Sabbatical Project: Love & Learning

“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.

Forget Me Not: For Alice who Lived and is Remembered

    "The gentleness of that moon-fish face told me at once: the old woman had just got out of prison.

     'She's a thief,' I said to myself. As I walked away from her, a kind of intense reverie, living deep within me and not at the edge of my mind, led me to think that it was perhaps my mother whom I had just met."––Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

I never met Alice. She chose not to attend San Benito County Jail’s weekly writing classes, so until she was dead, I hadn’t known she existed.

After her death, however, I learned of the great love students in my class held for Alice. One Wednesday, their sudden lethargy and irritability marked the room. Usually, writers arrive buoyant and ready to experiment. That day it was their sadness they brought with them. I wouldn’t have known of their loss had I not asked what lay behind their grim faces. Even so, it wasn’t something they expected me to understand. It was something between friends. A loss others might dismiss, so why risk talking about it. She’d been released. Soon afterward they learned she died. A friend was gone in a manner that touched on the fears they had about their own lives.

Alice was an elderly homeless woman, sometimes given to outbursts. Before her release, she had argued with not only jail guards but her cellies too. Cellmates, however, understood that anger wasn’t all there was to Alice. They loved her for her humor, her optimism, and her friendliness.

This is the Alice celebrated and written about in Forget Me Not, the latest collection of poetry and prose from the writers of San Benito County Jail. We hope you enjoy this work. Let it open your eyes and your heart to the stories of others like Alice, people in struggle, yes, but also people that bring meaning, connection, and light to those who look closest.

Please click here to learn more about Alice and the people who loved her: Forget Me Not.

Hope and Fear

"We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize."

––Thich Nhat Hanh

Each day, two white boards in a peer-tutoring space at the rural community college where I teach, record students' hopes and fears. 

Recently, one anonymous hopeful someone longed “to make a million” while on the other board somebody else wrote, “I need to see a doctor, but I’m not sure I can afford it.”

In reading these boards, you learn a lot, especially about students’ fears. Nowadays some, indeed, are afraid. “Will ICE be knocking on my door today,” wrote an anonymous someone a few weeks ago. Those words sat beside another’s fear that they hadn’t left enough time to finish an essay. “I’m so hungry,” wrote somebody else.

Seeing fears written in a public but mostly in an anonymous way somehow makes them more visceral, something I wanted to capture in this post. But I also wanted to document the ways in which the space and the people in it have made hope more tangible too.

One day not long ago, just outside my office door, a young man and woman reflected on a book they were reading for one of their English classes. These Chicano and Mexican American students named all the ways they related to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, expressing surprise and delight that a book written by an Haitian American academic told part of their own story as well. A second young man joined the discussion and together the three talked about masculinity’s challenges and traps and the need to open to the feminine and the feminine within the divine, which was something they felt connected them to their indigenous ancestors.

Only a few feet away, the newly organized Literary Society club meeting was underway. From across the room, I could hear laughter and sensed the joy it contained as the group made plans for a new student journal. This club had been inactive for about ten years, so it was quite a feat that suddenly more than a dozen people were willing to come together and spearhead a project with so much potential meaning on our campus. 

Only a few minutes later, a young man––an international student, perhaps the only one with this formal designation on our campus––came to my door expressing interest in the glitter jars that decorate tables about the room. They are like homemade snow globes and are there whenever anxiety or a need for delight overtakes someone––lift, shake, watch the glitter settle, and feel a bit more settled yourself.

Like many schools, our college has developed this international program to collect big student fees. We imagine our campus populated by foreigners, foreigners with pockets deep enough to save us from whatever looming financial crisis may be on the horizon. But it’s hard to imagine why any one rich enough to fly to the US would choose this tiny underfunded campus when close by are larger cities with the kind of well-funded colleges one sees on television programs America exports overseas.

Nevertheless, this young man chose us, and he is far from home in every way. The jars help him, he said, whenever he feels distressed. 

It was a pleasure to receive his gratitude as the jars mean a great deal to me too. I encouraged him to watch the short film Just Breathe (available on youtube) to learn more about the jars' origins and purpose without telling him I tear up every time I screen it for myself.

He smiled and made a suggestion. You should have bowls of fruits too, he said, and nuts, on the tables to feed hungry students and the smell of the fruit the textures and so on, it would excite the senses and help people with their writing.

Yes, I thought, what that would be a beautiful thing to do.

Early that morning I’d gone for a run, a practice returned to my life after a two-decades absence, and now, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, I can’t get enough of it. I could run for hours, it feels, all around the town. Lately, there is the scent of the sea even up in the old neighborhoods, and at this time of year blooming cherries. Peregrine falcons fly high overhead, and old women walk by with dogs who sniff my ankles. I rub the dogs’ heads and say good morning to the ladies knowing one day, if I live, I will be old because we only ever go one direction.

