Over the next weeks, I am going to blog about what I am reading in a seminar on “inquiry in educational leadership and policy analysis.” As part of this seminar, I am regularly writing 250 word reactions. Entries below will testify to my need for a few more words than that.
Here’s a set of readings.
Harter, S. (2006). What is your burning question? The challenge of framing a problem. In C. F. Conrad and R. C. Serlin (Eds.), The SAGE handbook on research in education: Engaging ideas and enriching inquiry (pp. 331-348). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Ortega v Gasset, J. (1969). On Studying. Some Lessons in Metaphysics. W.W. Norton
Grogan, M. (2004). Keeping a Critical, Postmodern Eye on Educational Leadership in the United States: In Appreciation of Bill Foster. Educational Administration Quarterly 40(2) 222-239.
At the center here for me is a question about the authority to pose questions. Do we ask the “burning questions” that launch meaningful inquiry or do they ask us? How do we implicate ourselves in the practices of education and at the same time distance ourselves from those so that we can ask authentic questions?
Ortega (1932/1969) and Grogan (2004) outline the dilemma but from quite different traditions of thinking about authority. Ortega, in good Modernist form, argued that only an individual’s immediate need avoids falseness in the process of study. Like his contemporaries, Ortega is trying to find space in Modern experience for the intuitive and spontaneous without abandoning the light of Marx and Freud and Darwin. Intuition is bound up, for Ortega, in doing rather than in some abstract (being). Grogan, adopting a “postmodern view” (p. 223), draws on Foucault to argue that needs are always already (to use a 1980s, pomo adverb) largely defined by the discourses those humans use to articulate their needs. She invites “writers and researchers” (p., 234) to take on local, ethical problems by looking at discourses and building counter narratives. She avoids specifics, tries not to get bogged down in how one resists a dominant discourse or how thoroughly integrated the discourse of educational leadership is (and so how difficult to resist).
Nonplused by the postmodern, Harter’s (2006) looks at what she has made. Her needs have arisen in reading philosophers (who turn out to be “worthy of revival at the level of empirical investigation,” p. 336—cannot resist including that phrase), attending to reality, historical theory, clinical practice, acknowledging uncertainty; finally developing a narrative that makes sense of the problem. Looking back at a career in science, she concludes that this often “top-down” “enterprise” (p. 346) is increasingly an activity that finds topics through “curiosity and exploration” (p. 347). She knows of what she speaks.
As I decide how to be a “scientist” (in addition to and never instead of a “humanist”), I wish I could find Harter’s steady pursuit of “truth” (in quotes here for Foucault) more compelling. She began studying self-esteem about the same time that Foucault began lecturing at the College de France. Foucault was questioning, among other things, the ability of scientists to be scientific. Late in his career, notably in a 1977 interview touching on “Truth and Power,” Foucault (1980) argues that intellectuals (his phrase for scientist in this setting) are in service (he notes an important distinction between those intellectuals who actively serve a hegemonic system and those “organic” intellectuals who arise from and remain connected to the proletariat). An intellectual’s contributions are further constrained by the position of her life and work (i.e., her field and political and economic relations) and also her position in relationship to “the politics of truth” (i.e., the ways her work deal with systems or “ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements,” p. 133). Sitting in the position of the professor (a topic Foucault and his contemporary Derrida wrote about extensively), she is after the “genuine” and “rewarding” (p. 331) with a remarkable disinterest in thinking about how those categories are produced. I came to the role of intellectual myself during the culture wars and the excesses of deconstruction; I cannot muster the faith she holds.
Grogan (2004) provides, at least initially, a more compelling path: she notes that the enterprise is collaborative (as does Harter) and that we have to find or problems in narratives about narrowness of understanding that obfuscates oppression. Almost in spite of herself, she too resolves the problem of agency, the difficulty of asking. Her “writers and researchers” partner with those who will do the work, will “encourage ‘oppositional imaginations’” (p. 234), but they do so by leading and writing and intervening. Foucault never worked out very completely how a human being might actually do the work of resistance; he was quite sure that writing and advising no longer (in 1977) could detach truth from current forms of hegemony. Grogan is unbothered by this uncertainty and, like Harter and Ortega, believes in the individual’s ability to resist.
So where to come down? I often return to the poems of T.S. Eliot or the philosophy of Hannah Arendt to make sense of the human condition, so I will throw in with Ortega. Posing a burning question is facing down a contradiction in the problem space that Grogan defines but then doing the work of metaphysics, seeking with and for others a “basic orientation” in a lifeworld that is finally disorienting. The questions of science (and poetry) grow out of doing and (being) in the world. These questions are ever contingent but that contingency is open to history, to the dimensions of time a space. The activity that comes to the surface for me here is waiting. Isaiah and Jeremiah mediated on the human need to wait. J. Alfred Prufrock and also the narrator in the Four Quartets try to engage in the act of waiting without falling into despair or losing faith in the possibility of ceasing to wait.
