.
Perhaps,
there will be no mastery here for me as a teacher; the sabbatical project is
large and keeps growing and I feel more unsettled the deeper I go. I don’t yet
know what any of it will mean for how I teach once I return to the classroom
come spring. But I do see these questions are enlivening my sense of what may
be.
I write
this post in hopes that love will remain at the foundation of what I do and that
the classrooms I enter will generate more of it.
