Full Contact Scholarship

When I read what one theorist, Dr. Merrifield, wrote about another theorist's, Dr. Soja, book, my jaw dropped in ecstatic joy: "Maybe the real problem here is Soja's prose.  It is far too remote and wordy, and often screams out for clear-spoken directness.  His verbosity militates against him really getting down deep, really immersing himself in the convulsions of daily life and in the cracks and marginal twilight zone of urban life. This is where his Thirdspace [theory] resides and it is plainly where he wants to be, but he cannot quite stoop that low." Whoa.  At times, Merrifield's tone is borderline offensive, I'll grant.  Nevertheless, there is something to learn from him about what it means to discourse with others.  

I would rather hear someone genuinely and thoughtfully disagree with my ideas and representation of those ideas than have my work met with bobbling heads.  As educators, we must balance intellectual encouragement with rigorous thought.  I think the two conflate with some frequency. 

I've done this: So thrilled that a student volunteered his ideas to the class discussion, I have nodded and trailed his thoughts with hmms and rights.  The quality of the ideas were firmly secondary to his willingness to share.  An informal poll of colleagues have revealed similar trends.  How openly we welcome classroom participation.   

But participation is not enough.  With high school students, I think there is much to be said for encouraging quiet and timid students to speak aloud in class.  However, if the teacher's only response is support or permissiveness, then he abandons edification for coddling.  Not all ideas students express are thoughtful.  Teachers have a tricky line to walk.  Though it's important that students take risks in classroom discourse, the sharing itself is only a first step.  If an idea is weak, rash, or problematic, the teacher has an obligation to question it, that is, to model for the class how thinkers explore others' ideas.  

I think teachers often find this modeling difficult.  I've both led, as a teacher, and been led, as a student, in many classes where the classroom discussion becomes wishy washy as others share their ideas with the whole class, deaf to the words of others and infatuated with themselves.  It's as if we have this unspoken binary: Either a teacher lectures or he lets students share, carte blanche.  Either we have a pontificating professor before us or mouthy students bemusing their own ears.  Why might this be? 

It seems to me that many of us (and I place myself in this category as well) are too concerned with the emotional well-being of others, to the point of soft scholarship.  Granted, teachers and classmates have to uphold common courtesy--it's rude to insult others, of course.  But, disagreement in classroom discussion is not discourtesy. 

I'd like to take the lead from the sporting world.  It is, after all, football season.  One would hardly expect two linebackers to spare each other's feelings before a tackle.  Tackling is what they do.  While I don't mean to distill academia into football, it's worth pointing out that at least part of our task as thinkers is to interrogate the ideas of others.  Understand in order to critique.  What we need is full contact scholarship.  I don't mean that students and teachers engage rudely or obnoxiously.  Far from it.  But I am calling for the celebration of disagreement in the classroom, for interrogating what others say, to poke and prod ideas until their merits and limits are clear.  It's not personal; it's academic.

Report Cards and Soda Pop

School isn't really about school. It's a place to learn things so that when you are not in school you can live a thoughtful and compassionate life. In short, school is about non-school. This is important to consider because we forget it fairly often. It's especially forgotten when Departments of Education publish report cards, not to mention when students drink soda pop.

There have been two articles in the last week that at first seem disparate, but which both speak to the same concern I have for education. The first describes the City of New York's system for assessing and ranking its schools throughout the five boroughs. The second reveals that removing soda machines from schools does little to curb students' consumption of it. At the heart of both is an inherent forgetfulness that schooling is nothing if students don't take it out into the world with them. School, remember, isn't about school.

The City's report card system for assessing the effectiveness of its schools uses a multi-layered, extensive process that includes test scores on math and literacy, assessors of quality (consultants from England...Cambridge, I think) who spend a few days interviewing members of staff and students, touring classrooms, and greatly following a regimen prescribed by the principal. Parents are also surveyed. In the words of the grading system's creator, it is "the only school-accountability system in the country where the results could not be predicted by poverty or race, since all results are adjusted based on demographic peer performance. He also said that, analyzing the data, school size and class size do not appear to be important factors affecting progress on test scores." That all sounds wonderful. However, there are many flaws to it. I'll leave it to the numerous critics of the system to spell out most of these flaws. I'd like to add one I've not heard.

The underlying problem of the school-accountability system is that it focuses on the schools. Granted, there is a need to ensure certain functionality--school culture, safety, teacher experience. But, what happens when students leave school? Do they read at home or on the train in the morning? Do they speak about politics or literature with friends online at night? The measure of education shouldn't be just what happens in school--it's much more about what students take with them when the academic doors shut behind them. They are only in school (at a very generous estimate) for seven hours a day, five days a week, ten months out of the year. What of their schooling follows them for the other seventeen hours per day, two days a week, and two months? Well, they are drinking soda, apparently.