How do we provide spaces for waiting for the folk who do higher education and higher education policy? What is and might and, perhaps, ought to be their focus as they wait?
Monday, September 21, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Landings
I am (not) home.
For the past month or so, I have been pedaling my bike through the Rock and Wisconsin River watersheds once again. I know where I am, seem to know the people I walk by on the street, for their basic facial features are much like those of my own family. The black ash and Norway maple that line the streets here in Madison, Wisconsin formed the landscape of much of my youth. While I grew up on the other side the northern sub-continental divide in the Lake Superior Basin among sugar maples and the occasional remaining white pine, time in Eau Claire and Madison, and Milwaukee and Cleveland and Washington State, for that matter, set me on my path. While I came into myself along the waters that flow out the Montreal River into the big lake, it has been the Wisconsin and Cuyahoga, even more the Nooksack, Nisqually, but especially the Cedar-Sammamish and the Milwaukee that have brought me to where I am. A child of streams I could drink from, I am a person of polluted urban waters.
My path has circled back to the city where I first lived away from home, a place between the Northwoods and the city. Madison is, of course, not the place I remember. A two-decade consumer binge is everywhere visible here. The campus is more akin to what Mark Edmundson (1997) called “a retirement spread for the young” than to a land-grant college. Indeed, it is much easier to find a local restaurant on the UW homepage than to find the University mission statement. Still, the mission is compelling:
The primary purpose of the University of Wisconsin–Madison is to provide a learning environment in which faculty, staff and students can discover, examine critically, preserve and transmit the knowledge, wisdom and values that will help ensure the survival of this and future generations and improve the quality of life for all. The university seeks to help students to develop an understanding and appreciation for the complex cultural and physical worlds in which they live and to realize their highest potential of intellectual, physical and human development.
It also seeks to attract and serve students from diverse social, economic and ethnic backgrounds and to be sensitive and responsive to those groups which have been underserved by higher education.
The phrases that make a college work are here: “examine critically,” “knowledge, wisdom and values,” “quality of life for all,” “appreciation for . . . complex cultural and physical worlds,” “ intellectual, physical and human development,” “serve,” “underserved.” But it is a mission that has abandoned the land-grant context for one that is closer to an unabashedly self-interested culture. The Extension can take care of the state’s needs. The UW is a global brand and as such cannot be constrained by a mission that binds it to a lifeplace in any concrete ways. Like its sister institutions, the UW has given up on embodying the Morrill Act. That mission simply does not pay.
The mission of this place was revised in the late 1980s when I was last here. Oddly, the dissonance I feel in that mission is part of what has drawn me here. An educator, I have uncoupled myself from the role of teacher and come to study the context of U.S. classrooms. I am caught in Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) paradox of neighborhood: I can “recognize the extent and uniqueness” of the place of interest—the classroom—only by moving to adjacent places that let me look back at it, but by making this shift, I am less involved in the place of interest, less a neighbor. I need the distance for a time if I am to see more deeply what it means to compose college.
Fortunately, I have landed in a corner of the campus that will bind me to learners. My initial foothold in the UW is a project assistantship in the WIDA Consortium, a WCER project. WIDA aims at this mission:
To promote educational equity and academic achievement for linguistically and culturally diverse students through the development and dissemination of curricular, instructional, and assessment products and resources.
While this statement is as distant from the places of learning as the UW mission statement, there is a difference in its implementation. WIDA is a consortium; its members are bound by statute to pursue the needs of three-quarter of a million English language learners and their teachers. The products and resources that WIDA produces have to work in the classroom, have to facilitate access for English language learners or those products and resources are abandoned, in part because they will not sell. Working at WIDA, I will study how language learners gain access to school and the cultural, social, and economic capital that are accessed through school. Moving through the ELPA, I will imagine how college students gain access.
Place matters. I have a new one.
For the past month or so, I have been pedaling my bike through the Rock and Wisconsin River watersheds once again. I know where I am, seem to know the people I walk by on the street, for their basic facial features are much like those of my own family. The black ash and Norway maple that line the streets here in Madison, Wisconsin formed the landscape of much of my youth. While I grew up on the other side the northern sub-continental divide in the Lake Superior Basin among sugar maples and the occasional remaining white pine, time in Eau Claire and Madison, and Milwaukee and Cleveland and Washington State, for that matter, set me on my path. While I came into myself along the waters that flow out the Montreal River into the big lake, it has been the Wisconsin and Cuyahoga, even more the Nooksack, Nisqually, but especially the Cedar-Sammamish and the Milwaukee that have brought me to where I am. A child of streams I could drink from, I am a person of polluted urban waters.
