The New York Sophist

What happens when your values cease to become incompatible with your university and start to become incommensurate?

I wonder if this is just my university, or all universities. But I feel more and more that the classroom – whatever that might be – is the last part of the university that resembles anything we assume the university to be about.

Throughout the university all resources and modes of power are turned toward self-preservation, increasing enrollment, and making those promises as real as possible through a career-oriented discourse that is delivered as unproblematic, natural, and good.

There is no time to consider the value or worth of any institution, whether it be a government, a college, or a company. If such considerations happen, they happen late at night when the sleepless student ponders the sacrifices they and their family made to place them in that dorm room. They review the many times they were belittled or insulted by faculty that week. And they wonder.

The daily attitude is one of cynicism. Student and faculty alike smirk and talk about cheating the system. What trick will they deploy today? What will be the cool and clever twist of the writing, of the presentation, of the discussion? What will the students not have read; what will the faculty buy as an excuse?

The classroom is the last place for a front to develop against what we commonly call neoliberalism, but I’m starting to see as a political extremist front of cynicism.

Cynicism isn’t a politics here, it’s mental health and survival. At every turn, we are told and sometimes we even teach that people are unpersuadable beings whose minds cannot be changed. It’s not even worth approaching them or trying to figure out how they think. Systems too cannot be changed, they are real. This is reality. You must prepare for the real world.

In the classroom we can question all this for sure. But even more so, we can perform an alternative to the workaday capitalist order by forwarding a different relationship between people there.

Removal of any and all late work penalties, point-based-grading, tardiness, and monitoring the discipline of bodies would be a good start.

Asking students how they would like to spend the time, and what they would like to investigate would be good.

Working through issues slowly and carefully for community satisfaction would be better than a quiz.

Faculty seem to be more invested in grades than students are. They seem to think points are a real, rare currency. They defend them through ridiculous performances of power and authoritarianism they call “respect.” Nothing needs to be said about the connection between respectability politics and authoritarianism. This has been detailed well in the politics that most faculty claim to be opposed to.

The classroom is the last place, boarded up from the neoliberal zombies or vampires. Whatever they are, they are coming, and the threat won’t be recognized till it’s too late. But as in most of these films, people bring their ideological truths about others into the safe space. They turn on those they think as doing less. We don’t practice how to care for one another, how to trust, and how to believe. We train students and one another how to resent, doubt, and scour for hermeneutic infidelity.

Is there an equivalent to an active-shooter drill we can perform in our classes to protect our students from the violence of the university’s discourse? The active-shooter training, like the discourse of careerism, pushes attention away from the violence in the daily experience of the university student, the violence shown toward those who ask for help, who question, and who seek assistance with understanding. Students are shown by faculty that they are resented and considered a waste of time. Faculty are happy being a boss, but the metaphor is a choice. There are no bosses at the university.

Perform in your class the world you’d like to see outside of it, where caring for others is how we arrange our political and economic system. We don’t twist and contort bodies to fit “reality” at the university, we prepare for its replacement by young, eager souls. Instead of teaching contortion, let’s teach hot yoga. Move yourself to improve yourself and by doing so, you improve others.

Fraught with a mix of disappointment, sadness, and anger I head to the university. Resistance still seems possible on a daily level, no matter how many stories of failure populate my days. But as long as teaching is teaching, we’ll have a place to mount alternative ways of thinking.

Last week I had the fantastic opportunity of sitting down with Tyler Poteet from Power of Public Speaking to record an episode for their podcast.

In this interview I talk about my classroom practices and my approach to public speaking. I think it’s probably one of the clearest articulations I have of the importance of public speaking and how limited our approach is as speech communication/rhetoric professors.

I think that the most important take away from doing this is that we have incredibly limited venues for the discussion and consideration of what the public speaking course is. Compare that to English composition, where they have book series at good university presses about their teaching. We are just embarrassed about teaching it, and often take that out on our students through our class and grading policies.

What will it take for us to embrace the importance of public speaking as a serious course?

Most dangerous teaching practices come from the assumption that the teacher is the source of knowledge in the class.

This seems like a no-brainer. Obviously, the teacher is there because the teacher knows the subject. But many processes and norms about teaching create some tension with this assumption.

First, most classroom teachers at the secondary level have a number of completed course hours in educational psychology and curriculum. They have the equivalent of two minors, or almost another undergraduate degree in courses on education itself. People who have great field expertise or knowledge in a subject are not called upon to be the regular instructor in courses.

There is a difference at the collegiate level between the professor and the practicioner, between the scholar and the artist. I tend to believe these divisions are better blurred, but the norms of the university suggest a difference that most people accept between studying literature and creating it. Although I think that literary criticism, or any criticism, is creating an art, just not the art it’s talking about.