The memories of these runs sometimes come with me to school, and I feel the blood pumping through my body as I look out at the students working away on their essays or talking with friends, and there is purpose in their focus. They are at it. They are here. I think, yes, there are things to fear in the world right now and so many reasons to hope.

Part Two Revision Strategies: Writing without Readers

Part Two Revision Strategies: Writing without Readers

“And what is the main thing, we speak of beauty and good itself, and so in the case of all the things that we then set down as many, we turn about and set down in accord with a single form of each, believing that there is but one, and we call it ‘the being’ of each./That’s true./And we say that the many beautiful things and the rest are visible but not intelligible, while the forms are intelligible but not visible …. Then let’s not be surprised if the carpenter’s bed, too, turns out to be a somewhat dark affair in comparison to the true one.”

––Plato Republic

For many writers enrolled in beginning composition courses, texts are only a site for right and wrong. In their minds, “naturally” talented authors write in perfect drafts. Plus, there is seemingly no such thing as a reader separate from the writer, a reader who has her own needs and desires that might be in opposition to the writer’s expressive strategies.

For example, my students sometimes experience their texts as being made of concrete. Revision, if it exists at all is meant only for removing errors. Everything else about the text is immutable and fixed as a prison wall.

I need them (and myself) to experience our drafts as being made of clay, ready to be wetted, reworked, and shaped into new and infinite forms. Texts can become sites for discovery, experimentation, and play. Something that can only happen if we learn to smash, manipulate, expand, and refine them with curiosity and joy.

For years, I thought and spoke about revision as being made up of four possible actions and two possible entry points. This helped me rework my own writing and made the revision process real for my students, something I covered in an earlier post (“Infinite Revision”).

In setting forth the four actions (adding, subtracting, moving, or replacing) I hoped to create simple ways of entering an abstract endeavor. Through revision as play, I hoped we could offer our readers freshness, surprise, and a less rigid more authentic voice that arose from delight not rigidity.

Until recently, the goal of revision for me was the reader’s on-going interest, but as I explored in last week’s post perhaps the reader’s presence dims rather than illuminates the writer’s ultimate purpose.

It wasn’t until I heard the celebrated author Ottessa Moshfegh name another possibility for revision, one that ignored readers and focused only on uncovering stories in their most illusive and ideal form that I realized my own approach to revision might benefit from further refinement.

Sometime after Moshfegh’s visit to my class, I was awarded a fellowship to the CatamaranLiterary Conference in Pebble Beach. There I worked with Scott Hutchins author of the novel A Working Theory of Love. It was like being taught by Buddha. In his presence, the most anxiety provoking writing tasks––the beginning or ending of a piece, its revision or its goal––became achievable and charged with hope.

Like Moshfegh, when approaching revision discussions, Hutchins never explicitly spoke about readers’ needs. Thus my anxiety about a text’s ultimate purpose may have been eased. He did guide us, however, to closely explore the work of other writers in order to identify how and why we found them affecting.

Everything about Hutchins’ approach to writing and writers was gentle and encouraging. He offered frameworks that made revision seem like a fundamental, even enjoyable task. What he shared was immensely helpful, and in that spirit, I share it with you.

Hutchins draws from Stephen Koch’s excellent book the Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction. In it, Koch proposes that there are roughly three primary phases to the writing process.

Phase one is the initial draft, where a writer gathers clay and begins to sense the particular elements in what is being created. Phase two, by far the longest, is where a writer expands, improves, and builds on what the phase one brought forth. Phase three is a time of intense polishing. The writer “cleans” up and ideally reduces the text by about ten percent.

Hutchins also shared what he named as the key ideas he’s taken from Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style. Those ideas are: state things positively; avoid modifiers; use strong nouns and verbs; and pay attention to periodic structure, placing the most important words of each sentence just before its final punctuation.

In his workshop, we therefore spent time scanning our own texts and reworking them with these guidelines in mind. For example, “Don’t revise only thinking of your laziest reader” might become “Find entry points to revision other than reader reaction.”

Likewise, getting rid of modifiers means your sentences will become lively and direct, not “so,” “very,” or “too” lively and direct.

In general, the strongest nouns and verbs are those that are the most specific and sensory. So, whenever possible, use proper names and the most active form of any verb.

Finally, think about the impact and placement of each word in a sentence. Consider placing strong words at the end of your sentences where they will have the most impact. I wasn’t at all sorry to experience how such focused actions, generated such dynamic texts. Or as I should say, I gained confidence witnessing dynamic texts emerge from focused action.

Since then, what I’ve learned about revision is that like everything else about writing, one will never grow bored considering what it can do and how one might approach it. Revision is writing and to write is to revise; it is best to enter all of it with respect for its magnificent possibilities and compassion for the writer engaging in it.