My path has circled back to the city where I first lived away from home, a place between the Northwoods and the city. Madison is, of course, not the place I remember. A two-decade consumer binge is everywhere visible here. The campus is more akin to what Mark Edmundson (1997) called “a retirement spread for the young” than to a land-grant college. Indeed, it is much easier to find a local restaurant on the UW homepage than to find the University mission statement. Still, the mission is compelling:
The primary purpose of the University of Wisconsin–Madison is to provide a learning environment in which faculty, staff and students can discover, examine critically, preserve and transmit the knowledge, wisdom and values that will help ensure the survival of this and future generations and improve the quality of life for all. The university seeks to help students to develop an understanding and appreciation for the complex cultural and physical worlds in which they live and to realize their highest potential of intellectual, physical and human development.
It also seeks to attract and serve students from diverse social, economic and ethnic backgrounds and to be sensitive and responsive to those groups which have been underserved by higher education.
The phrases that make a college work are here: “examine critically,” “knowledge, wisdom and values,” “quality of life for all,” “appreciation for . . . complex cultural and physical worlds,” “ intellectual, physical and human development,” “serve,” “underserved.” But it is a mission that has abandoned the land-grant context for one that is closer to an unabashedly self-interested culture. The Extension can take care of the state’s needs. The UW is a global brand and as such cannot be constrained by a mission that binds it to a lifeplace in any concrete ways. Like its sister institutions, the UW has given up on embodying the Morrill Act. That mission simply does not pay.
The mission of this place was revised in the late 1980s when I was last here. Oddly, the dissonance I feel in that mission is part of what has drawn me here. An educator, I have uncoupled myself from the role of teacher and come to study the context of U.S. classrooms. I am caught in Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) paradox of neighborhood: I can “recognize the extent and uniqueness” of the place of interest—the classroom—only by moving to adjacent places that let me look back at it, but by making this shift, I am less involved in the place of interest, less a neighbor. I need the distance for a time if I am to see more deeply what it means to compose college.
Fortunately, I have landed in a corner of the campus that will bind me to learners. My initial foothold in the UW is a project assistantship in the WIDA Consortium, a WCER project. WIDA aims at this mission:
To promote educational equity and academic achievement for linguistically and culturally diverse students through the development and dissemination of curricular, instructional, and assessment products and resources.
While this statement is as distant from the places of learning as the UW mission statement, there is a difference in its implementation. WIDA is a consortium; its members are bound by statute to pursue the needs of three-quarter of a million English language learners and their teachers. The products and resources that WIDA produces have to work in the classroom, have to facilitate access for English language learners or those products and resources are abandoned, in part because they will not sell. Working at WIDA, I will study how language learners gain access to school and the cultural, social, and economic capital that are accessed through school. Moving through the ELPA, I will imagine how college students gain access.
Place matters. I have a new one.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Redirections
On 12 June 2009, I formally resigned from a tenure-track position at Cascadia Community College, my college. A member of the fourth cohort of faculty at this new college, I find leaving it much like leaving home. In my six years at the College I rethought teaching college English and labored over reinventing the structures of the kind of college education that Mark Taylor (New York Times) or Thomas Toch (Atlantic) and various other voices have been calling for of late. As I began to clean out my office, I wondered about my decision to leave that place and the community that has put down roots there. I am, after all, college teacher by vocation and intuition as well as by training. If I could not ply my trade and grow at Cascadia, I likely am unable to pursue my profession anywhere.
Yet, leave I have. In the fall, I will start at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, a new place where I will develop differently. My guess is that the ELPA community has a very different interest in college teaching than my Cascadia community. The students and faculty there study educational leadership and policy; they are not engaged in guiding novices into higher education and making space for them. While, like my Cascadia community, they must generate feedback about performances for learners, they likely perceive learners and learning quite differently. Performance at Cascadia means documenting interactions in a half-dozen new and distinct discourses in search of growth in one’s ability to think, learn, communicate, and interact (Cascadia’s college-wide learning outcomes). Performance in the research-1 world seems to be more focused on contributions by already fluent members to specialist discourse communities. Cascadia aims at the cultivation of reflective practitioners; the UW, at credentials.
At one level, this change in professional trajectory makes little sense. Many teachers, especially those interested in general education, move away from R-1 settings where the focus is status and research rather than collective learning. At another level, though, the professional trajectory of a teacher has to wend through settings where the development of new knowledge is central. The demands of community college teacher’s life, at least on my interpretation of those demands, left me disconnected from the new knowledge being generated in my field and largely unable to affect the evolution of ideas or practices or institutions within that field. After teaching for 20 years, I am finally dissatisfied with the way a classroom teacher has been constructed, and I aim to push back a bit at that structure.
This change has been invigorating but also deeply sad. Sitting in my inbox this morning was a note from a former student who had encountered a Tobias Wolff short story on iTunes and flashed back to an experimental entry-level literature course that he and I shared. Corey was a student who had learned to learn and, in that class, learned to turn away from grades and toward art. He thought I might appreciate the piece and sent along a link. I will, for the next few years, not meet students like Corey in the context of a class I have designed and facilitate. I hope, in a few years, to understand more completely how that class worked for Corey and whether it is possible to ground a functional college curriculum not in grades and status but instead in craft and performance. Unsurprisingly, it is a student who, at just the right moment, helps me see what I am about.