The professor is in the class not to create, but to show students around what was created, what is being created, and so on. So the assumption that they are the source of knowledge is immediately in trouble if you think about the college course this way.

What about curation? This is my favorite metaphor for teaching college. I see myself as curating an exhibit of works that “go together to prove a point” which is what I think that curation is, as well as planning a concert program, or one-acts, or other artistic endeavors.

Not thinking through these metaphors – or considering the act of teaching as a metaphor – leads to danger, as one starts to think of oneself as both the source of information and the only source of information that the students will have on the subject.

This leads to a thin, rushed performance of the teacher at best. Obsessed with attention and control of time, the teacher believes that any missed attention is missed learning. They worry that not everything will be covered; they get upset when the students are not “where they need to be.”

The danger of the idea that you are “the teacher doing teaching” is that your commitment is to some construct of the material, not to the people right in front of you in the classroom. The commitment of the teacher must be to the students, the ones that you actually have, not the ones you wish you had, or the ones that these extant students would be if they had done better previously – or whatever narrative falls into place here.

To be a good teacher, realize that teaching is impossible when conceived of outside of metaphor. Teaching is always “as something else” because each class is an invitation to study more. Knowledge is fluid and relational; it is not a thing or a commodity to be traded between minds. It is something that is alive, it comes into being through relationships and continues to live when nurtured by memory and imagination as the student moves through life after your class. Teaching is always being an usher, a curator, or some other relationship to knowledge, anything but the source. There is always more to read and study and think about – the class is always an introduction and an invitation to learn more and to pursue new (or better) questions.

Teaching isn’t an art, it’s as an art. It’s as curation, it’s as ushering, it’s as a guide. It’s always “as something.” It is never transmission of knowledge as objects. When we think of it that way, the precious knowledge of our field comes first and students are left behind or worse – they do not feel they are a part of our field, they do not feel welcome and they do not pursue questions in the future. We lose out on the innovations they could provide to the field on questions of their own, or other’s, design.

I’m not sure how many of these there are going to be, but the more I think about it there are probably a lot of assumptions we make as teachers that are dangerous not only to the class you have right now, but to peoples’ conception of teaching and learning in the meta.

Every class and every teacher generates evidence and proof for what education “really is” for people. Every bad experience a student has encourages them to discount higher education or education in general and spin a narrative circled around things like “the only good teacher is experience” or “when you get a job, that’s when your real education begins.”

This dangerous assumption, as you have probably already guessed, is that you are preparing students for a life of work. That the things you teach them – or even the policies you have in your class – are essential to them being able to get and hold down a job.

This is usually easy for teachers to accept because teachers love exercising their authority. Most of the teachers I know enjoy being disciplinarians – making students do this or that, enforcing due dates and format of papers, shaking their head when students fail to read the details in a 15 page assignment description and make a mistake. They do not enjoy this because they are sadists, but because they really and truly believe they are serving the greater good of society and helping these students be able to function in the world.

Never does it cross the mind of the professor, upset that the syllabus wasn’t read, that the student might not automatically believe the class is important. What a shock that your class might not be the most important part of the students’ day or week?

This has to be communicated, and the idea that you are there to prepare them for a life of sitting in a cubicle, moving around files between different email servers, writing memos, and holding meetings isn’t going to cut it.

The assumption we should make is that student employment is not our business. That is between the university and the student, or even better, the student and the future employer. What we are here to do is introduce new, different, or discarded ways of thinking, feeling, and questioning to the student. Later, this expanded capacity for inquiry will lead them to a successful life, one that might not be centered around going to work at 8AM every weekday.

The university should argue that there is a strong correlation between a good job and attendance. But this is the only argument that is made these days. There is no attempt to convey that capacity to change one’s mind, to investigate ideas, and to expose oneself to difficult or unusual texts (either written or in other media) is valuable is totally absent. Instead, we demand medical excuses and funeral programs because we want the students to show respect and responsibility.

These two terms – respect and responsibility – are nearly absent from the professoriate. To assume you have a deep responsibility to your students never crosses the mind of the college teacher. Students are irresponsible, therefore I can mail it in. Ethics would question this: Why isn’t it that you now have to double down on your responsibility? Why don’t you have the charge to get the students interested in what you are having them do? Sadly though, most assignments are there just to generate points so a grade can be calculated. A mechanical operation doesn’t need to involve interaction between living people who care.

Respect is another one. This term needs deep exploration, away from the idea that one functions as a boss and an employee. When professors talk about respect, they use a corporate language. Why is this the assumed relationship? A teacher is not a boss – they have a relationship like a doctor or lawyer does with clients. This is uninvestigated, as we assume the teacher is the boss, they demand work, it’s done, and the students are “paid” with points. Disgusting.