The soda machine article supports this idea that school is about non-school. It would be reasonable to think that if soda machines are taken out of schools--where students spend chunks of their lives--there would be a decline in the drink's use. But this isn't the case. It's not the case because, though we shudder to think it, students are only students when they are in school. Otherwise, they are live, breathing, decision-making human beings.

Schools must do a better job, and teachers especially, at making students find the meaning of school outside of school. Some researchers have already begun trying to do this. Elizabeth Birr Moje, as one example of many, has studied how students conflate the various spaces they encounter each day: school and non-school especially. Another researcher, Lalitha Vasudevan, studies young people's use of multi-modal literacies, which seem to both serve and subvert institutions like school and home. These researchers need help, however, from the classroom.

I would add that teachers must take up the charge to confront the internecine role-playing that goes on within school walls: the role of teacher and the role of student. We must move beyond the facade of report cards and become much more serious about our work as educators. We, as pedagogues, have a lot to learn from soda pop.

Scholars Inside Invisible Boxes, Writing on Mirrors

In a foreword to Narratives of Social Justice Teaching, Ruth Vinz describes a sixth grade classroom in which—at the room’s center—is a boy in a cardboard box.  The boy, we later learn, is autistic, and when coaxed out of his box by the student-teacher he darts about the room, stands in defensive position with a pair of scissors aimed at her.  He runs for the window when Ruth, observing the classroom as a university liaison, pulls him down and holds him on her lap for the rest of the period.  The boy draws pictures of animals and plants. The box, you see, was used in the classroom because the boy’s mother suggested it.  When the boy’s mother, and the principal, and the teacher, and the student teacher, and Ruth sit at a table to discuss the child, it becomes clear that each person involved has their own standpoint—some unimaginable to the others—which has led to the normalizing of a child in box.

As I’ve been given this foreword to read as part of a graduate course on writing research, I begin to wonder about the questions Ruth raises.  It’s not just about classroom management or how students with special needs are responded to in schools.  It’s also about how scholars and researchers represents observations on paper. My mind leaves the foreword for a moment and certain words flash in my mind: paper, box, reader, writer, words, margins, representation, space.  I can do little to stop these words.  I pause and type out the sentence you just read and continue reading.

Ruth keeps silent as the others reach a consensus: that the student-teacher must leave the child in the box or leave the placement.  She leaves.  When Ruth continues that “thinking about the box through systems of interaction [might] make visible institutional positions and interaction that often marginalize negotiations and create less than productive spaces,” I quickly add to her list of binaries—school/university, student teacher/cooperating teacher—my own: writer/reader.  What are the spaces of reading and writing scholarship.  Ruth’s writing conveys her awareness of the reader: she crafts a narrative, a story through which she weaves observations and raises questions.  But the tides of academic writing seem far more content with templates and safe forms of “scholarly” writing in which the word “I” can be used only when trailed by speedy apologies.  What sorts of spaces are constructed for the reader when the writer is so busy genuflecting at the altar of Academe?  It’s the faithful who prays to idols while their neighbors suffer. 

I think about others who write about space and literacy, who seem of a similar camp as those Ruth describes in her piece.  They think that space is a social construct not an empty void to be filled with gibberish and knickknacks.  But even those who write about space and social justice and margins and centers often do so in a form that itself fits neatly into the academic box.  These writers imagine the readers to be just like them.  Whereas the student in the box suffers schoolish injustice, a scholar who writes in a generic box suffers from either complacency or sophistry.   The student’s box is explicit, heartbreakingly physical; the scholar’s box is implied and wrapped in authority of academia.  The student, when coaxed out of his box, arms himself with scissors; the scholar, when one draws his attention to his own box, cuts up opponents with words and indifference.  Both boxes are meant to keep others out, to provide safety from the dangers of reality.  I might suggest that the scholar possesses, in his invisible box, an accessory that our student lacks: a mirror.

I imagine the scholar writing in black marker on the cool glassy surface of a giant mirror.  With each word he sees his own hand and eyes and ears.  Each word reflects him unto himself.  The frame around the scholar’s mirror is of age-old woods from the earliest academic institutions: oak, perhaps, from Oxford; maple from Harvard.  The mirror hangs in a lecture hall that is filled with students eager to learn and inquire.  The scholar stands on a ladder and scribbles away.  He writes with words like is and of course and clearly and punctuates his ideas with periods rather than ellipses or dashes or question marks… He doesn’t typically narrate a story; he performs a tried and true verbal exercise for those who read and write just like him.

What incentive do young scholars have to break with the generic norm?  Their careers are built on being published; journals have a type of writing they accept; scholars, then, write in order to be published.  More than the editors of journals or the scholars themselves, it is the universities that seem most irresponsible here--dismissing narratives as little more than silly fiction, supporting projects that quantify boys in boxes, privileging status over students.  As Ruth suggests that boys in boxes must be met with cries of social injustice and political uprising, so too must we address scholars who write on mirrors.  Perhaps we might at least direct their markers away from looking glasses and toward windows, out of which they might wonder why boys in boxes aim scissors at their gullets.