This new gig cannot work without ongoing collaboration with learners who see themselves as learners. Cascadia provided those collaborations. Here is to discovering new provocateurs (not really collaborators, as I think about it) at the University of Wisconsin.
Yet, leave I have. In the fall, I will start at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, a new place where I will develop differently. My guess is that the ELPA community has a very different interest in college teaching than my Cascadia community. The students and faculty there study educational leadership and policy; they are not engaged in guiding novices into higher education and making space for them. While, like my Cascadia community, they must generate feedback about performances for learners, they likely perceive learners and learning quite differently. Performance at Cascadia means documenting interactions in a half-dozen new and distinct discourses in search of growth in one’s ability to think, learn, communicate, and interact (Cascadia’s college-wide learning outcomes). Performance in the research-1 world seems to be more focused on contributions by already fluent members to specialist discourse communities. Cascadia aims at the cultivation of reflective practitioners; the UW, at credentials.
At one level, this change in professional trajectory makes little sense. Many teachers, especially those interested in general education, move away from R-1 settings where the focus is status and research rather than collective learning. At another level, though, the professional trajectory of a teacher has to wend through settings where the development of new knowledge is central. The demands of community college teacher’s life, at least on my interpretation of those demands, left me disconnected from the new knowledge being generated in my field and largely unable to affect the evolution of ideas or practices or institutions within that field. After teaching for 20 years, I am finally dissatisfied with the way a classroom teacher has been constructed, and I aim to push back a bit at that structure.
This change has been invigorating but also deeply sad. Sitting in my inbox this morning was a note from a former student who had encountered a Tobias Wolff short story on iTunes and flashed back to an experimental entry-level literature course that he and I shared. Corey was a student who had learned to learn and, in that class, learned to turn away from grades and toward art. He thought I might appreciate the piece and sent along a link. I will, for the next few years, not meet students like Corey in the context of a class I have designed and facilitate. I hope, in a few years, to understand more completely how that class worked for Corey and whether it is possible to ground a functional college curriculum not in grades and status but instead in craft and performance. Unsurprisingly, it is a student who, at just the right moment, helps me see what I am about.
This new gig cannot work without ongoing collaboration with learners who see themselves as learners. Cascadia provided those collaborations. Here is to discovering new provocateurs (not really collaborators, as I think about it) at the University of Wisconsin.
Monday, July 13, 2009
On Great Books
I am mulling over Earl Shorris’s fall 2008 Common Review article on “great books” (I'm hoping it shows up as a back issue soon). As I contemplate surrendering (for a time) a position as a humanities teacher and taking up the role of education researcher, this seems like a theme worth thinking about.
Shorris, and the Great Books Foundation for that matter, has me in a sort of bind. I am the product of a great books education. Well, more precisely of a books education, for few of my faculty would have identified explicitly with the University of Chicago or the Great Books initiative. I spent seven years studying literature before I ever thought of how to build a career as a college English teacher. I kept taking classes in my masters program even after I had met the basic requirements because the books and the chance to read was what I needed to do in my mid twenties. In those classes, I forged lasting relationships with other humans and also a sense for how I fit in the world and what the traditions I inherited from my parents meant. I took up a habit of learning that has stuck. While that education has rarely directly produced much social or economic capital, I would not trade it. I love those books.
But still I wince when Shorris reels off the phrase “great books” without any need to justify the adjective. Indeed, he uses the phrase almost to declare that the adjective is inseparable from the noun (he is even able to talk about “the greater great books”). It is not the notion of “great” value in these books that makes me pause. My work in college classrooms over the past twenty years and my reading of establishment media makes me believe that we need what Shorris declares readers get from great books:
They see a thousand disputes and expect a thousand more. They learn that the comfort of surcease is slavery. That is what they find in great books, the common dream of humanity, the unending dream of humanity, the unending argument, freedom.
Amen. This basic criteria describes the texts that kept me in school. The most important of them, though, were not great by the measures Shorris implies (books with authority, classics). Sir Thomas Wyatt’s epistolary satires, the sonnets of Barnabe Googe, the work of Sherwood Anderson and John Steinbeck and Lucille Clifton. Wyatt is labeled a “silver” or “drab” poet; it is Shakepeare who is golden. The craft in these texts and the contexts in which I encountered them caught me up, addicted me to the “unending argument.” It is not clear to me that naming that craft “great” is either valid or useful. The contexts in which I encountered these texts surely were not universally great. I studied at times with indifferent teachers and nearly always with too many distractions. I read Steinbeck for the first time in a rush to be ready for an exam. The books had their effect, but they were not books on Shorris’s implied list, and the setting was rarely that of the Clemente program.