It would be ok perhaps to prepare students for the working world if the working world were a valuable life, or if the metaphor did not expand to consume in totality all the possible relationships that teachers and students can have. “The syllabus is a contract” is a horrible phrase that thoughtless professors proclaim every semester, unaware that they are participating in the colonization of all relationships as if they were business ventures.

Abandoning this assumption leave the question open in an uncomfortable way: What are we preparing students for? This moves us immediately into the petitio principii: Should we prepare students? Is that what we are doing?

Other possible metaphors could be: co-creating, sharing, building, working, discussing, and inquiring together. Whether these are preparation or not, I am not sure. I’m not even sure if I’m interested.

What actions help students become better at inquiry? This is the question that frames the encounter of the class, classroom optional.

Teaching online has me thinking about the assumptions we make about the classroom and what happens there.

I still have a classroom, but it is distributed. The classroom and the class is a state of mind that can be constituted through various means. My students invoke themselves as part of the class when they are working on assignments, reading, or participating in group chat. But there’s not a physical space for them to enter and become the class.

One of the biggest assumptions we make when teaching is that the people entering the classroom are empty, or lack knowledge. They are missing something and they have come into this room in order to get it. They get it from us. We are responsible for giving them something they don’t have and they need.

That last line might be the only good assumption that we can make as teachers. The rest of it is a function of the class sitting there together, facing you, there for the sole purpose of being in the class. These assumptions about the location of the students and the physical space are extremely dangerous.

The first of these dangerous assumptions is that the students arrive empty-handed. We believe them to arrive to the classroom because they lack something or because they don’t have something. What this means is that we are supposed to supply it. This ignores the lived experiences, attitudes, and thoughts that the students arrive with.

This is throwing away a resource that can be used to educate. Assuming that the students know nothing is a favorite trope and source of complaining by teachers, which is a strange irony given that teaching is supposed to increase knowledge, according to these same people.

It’s dangerous because it indicates to the students that teaching is a pedantic sham, a power grab, a demonstration of authority, the practice of one-way flows of power. Assuming the students have nothing to contribute to your classroom or your lesson that day is to assume they have had no experiences with your subject that sparked a question, thought, or a general curiosity.

Everything we teach you can encounter, and probably have encountered, in daily life. I’m referring to all courses offered at the university. To assume that this is first contact is to engage in the rhetorical performance of the pedant.

This discounts the educational experience for students. They read the scene as an expensive hazing ritual that they have to engage in, or a puzzle they have to solve to make the arbitrary gamemaster happy in order to get their degree. Many students have been indirectly taught through this assumption that teachers are disconnected from reality, that school and the classroom are irrelevant, and that they just have to get through it in order to get a degree. We’ve taught them this by making the mistake of assuming they don’t know.

What about assuming you don’t know, and approaching the class this way?

What about asking the students to say what they believe to be the principles at play in the issue?

What about placing the readings on-par with student narratives (i.e. they all have the same level of credibility)?

These will be hard to get going as the students will immediately smell a trap and become reticent. They have been burned too many times by mistaking a question meant to prove the teacher’s superiority and student inferiority as authentic curiosity. One has to build that trust up again and avoid cynicism, sarcasm, and the like, and avoid the teacher tropes of talking about “stupid people” in the world or conveying a political opinion as “the most obvious thing.” You are inadvertently beating up on their friends, family, previous mentors, and loved ones. They assume they will be next.

The students are participants in the class not recipients of the teacher’s discourse. They are investors and co-creators in the space. To assume they are there because they are missing something is to have the worst read possible on the classroom (besides that small fragment of professors out there who think they are ‘too important’ to be teaching). Nobody enters a classroom to get something; they enter because they have to in order to live the life they imagine they want. WIth that in mind, they are probably thinking about a great many things. See if you can get them to share. As the teacher, your role is to make connections, develop, and push things around. Relationships and associations are not the delivery of essential content, but are the essential content. The idea that if students don’t get something there’s no teaching is the logical endpoint of this failed assumption.

This all will come together at the end of these posts in my favorite metaphor for teaching, that of encounter. The classroom as the clearing in the woods, the first contact of rich traditions of different societies, the dinner party of strangers, there are many other ones you can come up with. Rhetoricians are lucky; we have tools and practice for “audiencing” (Crosswhite) groups of people and bringing forth the intersections of lived experience and identity they share in order to give them the opportunity to be persuaded, to think again, or to feel differently about a subject. It’s too bad that rhetoricians are the least likely to do this in their classes. Just look at our embarrassing public speaking books. If the assumption is going to have to be that students come in with materials and experience that can help make the class, this one is easiest – they’ve spent days and days of their lives pleading with others to agree with them, and will continue to do so. As will we. As will I, here.