Musing on Engaged Learning

So I just got back from the Pacific Northwest Two-Year College English Conference. It’s a pretty small meeting of community college English faculty. The theme this year was “Pedagogy and Politics: Citizenship in the Classroom and the Community College.” I’m paging through ten pages of journal scribblings and consolidating what I learned. There seem to have been two threads for me:

1. School is not really structured to support deep learning; that sort of learning happens in communities of engaged people who rely on one another to develop.
2. Students and faculty often have quite different perspectives on the ethical and historical issues that define a general education; they need to arrive at a common vocabulary if they are to become a real learning community.

Perhaps the most interesting phrase was “the unstated curriculum.” Paul Bodmer used this phrase to name the social life that most community college students never experience. Faculty and most folk who run colleges spent time “on campus”; that is, they lived with a group of people who were also in the business of learning. The ideas and skills that circulated in class followed us around quite naturally in lunch conversations or arguments at a local tavern. In the best case, “on-campus” learners practiced not for class but in a community. Bodmer observed that the majority of community college students come in for a class and then leave; they don’t really experience the “unstated curriculum.” One result is that they get fewer opportunities to practice and get feedback from other learners. They come to see knowledge as something owned by authorities and not constructed by learners. He wondered about (without in the way of a solution) how to offer the current generation of college students a chance to experience the “unstated curriculum.”

I wonder about this as well. We know (Bodmer pointed to reports issued by the DoE and the AAC&U) that not all (and likely not enough) students are not leaving college with fluency in “critical thinking” or “problem solving.” We know that this is so in part because they have too few opportunities to practice these skills and get feedback on their development. Of course, the current crop of students practice thinking and think quite fluently. But the exemplars are The Daily Show and Fox News (Bodmer’s examples). In these cases, the thinking is produced by someone else and neatly packaged. Humor or ideological correctness displace rigor and argument.

In the final session I attended, we talked about how to imagine a research writing class as a student club that was responsible for publishing work on important local topics. What I still wonder is whether my students would find this a) too boring (it ain’t the Daily Show) or b) the crackpot idea of some social do-gooder (the folk at Fox News might say this).

On Exploring College Further

I was scribbling on the bus yesterday morning (my route doesn’t have a wireless router yet, so I didn’t publish from there). I am reading a couple pieces about education with a bunch of writers (at least, I believe I am reading “with”; are you all reading?). As I reread the material, two of the three pieces seem “unusual” for a college course. One piece, a chapter from the ubiquitous Rules for Writers (Hacker rules!), sounds and feels like pretty typical college reading. But we are matching that handbook chapter with a chapter form Frances Moore Lappé’s Democracy’s Edge and the introduction to the second edition of Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers. Lappé and Elbow create an odd context for Hacker. They talk frankly about learning and about how school has interfered (Elbow’s book first appeared in 1973) and does interfere (Lappé is responding in 2006 to No Child Left Behind and testing and such) with learning. I have offered these texts as a launching pad for a ten-week exploration of higher education and its status in the U.S. democracy. In reflection, it’s a potentially confusing and, I think, powerful context.

Why? Lappé, while her focus is on public secondary education, offers a thesis about the purpose of education that catches us all in a sort of bind. She says what we believe but not what we expect:

[Education is about] developing the capacity to be responsible for oneself, to
know oneself well enough to discover one’s own passions and how to feed them
through a life-time of learning and satisfying work, to be able to collaborate
in creating communities that work for all, and to have the courage to stand up
for what’s right even when it’s unpopular (254)

She does not dodge the need for new knowledge or skilled performance, but she declares that education has to be about the development of learners. The bind here is that learners and teachers live in fear of grades and degrees and graduate school. We more often than not wonder “when will I use this” or “how does this pay” and lose our focus on how learners need to grow. Lappé challenge me (and I hope us) and I wonder if we will be willing to take up the challenge she borrows from John Dewey: see education as the practice of living well and not preparing to live well in the future; that is, learn and act in the world in which you live (267).

This thesis has huge implications for how we (these writers and I) need to look at our research and discussions and writing. We are, if we respond to Lappé’s challenge, doing work for our communities and society. We are acting as citizens.

Elbow deepens this challenge in a variety of ways. What strikes me most is his “believing game”:

a disciplined and methodological use of believing, listening, affirming,
entering in, attending to one’s experience, and trying to share one’s experience
with others (xxi)

For me, Elbow’s “nonargument” names the sort of “argument” that democratic citizens do, the sort of work that we should see ourselves engaging with and for our communities (local and global). Citizens notice problems and opportunities around them, and they shoot off their mouthes but also listen and wonder and consider and try out ideas and ventures and solutions on their friends and fellow citizens. Citizens reflect on and see if their community is (because of these ideas and ventures and solutions) being conserved or saved or improved or transformed or whatever.

Democratic citizens. College writers. The link here excites me. Can we (these writers and I) move beyond “doubting” (“criticizing, debating, arguing, and trying to extricate oneself from any personal involvement with ideas through using logic”) to “believing” and then put the two games in play together? That might be fun. In my mind, we would arrive at a place where “arguing” becomes productive for us as individuals and communities.