In 1993, in my first full-time college English gig, I taught a class called “Great Books.” As I read parts of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces with students at a regional campus of Kent State University, I found myself caught between a certainty that this reading mattered and a deep skepticism about how my college and discipline named what mattered. I found then and find now the need to declare books “great” curious. I am happy to argue for the qualities of different texts; I know that I prefer the Inferno to the Republic, and I know why. I wrote a dissertation that reflected at length on the history of the reception of texts, of how texts become great and lose that status. I have spent hundreds of hours drawing relatively students into texts with no interest in declaring those books or those students “great.” Indeed, my students have taught me again to relish Hamlet, in part because they do not know whether it is great.
Shorris’s need to have great books strikes me now as both self-evidently important and at the same time revelatory of a culture losing its way. Not knowing the cultural artifacts that make up one’s cultural entitlement is, at some very basic level, to be intellectually poor and, worse, to lose track of what it means to be human (though Shorris is surely right in arguing that knowing these artifacts does not necessarily make one intellectually right and humane). Of course, a meaningful education needs to include a careful reading of tradition, of great books. But declaring the artifacts of a tradition great can also invite a kind of quietism. Shorris concludes, rightly I think, that the great books make space for continual dispute. The stories he shares of poor people in Darfur and Cuernavaca and and Chicago and Madison sitting to read great books are compelling, and Shorris labors not to idealize the effects of reading Plato. But the telling of these stories dodges action and responsibility. I can read them and feel that the world still works and then flip on HGTV or go and fill my car with fuel or buy tomatoes from Mexico in Seattle in January. I finish the article more certain that the humanities matter and also that Shorris’s humanities and the institutions he mentions (among them Bard College, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s College but also Berea College and the Korean National University) are complicit in “the comfort of surcease.”
Let me offer an apology. Shorris imagines inviting people into the great books conversation might (again, he avoids utopian claims) result in more disputation and freedom. Surely this can happen, in some places. By holding onto his adjective, he seems to avoid locating the invitation and linking the reading of books with being in a time and place and owning the implications of actions. Reading the great books, according to Shorris, helps the reader understand that there is no answer to “the riddle of earthly life,” only unending argument. Great books on this line, sanction humans in disconnecting from place and the demand for answers and actions that relationship to place makes. The books may well be great; the abstract notion of greatness is problematic.
Since about 1970, students moving through U.S. colleges and receiving what Robert Hutchins might call—and the U.S. New and World Report certainly has called—“the best education” have dug a $2 or $3 trillion hole in the U.S. economy and exported the ideology of leverage. The economic growth that the best and brightest enabled between 2001 and 2008 is, it turns out, roughly equivalent to the debt that economy generated during the same period. Highly educated Americans have—reading whatever books were required, enshrined self-interest—become comfortable with the fruits of imperialism, if not with the idea. They have become expert in using law and reason as an instrument (Stanley Fish is a wonderful emblem for a humanist in this setting). They are caricatures of the heroes of the books collected in any culture (even the deeply flawed characters Shorris mentions). They are now managing a plot wherein the characters who have failed (made loans that won’t be repaid, cars that won’t sell, schools that do not provide all students access to learning) remain protagonists even though the logic of the plot aims at other values. They have overseen an environmental debacle and are able to make the argument that being concerned for habitat is too expensive.
I am one of those educated folks (though my pedigree is not great; I am the product of state schools). For the past 20 years or so, I have tried to manage a career as a public servant in a culture that is not clear on whether the phrase “public good” is meaningful. I love the books, but my exposure to the books tells me that I have to turn to service learning, I have to ask students to read their environments and take up an obligation for inventing and testing answers. We will still read, but rather than hiding behind abstractions about greatness, we are beginning to wonder about how studying at a publicly funded school draws us into networks of obligation.
We are working with, among other texts, Aldo Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic.” My students do the reading fairly quickly. The discover that Leopold noticed in the 1930s that environmental education (great or otherwise) had not slowed the flow of topsoil down the Mississippi and argued that more of that same education would likely not result in more learning. We talk about the big idea here: the question, for Leopold, was not the books to be read (though he sensed that content mattered) but the moral and ethical purpose behind the reading and the relation of the readers to the topic. My students read Leopold and wonder about his greatness, for I do sing his praises. His prose is beautifully balanced but difficult to their ears. His ideas seem of obvious importance and completely implausible. But what seems to matter in their education happens next. Once we have read, we try to use it to rethink where we are and how we relate to our place. In coming years, we will begin to use his thinking to launch community initiatives; rather than simply thinking about the great ideas, we will try them out and document our efforts.
My students find this approach to books, great or otherwise, a bit odd. They are accustomed to reading books selected by others because these books are correct though not always great. They are practiced in arguing about whether they agree or disagree with the ideas and being tested on whether they understand the main points. They are unused to hearing ideas generously, illuminating those ideas collaboratively, and putting those ideas to work in real environments away from school. The work is hard; evaluations of the work are descriptive and difficult to sort onto a normal curve. I am not used to this practice either. In fact, I rarely manage to facilitate it in a very complete way. This sort of service brings with it serious obligation to those who have not read the books and to those who have and have elected to do nothing with those books. My students regularly declare I am asking too much. They know other readers and writers are getting away by parroting forms.
But those who take up the obligation, find their way to a different voice. And they come to love the books, not because the books are great but because the books have the capacity to motivate and guide and obligate action. My students are honest about our realities: we acknowledge that we learn more about how we should be than we are willing to live out. Still, the books lead us to action, give us a sense of a public space in which we need to talk and listen and say what we have found in the books. Like Shorris, we learn that the public dispute is unending, but we also learn that we are obliged lovingly to make claims, to add to the tradition that we love. In the midst of this learning, often at the end of a course, my anxiety about “great books” and the humanities becomes productive not because my students and I have covered great content but because we have entered into a community that speaks from the tradition to the present. Our claims are almost never great. Indeed, in a ten-week quarter, much of what we write is not as good as what we are able to write. But we carry on, we are willing not to be comfortable.
Shorris, and the Great Books Foundation for that matter, has me in a sort of bind. I am the product of a great books education. Well, more precisely of a books education, for few of my faculty would have identified explicitly with the University of Chicago or the Great Books initiative. I spent seven years studying literature before I ever thought of how to build a career as a college English teacher. I kept taking classes in my masters program even after I had met the basic requirements because the books and the chance to read was what I needed to do in my mid twenties. In those classes, I forged lasting relationships with other humans and also a sense for how I fit in the world and what the traditions I inherited from my parents meant. I took up a habit of learning that has stuck. While that education has rarely directly produced much social or economic capital, I would not trade it. I love those books.
But still I wince when Shorris reels off the phrase “great books” without any need to justify the adjective. Indeed, he uses the phrase almost to declare that the adjective is inseparable from the noun (he is even able to talk about “the greater great books”). It is not the notion of “great” value in these books that makes me pause. My work in college classrooms over the past twenty years and my reading of establishment media makes me believe that we need what Shorris declares readers get from great books:
They see a thousand disputes and expect a thousand more. They learn that the comfort of surcease is slavery. That is what they find in great books, the common dream of humanity, the unending dream of humanity, the unending argument, freedom.
Amen. This basic criteria describes the texts that kept me in school. The most important of them, though, were not great by the measures Shorris implies (books with authority, classics). Sir Thomas Wyatt’s epistolary satires, the sonnets of Barnabe Googe, the work of Sherwood Anderson and John Steinbeck and Lucille Clifton. Wyatt is labeled a “silver” or “drab” poet; it is Shakepeare who is golden. The craft in these texts and the contexts in which I encountered them caught me up, addicted me to the “unending argument.” It is not clear to me that naming that craft “great” is either valid or useful. The contexts in which I encountered these texts surely were not universally great. I studied at times with indifferent teachers and nearly always with too many distractions. I read Steinbeck for the first time in a rush to be ready for an exam. The books had their effect, but they were not books on Shorris’s implied list, and the setting was rarely that of the Clemente program.
In 1993, in my first full-time college English gig, I taught a class called “Great Books.” As I read parts of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces with students at a regional campus of Kent State University, I found myself caught between a certainty that this reading mattered and a deep skepticism about how my college and discipline named what mattered. I found then and find now the need to declare books “great” curious. I am happy to argue for the qualities of different texts; I know that I prefer the Inferno to the Republic, and I know why. I wrote a dissertation that reflected at length on the history of the reception of texts, of how texts become great and lose that status. I have spent hundreds of hours drawing relatively students into texts with no interest in declaring those books or those students “great.” Indeed, my students have taught me again to relish Hamlet, in part because they do not know whether it is great.
Shorris’s need to have great books strikes me now as both self-evidently important and at the same time revelatory of a culture losing its way. Not knowing the cultural artifacts that make up one’s cultural entitlement is, at some very basic level, to be intellectually poor and, worse, to lose track of what it means to be human (though Shorris is surely right in arguing that knowing these artifacts does not necessarily make one intellectually right and humane). Of course, a meaningful education needs to include a careful reading of tradition, of great books. But declaring the artifacts of a tradition great can also invite a kind of quietism. Shorris concludes, rightly I think, that the great books make space for continual dispute. The stories he shares of poor people in Darfur and Cuernavaca and and Chicago and Madison sitting to read great books are compelling, and Shorris labors not to idealize the effects of reading Plato. But the telling of these stories dodges action and responsibility. I can read them and feel that the world still works and then flip on HGTV or go and fill my car with fuel or buy tomatoes from Mexico in Seattle in January. I finish the article more certain that the humanities matter and also that Shorris’s humanities and the institutions he mentions (among them Bard College, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s College but also Berea College and the Korean National University) are complicit in “the comfort of surcease.”
Let me offer an apology. Shorris imagines inviting people into the great books conversation might (again, he avoids utopian claims) result in more disputation and freedom. Surely this can happen, in some places. By holding onto his adjective, he seems to avoid locating the invitation and linking the reading of books with being in a time and place and owning the implications of actions. Reading the great books, according to Shorris, helps the reader understand that there is no answer to “the riddle of earthly life,” only unending argument. Great books on this line, sanction humans in disconnecting from place and the demand for answers and actions that relationship to place makes. The books may well be great; the abstract notion of greatness is problematic.
Since about 1970, students moving through U.S. colleges and receiving what Robert Hutchins might call—and the U.S. New and World Report certainly has called—“the best education” have dug a $2 or $3 trillion hole in the U.S. economy and exported the ideology of leverage. The economic growth that the best and brightest enabled between 2001 and 2008 is, it turns out, roughly equivalent to the debt that economy generated during the same period. Highly educated Americans have—reading whatever books were required, enshrined self-interest—become comfortable with the fruits of imperialism, if not with the idea. They have become expert in using law and reason as an instrument (Stanley Fish is a wonderful emblem for a humanist in this setting). They are caricatures of the heroes of the books collected in any culture (even the deeply flawed characters Shorris mentions). They are now managing a plot wherein the characters who have failed (made loans that won’t be repaid, cars that won’t sell, schools that do not provide all students access to learning) remain protagonists even though the logic of the plot aims at other values. They have overseen an environmental debacle and are able to make the argument that being concerned for habitat is too expensive.
I am one of those educated folks (though my pedigree is not great; I am the product of state schools). For the past 20 years or so, I have tried to manage a career as a public servant in a culture that is not clear on whether the phrase “public good” is meaningful. I love the books, but my exposure to the books tells me that I have to turn to service learning, I have to ask students to read their environments and take up an obligation for inventing and testing answers. We will still read, but rather than hiding behind abstractions about greatness, we are beginning to wonder about how studying at a publicly funded school draws us into networks of obligation.
We are working with, among other texts, Aldo Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic.” My students do the reading fairly quickly. The discover that Leopold noticed in the 1930s that environmental education (great or otherwise) had not slowed the flow of topsoil down the Mississippi and argued that more of that same education would likely not result in more learning. We talk about the big idea here: the question, for Leopold, was not the books to be read (though he sensed that content mattered) but the moral and ethical purpose behind the reading and the relation of the readers to the topic. My students read Leopold and wonder about his greatness, for I do sing his praises. His prose is beautifully balanced but difficult to their ears. His ideas seem of obvious importance and completely implausible. But what seems to matter in their education happens next. Once we have read, we try to use it to rethink where we are and how we relate to our place. In coming years, we will begin to use his thinking to launch community initiatives; rather than simply thinking about the great ideas, we will try them out and document our efforts.
My students find this approach to books, great or otherwise, a bit odd. They are accustomed to reading books selected by others because these books are correct though not always great. They are practiced in arguing about whether they agree or disagree with the ideas and being tested on whether they understand the main points. They are unused to hearing ideas generously, illuminating those ideas collaboratively, and putting those ideas to work in real environments away from school. The work is hard; evaluations of the work are descriptive and difficult to sort onto a normal curve. I am not used to this practice either. In fact, I rarely manage to facilitate it in a very complete way. This sort of service brings with it serious obligation to those who have not read the books and to those who have and have elected to do nothing with those books. My students regularly declare I am asking too much. They know other readers and writers are getting away by parroting forms.
But those who take up the obligation, find their way to a different voice. And they come to love the books, not because the books are great but because the books have the capacity to motivate and guide and obligate action. My students are honest about our realities: we acknowledge that we learn more about how we should be than we are willing to live out. Still, the books lead us to action, give us a sense of a public space in which we need to talk and listen and say what we have found in the books. Like Shorris, we learn that the public dispute is unending, but we also learn that we are obliged lovingly to make claims, to add to the tradition that we love. In the midst of this learning, often at the end of a course, my anxiety about “great books” and the humanities becomes productive not because my students and I have covered great content but because we have entered into a community that speaks from the tradition to the present. Our claims are almost never great. Indeed, in a ten-week quarter, much of what we write is not as good as what we are able to write. But we carry on, we are willing not to be comfortable.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
What Do College Students Need?
A friend who teaches history recently turned me onto a 6 January 2008 entry in Stanley Fish’s New York Times blog. In his reflections on the humanities, Fish (in his compelling rhetoric) declares with certainty that the humanities cannot “save us,” that it is not the business of humanities faculty to save us. The last paragraph of this entry puts a point on the argument:
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.
What is interesting to me is that this line of argument grows out of reflections on how New York State might improve “academic quality” through investment in, among other things, research and “academic superstars.” Like his culture, Fish takes a supply-side approach to the topic. What matters is maximizing supply. The only line of thinking available involves increasing incentives to produce and invest in what is already being produced and invested. Reflecting on what is being supplied or about what moral or ethical or ecological side-effects is at best inefficient, at worst imperialist. There is no perspective from outside the activity that matters.
Supply-side thinking about school increasingly fascinates me. Fish declares that education (at the very least in the humanities) ought not be expected to save us, that is, to make us more healthy or fend off danger. Education (and the humanities) is a thing to be enjoyed within an always closed system. And Fish knows the system as it presently exists (he established part of the authority of his argument by pointing to 45 years of experience in this system). The logic here is perfect as long as one accepts that the system of education as it exists is all we get.
Fish’s analysis is absolutely accurate for the teachers and students of literature that he knows. That said, I feel no particular obligation to accept his analysis as what is so. Indeed, his argument collapses in on itself with exclamations like “there is no evidence to support [the salvific effect of the humanities]” and “I can tell you [the notion that the study of the humanities make one good and wise] just isn’t so.” Fish is largely uninterested in evidence from outside his narrow experience and is certain that the authority vested in a professor is enough to carry the generalizations. I have spent nearly 20 years in the company of college humanities teachers who Fish likely would not recognize as such. We care deeply about students and write and revise class activies and handouts more often that essays. Oddly, on any evidence about humanities teaching (number of classes taught, number of students encountered, number of papers responded to), this is the community that will need to make judgments about what impact the humanities have on learners (we are pleased to leave to Fish and his community judgments about the significance of publications about rhetorical theory and the like).
From within my community of practice, I find Fish’s assumptions to be consistent but of relatively little use, his assertions about use, pleasure, and justification to be fairly hollow. Free from that community (I tore up my MLA membership card almost a decade ago), I continue to look for ways that education (and humanities education) can make a community more healthy and safe (words worth thinking about at length). The issue for my community is not primarily whether education can save us, but what health looks like and whether our educational practices actually move us toward health so defined. The exploration of these questions may well lead me to Fish’s conclusions, but they will lead me there through data about learners and teachers who remain largely outside Fish’s field of vision. This exploration will also lead to a much more diverse conversation than the one Fish appears to presume. Rather than looking at what commodities are identified with academic quality, I am interested in conversations about what we want from education, conversations that ask stakeholders to speak with honesty and to listen to other stakeholders.
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.
What is interesting to me is that this line of argument grows out of reflections on how New York State might improve “academic quality” through investment in, among other things, research and “academic superstars.” Like his culture, Fish takes a supply-side approach to the topic. What matters is maximizing supply. The only line of thinking available involves increasing incentives to produce and invest in what is already being produced and invested. Reflecting on what is being supplied or about what moral or ethical or ecological side-effects is at best inefficient, at worst imperialist. There is no perspective from outside the activity that matters.
Supply-side thinking about school increasingly fascinates me. Fish declares that education (at the very least in the humanities) ought not be expected to save us, that is, to make us more healthy or fend off danger. Education (and the humanities) is a thing to be enjoyed within an always closed system. And Fish knows the system as it presently exists (he established part of the authority of his argument by pointing to 45 years of experience in this system). The logic here is perfect as long as one accepts that the system of education as it exists is all we get.
Fish’s analysis is absolutely accurate for the teachers and students of literature that he knows. That said, I feel no particular obligation to accept his analysis as what is so. Indeed, his argument collapses in on itself with exclamations like “there is no evidence to support [the salvific effect of the humanities]” and “I can tell you [the notion that the study of the humanities make one good and wise] just isn’t so.” Fish is largely uninterested in evidence from outside his narrow experience and is certain that the authority vested in a professor is enough to carry the generalizations. I have spent nearly 20 years in the company of college humanities teachers who Fish likely would not recognize as such. We care deeply about students and write and revise class activies and handouts more often that essays. Oddly, on any evidence about humanities teaching (number of classes taught, number of students encountered, number of papers responded to), this is the community that will need to make judgments about what impact the humanities have on learners (we are pleased to leave to Fish and his community judgments about the significance of publications about rhetorical theory and the like).
From within my community of practice, I find Fish’s assumptions to be consistent but of relatively little use, his assertions about use, pleasure, and justification to be fairly hollow. Free from that community (I tore up my MLA membership card almost a decade ago), I continue to look for ways that education (and humanities education) can make a community more healthy and safe (words worth thinking about at length). The issue for my community is not primarily whether education can save us, but what health looks like and whether our educational practices actually move us toward health so defined. The exploration of these questions may well lead me to Fish’s conclusions, but they will lead me there through data about learners and teachers who remain largely outside Fish’s field of vision. This exploration will also lead to a much more diverse conversation than the one Fish appears to presume. Rather than looking at what commodities are identified with academic quality, I am interested in conversations about what we want from education, conversations that ask stakeholders to speak with honesty and to listen to other stakeholders.
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